Holding On To a Grievance Is Like Holding On To a Live Grenade

“A grievance is when your ego hijacks your mind, takes you to hell,
demands a ransom and leaves you there (in hell) anyway.”
Robert Holden, Shift Happens

Everyone gets hurt. Accept it. We all face betrayal, gossip, lies, infidelities and the pain of being victimized by people-- even those we once loved and trusted. Asking “why me?” is never a solution. It’s pointless and so is harboring a grudge. A grudge or resentment is a vial of emotional poison. When we allow personal wounds to fester into resentments, we betray ourselves by swallowing the emotional poison we‘ve concocted to kill our perpetrator. Or as Robert Holden says, “Carrying a grievance is like carrying a grenade that blows up in your mind” everyday.

Holden goes on to say that creating a grievance is being “kidnapped by your own ego, sitting in hell hoping the ‘bitch’ or ‘bastard’ who is the cause of the grievance ends up in hell, too. The great hope is you can both live unhappily ever after.” Truer words are hard to come by. Grievances exist only in our thoughts and emotions. If we fail to process an emotional wound, we will develop a grievance. Processing emotional wounds requires allowing ourselves to feel the betrayal, the hurt and the deep sadness caused by our sense of loss. Sadness is the healing feeling. It brings us back to wholeness. But many of us can’t bear facing our pain, so we jump over the healing feelings and land face-down in our feeling of choice: anger.

Anger is a grenade waiting to explode-- over and over again-- in our minds and bodies. When we fail to process an emotional wound, we stumble on the road to forgiveness. Resentment becomes our weapon of self-torture. Every time our perpetrator comes to mind, or within sight, the emotional grenade we’re harboring explodes. It ignites in our brains, but the implosion quickly spreads throughout our bodies and eventually shatters our souls. We re-live the betrayal one more time as if it just happened. And we relive it endlessly as long as we choose resentment over forgiveness.

Any time we refuse to forgive another person, we give our emotional power away to them. In effect, holding on to resentment is our way of saying to our perpetrator “I want to suffer for the rest of my life over what you did to me. I am choosing to forever give you power over me and my life by refusing to forgive you.” Is this what we really want to do? I don’t think so. The only way we can take our power back from the offending person is by forgiving them. Forgiveness requires that we revisit the wound with the intent of actually allowing ourselves to honestly feel the hurt we’ve repressed. Once we feel the hurt, we can allow ourselves to feel our sense of loss and the deep sadness it produces. Tears will bring authentic healing. As an old Native American proverb says “the soul would have no rainbow if the eyes had no tears.” Tears help to release the sadness and bring us back to wholeness. Then we are able to forgive and take back our power.

The choice is ours: healing or perpetual suffering. Holding on to a resentment gives us a false sense of power that always explodes, wounding no one but us. Forgiveness sets the perpetrator of our grievance free, and more importantly, it sets us free: Free of anger, rage, hatred and victimization. Allow yourself to grieve and forgive your losses. Allow your soul to shine!