Resentment involves feelings of anger and bitterness. While it’s common for such feelings to arise in relationships, holding onto grudges can negatively affect the relationship and your physical and mental health.
Harboring resentment might make you avoid certain family members or even act out because of your anger. You might make snide or passive-aggressive comments, lash out, or do things to “get back” at them. No matter how it’s expressed, these feelings aren’t good for your well-being.
Letting go of resentment in a relationship often involves practicing empathy, focusing on gratitude, forgiving yourself (and the other person), and understanding *why* you feel so resentful in the first place.
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Strategies to Let Go of Resentment
The first step toward letting go of resentment is admitting that there’s a problem. Once you admit it, here are ways to handle it by changing your mindset, perception, and emotional response:
- Develop self-compassion. While resentment as a coping mechanism may have worked in the short term, it’s important to be kind to yourself. You are a human who makes mistakes.
- View the situation with empathy. When you consider the other person’s perspective, you might have a different take on what happened.
- Be grateful. Gratitude actually makes you happier. If you’re envious because your work colleague won a special award, keep in mind that—according to one scientific study—benign, motivating, and positive envy will appear in those who cultivate gratitude rather than the malicious, slandering type of envy.
- Forgive yourself and others. Although it might be hard to let go of resentment, making peace with what happened increases your sense of well-being and purpose in life.
- Reflect and identify the source of the resentment. If it is something that you can address through clear and courageous communication, practice doing so by communicating needs, boundaries, and requests. If the resentment stems from a situation that is out of your control, acknowledge the feelings arising from that, such as grief or rage, and then practice accepting and focusing on what you can control once the feelings have been processed.
What If You’re Still Angry
Letting go of resentment is sometimes easier said than done. It often means shifting the negative thought patterns that contributed to those feelings in the first place. If it seems like resentments are holding you back and you just can’t let them go, talking to a mental health professional can be helpful. Interventions that can help include:
- Anger management therapy: There are multiple approaches to dealing with your anger. These approaches can help you reduce anger-inducing situations, improve your self-control, and teach you how to cope in a healthier way.
- Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT): Anger can be a debilitating psychological problem, but research suggests that CBT can be an effective treatment. CBT treatment was the most popular intervention due to its effectiveness and its work in non-clinical and psychiatric populations.
- Relationship counseling: If you’re still struggling, seek couples or relationship counseling. Nowadays, you can opt for traditional in-person therapy or choose to work with one of the many practitioners offering online therapy.
Why You Might Feel Resentment in a Relationship
A variety of things can cause this complex emotion. Resentment happens when you feel like you’ve been taken advantage of, mistreated, or not heard. It’s often defined as a feeling of indignation.
Unfortunately, resentment can unleash other destructive thoughts and emotions. Resentment can ultimately poison relationships if it’s left unchecked.
Resentment can stem from:
- Jealousy
- Betrayal
- Embarrassment
- Shame
- Trauma
- Sharing your needs and not having them met (feeling entitled/believing they should be met)
- Not sharing your needs and not having them met (feeling entitled/believing they should be met)
- Not identifying and setting your boundaries and having them violated
- Communicating boundaries and having them violated
- Hoping someone will read your mind and then become resentful and upset that they do not
In romantic relationships, especially long-term ones, one partner might resent the other because of an imbalance in power or workload. For example, it’s not uncommon for a wife or woman in a heterosexual relationship to feel like she has to work a job, take care of most of the housework, and oversee childcare and household labor while her partner focuses only on work.
Resentment in an intimate romantic relationship might flourish when one person always initiates sex and the other never does. Or in a case common to seniors, when one person faces medical challenges and their significant other steps up to be their caregiver. The caregiver might grow resentful as their own needs go unmet, and that can create tension in the relationship.
In one study, researchers examined how tension affected well-being over the first 16 years of marriage. Investigators defined tension as feelings of irritation, resentment, and disappointment about the relationship.
These findings suggest that it isn’t just overt conflict that hurts relationships. Negativity, including unvoiced negative feelings, can be especially damaging to relationships.
Because tension plays a significant role in the well-being of the marriage, it’s important for interventions to look at both partners’ tension levels and how they handle tension to determine the couple’s relationship functioning.
How to Tell If You’re Holding Onto Resentment
It’s tricky to recognize signs of resentment. That’s because it’s a multi-layered emotion that may combine myriad feelings at the same time. Overall, a resentful person feels like they’ve been wronged. They may:
- Be tense when they’re around the person they believe wronged them
- Avoid conflict with the one involved
- Ruminate obsessively and be unable to stop thinking about the incident or interaction
- Talk badly about the person behind their back
- Refuse to admit they’re upset or talk about the situation at all
- Pull away emotionally and physically from the person they feel resentment toward
- Engage in passive-aggressive behavior without openly discussing your feelings
Feelings that contribute to or may indicate resentment include:
Can Resentment Ever Be a Good Thing?
Although it might seem counterintuitive, the person who feels resentful has some advantages. Here are some not-so-obvious ways it might *feel* better to suppress resentment rather than address it.
Resentment can help you:
- Protect yourself, feel safe from vulnerability, and avoid being hurt again
- Promote your own feelings of self-worth
- Develop a sense of control and power
- Avoid addressing deeper issues in yourself, the other person, or the relationship
- Avoid difficult communication and conflict
- Avoid responsibility and next steps
While it might sometimes feel better to hold onto those resentments, keeping a grudge going can ultimately hurt your well-being and relationships if not addressed through healthy communication. It’s not a productive way to handle conflict and move forward within a relationship.
How Resentment Can Slowly Ruin a Relationship
If you hold grudges or stew about something, all that anger can take a toll on your mental health. Without effective communication or problem-solving with the other person, you can become stuck in feelings of ill will.
Negative Effects of Resentment
Anger has been linked to a range of negative health effects, including:
Persistent resentment in a relationship will naturally create a wedge between you and the other person. If you try to discuss the matter and your partner stonewalls, you might close up all over again. That can lead to feelings of isolation, withdrawal, and disconnection. It might even spell the end of the relationship altogether.
Without the opportunity to open up to someone like a friend or family member or reach out to a trusted psychologist about your feelings, the situation will likely worsen. You’ll then have no way to vent, to gain an opportunity for perspective, or to heal.
Key Takeaways
- Resentment can occur in relationships when feelings are hurt, unmet (or unspoken) needs are unmet, and frustrations go unaddressed. Over time, this can damage the trust and intimacy between people.
- Signs that you are holding onto resentment include passive-aggressive behavior, irritability, and emotional withdrawal.
- Overcoming resentment in relationships involves practicing empathy, forgiving yourself and others, and identifying the source of the resentment. In some cases, you may find it helpful to talk to a mental health professional to manage your feelings, minimize stress, and improve relationships.
Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
Xiang Y, Chao X, Ye Y. Effect of Gratitude on Benign and Malicious Envy: The Mediating Role of Social Support. Front Psychiatry. 2018;9:139. Published 2018 May 7. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00139
Manalel JA, Birditt KS, Orbuch TL, Antonucci TC. Beyond destructive conflict: Implications of marital tension for marital well-being. J Fam Psychol. 2019;33(5):597-606. doi:10.1037/fam0000512
Lee AH, DiGiuseppe R. Anger and aggression treatments: a review of meta-analyses. Curr Opin Psychol. 2018;19:65-74. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.04.004
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