Don’t Let Your Anger “Mature” Into Bitterness

“Bitterness is unforgiveness fermented.”—Gregory Popcak

All bitterness starts out as hurt. And your emotional pain may well relate to viewing whoever (or whatever) provoked this hurt as having malicious intent: As committing a grave injustice toward you; as gratuitously wronging you and causing you grief. Anger—and resentment—is what we’re all likely to experience whenever we conclude that another has seriously abused us. Left to fester, that righteous anger eventually becomes the corrosive ulcer that is bitterness.

Fellow PT blogger, Stephen Diamond, Ph.D., defines bitterness as “a chronic and pervasive state of smoldering resentment,” and regards it as “one of the most destructive and toxic of human emotions.” If we repeatedly ruminate over how we’ve been victimized, “nursing” wrongs may eventually come to define some essential part of who we are. Take hold of our very personality. We’ll end up becoming victims not so much of anyone else but of ourselves.

Such is the inevitable result of becoming obsessed with blaming someone else for our misery rather than refusing to permit external hindrances or setbacks from blocking us from pursuing our goals. Frankly, it’s all too easy to hamper ourselves by falling into the trap of righteously obsessing about our injuries or outrage. Doing so does afford us the gratification of feeling that we’re better than, or morally superior to, the source of our wrongs.

The Cost of Bitterness

Yet the benefits of retreating into acrimonious victimhood—defaulting to bitterness—invariably carries a high price tag. It can:

• Prolong your mental and emotional pain—and may even exacerbate it
• Lead to long-lasting anxiety and/or depression
• Precipitate vengeful acts that put you at further risk of being hurt or victimized—and possibly engulf you in a never-ending, self-defeating cycle of getting even
• Prevent you from experiencing the potential joys of living fully in the present—vs. dwelling self-righteously on the past wrongs inflicted on you
• Create or deepen an attitude of distrust and cynicism—qualities that contribute to hostility and paranoid thinking, as well as an overall sense of pessimism. Such a bleak perspective prompts others to turn away from you
• Interfere with your cultivating healthy, satisfying relationships, and lead you to doubt, or disparage, your connection to others
• Compromise or weaken your higher ideals, and adversely impact your personal search for purpose and meaning in life
• Rob you of vital energy far better employed to help you realize your desires, or achieve goals that you coveted earlier
• Undermine your physical health. The chronic anger that is bitterness can raise your stress baseline, thereby taxing your immune system
• Blind you from recognizing your own role, or responsibility, in possibly having been vindictively harmed by another
• By keeping you in a paradoxical state of “vengeful bondage,” erode your sense of well-being.

Source: Asya 173.deviantart/Used with Permission.

The question is: Do you really want to see yourself as a “victim,” with all the implications of helplessness embedded in that defeatist label? Consider that if you obsessively ruminate on the righteousness of your anger, your wrath will only become further inflamed. It exists to mask your underlying emotional distress by prompting you to focus not on the personal injury you’ve suffered but on the one who so wronged you. Besides, you don’t really have any control over the other person.

Finally, your personal power is pretty much limited to yourself. Even in the face of the gravest injustice, redirecting your focus inwards is precisely how you go about empowering yourself.

The Cure for Bitterness

Virtually every writer who has weighed in on the subject of bitterness has discussed its ultimate remedy: forgiveness. Forgiveness alone enables you to let go of grievances, grudges, rancor, and resentment. It’s the single most potent antidote for the venomous desire for retributive justice poisoning your system. If this impulse hasn’t infested you physically, it’s at least afflicted you mentally and emotionally. Learning to forgive your “violator” facilitates your recovery from a wound that, while it may have originated from outside yourself, has been kept alive from the venom you've synthesized within you.

If anger intimates an almost irresistible impulse toward revenge, then forgiveness is mostly about renouncing such vindictiveness. It can hardly be overemphasized that when you decide to forgive your perceived wrongdoer, you’re doing so not so much for them but for yourself. It’s your welfare that’s primarily at stake here. As already suggested, the longer you hold onto your anger, the more you’ll sink into the destructive quagmire of ever-cycling feelings of hatred and resentment. The more, over time, your anger will “mature” into bitterness.

