Grudges: knowing when to hold them and when to fold them
Holding onto resentment may cause more harm than we think
If you’re heading home for the holidays, you’re destined to run into your high school ex at the grocery store. You’ll see that girl from middle school who told everyone you still sleep with a teddy bear at a Christmas party. Or maybe you’ll be forced to have dinner with the aunt who always forgets your birthday. You might try to white-knuckle through the interactions and smile through the awkward small talk, but inside the anger and resentment is still potent. You have a grudge.
What do we do with our grudges? Are they a natural response to being hurt, a way of protecting ourselves? Or are they quietly weighing us down, damaging our well-being and relationships? When you’re preparing to revisit a hometown ecosystem of unresolved tension, it’s worth asking the question: Is holding on to a grudge worth it? Or is it time to let go?
Having a grudge can feel good — festering in your victimhood, fantasizing about revenge, pummeling them with your angry, vindictive thoughts. They’ve wronged you, so they deserve it. These spurts of anger release surges of dopamine, our brain’s pleasure chemical, psychologist Fred Luskin writes in his book Forgive for Good. We lean on grudges to protect ourselves, to soothe the pain others have inflicted on us. We’d rather feel the grudge than the hurt.
But just like the dopamine we get from alcohol, drugs or social media, the easy fix we get from holding a grudge “captures” the pleasure centres in our brain, writes Luskin. It’s addictive and makes it harder for us to get pleasure from the things we should be getting pleasure from, like reaching a goal or spending quality time with people we love. It’s a Band-Aid coping mechanism and potentially hurts more than it helps.
Letting go of a grudge can feel like giving up. But letting go of a grudge isn’t for the benefit of the other person; it’s for your own good. If someone doesn’t deserve a spot in your life, why carry around the grudge-shaped hurt they caused you? When we numb ourselves with a grudge, we ignore the root of the issue: to truly heal, you have to let go of your grudge and confront the pain.
Healing doesn’t mean you have to become best friends with someone who betrayed your trust or role-play the perfect, happy family at Christmas dinner. You’re not lying down and surrendering to mistreatment; you’re freeing yourself from the grasp of anger so you can make thoughtful, conscious decisions about the connections in your life. Maybe you’ll discover you want to reconnect with that middle school frenemy, or maybe you’ll realize that certain people just don’t fit in your life, and that’s okay.
When you head home, grudges will likely greet you before you even set your bags down. They’ll show up in the grocery aisle, around the dinner table and in conversations you’ve rehearsed in your head a hundred times. But before you let anger bubble over, before you feel the weight of the grudge pull you down, it’s worth peeling back your grudge and taking a peek at what’s underneath. Holding on might seem easier, but sometimes, the braver choice is deciding you’ve carried something long enough.
