4 Ways Resentment in Relationships Impacts You

Relationships are a blessing from God. In a perfect creation with glory undimmed and unmarred by sin, the one thing God said was not good was human isolation. God said that “it is not good for the man to be alone.” We are designed to exist in relationships and community – it is there that we flourish and come into the fullness of our humanity.

Too often, however, relationships are sites of pain – unmet expectations, disappointed hopes, and broken promises. “Familiarity breeds contempt.” That pithy adage describes galaxies of hurt in relationships.

Resentment is a complex emotion that often melds anger, disappointment, and disgust when someone treats you or someone you care about in a way that hurts or insults you or them. While other emotions dissipate with time, resentment tends to be more persistent and resilient. It can last for decades.

A good image to help picture resentment is that of a bitter plant that takes root and if nurtured can continue growing for years. Resentment in relationships can build up gradually over time from many interactions, both large and small. It can also take root after just one interaction, and it affects all kinds of relationships, such as those between colleagues, spouses, parents, their children, neighbors, siblings, students, teachers, and more.

The causes of resentment are myriad. It can be brought about by anything, such as a look, something that someone says, receiving a poor grade for an essay when you worked hard and thought you deserved better, someone simply doing things differently to the way you do them, or regretting moving your family to a new city or taking on a new job.

It can stem from a spouse feeling unappreciated, a child feeling unacknowledged by their parent, or feeling like you provide more emotional or other support to others than they do to you. When someone feels they have been hurt, insulted, or treated unfairly, if the resulting ill feelings of anger and bitterness are given their head, nurtured, and allowed to fester and grow, resentment can result.

4 Ways Resentment in Relationships Leaves an Impact

Resentment can be short-lived or last for a lifetime if not dealt with. Feelings of joy, hope, fear, disappointment, or any other of the complex emotions that we can feel throughout the day have an impact on how we relate to others. How does resentment in relationships leave an impact?

1. It colors all communication in the relationship

People typically hear things differently depending on who’s saying it. If your friend tells you to “go break a leg” before you get up to give a public presentation, you’ll likely take that as encouragement and something helpful for you.

On the other hand, if someone you don’t like or have a poor relationship with tells you the same thing, you may hear a darker meaning than intended. They may be the same words, but the emotional context of the relationship shapes how we understand someone’s words.

The same can be said of resentment. The feelings of injury or insult that morph into resentment color how we perceive the person we hold those feelings of resentment for. They may say the most mundane things, but we will inevitably read their words through the lens of our hurt.

A simple instruction can feel like a demand, critique feels like an attack, and even generous actions may begin to get interpreted as manipulations. Resentment can color all communication in a relationship and distort the intended meaning of people’s words.

2. It changes the tone of the relationship

Each relationship we find ourselves in has a tone. It may be formal, warm, collegial, intimate, civil, or antagonistic. Resentment has the effect of lowering the temperature of any relationship by a few degrees.

When we feel that someone has injured or insulted us, our affections toward them tend to cool. We’re not as friendly toward them; not as willing to be vulnerable with them; not as prepared to go the extra mile for them. Resentment is an emotion that tends to trigger negative thoughts and reactions toward its object.

As such, resentment can make close friends begin to act distant, or a spouse more reluctant to help with chores or be physically intimate, or neighbors, and colleagues to stop looking out for one another. The tone of any relationship is usually affected for the worse by resentment.

3. It poisons the one feeling it

Resentment in relationships affects the relationship because it affects the person who feels it. If you feel resentment toward another person, your emotional disposition is affected. Resentment can ruin your day, your personal spaces, and experiences.

If you’re resentful toward a coworker, for example, going to work becomes an added emotional burden to the ordinary stresses of work. These added emotional burdens weigh down upon you, the person feeling resentment. The other person you feel resentment toward may not even be aware that you feel that way (which can create further resentment).

Resentment often manifests itself as anger, and when you’re feeling resentful you can lash out at people. Resentment also causes you to withdraw yourself emotionally from the relationship, meaning that you no longer enjoy the fullness of that relationship. As time goes on, those feelings can intensify, and that affects not just that relationship, but your entire emotional and relational landscape as well.

4. It breaks the relationship

Ultimately, resentment in relationships has the effect of breaking down relationships. When resentment takes root, it chips away at the life-giving elements that keep a relationship flourishing.

Emotional withdrawal in the wake of resentment further undermines the relationship at a time when more and positive engagement is needed. Resentment does not bridge chasms; it simply widens them. Eventually, it can become impossible to bridge the differences and the relationship breaks down entirely.

Moving Past Resentment in Relationships

Resentment is a relationship killer. It hurts both the person feeling it, and the ones they feel antipathy toward. As it can erode relationships, resentment should be dealt with. There are usually reasons behind feelings of resentment which ought to be addressed, through counseling to understand the feelings and gain skills to deal with them constructively.

Forgiveness is also an important step in dealing with resentment. After all, resentment flourishes because of ill feelings that one can’t let go of. Forgiveness opens the door to restoring your relationship with the person who treated you poorly after addressing their actions and how they affected you.

Being able to address the root causes of the resentment allows the relationship room to reset and proceed on a new footing. Our expectations of others can set us up for disappointment, especially when they are not realistic or expressed. Perhaps you need to make your needs and expectations clear to people.

People aren’t perfect. In marriages and other intimate relationships, partners can be oblivious to their partner’s needs, or they go about meeting those needs in ways that simply don’t land well and don’t appeal to their partner. Rather than feeling resentment, it’s more productive to be patient and communicate these things clearly to others with the knowledge that lasting change will take time.

Additionally, it may be helpful to let go of control. If people do things in ways you don’t like or that you don’t think are best, be aware that your way is not the only way. This is hard, largely because it calls you to step outside of yourself and not insist on things being exactly the way you want them to be.

We must come to terms with the idea that other people don’t think like us, nor do they do life the same way we do. We can strive toward a more balanced relationship where give and take occurs.

Conclusion

Resentment is like a bitter root that occupies the heart, mind, and soul of the person who harbors it. It can poison relationships, making it difficult for people to relate to one another in life-giving ways. Relinquishing resentment is necessary to restore a relationship to good health.

It requires forgiveness and empathy, along with clear communication and setting expectations with the awareness that people aren’t perfect. They will disappoint us or act in ways that don’t meet our standards.

However, we aren’t perfect, either, and that should give us pause as we relate to others. In as much as people should be patient with us and our flaws, loving us for the good and despite the bad we possess, we should also be as charitable toward others.