Career Coach: Rising from Resentment

I have a special interest in leveraging difficult emotions. They carry important messages for us, and we can use them to help us adapt and thrive. In the past, I have written on anger, jealousy, and disappointment; this time, resentment gets the star treatment.

Resentment arises when your subconscious mind assesses that another party is not honoring their end of a bargain. For example, let's say that you and a coworker are tag-teaming a project, and he arrives late to an important meeting. “No problem!” you say. “We’ll just be really efficient today.” Your co-worker breathes a sigh of relief and thanks you for your understanding...then shows up late to the next three meetings, bringing lame excuses every time. Suddenly, you feel resentful.

Resentment supports our interest in maintaining reciprocity. It usually applies to our relationships - with individuals, with groups, with organizations - but we can also experience resentment over broken rules and breakdowns in policy administration. Reciprocity is vital to a healthy relationship; when it fails, breakdowns in trust, cooperation and good will tend to follow. Resentment, then, is a wake-up call—a signal to restore your sense of balance before the relationship in question gets worse. If we can’t find a way to air our grievances, our subconscious will continue to produce waves of resentment until we do.

Considered the options in the situation described above. You could remind your coworker of your agreed meeting time and ask that he please honor it. You could realize that you, too, have been late before, and consider the two of you even. You could decide that you will never work on a project with him again. Or you could consider letting it go, absolving him of the need for reciprocity.  While the first three options are acceptable ways to resolve feelings of resentment, the fourth choice would not effectively do the same.

So how do we process resentment in an adaptive - rather than reactive - way? The only reliable method is to turn our attention inward. We can then reflect on the following:

Clarify the context in which your resentment is arising. (Your colleague is consistently late for meetings, creating an imbalance in your shared responsibility).
Consider the conditions of satisfaction that are not being met. (You believe in calling ahead when running late and, furthermore, learning from past mistakes.)
Ask yourself how you might successfully air the grievance and who would its most effective target. (In this case, inviting a discussion with your coworker would better address the problem than complaining to someone else.)
Modify one or more of the above. (You could shift your conditions of satisfaction by redefining the word “late,” giving each of you a 10-minute grace period. If you are confident that this will work, your subconscious will also shift its expectation of reciprocity and stop sending red flags of resentment to your conscious mind.)

All of our emotions work this way. Just as our subconscious alerts us to anger, anxiety, jealousy, and disappointment, it also sends pleasurable emotions like happiness, satisfaction, excitement, and joy. (For more on the subject, see this post.) By assessing our needs and considering strategies that are viable in the context of our situations, we can effectively turn that challenging resentment into pleasurable satisfaction.

—Andrea Zintz, Career Coach