Healing from Bitterness and Resentment
Have you ever felt trapped and helpless within a relationship? Do you feel depressed and unloved most days? You may feel isolated, caught up within a vortex of emotions and unable to reach out to communicate with your partner. Emotionally abusive relationships have immense, destructive powers; they have the ability to overwhelm and to make you feel undervalued. When the power within the relationship is unevenly balanced, you will need to seriously consider your options before healing can even begin.
When you become caught up in a relationship centred on emotional abuse and negativity, your life will very quickly spiral out of control. Some people are driven by the need to have control of others, they may not even do this consciously, but they are compelled to do so by their past experiences, their inability to succeed within relationships and possibly by past rejections. Whether it is a conscious or subconscious motive, their actions can be cruel. Your need to seek approval within the relationship may increase dramatically.
At times you may experience strong emotions of hate and bitterness, and at other times, may find yourself so desperately in love that it threatens to become all-consuming. If you are reading thus far and it strikes a chord, you may well recognise the signs. When you are so in love, you want to shower your partner with affection and to make them feel happy and secure. It is possible to be too loving, too dependent on your partner’s approval. Early signs often dictate a slippery slope to a very one-sided connection, where one partner has all of the control and the other starts to feel their own sense of self-worth slipping away.
Take Cindy. She was in a marriage for almost twenty years. During that time, promises that were made to her were often broken, and life became a trial of emotional abuse. She felt unloved, unwanted, and totally worthless. She would spend hours locked away in her room, desperately unhappy. She couldn’t talk to her husband about her feelings because he got angry.
Eventually, her own anger inwardly started to develop. She blamed him for making her feel so inadequate. Bitterness, tinged with depression was a heady cocktail that kept her trapped within her own isolation. Cindy felt hurt and betrayed by his lack of love towards her. How could he promise so much and then give so little? In her feelings of insecurity and low confidence she caught the voices in her head saying, he created these feeling in me and yet he still seemed unhappy.
Gradually Cindy found herself getting out of the house, walking for miles, embracing the beautiful scenery around her. This became a daily ritual and through the intense beauty of nature, she started to experience her own sense of solace learning that being on her own was not so bad. Through hours of reflection, analysing the past, she realised that somehow, without meaning to, she had given him her power and that she had to take some responsibility for the way she was feeling. Gradually Cindy began her own inner healing through her need for change.
In Neuro Linguistic Programming terms, everyone has their own ‘a map of the world’ which simply records each individuals journey of experiences to date. This map is unique, based upon your own perceptions enabling you to make conscious decisions. But, depending on those experiences, the map of the world may not always enable you to view life with great clarity. Sometimes you may think you know someone and yet your perception is fragmented. At times, through the trauma of emotional or physical relationships or through any type of emotional pain, resentment can occur and the map can become tainted often with false impressions gleaned by your understanding of how to react to life’s events. NLP is a resource that can help to change behaviours and thought processes so that each map can develop and change as the person grows.
Relationships are not always easy, but if you hand over your personal power so readily, you render yourself power-less, you must assume responsibility. When you forgive yourself and others, you start to heal and you learn a valuable lesson that life is not always as it seems to be and neither are people. Cindy learned to re-generate her own power and to move away from an abusive, intolerant relationship that kept her trapped for the best part of 20 years. You can make valuable changes to empower your own life too.
Join us at the upcoming Wellness Retreat or contact us if you have more questions
