How Your Resentments Are Delaying Your Dream of A Better Life And What To Do About It

8 time-proven ways to free yourself from shame and deep-seated resentments

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Guilt and lack of forgiveness of self and others burden many people with the heavy weight of inappropriate shame and the mental and physical destructiveness of deep-seated resentments.

In recent years, much has been written about the destructiveness of repressed emotions and particularly anger and resentment in contributing to life-threatening illnesses.

The underlying reasons of why we won’t forgive

Why won’t we forgive?

I believe it starts from our unwillingness to forgive ourselves.

We believe that we are undeserving of love, respect, acceptance, appreciation, and the right to live a life where we walk in peace, joy, harmony, and abundance.

Somewhere in our life, we started to believe that all the rules and regulations of the society in which we live defined who we were supposed to be.

The “I am not good enough” syndrome

We stopped trusting and believing in our own inherent worth and came to believe that we were ‘not good enough.

Messages such as ‘you failed’ or ‘you should’ became a litany for us to abuse ourselves with guilt.

I call it abuse because it is just as painful when we do it to ourselves as when others do it to us.

We became judge and jury and found ourselves guilty of our perceived offenses.

When the primary caregivers such as parents, teachers, and other societal influences are unable to love themselves unconditionally, this ‘learned attitude’ is passed on to the next generation as shame in an attempt to control behavior.

The destructiveness of bearing a “sense of deep-seated shame and resentment”

This sense of shame differs from guilt in that guilt is about behavior.

Shame is deeper and more pervasive.

It is about your being and feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and being bad and unlovable become the conviction underlying your life.

Children grow up believing they are ‘not good enough and become the caregivers for the next generation.

The effects of this negative mindset can result in both physical and mental dysfunctionality in life.

This, in turn, prevents us from living the dream that we would otherwise want to manifest for ourselves!

And so it goes, on and on.

I am not blaming the parents and caregivers here as we parent the way we were parented.

My own definition of maturity is that maturity is achieved when we are able to forgive our parents and other significant adults for being human.

What Is Self-forgiveness?

Self-forgiveness is the willingness to believe that you are worthy — that there are no mistakes.

Rather, you are on the planet, or in Earth School (as some people call it) to learn about being human.

The opportunities to learn are just that — not mistakes — just opportunities to learn.

Practical Steps to Self-forgiveness

• 1. Examine how you perceived a certain situation and how you can choose to change your perception.

Remember that the thoughts we think create our “feelings”, and it is our perception of those feelings that create our interpretation of the situation.

• 2. Accept yourself and your humanness — you are not supposed to be perfect.
• 3. Admit when you make a mistake.
• 4. Remember that everybody is doing the best they can with what they know, and that includes you.
• 5. Let go of past-future thinking, stay in the ‘Now.’
• 6. Confront your emotional pain — own your own ‘stuff.’
• 7. Appreciate the lessons that have contributed to your growth and made you who you are now.
• 8. Say ‘I forgive myself for ____________ (whatever).’

I hope you have found my article to be helpful in answering your questions concerning 8 time-proven ways to free yourself from your shame and deep-seated resentments!

Please share your sentiments in the comments section.

Thank you for reading!

My thanks to Sahil Patel for publishing my article in his stellar Reciprocal publication!

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