Resentment Is Bad For You.
a proverb says, Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never harm me.
Alas that is quite untrue! Words can do untold damage, even at a physical level. When someone deceives you, or curses you, the anger of rear you feel produces profound changes to your heart rate and blood pressure. Your body gears up to fight or run away. In extreme cases, people can suffer heart attacks and strokes as a result of hearing cruel words or watching horrible events.
Pain is an important safety valve. When you cut your leg, the pain you feel warns you of the damage done and reminds you to be more careful. It may send you hurrying to someone you love for consolation. Or to a doctor for stitches.
Feeling anger when you have been hurt by someone is not wrong. (We shall come back to this).) It is a normal reaction and the sign of a healthy personality. If the matter is small and trivial you probably need simply to admit the feeling and quietly bring it under control.
But if it is a more serious hurt you may well need help. The pain should not be ignored. It should be openly admitted to someone else who can comfort and help. It often takes time before emotional pain subsides.
Ideally, talking will be followed by reconciliation with the person who caused the hurt. You say to me, 'You hurt me.' We talk about it until I understand the hurt and show I am sorry about it and want to give you comfort and love.
Usually that will be sufficient to take much of the pain out of the hurt. But suppose you refuse to talk or to admit there is a problem. The anger you felt at the beginning does not go away. Instead it settles down into a long-term resentment. Every time you think about the event you smoulder inside. It worms its way into your personality and relationships. 'I'll never trust anyone again,' you say and hold people at arm's length.
If the resentment is strong enough, the inner stress may take its toll on the body. So initial anger may be health but long-term, unhealed anger is very dangerous indeed. For our own good, we need to learn how to forgive.
Showing posts with label anger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anger. Show all posts
Friday, November 26, 2010
Thursday, November 25, 2010
How Can I Forgive... from Vera Sinton
Once in a while there is a hurt which stops you in your tracks. You feel shocked, outraged. You may be blazing with anger or just feel cold and numb. The last thing you feel like doing is turning towards the one who hurt you. Perhaps you feel its impossible to forget the hurt or stop feeling the anger. Perhaps it even seems that it would be wrong to forgive: what has been done offends all justice.
A small boy is playing with a stick in an open space just beyond his village. There are still some bones and skulls to be seen in the grass, remains of the last massacre when troops swept in and shot all the people they suspected of helping the guerrillas. In the boy's mind, the stick is a machine gun. He is practising shooting his father's murderers. He is the man of the family now. When he grows up he has to take revenge.
Fifty years on from the second world war some of the inmates of prisoner-of-war camps in the Asian jungles are still campaigning for compensation. They speak of the lasting physical effects of the tortures they went through. 'The world may forget', one man says, 'but I could never forgive'.
Maybe the unforgivable hurt is to someone you love. Shirley bottled up the hurt done to her husband by a colleague at work. 'I have no problem forgiving for myself,' she said, 'but I feel I have no right to forgive that'
Forgiveness for the little everyday injuries is something we give and receive all the time.
I tread on your toe and you say, 'That's all right.'
Someone makes a mistake that delays the whole team at work but we smile and carry on.
A comment from a friend suddenly hurts me. She sees my frown or the way my shoulders sag and quickly shows she is sorry and cheers me up. We forgive and are forgiven, hardly noticing it happens.
But what happens when it comes to the big hurts for which there will be no easy cure? How can we forgive?
Some people have found the answer to that question.
A small boy is playing with a stick in an open space just beyond his village. There are still some bones and skulls to be seen in the grass, remains of the last massacre when troops swept in and shot all the people they suspected of helping the guerrillas. In the boy's mind, the stick is a machine gun. He is practising shooting his father's murderers. He is the man of the family now. When he grows up he has to take revenge.
Fifty years on from the second world war some of the inmates of prisoner-of-war camps in the Asian jungles are still campaigning for compensation. They speak of the lasting physical effects of the tortures they went through. 'The world may forget', one man says, 'but I could never forgive'.
Maybe the unforgivable hurt is to someone you love. Shirley bottled up the hurt done to her husband by a colleague at work. 'I have no problem forgiving for myself,' she said, 'but I feel I have no right to forgive that'
Forgiveness for the little everyday injuries is something we give and receive all the time.
I tread on your toe and you say, 'That's all right.'
Someone makes a mistake that delays the whole team at work but we smile and carry on.
A comment from a friend suddenly hurts me. She sees my frown or the way my shoulders sag and quickly shows she is sorry and cheers me up. We forgive and are forgiven, hardly noticing it happens.
But what happens when it comes to the big hurts for which there will be no easy cure? How can we forgive?
Some people have found the answer to that question.
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