It was one of those nights in which sleep eluded me. My mind was fixated on a conversation that had occurred the day prior and couldn’t let go of the perspective it had taken.

On rising the next morning, I sat with my journal and wrote. Once again, I was blessed with its fruit.

My writing revealed my resentment at someone’s inability to take a stand. Inability is the key word, for they really were unable – but my mind had simply ignored that fact and instead clung on to the incorrect view that the person could take a stand, and should. My ill founded thinking was the cause of my resentment, not the person – but it took my writing to see that.

I wrote about their early life, of the experiences they had endured, and of the mechanisms they had creatively developed to survive. Taking a stand was not one of them. Taking a stand incurred violence. So instead, they learned to hide, and as an adult, to keep ‘messy’ people and ‘messy’ life out of their lives. Whilst voicing strident opinions with an intensity that reflected their fear came easy, acting on them did not.

It made sense. Our early years are the context in which we learn to think so that we survive and stay connected with people. Unconsciously, it becomes our ‘manual’ for navigating life. ‘Don’t speak up’, ‘don’t annoy anyone’, ‘work hard’, ‘don’t try’ and endless others become ‘chapters’ that steer our engagement with life from behind the scenes.

As my writing revealed this person’s history, compassion rippled through my body. I understood how difficult it is to break out of a lifetime of unconscious psychological habit, something that can only occur if we trust the core of who we are. None of this person’s early experiences inserted that ‘chapter’ into their personal ‘manual’. My resentment was ill founded.

If you are feeling resentful towards another and wish to move on, I invite you to sit down and write about the situation on which you have fixated. Articulate on the page what you think the person should have done. Be honest with your recount, because it is this thinking that is getting in the way. Then reflect upon what that person would have needed to know about themselves, and the experiences they would have needed in life, to become the sort of person you expect. Then write about the early life they had and how they learned to survive in that context. It’s no good resenting someone for actions and behaviours they have no idea how to execute or that they are not capable or free to do so. Like canaries in an open cage, rarely is anyone completely psychologically free to live congruent with the active intelligence that animates us. We all possess our own straightjackets.