Next step to lowering stress? Giving up the grudges

I’ve been on a mission to lower my stress, and I’ve been doing pretty well. Giving up guilt and my new approach to exercise (i.e. actually exercising) has helped a lot. So has this blog – simply writing and putting it out there for people to read, relate and respond to is incredibly cathartic; it’s like my own little group therapy session.

But I realized recently that there is one thing (ok, maybe two – I’ll save the second one for another time) that I haven’t addressed – something that makes my shoulders hunch and causes me to spend too much time and energy worrying about things I can’t control or change: Grudges.

The thing is, the grudges I’ve held on to aren’t against people who have hurt me, they’re against people who have hurt those I love.

If someone has hurt me in the past, I tend to get over it. It might take awhile, but I move on. Just ask the woman my ex cheated on me with. She apologized to me several years ago and while we aren’t best friends, we are friendly with one another – albeit from a distance of about 3,000 miles – and there’s no animosity between us. We all make mistakes, but hopefully we learn from them and can do better, be better.

But if someone hurts a person I love, I have a much harder time letting it go. I have a harder time putting on a friendly face and pretending that everything is fine when I know what they did to one of my friends or family members, and how much it hurt them. I don’t go all Revenge-y on anyone. I’m not mean or rude. But they probably know something is up by my less-than-convincing fake smile. I’ve tried to make it look more genuine, but I’m a failure at being fake. (Which I think is actually preferable to the alternative of being great at it.)

Yet the folks who were hurt have probably moved on, like I have with those who hurt me. It’s a natural part, a necessary part, of the healing process. They may keep the bad memory tucked away in a safe place, handy enough for easy retrieval in case that person does something else to hurt them. But they don’t dwell on it.

So why do I?

Why do I have a harder time forgiving those who hurt people I love, than I do those who hurt me? Why do I let it bubble up any time I see them, and use so much energy worrying about what they’re doing now? Why do I let something that happened a long time ago affect how I feel today?

They may not have apologized or done anything to right the wrong. But I can’t control that. I can only control one thing: The way I respond.

And that response is going to change, starting now.

Holding a grudge doesn’t fix anything, it doesn’t make anyone feel better, it just prolongs the resentment and keeps us from moving past it. It makes it harder to see past the person’s transgressions, sometimes a singular transgression, harder to find the good. And I’m sure, even if I’ve been blind to it, there is some good in them.

Of course it’s easy for me to sit here and say right now that I’ll give up those few grudges. But the true test will be how I feel the next time I see them. With any luck, I’ll be able to give them a genuine smile and grudge-free greeting. After all, by then they won’t have the power to dampen my mood, I’ll have taken it back.

What is the biggest grudge you’ve ever held, and do you still hold it against someone?