The Quiet Cost Of Family Resentment

Some of the heaviest resentment we carry is toward our own family, a parent who could not give what we needed, a sibling who creates triggers, a grandparent whose choices still shape the family today. It can sit quietly for years, costing you more peace & more freedom than you realize, leaking into your mood, your other relationships, and the stress you carry throughout your days.

This workshop is a chance to understand where that resentment really began and what it has been protecting you from feeling. We will look gently at the old family roles and unspoken agreements underneath it, without blame and without asking you to excuse anything. When you can finally see what you have been carrying and why, something starts to soften, and you get to decide what you keep and what you are ready to set down.

Transcript

The quiet cost of family resentment. For those of you who don't know me, My name is Joanna Lin. I am a systemic therapist and the founder of the Family Imprint Institute. For over 20 years, I've really been focused on working with couples, And much of the time, They feel very much stuck in the same painful cycle, The kind of conflict that just seems to come out of nowhere and be pretty cyclical and lead nowhere. And we're going to talk today about the roots of where some of that difficulty inside of relationship originates. My approach really goes beneath the surface of, You know, Have more date nights and get some better communication tools. Those can be important, But they don't usually move the needle in the changes that we're really looking to see. I work a lot with the family imprint, What I talk about with my clients called the body memory, And a lot of our emotional patterning that each person inherited long before they ever got involved inside of a relationship. What looks like a flaw inside your partner or even something that you might call a flaw for yourself is often an old survival strategy that might still be running somewhere in the background. That's really the heart of what might be a trigger or the certain things that really pull you under. And so just to be clear, Right off the bat, This is not a workshop about blaming your family or sidestepping or making any kind of excuses for the hurts that may have happened over the years. This workshop is much more about understanding what you have been carrying so that you finally get to choose whether or not you keep carrying it in the same way. And so because this is a tender topic, Let's just take a breath together before we really dive in. Just in through the nose. And out a little slower than that inhale came in. Resentment towards family members rarely starts where we think it does. It might be easy to point to a certain moment like a comment your mom made or the time your brother chose himself over maybe what the family had learned to expect or the year your father was battling depression or addiction and just wasn't there. Often underneath such a moment like those descriptions is something much older. And I think the challenge is that nobody taught us directly. You know, This kind of stuff isn't spoken aloud. Instead, It's more like we absorb it by watching what got rewarded and what got punished inside of our certain family. And we tend to build upon that in the relationships that we grow into in our adulthood. And once that role is sort of set, It seems like every interaction since that original hurt gets filtered through it. That's why the resentment of today can feel so disproportionate to the moment that triggers it. So you're not overreacting to the comment or that moment. We're often in a place of reacting to years of unspoken agreements that it is finally crack under the weight. Maybe you've wondered why a small comment from, Say, A partner or maybe a sibling just knocks the wind out of you. Maybe even decades later after that original hurt started. And there is a reason why. It's never really about the comment. There's usually a deeper story underneath it. And the story made sense given what you needed and didn't receive at the time. And that's a little bit about what we're going to explore together. And of course, The things that I've shared is really a simplified example of what sets up resentment in the first place. Let's explore a bit more of a serious situation. And this is what I hear a lot inside of my practice. It seems to be lived in the stress of aging parents or a parent dies and one parent remains. And it seems to be that one sibling carries the bulk of the responsibility or what's needed inside of that kind of family change. Maybe it's logistical that one sibling lives closer or the other just doesn't have the emotional or financial means to be able to step in. And that means that the one sibling, And sometimes I've seen this over, You know, A family of six, It's not just a family of two and one can't do it. So it defaults to the other. But sometimes across the board, It's one sibling that ends up handling the doctor's appointments, Or the late night calls of distress, Or even meeting the slow unraveling of a parent's health. This can be really big. And the others might visit on holidays and maybe they see, Oh, Everything's going well because that's what they see over the dinner or the weekend that they're just visiting. And what's interesting here is nobody really agreed to this. Nobody said, Oh, That's the division of things and how it's going to go. This more often than not happens by default. And then it kind of just settles in. It hardens into this way. And then the resentment here is rarely about the caregiving itself. More about being the only one that seems to notice, There's caregiving to do. There's a gap here that needs to be filled. And maybe the other siblings are wrapped up in their own lives or have different circumstances. And