Hi beautiful lady,
Thank you so much for sharing these thoughts with us. How true it all is ! Anger and resentment may be legitimate and need to be acknowledged but nothing good comes of dwelling on them and allowing them to become entrenched. First of all, they cannot change whatever caused them. Being toxic emotions, they will eventually spread their poison to all areas of our life.
Self-forgiveness is a priority. There's healing in accepting that we are all flawed humans, mostly learning by the mistakes we make. We are thrown in this bewildering world without a user's manual. Whether we admit it or hide it, we all have skeletons in our cupboards, people and situations we could have handled better. The only positive thing we can do is try to figure how to avoid repetition, while keeping in mind that repetition also plays a part in the learning process. Life is a learning curve. Like every learning process, it mostly happens gradually. Setbacks are to be expected but we often regard them as failure. Would it be helpful to scold a child who stumbles while trying to master walking skills ?
But anger and resentment can be useful. They can be an incentive to make a change or improve on something that didn't work out. A traumatic past turned me into an extremely angry person. This rage could be directed against myself, everyone else around and the system too. A whole life can easily be wasted by constant lashing out and/or self-punishment for not coping. It's been a long, often chaotic ride but I gradually learned to catch the feeling as it rises, acknowledge whatever/whoever angers me, accept that the feeling is justified. If another person has caused the anger, I recognize that their actions were motivated by personal issues and how I may or may not have contributed to the situation. I then instantly try to find ways to bring positive results into the situation.
No matter how small and limited these may be at the time, they may have a delayed impact or create a ripple effect. This automatically engages the mind elsewhere and does away with the feeling of helplessness. It begins to set conditions for healing, taking control instead of being controlled. Turning away from negativity and embracing the positive/creativity.
Accepting that nothing can change the past, our past stuff ups or other people's, but changing our attitude towards them can certainly improve our lifestyle...and peace of mind.
