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Greetings and welcome to my post. Thank you for reading and for wanting to seek help for your relationships. As you know, I am writing this year in 2015 want to invite you to consider what is a healthy versus an unhealthy relationship. Throughout this series, I am focusing on intention and how important each person views a problem or a person in a relationship. When both people are in agreement on the intention, than you know where each other is coming from.

For this series, I want to focus on asking you this question: Do you want to be resentful regarding the past or do you want to pursue forgiveness of the past? When you think of your most important and personal relationships, how do you view problems and this relationship topic called resentment? When you get to a place in which you are wanting to not be resentful and instead think of ways to be forgiving, you are investing in building healthy relationships. And healthy relationships are so much more meaningful and purposeful in building happiness and enjoyment in the relationships.

How do you view resentment? What comes to mind when you think of this word and how would you define this? Can you look back over your life and notice resentment at different times in your life and how did that make you feel? Can you remember a time in your life when resentment was happening versus a time when you choosing to be forgiving?

For the sake of this writing, I would like for you to view resentment as frozen anger. In many ways, resentment is a hard, cold anger towards someone that affects our emotional health. Resentment turns anger into a tough, stiff and rigid wall around us. On one hand, anger is a normal feeling and anger tells us or informs us like a warning sign or a flashing signal on our car dashboard informing us something is wrong and something is going on. This dashboard light is reminding you that your car something needs your attention.

So when you think of your most important personal relationship, if you find yourself feeling angry over past hurts, it is important to face and deal with that anger as soon as possible. I don’t know about you, but when a dashboard light on my car goes off, I want to attend to it as quickly as possible. When you feel anger, you also quickly need to attend to it as anger is a signal to you that something has gone wrong in your relationship. Anger has occurred and it would be healthy to attend to it right away.

Anger is like a weed in your flower garden. You have a beautiful rose garden or a beautiful flower garden and you notice some weeds are starting to grow and are threatening to affect and take over your flowers. You say to yourself that it would be a good idea to get rid of the weeds so as to prevent these weeds from growing tall and deep and interfering with your flower garden. Weeds distract you from focusing on the flowers.

So it would be wise to dig up a weed as quickly as possible. But then life gets busy, your schedule brings demands and pressures from life and others, and for the most part, you do feel the need and importance of getting to the weeds but you find yourself not finding the time or schedule to pull the weeds.

When you avoid or you put off attending to the weeds, in a few weeks, these small weed plants start to grow and start to multiply. This leads to the weeds starting to take over the flower garden and the initial intention to get to the weeds only leads to them being neglected and overwhelming you, and now your flower garden now is a mess and the original idea of pulling them sooner rather than later, only leads to crowding out the flowers with the weeds.

The same can be true of resentment. We all struggle to let go of resentment as they are like weeds that are deeply rooted when we neglect attending to our anger. We start to feel and conclude that we will never be able to pull them up or get rid of them. As a result, our unresolved frozen anger grows quickly and deeply in our hearts as they start to crowd out other feelings and destroy our happiness and trust with someone else. This resentment can turn us into bitter and isolated people.

If you feel some anger towards someone and you know in your personal relationship how important it would be to confront and talk about this anger to this person but you don’t, you then are stuffing your anger like turkey in which you place the stuffing into the inner cavity of the turkey. Anger turns into resentment when we stuff it and don’t resolve it.

As a result, resentment is like bitterness, hate, indifference, and annoyance with someone that it results in you feeling and finding yourself building up a wall as you start to think of strategies just to avoid them because you do feel so much anger and resentment towards them. And when resentment builds, walls build, trust goes out the window, and you start to find yourself not wanting to be with that person at all. And this only leads to avoiding or isolating yourself from that person. Thanks for reading.