yet, We can all understand it's unfair that it falls on one person. Now, In some families, The one who became, Say, More financially successful quietly becomes the family safety net. If a car repair comes up or some sort of crisis, A parent's medical bill, It gets routed to whichever sibling has the means, Often without anyone asking, Well, Is that fair? Is that sustainable? How is this going to look over time? I think a lot of us can relate, Especially if we have a lot of buildup of resentment. It's when it feels like we cannot say no. You know, It's impossible to say it because if you don't do it, Who will? Well, This is the perfect environment. It just makes it, You know, Ripe for resentment to grow. And it's this sort of overextension that can be framed and like, Well, This is just what family does and this is just what you have to do. But the truth is, Over the years, The resentment builds less around one single ask or one single crisis, But it's the assumption underneath all of them. And then they tend to build up. And so both of these examples, Or the ways that it can go in a family, Carry a particular kind of weight. And then I think it's the next stage that resentment gets tangled up with guilt, And it becomes even more cemented and even more heavy. It's like you cannot fully be angry about carrying more than your share when some part of you also believes that showing up is the right thing to do and it's just what family does. And so I call it like a double bind. There's this anger and resentment, But it's also mixed with loyalty and this feeling that there isn't any other choice. Both being true at the same time, It's kind of working at this cross purpose inside of you. And it's often what keeps people stuck longer than almost anything else inside of family resentment. It's almost like if we could look under the hood of family resentment, We're going to find a mix of all of those things. But resentment, More times than not, Is often protecting you from something tender. Underneath resentment is almost always a softer, It's almost like what resentment might be protecting, Like it's standing on guard for some of these more tender and softer feelings. And so maybe it's connected to grief for the parent you needed, But you didn't get. And so now you feel in order to stay connected to that parent, You give what you never got. And so there are many reasons when our parents are aging, When that sort of gets reordered, And we're supposed to be the one that notices and takes them to the doctor's appointment or maybe helps them organize their finances or fills out paperwork, Whatever it is that has you feel more in the position of caregiver. And this can really begin to shift so much about our own overwhelm because many of us who have aging parents also might have children in their teens or getting them ready to launch off to school or maybe dealing with midlife challenges with our health and our marriage and our careers. And so this real feeling of being pulled in a thousand directions. And it might feel easier to feel resentful, Overwhelmed, And angry. There's almost like a push forward with that kind of emotion than grief and sadness that might threaten to pull you under. That if I really get real with myself, With how much grief I feel about this, Maybe I won't know how to clear out of it. And so that requires a different, I'm going to say, Honesty with yourself and a different healing approach. I think what else resentment protects us from is an overwhelming sense of fear, Of what it might mean if you really could count on someone. And so sometimes, Especially when it's a parent, If you grew up not being able to really count on them. There's a deep undertone of sadness for the child that you were. Who adapted, Who's highly independent and highly capable, But that no one notices even still today how much you're carrying. And maybe you've learned to carry it well, But it doesn't mean that it's not heavy. And so there's an awareness that we want to look at, Even if nobody else can acknowledge that for you, An awareness that we want to look at that with our time together today. I think for many of the clients I've worked with, Resentment, And maybe it's strange to say it like this, But in some way, It's easier to live with than grief. It is a movement. It's somewhere to direct the feeling. It kind of keeps you in motion. And for many of us in the 72 balls we've got in the air, We need that. We maybe feel a bit justified in our position or our hurts. But I tell you the path to freedom, The path to resolving this, The path to living differently in your most important relationships is sitting with how much it actually hurt. Because here's the hook. If we don't integrate that, We end up repeating it with our own children or living it out inside of our own marriage. And so the moment you can name what's underneath, Whatever that personally is for your resentment and how you carry it, The resentment itself starts to loosen its grip. Even before anything else has really changed inside of the relationship. I mean, The truth is the change is in us anyways. We've got to shift how we're holding it, How we're relating to this person. Our own healing movements are in us. They're our responsibility. And as we shift and change those internal places, The whole way we show up in that relationship shifts and changes as well. And so deep down, It's not about the person. But it's more like they signify that it's standing in the way of something we truly needed. So I grew up as a kid and I really wanted mom to hear me and understand me. And now I'm 50 and she still can't provide that. And so the resentment that I have and what she wasn't able to provide, I'm still in a fight for what I didn't get enough of, Even though I'm way past childhood. So if you think of it that way, What might the