For about eleven years I carried a grudge against a man I worked with. I won't tell you his name, and it wouldn't matter if I did. He took credit for something I built, said something about me in a meeting I wasn't in, and never once acknowledged it. I was right about what he did. I still am.
And for eleven years, I told myself my resentment was about justice. About truth. About not letting people get away with things.
It wasn't. It was about me replaying a meeting I wasn't even in, over and over, on the treadmill, on the Harley, in the shower, in the middle of the night. He had moved on years before. I was the one still sitting in that conference room.
What Resentment Actually Is
The word itself tells you what's going on. Resentment comes from the old French ressentir — to feel again. That's exactly what it is. Not a feeling, but a re-feeling. You take the original hurt out, turn it over, feel it again, and put it back. Then you do it tomorrow.
Anger, by itself, is not the enemy. Anger is information. It tells you a line was crossed, something you value was threatened. Paul says, "In your anger do not sin: do not let the sun go down while you are still angry" (Ephesians 4:26). Notice what that verse assumes. It assumes you will be angry. The instruction isn't "don't feel it." It's "don't let it set up camp."
Resentment is anger that set up camp. It's anger that was never processed, just stored — and stored anger doesn't stay the same. It hardens.
"See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many." — Hebrews 12:15
Why It Feels Like Justice
Here's the trap. Resentment feels righteous. It feels like loyalty to the truth. If I let go of this, I tell myself, then I'm saying what happened was okay. I'm letting him off the hook.
But I had confused three different things. Forgiveness is releasing my claim to make the other person pay. Reconciliation is restoring the relationship, and it requires two people and real trust. Justice is making things right, and sometimes that's appropriate to pursue. You can forgive someone and never be close to them again. You can forgive someone and still report what they did. Forgiveness doesn't erase the truth. It just stops me from being the one who keeps serving the sentence.
John Climacus, the seventh-century monk who wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent, devoted an entire step of his ladder to what he called the "remembrance of wrongs." He described it as anger's final form — a rust on the soul, a nail driven into it. Those old monks weren't naive about injustice. Many of them had fled real cruelty. But they had watched what nursing a wrong does to the one who nurses it, and they didn't sugarcoat it.
What the Body Knows
Modern research has put numbers on what the monks already saw. In a well-known 2001 study, psychologist Charlotte van Oyen Witvliet at Hope College had people recall someone who had hurt them. When they rehearsed the hurt and nursed the grudge, their heart rate went up, their blood pressure rose, their facial muscles tensed, and they reported more negative emotion. When they imagined responding with empathy and forgiveness, those stress responses went down.
Think about that. Every time I replayed that meeting, my body responded as if it were happening again. For eleven years, I was giving a man I didn't even like the power to raise my blood pressure on demand.
Fred Luskin, who has led forgiveness research at Stanford for decades, puts it this way: a grievance is a hurt that we've rented too much space in our minds. The event happened once. The rent is what we keep paying.
"Forgiveness is for you and not for anyone else." — Fred Luskin, Forgive for Good
How I Finally Set It Down
I'd love to tell you it happened in one moment of prayer. It didn't. It happened over months, and it started with a spiritual director asking me a very simple question: "What do you get out of keeping this?"
I didn't have a good answer. The honest one was: I got to be the good guy in the story. I got to feel wronged, which felt a little like feeling important. That was hard to admit.
Here's what actually helped, and what I'd suggest if you're carrying one of these:
Name it plainly. Write down what happened in two or three sentences. Just the facts. Not the whole saga — the saga is part of the replay.
Name what it cost you. Not what they took — what the grudge has taken. Sleep? Peace? Time? Joy in a place you used to love?
Separate the three. Ask yourself: Is there justice I actually need to pursue? Is reconciliation possible or even wise? And then, separately: am I willing to release my demand that they pay?
Pray it, and pray it again. Jesus told Peter to forgive seventy times seven. I used to read that as "forgive seventy-seven different offenses." Now I think it also means forgiving the same offense seventy-seven times — every time the replay starts, you release it again.
Get your body involved. When the replay kicks in, move. Walk. Breathe out slowly. Your nervous system needs a signal that the meeting is over, even if your mind hasn't gotten the memo.
The Forgiveness Practice on the Tools page walks through this in more detail.
What I Found on the Other Side
I ran into that man at a funeral a couple of years ago. We shook hands. He was older, grayer, and had clearly forgotten whatever I'd been carrying all those years. And I felt… nothing much. A little sadness for both of us. That was it.
That's what freedom felt like. Not a big emotional scene. Just realizing the conference room was empty, and I could finally walk out of it.
So let me ask you: what are you still re-feeling? Who is living rent-free in your head, and what has it cost you? This week, write down the name. Then write down one thing you're willing to release — not because they deserve it, but because you do.