Resentment

• Opposing the facticities of life is not a necessary and sufficient condition for resentment, but makes it more likely

• Different from anger by being a private internal conversation that grows in silence, while anger is usually public and visible. Resentment shows up indirectly when something is holding someone back from full commitment to their behaviour or if something is interfering with their ability to work with others.

• There’s usually a story about why the conversation can’t be public. E.g, other people won’t understand, or it’ll be even worse if I complain publicly.

• Anger can turn into resentment because of being in a weaker power position. E.g, resenting someone who humuliated you by abusing their power and to complain would invite retribution. Uneven distribution of power happens everywhere in society.

• Resentment corrodes everyone involved.

  -Those in resentment pay by being in constant suffering - there is no joy or happiness in resentment. Resentment also reduces possibilities for action, as it diverts us to an obsessive conversation about what was lost in the past and who should be blamed. Conversations about the future are also contaminated by that assessment since we live in the assessment of being treated unfairly from now on. Possibilities for the future become new ways for expanding the resentment.

  • Those being resented are surrounded by hidden currents even if they’re not aware of it. They are disrupted whenever they try to coordinate action and someday, they will pay for what they were silently accused of.

• Resentment can be reconstructed by the underlying story - we’re the victims here and we had the moral right to have something and we deserve better. Therefore, something is to blame for the situation. The linguistic reconstruction for resentment is:

  • I assert that X has happened
  • I assess that X did damage me and restricted my current possibilities
  • I assess that this is not fair
  • I declare “A” responsible for this ( A” being a person, a group of persons, an institution, etc.)
  • I assess there is nothing I can do now to get “A” to repair the damage inflicted on me
  • I declare this is not right (it should not be or it should be different)
  • I declare that sometime, somewhere, somehow “A” will pay for this.

• From this reconstruction, we can see that resentment involves a tention between an assessment of facticity (“things should be different”) and a simultaneous assessment of possibility (“there is nothing I can do now”)

Moving Out Of Resentment

To move from resentment to Acceptance:

• Reexamine the grounding of the accusation of the resentment. We may find the person being blamed is not responsible for the situation, or that there is no one to blame or that we have our fair share of responsibility.
• If the accusation is well-grounded, explore the possibility of coming to terms with the past and closing the private conversations of resentment.
  • Reexamine the assessment that keeping the accusation silent and not speaking up is grounded. There may be room for making a complaint or requesting for a promise for the other person to not act in the same way again. We can also ask for compensation for what has happened. Resentment often happens when we don’t even consider the possibility of making a complaint and requesting a change in behavior.
  • Declare Forgiveness
  • Sometimes, the wrong being done is so unacceptable that it doesn’t make sense to keep the relationship with the other person. The way to end the resentment could be to end all relations with the other person.
  • Even the option of severing all ties may be impossible usually due to a dependence on the other person.

Anticipating Resentment

When designing systems, it is possible to anticipate the possibility of resentment occuring (e.g, in organizations) and the following things can be done to avoid it:

• Making clear promises: when people assess that promises made to them were not fulfilled, this creates resentment. This usually happens when the promises both parties heard were different. This occurs with promises that have unclear conditions of satisfaction or different standards between both parties to assess the commitment by. Hence, it is important to make clear promises and check how the promises were listened. However, there is always ambiguity in communication, this is a facticity of human communication.

• Making mutual commitments to share some private conversations: to deal with resentment before it can grow, we can mutually agree to share private conversations we have with one another if we assess that it interferes with coordinating action together. This allows identify resentment at its source and dealing with it as soon as it appears. There must be enough safety for everyone involved so that people believe they will not be negatively affected by sharing those conversations.

  This does not mean making public all private conversatiaons, we have a right to privacy. The conversations that we commit to share are the ones we think can interfere with our ability to coordinate action.