resentment you're carrying be a placeholder. Because it's standing in the way of something you truly need now. Or truly needed back then. If we go back to that thought that anger and resentment are often connected to grief, Longing, And overwhelm. So let's drop in. So I'm just going to ask you if you're driving, If you can pull over for a moment. If you can stop multitasking and just drop into this exercise, You might want to open a fresh document on your computer or grab your journal. And I want you to bring to mind. The person you feel the most resentment with. And then ask yourself. What am I longing for? What's underneath that resentment? Do you wish that they would hear you? Understand you. Be more supportive of you. Do you wish that they would apologize? Do you wish that they would express love to you? Do you wish that they would believe in you? That they would respect you. That they would just slow down enough to really listen. To acknowledge you, Even if you hold differences. So I'm just going to give you a full minute. To ask yourself. With that relationship where you feel the most resentment. What are you longing for? Within that relationship. Be sure to. . . Not go into story about it. To just use like an adjective, Like some of the examples that I gave. And now the follow-up question to that. Is how can you bring that very thing? Into your life. And into your relationship. Is there a way, First of all, We can give that to ourselves. I can validate my own needs. I can see myself. I can acknowledge all that I have done. I can build self-respect within me. I can turn more of my attention in certain friendships where there's lots of respect, Validation, And acknowledgement. I can attend more of these communities that are around me where I really feel seen and understood and acknowledged. I think sometimes, Especially when it comes to family members, We keep knocking on the door, See me, Hear me, Understand me, And that door is not opening. And so the biggest. I guess insight that that question provides. Is what is the actual medicine? That I can give to myself. How can I listen more to my own needs? How can I love myself more? How can I believe in myself? And so as we continue with this exercise, What we're trying to do here is to separate out what might feel like a resentment loop. Where we might hear ourselves complaining in our mind and weighing heavy on the heart. I think often in families, There can be resentments that have been crystallized and cemented for years, Sometimes decades. And so we want to, With tenderness and care and compassion, Take that apart a little bit. And I think writing it down really matters. We want to get it out of our head. And ability to really see it. And so returning back to your journal, And you're more than welcome to open up a document on your computer and do it there. And we're going to move through four questions, Just one at a time. And I want you to free write whatever comes up. No editing. There's no version of anything that you would answer that you could ever get wrong. That if I can understand maybe I hurt my sister's feelings, And she made it mean this, And she's not going to forgive me, And I maybe keep saying sorry, But no, It's not going to happen. The resolution is not going to happen. So how can I come to completion within myself? And a lot of that is trying to understand what stops your family member from being able to have grown up adult emotionally mature conversations. What has them, Maybe it's their pride, That gets in the way of being able to express apology? Why do they go so hard and defensive instead of being soft and tender and vulnerable, The very things that would be needed to repair their relationship? So a lot of healing resentment is taking back, OK, Wow, This is my version of events. And I can acknowledge maybe I did say that thing. But I didn't say it from a place of wanting to tear them down. And I know I reach out and ask for help from my dad, And he may not be willing to give that help because emotions feel like learning another language to him, One that he doesn't know. And so I'm going to stop knocking on that door that never seems to open, That breaks my heart a little more every time. And we start to look for friendships and communities and spaces and places that we can receive that. Their lack of awareness and respect for boundaries is their work to do. No longer feeling bad for setting my boundaries and protecting my peace has helped the most. It is still painful. Oh, Gosh, You are bringing up the deep work of what we need to do in difficult family relationships. You know, Your boundary is never about the other person. And if we wait for them to get it or accept our boundary or understand where we're coming from, We're still stuck in that loop. Being able to hold your boundary, Protect your peace, And feeling that this is a part of what I need to do to stay healthy for me. And so I just put in the chat the boundary that lets you love without losing yourself. That might be so supportive to those of you because it's really an extension of so much we're talking about today. Anger seems energized. Ah, Yes. Good observation. But I'm exhausted. So maybe I need the sadness and low energy to heal. It's so interesting, Deb, I think from my own experience, The moment I stopped. . . Fighting against and kind of giving in to the grief and the sadness was when I found greater clarity and it was a faster path to resolution. I see people in my practice stuck in a fight for what they didn't get enough of as a child. And if we're still in that fight, We're going to play it out again. And it lives out with our spouse, With our kids, In our professional life. And often the best relief resolve is to go back to the root. And resolve it there. As much as humanly possible. And to do that, We're going to need to have