Resentment

Resentment has been called the number one offender.  It probably leads more alcoholics back to drink than any other condition of the mind.  The word resentment comes from the Latin root “Sentire” which means “to feel.”  So to have resentment means to “re-feel” an emotion usually of anger or hatred towards someone.

There are several issues in dealing effectively with resentment:  the problem of envious or jealous comparison, forgiveness, courage to confront issues before they become resentments; and most importantly the willingness to give up defects of character fostered by maintaining resentments.   These defects can take the form of self-pity, pride and a stance of victimization.  These issues will be dealt with more completely in a future blog(s).

There was a cartoon in a Grapevine monthly publication a few years back that gets to the heart of the resentment problem for alcoholics:  The cartoon depicts several AA members in a cemetery gathered around the tombstone of a recently departed brother.  There are no words between the members, just them looking at the tombstone caption:  “Here lies a man with a [JUSTIFIED] resentment,”  emphasis mine.  It seems from an accumulation of hugely negative experiences of our society that we are not a class of persons who can handle any kind of resentment, justified or not.  Conversely, as the Big Book says, “…resentment is the dubious luxury of normal persons…”

So why is resentment toxic and even fatal for alcoholics?  For me, it’s because it can be so totally possessive of my consciousness.  My pattern is to replay the actions of others that hurt or betrayed me in my mind’s imagination until I can feel palpable indignation.  How could they have done that to me?  Or often as not, how could have I let them do that to me, which promotes anger towards myself?  This of course leave aside what was our part in causing them to act so harmfully to us.  That is the process of the fourth and fifth steps in the AA program to discern our patterns of behavior or “defects” if you will that cause retribution on the part of others.  However, here, for the purposes of dealing with resentment, we can assume that there are actions of others that wrong us and cause us actual or emotional harm.

An urge to show them or to “drink at them” is often the basis for taking the first drink and possibly losing a substantial amount of sober time and having to start over the climb back into a clean life.  All the time the thoughts precipitating that first drink are ones of retribution justified by our self-pity and sense of being wronged. Has there ever been a resentment that was not based on someone or something treating us unfairly, based on our definition of fairness of course?

We can see it is not the initial actions of others that most often threatened our sobriety. It is our harboring feelings of resentment successively replayed in our mind until the only relief appears to be a totally justified first drink and resulting drunk.  So to rid ourselves of resentment and continually keep our consciousness clean of them is one of our chief tasks as alcoholics who want desperately to maintain our sober way of living.  The next blog on resentments will get into some of the mechanisms for doing exactly that.