Being Resentful Is Not the Same as Getting Frustrated
All of us will experience times of frustration in our relationships. (This is true for all kinds of relationships, but I’m going to focus on romantic partnerships in this part of the book.) After all, we’re constantly learning how to give and accept love, and learning how to love another person as God loves them gives us daily opportunities to see where we’re lacking and where we need to improve.
When a partner leaves the toilet seat up or doesn’t take out the trash in time for the morning collection, we might get frustrated. Similarly, when we leave our clothes on the floor or accidentally throw away important paperwork or track mud in the house, our partner might get frustrated with us. That frustration can lead to arguments, and it’s a bad feeling for everyone involved. Again, we’re all trying our best to move forward and grow as individuals in relationships with the hopes of learning to let go of the small frustrations and focus on loving others unconditionally. But it ain’t easy.
Resentment, however, is on a whole different level. This idea of keeping score, a game we have all played in our relationships from time to time, can poison a relationship. When we’re always on the lookout for fairness and equality in the tasks around the house, for example, we can always find ways to feel we’re being cheated and then start to grow in resentment toward our partner.
Harboring resentment against someone is dangerous because it leads directly to a disconnect in our ability to have empathy for them. After all, if I see the relationship as my partner failing to shoulder what I deem is an equal responsibility in the family, why would I ever try to put myself in their shoes and try to feel what it’s like to be on their side of things? Once our ability to have empathy for our partner fades away, the warning lights start going off and something needs to be done quickly to refocus the relationship and get things back on track.
So What Do We Do?
Communication is key to healing from resentment in a relationship. It’s not hard, but it is something we have to actively work on, especially because the things that bother us might not bother the other person, or we might not hear what the other person is actually trying to communicate.
The things that bother us and what we think have to get done may not be the same things that bother our partner or that they feel have to get done. Our typical approach to solving this problem is to nag our partner in an effort to get them to comply with what we want them to do, which builds resentment at both ends. We feel we shouldn’t have to nag our partner just to get them to do something as obvious as picking up their clothes off the floor. They get frustrated at being nagged for something as unimportant as leaving some clothes laying around.
To fend off resentment, we have to communicate what things are important to us and why. We can’t expect our partner to read our mind. We have to tell them what things we value, what things we have grown to expect in relationships because of our past experiences, and we have to tell them why. It isn’t enough to say, “I can’t stand you leaving your clothes on the floor!” because if clothes on the floor doesn’t bother our partner, they’ll just think we’re weird for having a problem with it. We have to share the reason this bothers us as well.
This insight into our thinking will help foster a healthier dialogue. Our partner may respond, “I see where you’re coming from and I’ll try to be more conscious of this,” or they will share their viewpoint for why they don’t see it as an issue, and we can then seek some kind of compromise or at least understanding.
Another approach to avoiding or healing resentment is to do it yourself. I’m not suggesting you should do everything yourself but rather that you think about the small things that happen in your life that breed resentment (such as the clothes on the floor). Wouldn’t doing the things we want to have done rather than nagging and harboring resentments go a long way toward maintaining a peaceful relationship? Let’s face it, picking up a shirt and tossing it in the hamper ends the whole problem right there. You’ve just kept a five-second task from spilling into an argument that could last well into the night and potentially foster a lot of resentment.
Sometimes resentment builds in a relationship because we don’t hear what our partner is saying or we misunderstand what they mean to convey. Active listening is a skill often suggested in couples therapy to address this, and it really works. When in a conversation with active listening as a goal, we sit next to, rather than across from, our partner. Sitting next to our partner is a nonverbal way of showing that we’re in this together. Next, we hold hands, which can be hard when we’re engaged in a difficult conversation, but holding hands goes a long way toward cutting the tension and making us think twice before saying something hurtful.
The most important skills of active listening are listening, paraphrasing what we have heard, and being willing to listen when our partner corrects what we’ve heard. It takes effort to learn to listen to our partner instead of focusing on our thoughts or formulating our response, but it makes all the difference. We quietly listen to what they’re saying and then before responding with our own thoughts, we paraphrase what we’ve heard them say: “So what I hear you saying is . . .” Once we relay what we think we’ve heard back to them, we give our partner space to correct it with what they actually meant, just in case we misunderstood them.
Our interpretation of what our partner has said so often misses the mark on what they were actually trying to say. For example, our partner might say, “It really bothers me that you leave your clothes laying around on the floor.” We hear, “You are disgusting and dirty and not worthy of love.” Okay, that might sound like a bit much, but it’s not too far from the truth. We hear something critical about one small part of our life, one small thing we’ve done or didn’t do, and we extrapolate it to mean that our partner finds us to be an absolute failure.
Thankfully, this active listening technique can help us get closer to hearing what they actually mean:
“It really bothers me that you leave your clothes laying around on the floor.”
“So what I hear you saying is that I’m dirty and leave our house messy and you’re disappointed in me.”
“No, actually, I think you do a great job keeping the house picked up; it’s just this one little thing.”
Once we hear what our partner is actually trying to say, it’s typically just limited to a small issue that can be corrected rather easily, and it’s rarely as catastrophic as the thing we’ve made up in our head.
This excerpt from St. Dymphna’s Playbook: A Catholic Guide to Finding Mental and Emotional Well-Being is reprinted with permission of Ave Maria Press.
Tommy Tighe is a marriage and family therapist, creator of the Saint Dymphna’s Playbook podcast, and the cohost of Repent and Submit on CatholicTV. He is the author of St. Dymphna’s Playbook, The Catholic Hipster Handbook, and The Catholic Hipster: The Next Level.