our own boundaries. To do that, We're going to need it's almost like the permission to allow ourselves to feel and to heal. So the first question I want you to bring to your journal from today's exercise to separate the loop over the resentment to the hurt underneath it. Is think of that family member that is very difficult. Or we could bring back that person you carry the most resentment towards. And to start, Let's just write their name at the top of the page. And I want you to write down right underneath their name. What you would say if someone asked, What happened? Like, What's the problem here? And as much as possible simplify it. Keep it in a sentence to three sentences. So much about what keeps the looping alive is the story we are hooked into, We are invested into. So this is a part of the exercise to really step out of story and simplify it as cleanly and clearly as possible. In just one to three sentences. If someone asks, What happened? Like, Why don't you and your sister talk anymore? Or why did you avoid your dad this Father's Day? What would you write? The third part of this is that longing that we talked about. So what did you need from this person? That you didn't receive. To feel supported, Like a parent would support their child, Even their adult child. To feel accepted as you are, Quirks and all. To be heard even when your views or perspectives are different. To be believed about how much something still hurts. So give yourself some time here. I'll just be quiet for a moment as you give yourself some time with that one. And so the truth is, That unmet need didn't just disappear. It absolutely shaped you. And so what role maybe did you end up playing in the family? Because this need went unmet. And so the example of what I mean there is, Did you become the easy one, The accommodating one? The strong one. Who never asked for anything from anyone. Did you retreat back into your room and become invisible because mom or dad's needs were bigger than what happened to you at school today or what was going on for you? Did you become the one who fixed things? I can't tell you how many clients I've had where they're eight years old and they're the mediator for their parents. And so you can imagine the kind of resentment and hurt and challenge that would bring in to your adult experience. And so just beginning to notice how that shaped you. How it might be showing up today. And I guess I view resentment as sort of like this backpack full of bricks, Really heavy things. And I'm just hoping that our time together today helps you to unpack some of those bricks and maybe if you go back and you listen to the recording and you you sit with this exercise and you get to lighten many more of those bricks because that backpack absolutely impacts the stresses we come up against today. And I don't know about you, But I got more than enough of current day stresses than to have to carry, You know, Tons of brick weight in my backpack. Upon this exercise, In what ways can you take steps towards taking care of yourself? And I even mean like, Oh wow, I got myself my favorite glass and I've got fresh squeezed lemon in here and I feel so taken care of. And I think where we get almost like a gold star on that action is if we could imagine saying to our parents, You know what? I'll take it from here. I'm going to make myself my favorite lemon water. And there's a part of me, Like a growing part of me that trusts you would have taken care of me in a more of a priority way if more had been given to you in your childhood. And so the way that we'll be close, Even though I'm not going to come and visit, And even though I need to take my space, The way that we're going to be close is that I'll do what you couldn't. I'll take care of me. I'll be tender. I'll be kind, Even in my thinking. I'm going to take a class on how to work with my emotions. I'm going to unconditionally love myself. Even when I didn't follow through on the thing I said I would even when I. I don't know, Didn't go to the gym this morning and I promised myself I would. I unconditionally love myself. And so that's a big part of this new practice when we drop the resentment. When we understand it's been a cover for so much hurt. We can be much more kind and compassionate for ourselves. There can be such a I was going to use the word disappointment, But it's so much bigger than that. There's such a hurt when our adult parents aren't able to help us when we are an overwhelmed parent. Often what we end up feeling is missing from our parents availability is what they didn't receive enough of from their parenting. So it's absolutely not to excuse it. It doesn't make it any less painful. But we stop taking it as personal. And so if I hold this as personal, That my dad's just selfish and he's not helping me and I'm so overwhelmed, We're in what we call as therapists, A limbic lockdown. The limbic system, The part of our brain is like where all the executive functioning goes like, Okay, I'm overwhelmed. I'm going to make myself a chamomile tea. That's what I can do to support myself in the moment because I am not going to make a good choice forward from feeling stressed, Resentful, And reactive. That there's this place where we start to switch into, I'm gonna give myself what was never available over here. And then we're a little bit more resourced to go, Yeah, Wow, From the stories dad tells, He raised himself. And he has no concept of how to really step in to support in a meaningful way. When we talk about narcissistic personality disorder, Everyone's talking about that, And there seems to be a thousand articles on it, And they all miss the point from my perspective. When we're working with somebody, Or we love somebody, Or we're trying to co-parent with somebody who's a narcissist or our own parent, What we want to look at is What, What