What Your Resentment Is Trying to Tell You
A couple years ago I couldn’t stand being in my own home with my own family.
It was a bizarre feeling. Because I was also bursting with love for them. Enormous, aching, would-do-anything love. I was doing anything. I gave them everything I had. I put them first. My kids more than my husband, sorry Allen. And still, some nights, I couldn’t be in the same room without wanting to walk out the front door and keep right on walking.
It made me feel like a terrible mother.
When I hugged my kids, I prayed to the gods of worn-out mothers that they couldn’t feel the fire of rage roiling in my chest. Pressed right up against them while I held them close and told them I loved them. Which I did. That was also true.
I tried not to snap when they asked me a question. I often snapped anyway. I was on a hair trigger, all day, every day, for what felt like no reason. So I left. I took trips. I went out for girls’ nights. I called it me-time. I told myself I was refilling the tank.
The tank did not refill.
I came home from every trip just as burned out as before. Resentful of everyone in my own house before I’d even set my bag down. How dare they. How dare they ask me for one more thing when I was already giving everything. How dare they interrupt me again. Could they not see what I was already carrying?
That’s the part I didn’t say out loud to anyone for a long time. The rage. The exhaustion people understood. The rage underneath the exhaustion? I wasn’t sure
I went to therapy to fix it. I assumed it was anxiety. Showing up as anger, the way it sometimes does. I did not know it was resentment. Resentment wasn’t allowed. Resentment sounded ungrateful. Resentment was something a bad wife and mother felt. But I was doing all I could not to be either of those. I was bending over backward to do everything right.
When the word finally did reveal itself (ugh… resentment) I saw it as a me problem.
And it was a me problem. Just not the one I thought.
I thought of it as an attitude problem. Something I needed get over. Manage. Because I was doing my job. Dinner happened. Homework got checked. Everyone got where they needed to be. Fights mediated. Emotions managed. Problems solved. If the job was going fine and I still felt like this, the problem had to be me. My attitude. My lack of gratitude. My inability to just be present and enjoy it.
What I didn’t understand yet was that I had no boundaries. None. I did not honor myself as a full human being inside my own family, with wants and needs that counted for something. I thought everyone in my house deserved unrestricted access to my time and my body and my attention, all day, on demand. I thought it was my job to manage everyone’s emotions along with my own. To carry the schedule, the moods, the meals, the mediating, and to do it smiling, because a good woman doesn’t make her sacrifice visible.
I was not honoring myself as a person. I was functioning as a resource.
Here’s the part that actually changed things for me, eventually.
The resentment I was trying so hard to get rid of was not the problem.
The resentment was information. A signal from a brain that was still working correctly, still tracking reality, still trying to protect me even after I’d stopped listening to it. It was telling me something needed to change. My energy. My time. My nervous system. It had been telling me for months, maybe years, and I had spent all of that time trying to silence the messenger. Never thinking to read the message.
You know this loop, probably. You’re running it in a different room with a different set of small hands reaching for you. A different set of demands. The irritability. The snapping you promise yourself you’ll stop doing tomorrow. The trip you take that doesn’t touch the actual problem. Because the problem was never a lack of time away. Or a shortage of spa days. The problem was that you had no space for you at home. For you to matter. Where you can say no. No place where your needs got to register as real.
This is not a character flaw. It’s not an attitude problem, no matter how many times you’ve called it that in your own head. It’s a nervous system doing exactly what it’s built to do, sending up a flare, over and over, until someone in charge finally looks up.
The someone in charge was me. It’s you too.
Resentment doesn’t need to be managed away. It needs to be heard.
If you’re in it right now and don’t know where to start, that’s normal. Boundaries aren’t obvious when no one ever taught you where yours were allowed to be.
→ Book a free 15-minute Clarity Call if you just want to talk it through.
→ Book a 90-Minute Clarity Reset if you already know what the one thing is and you’re ready to build a plan around it.
One session. One problem. A place to start.