It’s as though you’ve somehow cultivated your anger as some sort of analgesic and, rather than devoting yourself to actually healing from your hurt, you’ve instead become addicted to numbing it through a painkiller. And the irony of this situation is that to have your painkiller (your anger) continue to work, you must keep your wound fresh and open. Yet if you’re ever to transcend your wounding experience, both your pain and its painkiller have to be allowed to “expire.”

As I’ve bulleted above, any bitterness still dominating you will only augment the injury you’ve already sustained. What’s your choice? In your mind, or with family and friends, you can continue to berate or castigate the one who harmed you. Or, you can choose to become not problem-focused but solution-oriented and contrive to put your ill-treatment behind you. This might seem like a no-brainer, but in fact, it may not be that easy to relinquish your “superior” position of righteous victimhood. Here’s what you need to be reflecting on:

Anger Essential Reads

Did Anger Evolve to Make Us Happy?

What Fruit Flies Can Tell Us About Our Own Aggression

Did the person who hurt you consciously intend to treat you maliciously? Did they really have a personal vendetta against you? Or might their motive simply have been self-interested? Typically, your offender’s prime motive wasn’t to gratuitously cause you pain but to achieve their own ends. And if they did wish to hurt you, might it be possible that their motive was retaliatory? That they perceived you as earlier having hurt them? In which case, their harming you back would have seemed altogether just to them.

Your protracted anger or rage is essentially interpretive. If you’re to move beyond your acrimony, you need to amend your negative assessment of their behavior. To the degree that you might actually have contributed to their actions, it might be time to ask yourself whether you conceivably had some blame for their harming you.

Alter your attitude to free yourself of the bondage that, regrettably, is inherently linked to your bitterness. You need to be willing to regard the other person anew—not as villainous, which may conveniently have served to justify your bitterness, but as insensitive to your feelings or general welfare. Being able to reperceive them in this light can’t help but facilitate a crucial attitudinal shift softening your resentment.

It’s also key to realize that even if the other person has been guilty of intentionally hurting you for no reason other than their own perverse satisfaction, it still makes sense to forgive them. Whether they’ve displaced their rage toward someone else onto you, or whether they’re totally devoid of any empathy or common decency, your bitterness nonetheless causes you far more harm than it does them. Your taking personally what they did also represents an irrational distortion of their motives. In such instances forgiving them is really about letting go of your retaliatory rage simply so that you can move on to enjoy whatever satisfactions life continues to offer you.

The simplest plan that I’ve seen for implementing the intention of regaining your emotional equilibrium through abandoning your resentment and bitterness is from James J. Messina. Here, considerably abridged and reworded is his five-step plan:

1. Identify the source of your bitterness and what this person did to evoke your resentful feelings
2. Develop a new way of looking at your past, present, and future—including how resentment has negatively affected your life and how letting go of it can improve your future
3. Write a letter to this person, describing [their] offenses toward you, then forgive and let go of them (but don’t send the letter)
4. Visualize having a better future having neutralized the negative impact of resentment
5. If bitter, resentful feelings remain, return to Step 1 and begin again.

Concluding Quotations on Bitterness

I think the following quotes forcefully sum up many of the points I’ve tried to make here. So I’ll close this piece with them:

“Anger is a short madness."—Horace

“It is hardly possible to build anything if frustration, bitterness, and a mood of helplessness prevail.”—Lech Walesa

“I know from personal experience how damaging it can be to live with bitterness and unforgiveness. I like to say it’s like taking poison and hoping your enemy will die. And it really is that harmful to us to live this way.”—Joyce Meyer

“Something my mum taught me years and years and years ago, is life’s just too short to carry around a great bucket-load of anger and resentment and bitterness and hatred.”—Kevin Rudd

And finally, alluding to just how seductive the retaliatory self-righteousness of bitterness can be, this simple edict: “Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.”—Martin Luther King, Jr.

© 2015 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.