did they not have behind them? And typically they didn't receive the mothering, The nurturing, The support, The direction, The care from their mom and dad for 1, 001 reasons. And so now they lean in to anybody they can get close to, To try to get those empty spaces from their childhood filled. So they couldn't lean back in parental love and support. So now they lean in and they try to take everything that they can get, Even from their own children. And so if you have a narcissist in your world, Your healthy, Resilient boundaries are the most important thing. But if we get stuck in a resentment story or a resentment loop that they are a narcissist, We're just going to stay stuck. And there's no ability to really resolve it or come to peace with it or choose a different action with it. So don't stay stuck in that sort of slapping an identity on someone and just getting more angry about it. The healing is in you. Every single time. And so what can i do to shift this what can i do to hold this more lightly what can i do to understand that they are not you know doing this personally to me it's almost like my needs have bumped up against their limits. That might be the strongest position to hold because It's not like I want you to try to. . . Make nice with your reality. So it's like what Michelle is explaining is, No, I really do need help and it's not there. And I feel resentful about that. So that's real and understandable. But if we build that out and dig into the hurt and the crystallization of the resentment there, There's not a lot of healing movements that are possible. There's not a lot of ways for the energy that's already expended to get the body back to balance, To get the body back to energy. To be able to deal with this differently. And so that's something that I think is just so, So important. How to shift from resenting that I have to do all this work for myself versus engaging it as an empowering choice. I'm in a collective of therapists and we have a joke. It's just a joke, But we all laugh that, You know, We're all in therapy for the people in our lives who wouldn't dream of going to therapy. And we've got to continue to rise to the occasion to, You know, Do the deeper work. And so we do the work because we want a better life. Because we don't want to repeat all this pain with our kids, With our spouse, With ourselves in different ways, With our own self-talk. We do this work because we want life to feel lighter. We want to welcome in more love. We don't want resentment to be like the wall that blocks it from coming in. And so I just want to acknowledge each and every one of you for tuning in and spending an hour with me to look under the hood of this very tender question. That a lot of the times people just carry resentment almost like, What is that saying? Like the chip on the shoulder, Right? It's a part of my persona. It's a part of my, What's the word I'm trying to think of? Like the barrier that keeps me protected. And yet it leeches into each and every further relationship and it grinds down our own energy. And so you guys are turning towards what do I need to do to empty out that backpack? What different perspective might I have so that I hold this differently? How might I get vulnerable and actually turn towards the grief? Instead of being fueled by the anger. Because that only can take us so far. Holding a boundary is tiring. You can limit time with parents. I wanted speak to boundaries for a minute because i had many clients say to me i have a boundary with my mother in law i haven't talked to her and you know seven years. That's not a boundary and so yes holding a boundary is tiring until it isn't. Until you've mastered that capacity to really Be with what's right for you. And I think the biggest part is growing your tolerance for disappointing another. Growing your tolerance to say, I know you're having another crisis, And I'm going to have to call you tomorrow, Or whatever the example is. That either I'm at this crossroads of letting a loved one down, Or I'm going to let myself down. And I need to not let myself down. If you're in that place where it takes a lot of energy and it's super time consuming in there and you might just want to have a coffee. Instead of going for a dinner. You might want to meet for lunch instead of going away for a weekend. And so what I notice is that many of my clients will say, Oh, We always, You know, Go to the cottage for a week. And I'm like in emotional recovery for three weeks after. And so there's a decision there about what is it costing me? To maintain a relationship that really taxes me. And I don't know, Sometimes cottages are too far apart or you're flying somewhere else or something, But can I go for an evening instead of the week? Can I honor my limits? Because it won't always be this way. I promise you that. As someone who was flattened after Christmas dinner for a good couple of weeks, You know, I'm a therapist for a reason. That once you master holding that boundary and getting some practice with disappointing a loved one to avoid disappointing yourself. Once you get there, It's sort of like training for a marathon where day two is hell on wheels and day 72, You're like, Woof, I'm in the rhythm. I got this. I am made to do this. And so we just know it's a little bit like that. We're going to bring our practice. It might be a little shaky and tiring at first, And the next time will be slightly easier. And it's a little bit different for all of us when that place of feeling like, I can trust myself. When that other person asks too much of me. And so thank you all so much for joining me. And my hope is always that you take something meaningful, Something relative, Something that you can add in to what's felt challenging right from this class. And we'll see you all again in a future class. Take good care.