I am a Resentment Queen. Part Two.
In which I consider the strange and unsettling relationship between caring and resentment
A little backstory. I’m a woman who learned early in life that taking care of other people was the best way to justify her existence. If I took care of someone, they might value me. I might get some goodies. Like attention. Love. Acknowledgment.
Sad? Yes.
But true.
So, for much of my life, I looked for ways to help, to be useful. Was my mother overwhelmed? I tried to lighten her load. I did laundry, vacuumed, helped with dinner. Listened to her worries and complaints. Acted as a confidante. Did (some of) my boyfriends take advantage of me? Sure. Isn’t that what love is all about? Giving and not getting in return? In my professional life, if there was a job that needed doing, I did it. Even if it wasn’t technically my responsibility. I took it on myself. To take it off someone else.
That’s nice, right? By being so helpful, I was being nice.
Well, maybe at first. But, over time, the behavior became pathological. Dysfunctional. Non-nourishing. Because I wasn’t really being nice. I was surviving.
That is, by living for other people, by erasing myself and fixing everyone else, I distracted myself from a basic truth:
I wasn’t getting what I needed.
AND, corollary: The world was an unreliable, chaotic, dangerous place.
What I’m saying is this:
In order to survive (psychically) I continued behaviors that didn’t nourish me, that didn’t teach me that I was valuable and loved just for being myself. My psychic survival depended on constantly proving my worth to others by allowing them to use me for their purposes. My needs were not relevant. (When, of course, all humans’ needs are relevant.)
If the people I relied upon for physical (and psychic) survival actually needed me to take care of them, then my own survival — obviously — required my prioritizing their survival, their needs. So they wouldn’t abandon me because their needs weren’t met. My need was to satisfy their needs. A fusion of needs. Exit me.
My fundamental belief that I could stave off chaos by taking care of (and thereby controlling) other people amounted to a new belief: that I was valuable and powerful because of everyone else’s incompetence and need. I became
grandiose.
The more I helped and fixed others — the more grandiose I became — the more resentment I felt. Because of the gargantuan imbalance between my needs and others’ needs and my (unconscious) decision (or need) to focus solely on those others’ needs at the neglect of my own.
What I called “caring,” in other words, was more aptly called “pathological caregiving” or “compulsive helping” or just plain “narcissism.” Taking on other people’s needs was the means of addressing my own basic need — to justify my existence, to fill myself up with purpose and value by serving others, not by being my own precious self.
Sad? Yes.
But true.
So when caring leads to resentment, beware. It could mean you’re high on grandiosity. You’re erasing others’ agency and competence by taking over for them. Because you know what’s best. You’re assuming that you’re the best person for any job, and you’re frustrated that everyone else isn’t like you. (I mean, wouldn’t the world be a much better place if everyone were like you? Of course!) You’re contemptuous of the people who have the needs you need them to have so you can feel needed. All sources of bubbling, blistered, blasting resentment.
The antidote to this grandiosity is humility. Which means getting back in your own body and just sitting there. If you refrain from getting in other people’s gardens and stay in your own garden for a while, your body might serve up information you really need to have. Like sadness. Or fear. Or rage. Or disappointment. Or whatever the hell your endless activity in service of everyone but yourself is distracting you from.
Guaranteed they’re not good or fun feelings. If they were, you wouldn’t be so grandiose. You wouldn’t need to be so out of touch with yourself. But I promise you: Dealing with these bedrock emotions is productive. It is healing. While steeping in corrosive resentment gets you nowhere and, eventually, eats away at that very same body your grandiosity protects you from getting to know.
Note that, when I say “humility,” I do not mean false modesty. I don’t mean swinging to the opposite extreme from grandiosity (which is tempting and maybe inescapable for those of us who have never had a realistic sense of ourselves, of our self-worth). The work of inhabiting humility is discovering our power, our strengths, and loving them. Not overblowing them. Just knowing them, appreciating it when others notice them, celebrating them quietly and gratefully, and moving on to the next thing.
Humility would be another word for stability. For equilibrium. For being realistic. For getting back in whack. All good things for Resentment Queens.