Community Chat

[jessa]

On 5/1/2015 Preds said:

They've been feeding well lately, jessa.

lol......I guess so........

[Preds]

JuJu ... exactly ... don't make it personal. Stick to the debate ... not the individual. Odds are most here would get along in real life.

[SaRina]

IMO it's important to feel/express one's anger initially but important to let it go soon thereafter. Whenever I encounter a personal situation that makes me angry I ask myself a few questions:

1) Is it benefitting ME in any way to be angry? (No. It is affecting my body in a negative way at the cellular level and therefore has the potential to cause illness.)

2) Will being angry change the situation in a beneficial way? (No. But it may serve to escalate the situation.)

3) Is there ANY apparent benefit to remaining angry? (No. I can't think of any benefit.)

I find if I have this conversation with myself it helps to bring me out of the emotion and back into logical realistic thinking.

Recently I was very angry at a family member who I never cared much for to begin with. Then I realized Wow! What a waste of time and energy on my part being angry at this person. My time and energy can be much better spent on so many other things..so pffffffft - Get out of my head.

I'm still not perfect...still a work in progress.

[dooBdoo]

I don't hold grudges, and I hate to see it when it happens. To me, it's destructive to the person who can't forgive and "let go." This article is interesting (sorry it's long but I know some posters don't like to go to links) by Nancy Colier, LMSW, Rev., psychotherapist and interfaith minister:

Why We Hold Grudges, and How to Let Them Go

It's not about the person who wronged you. It's about who you want to be.

"...To begin with, grudges come with an identity. With our grudge intact, we know who we are—a person who was “wronged.” As much as we don’t like it, there also exists a kind of rightness and strength in this identity. We have something that defines us—our anger and victimhood—which gives us a sense of solidness and purpose. We have definition and a grievance that carries weight.

To let go of our grudge, we have to be willing to let go of our identity as the “wronged” one, and whatever strength, solidity, or possible sympathy and understanding we receive through that “wronged” identity.

We have to be willing to drop the “I” who was mistreated and step into a new version of ourselves, one we don’t know yet, that allows the present moment to determine who we are, not past injustice.

But what are we really trying to get at, get to, or just get by holding onto a grudge and strengthening our identity as the one who was “wronged”? In truth, our grudge, and the identity that accompanies it, is an attempt to get the comfort and compassion we didn’t get in the past, the empathy for what happened to us at the hands of this “other,” the experience that our suffering matters.

As a somebody who was victimized, we are announcing that we are deserving of extra kindness and special treatment. Our indignation and anger is a cry to be cared about and treated differently—because of what we have endured.

The problem with grudges, besides the fact that they are a drag to carry around (like a bag of sedimentized toxic waste that keeps us stuck in anger) is that they don’t serve the purpose that they are there to serve.

They don’t make us feel better or heal our hurt. At the end of the day, we end up as proud owners of our grudges but still without the experience of comfort that we ultimately crave, that we have craved since the original wounding. We turn our grudge into an object and hold it out at arm’s length—proof of what we have suffered, a badge of honor, a way to remind others and ourselves of our pain and deserving-ness.

But in fact our grudge is disconnected from our own heart; while born out of our pain, it becomes a construction of the mind, a story of what happened to us. Our grudge morphs into a boulder that blocks the light of kindness from reaching our heart, and thus is an obstacle to true healing. Sadly, in its effort to garner us empathy, our grudge ends up depriving us of the very empathy that we need to release it.

The path to freedom from a grudge is not so much through forgiveness of the "other" (although this can be helpful), but rather through loving our own self. To bring our own loving presence to the suffering that crystallized into the grudge, the pain that was caused by this “other,” is what ultimately heals the suffering and allows the grudge to melt. If it feels like too much to go directly into the pain of a grudge, we can move toward it with the help of someone we trust, or bring a loving presence to our wound, but from a safe place inside. The idea is not to re-traumatize ourselves by diving into the original pain but rather to attend to it with the compassion that we didn’t receive, that our grudge is screaming for, and bring it directly into the center of the storm. Our heart contains both our pain and the elixir for our pain.

To let go of a grudge we need to move the focus off of the one who “wronged” us, off of the story of our suffering, and into the felt experience of what we actually lived. When we move our attention inside, into our heart, our pain shifts from being a “something” that happened to us, another part of our narrative, to a sensation that we know intimately, a felt sense that we are one with from the inside.

In re-focusing our attention, we find the soothing kindness and compassion that the grudge itself desires. In addition, we take responsibility for caring about our own suffering, and for knowing that our suffering matters, which can never be achieved through our grudge, no matter how fiercely we believe in it. We can then let go of the identity of the one who was “wronged,” because it no longer serves us and because our own presence is now righting that wrong. Without the need for our grudge, it often simply drops away without our knowing how. What becomes clear is that we are where we need to be, in our own heart’s company."

link: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/inviting-monkey-tea/201503/why-we-hold-grudges-and-how-let-them...

