The Only Cure for Resentment

Monday, April 21, 2025. This is for Vivian in Vancouver.

Resentment is a classic sign of relational devitalization. And it’s a stubborn little beast.

It survives logic, outlasts apologies, and festers even in therapy sessions where everyone’s crying and nodding and pledging to “move forward.”

It hides behind polite smiles, weaponized silence, and passive-aggressive dishwasher loading.

In couples therapy, it’s often the uninvited third partner, sitting in the corner like an unpaid intern with a grudge and a clipboard.

But here’s the hard clinical truth: the only cure for resentment is grieving what you didn’t get.

Not revenge. Not justice.

Not a better version of the person who hurt you. Not even closure, which is often just revenge with a self-help filter.

No—grief.

Real, visceral, bone-shaking grief.

The kind that doesn’t expect the other person to change. The kind that recognizes you might never get what you needed.

Why Resentment Isn’t Just Anger (It’s Anger’s Fossil)

Let’s discuss nuance for a moment. Anger is an emotional flare: hot, visible, reactive.

But resentment is its archaeological bedrock—pressurized, buried, and distorted by time. It’s the sediment of unmet needs and unspoken expectations that hardened into narrative.

Researcher Michael McCullough (2008) describes resentment as “the result of perceived unfairness that remains unresolved due to a lack of restoration or restitution.”

When couples can’t metabolize betrayal, disappointment, or abandonment—especially in relationships with chronic misattunement—resentment takes root.

Over time, resentment becomes a protective identity. “I’m the one who always has to compromise.” “I’m the one who cared more.” “I’m the one who got left holding the emotional bag.” “for 15 years I worked shit jobs while you sat at home doing nothing for no one.” These roles feel empowering, but they are actually just ossified pain.

The Neuroscience of Hanging On

Holding onto resentment lights up the same regions of the brain associated with rumination and threat monitoring—the amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex (Ray et al., 2008).

You stay in a state of hypervigilance, re-activating the hurt again and again in an attempt to make it resolve differently.

But, frankly, at the risk of sounding arrogant, here’s what most therapists don’t know enough to tell you.

Research tells us that our brain deems imagined justice as real, so every re-run of the betrayal provides a tiny hit of moral indignation (Takahashi et al., 2009). In other words, resentment is a self-replenishing drug—a dopamine delivery system shrink-wrapped in aching bitterness.

Why Forgiveness Doesn’t Work Until You Grieve

Let’s be honest: most forgiveness talk is clumsy and premature.

People try to forgive before they’ve fully mourned what happened. They intellectualize the pain. They justify it. They shame themselves for still being angry.

But forgiveness without grief is emotional bypassing.

Thought leader Janis Abrahms Spring once puts it to me plainly at the Couples Conference in 2016: “Daniel, You don’t forgive to be noble. You forgive because your pain deserves it.”

But first, you need to honor that pain—not suppress it.

That means naming the thing that didn’t happen: the apology you never got, the protection you never received, the loyalty that was never mutual.

Grieving as a Relational Act

In couples therapy, when one partner finally says: “I now see that your career plans were more important to you than mine” or “I realize you were never going to protect me from your mother,” or “I needed you to fight for me, and instead you just shut down,”—that’s grief. That’s the exhale before any hope of repair.

Grief opens the door for re-humanization.

When grief is blocked, the partner becomes a villain.

But when we grieve, they become something a bit more nuanced: a flawed human who could have done better, but didn’t.

And that’s where healing begins—not with a fantasy of what should have happened, but with the truth of what didn’t.

The Paradox: Grief Gives You Back Choice

Once you grieve the unmet need, you’re no longer waiting for it. That’s the miracle. You are free to either:

• Accept the partner as they are, and stop punishing them for a version of themselves that never existed.

• Or leave with clarity, rather than persist with performative righteousness and resentment.

Either way, grief restores your agency.

The Physiology of Long-Term Resentment

Resentment isn’t just a bad vibe—it’s an endocrine hobby.

When you clutch your grudges like heirloom china, your body obliges by throwing a long, slow tantrum.

The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis—the hormonal Rube Goldberg machine that runs your stress response—starts acting like a malfunctioning sprinkler system, dousing your organs in cortisol whether there’s a fire or just the memory of one. Your blood pressure also rises.

Your sleep fragments. Your immune system politely resigns. You’re not just mad. You’re physiologically marinating in your own outrage.

And then there’s your amygdala—the drama queen of your brain—lighting up like a Vegas sign every time someone mentions the thing.

That betrayal, that dismissal, that unresolved injustice. The prefrontal cortex, which is supposed to be your inner therapist, gets hijacked by old scripts and emotional reruns.

