I hold grudges forever

What this looks like

You hold grudges that go back years and you can recall each one in detail. Some of the people involved don’t know you still think about them. Some have died and you’re still angry at them. You’ve been told to forgive. You’ve considered it. You can’t bring yourself to do it.

You’re keeping a record of what was done to you. Nobody else has acknowledged it the way you have.

What you’ve already tried

• Forgiveness exercises
• Writing the unsent letter
• Therapy that explored why you can’t let go
• A meditation practice on compassion
• Talking to the person who wronged you (sometimes)
• Telling yourself you’re better than them
• Telling yourself it isn’t worth your energy

You’re still holding all of it.

Is my anger normal or a problem?

Why forgiveness exercises haven’t worked

You probably learned at some point that what happens to you isn’t always taken seriously by the people around you. You may have grown up in a house where complaints got dismissed, where the bigger personalities won and the smaller ones swallowed it. You may have been the child who wasn’t allowed to be hurt. You learned to hold the record yourself because nobody else was going to.

The forgiveness exercises ask you to drop the record without giving you anything in return. Dropping it feels like agreeing that what they did was fine. The forgiveness model also asks you to give the other person something they haven’t asked for. They might be dead. They might be unrepentant. They might still believe they did nothing wrong. You’re not going to release them from a debt they refuse to acknowledge.

You’re carrying the record because nobody else has. We work on what would let you set it down.

How we work with it

Strategic therapy doesn’t ask you to forgive. We work on what you’ve been doing daily to keep the record alive, and we find a different keeper for what happened to you. You can stop being the sole archive without agreeing that any of it was acceptable.

You’ll put it down. The people who wronged you stop being who you give your evenings to.