Resentments – you know – those niggling or blaring thoughts that keep running the hamster wheel in our heads, swirling mind chatter about what someone else should or shouldn’t do or has or hasn’t done until they whirlpool in anger, frustration, getting even; until the resentment is the focus of our day and our night and our day…. This kind of “thinking” can lead one to lose their serenity – their ability to move out of the Limbic part of their brain (where reactions occur) and into the cerebral cortex part (where reasoning, logic, thinking occurs). It is from the Cerebal Cortex that a person can take constructive action, such as deciding what realistically can/should be done about a resentment.

Getting stuck in the Limbic part of the brain is what can cause a person to react to the emotion via the brain maps (neural networks) they’d embedded as coping skills; it’s what can cause a person to relapse. For the family member, relapsing can be trying to control, manipulate, do something | anything to make the feeling go away, and for the addict | alcoholic, that can be having a drink or using their drug of choice. The brain flips back to that which it knows best – it relapses – because those Limbic-based reactionary coping skills are so deeply grooved.

Why is it We Get so Stuck on Resentments

We “React” from the Limbic and “Respond” from the Cerebral Cortex.

To answer this, I want to share what I consider a very informative article by Tian Dayton, Ph.D., titled: “Childhood Trauma and the Wheel of Trauma and Addiction.” While the title includes the term, “childhood trauma,” it is for Dr. Tayton’s discussion of the Limbic system’s mind/body neural networks and how they govern our emotions that I share her piece. As Dr. Dayton writes in this article,

“When we live with addiction, we’re often too preoccupied with our problems to take the time to talk through these intense reactions so we can’t use the thinking, reasoning parts of our minds to regulate our overwhelming feelings. And to make matters even more complicated, our cortex, or the part of our brain where we do our thinking and reasoning, shuts down when we’re really scared. What keeps going are what psychologists refer to as the “survival” part of the brain where we scan for further danger or plan a quick exit or a confrontation,” Tian Dayton, Ph.D.

Dr. Rick Hanson shares equally enlightening insights in his interview, “BUDDHA’S BRAIN: Interview with Dr. Rick Hanson on the Science and Spirituality of the Brain” appearing on The Mindful Word:

“…it is a fact that the brain is very efficient at learning from negative experiences and that it has a bias in which it continually scans for bad news. That’s the bias of the brain. There are some individual exceptions to that but that’s the generalization that we’ve inherited from evolution. That’s the nature of the caveman brain. It looks for bad news, it locks onto the bad news and ignores the larger context. It overreacts to the bad news, it fast tracks that bad news reaction into immediate emotional memory storage and it sets up that record in storage for immediate access and retrieval based on anything that’s remotely similar. That’s the brain we’ve got, which is very effective for survival, but lousy for every day quality of life, spiritual practice and world peace because we’ve got a bunch of cavemen and cavewomen running around this world who are extremely reactive to each other, stuck in a lifeboat with seven billion other people jammed together and armed with nuclear weapons,” Dr. Rick Hanson. Click here to read the entire interview.

How Do We Change Where We “Think” in Order to Let Go of Resentments

As Dr. Dayton wrote in her article linked above, “We need to actively adopt activities that stimulate serotonin, one of the body’s natural antidepressants or mood regulators. Comfortable exercise, sharing emotions, journaling, meditation, relaxation, guided imagery and a relationship network all stimulate serotonin to enter the blood stream.”

Not only do these suggestions help with serotonin, they also help with a host of other brain health actions, such as improving cell health, balancing and replenishing neurotransmitters and receptors and building new connections. And improving brain health is what recovery is all about – whether you are the addict | alcoholic or the family member.  Bottom line, the new brain imaging technologies and resulting research are helping us better understand we really do have control over our thoughts and therefore our behaviors and actions, which can be an important tool in the prevention of a relapse.

To share some additional thoughts on all of this, please find the following posts:

Here’s to Neural Networks and Neurotransmitters: Keys to Brain (and Therefore Physical/Emotional) Health!

Understand Brain Maps | Change a Habit | Change Your Life

Step Away From The Conflict – Change Where You Think

And, I’ll leave you with one last thought – this, a quote from Ann Landers,

“Hanging onto resentment is letting someone [or something] you despise live rent-free in your head.” ~ Ann Landers

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Lisa Frederiksen

Author | Speaker | Consultant | Founder at BreakingTheCycles.com

Lisa Frederiksen is the author of hundreds of articles and 12 books, including her latest, "10th Anniversary Edition If You Loved Me, You'd Stop! What you really need to know when your loved one drinks too much,” and "Loved One In Treatment? Now What!” She is a national keynote speaker with over 30 years speaking experience, consultant and founder of BreakingTheCycles.com. Lisa has spent the last 19+ years studying and simplifying breakthrough research on the brain, substance use and other mental health disorders, secondhand drinking, toxic stress, trauma/ACEs and related topics.

Latest posts by Lisa Frederiksen (see all)

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