You’re stuck reliving Season 3, Episode 9 of “How Could They Do That To Me?” long after the original cast has moved on.

Meanwhile, your body’s quietly logging the damage: elevated inflammation, leaky gut syndrome, reduced neuroplasticity, and—if you keep it up long enough—a set of arteries that look like they’ve been personally ghosted by joy.

Long-term resentment, in short, is a slow-motion form of self-immolation.

It's the nervous system trying to time-travel back to a fight you didn’t win and demanding justice from a body that can only offer ulcers.

And because the brain doesn’t distinguish much between real threats and remembered ones, it responds the same way: tighten the muscles, squint the eyes, prepare the tongue for sarcastic retorts no one will ever hear.

So yes, resentment is real.

But so is the bill it sends to your cardiovascular and immune systems.

And unlike a justified outburst or a clean cry, resentment doesn’t pass through. It builds. It settles. It takes a seat on your chest like a cat that hates you but knows you’re allergic.

Shall we talk about grief next? Because, frankly, it’s the only exit ramp.

The Gavel of Grief

If resentment is the body’s attempt to hold court in a trial that never ends, then grief is the gavel that says, enough.

Not because justice was done. Not because anyone apologized.

But because your nervous system can’t keep living on a steady drip of adrenaline and imagined rebuttals.

Grief, inconveniently, is the cure. Not the neat, poetic kind of grief that comes with a memorial service and some casseroles. No, this is the grief of finally accepting that you will never get what you deserved—and mourning the version of yourself who waited for it.

Physiologically, grief is messy, but metabolically necessary.

Another thing you need to know is that it reactivates the parasympathetic nervous system—the long-neglected “rest and digest” mechanism that resentment shoved into a closet.

Tears aren’t just emotional. They also release oxytocin and endorphins, which help calm the nervous system, reduce inflammation, and reset the HPA axis (Hendriks et al., 2013). Think of crying not as weakness, but as a built-in biofeedback system saying, Bless your heart, you finally stopped holding your breath.

Grief takes the narrative away from the courtroom of blame and into something truer: loss.

You lost trust. You lost a version of love you once fiercely believed in.

You lost time. You lost an imagined future.

That profoundly hurts.

And unlike resentment—which says “I’ll keep this wound open until someone else fixes it”—grief says “I’ll close this wound myself, because I prefer to live.”

Once grief has done its work, the brain rewires.

Neuroplasticity blooms in the soil resentment never allowed. Your memory recontextualizes the pain. The body, no longer tasked with scanning for threat, sleeps better. Digests better. Loves better. You begin to belong to yourself again.

In short: resentment is a survival strategy that overstays its welcome.

But grief is what finally lets you go home.

Couples Therapy Application: The Grief Protocol

Here’s what this looks like in session:

• Identify the Grievance – Not just the behavior, but what it meant. ("When you didn’t show up at the hospital, it confirmed I’m on my own.")

• Name the Wish – Say what you needed. ("I needed you to fight for me.")

• Accept the Loss – Not to excuse, but to integrate. ("You didn’t, and you may never. That’s what I have to grieve.")

• Choose the Path – Stay or go. But no more shadowboxing with ghosts of the past.

If resentment keeps returning, some clients benefit from writing a “burn the bridge letter”—not to send, but to finally purge the fantasy. This letter says:

• Here’s what I needed.

• Here’s what you game me instead.

• Here’s what I now know I’ll never get from you.

• And here’s what I release myself from wanting.

No makeup sex. No carefully staged apology arcs. No redemption fantasies. Just ashes, and from those ashes, perhaps a self unburdened by toxic longing.

Final Thought: Resentment Is a Waiting Room for a Train That Never Comes

And you—gentle reader, deserve more than that.

You deserve to stop waiting.

You deserve to cry, scream, wail, break a plate, write the damn letter, and then finally whisper: “I wanted more. I didn’t get it. And I will not stay in pain’s basement trying to decorate it.”

That’s not weakness. That’s the beginning of something else: a future that doesn’t orbit the past.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

McCullough, M. E. (2008). Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. Jossey-Bass.

Ray, R. D., McRae, K., Ochsner, K. N., Gross, J. J. (2008). Cognitive reappraisal of negative affect: Converging evidence from EMG and self-report. Emotion, 8(5), 587–592. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013446

Takahashi, H., Kato, M., Matsuura, M., Mobbs, D., Suhara, T., & Okubo, Y. (2009). When your gain is my pain and your pain is my gain: Neural correlates of envy and schadenfreude. Science, 323(5916), 937–939. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1165604

Spring, J. A. (2004). How Can I Forgive You? The Courage to Forgive, the Freedom Not To. HarperCollins.