[dooBdoo]

On 5/1/2015 Justina said:

IMO it's important to feel/express one's anger initially but important to let it go soon thereafter. Whenever I encounter a personal situation that makes me angry I ask myself a few questions:

1) Is it benefitting ME in any way to be angry? (No. It is affecting my body in a negative way at the cellular level and therefore has the potential to cause illness.)

2) Will being angry change the situation in a beneficial way? (No. But it may serve to escalate the situation.)

3) Is there ANY apparent benefit to remaining angry? (No. I can't think of any benefit.)

I find if I have this conversation with myself it helps to bring me out of the emotion and back into logical realistic thinking.

Recently I was very angry at a family member who I never cared much for to begin with. Then I realized Wow! What a waste of time and energy on my part being angry at this person. My time and energy can be much better spent on so many other things..so pffffffft - Get out of my head.

I'm still not perfect...still a work in progress.

Justina, What an eloquent post. I think you summed it up so well, and that's pretty much my thought processes, too, but you expressed it more clearly than I can. Thanks.

I'm definitely a work in progress... still making lots of mistakes but doing my best to learn from them and do better in the future.

[JuJu Squeezie]

The only thing I cannot ignore is some nic who will never let me know who she/he is, telling lies about me here.

If I can't get them to stop it, I have decided I will just bury them on a red ant hill in my mind and they will be forever poofed. This tit4tat thing is old and every insult has been hurled at least 100 times.

I hope to stick to ant hill punishment and carry on!

[dooBdoo]

On 5/1/2015 JuJu Squeezie said:

The only thing I cannot ignore is some nic who will never let me know who she/he is, telling lies about me here.

If I can't get them to stop it, I have decided I will just bury them on a red ant hill in my mind and they will be forever poofed. This tit4tat thing is old and every insult has been hurled at least 100 times.

I hope to stick to ant hill punishment and carry on!

The spreading of falsehoods is beyond annoying, that's for sure, JuJu, and I'm sorry you've experienced it. I guess all of us have been the recipients of that. Some of it is just misunderstandings that keep festering, but others are purposeful and harmful. Love the ant hill, though, and I'll have to remember that!

[melfie]

Well, I was replying to Lion in the other thread and it's closed for comment. Lion said, "In *their* mind it happened, but it wasn't really that way at all." I thought that was an interesting statement because really that may not be the case. Perhaps it was in her mind it happened but it didn't happen that way. If Lion (for example) is telling her "accuser" to support the accusation with proof and the accuser cannot what does that accomplish? Is it proof it didn't happen? Does not being able to pull up a post or thread make her right? And if being right is so crucial then why? Ego? In squabbles one person rarely is 100% right and the other 100% wrong. And to some being right is important because it means being victorious. If we let go of that need there will be a lot less conflict here.

[Surfnturf]

On 5/1/2015 melfie said:

Well, I was replying to Lion in the other thread and it's closed for comment. Lion said, "In *their* mind it happened, but it wasn't really that way at all." I thought that was an interesting statement because really that may not be the case. Perhaps it was in her mind it happened but it didn't happen that way. If Lion (for example) is telling her "accuser" to support the accusation with proof and the accuser cannot what does that accomplish? Is it proof it didn't happen? Does not being able to pull up a post or thread make her right? And if being right is so crucial then why? Ego? In squabbles one person rarely is 100% right and the other 100% wrong. And to some it's important because being right is being victorious. If we let go of that need there will be a lot less conflict here.

melfie, I missed the last posts on that thread because of a real life distraction, but I agree with your post here. Part of it has to do with my personality. I am Irish. My dad tells me I am more like his side of the family than any of his other children. I simply cannot truly hold on to a grudge for long in real life, just like my grandfather couldn't. Sometimes this trait of mine produces incredulous reactions. But it is what it is. LOL

[JuJu Squeezie]

On 5/1/2015 dooBdoo said:

On 5/1/2015 JuJu Squeezie said:

The only thing I cannot ignore is some nic who will never let me know who she/he is, telling lies about me here.

If I can't get them to stop it, I have decided I will just bury them on a red ant hill in my mind and they will be forever poofed. This tit4tat thing is old and every insult has been hurled at least 100 times.

I hope to stick to ant hill punishment and carry on!

The spreading of falsehoods is beyond annoying, that's for sure, JuJu, and I'm sorry you've experienced it. I guess all of us have been the recipients of that. Some of it is just misunderstandings that keep festering, but others are purposeful and harmful. Love the ant hill, though, and I'll have to remember that!

"Red" ant hill, that red is the kicker! I may need help remembering.