Listen to Resentment

And anger, dread, and all the other negative emotions you've been told to mask.

Recently, I was on author Glennon Doyle’s podcast We Can Do Hard Things discussing my first book, Laziness Does Not Exist. Glennon and her co-hosts Abby Wambach and Amanda Doyle all strongly connected with the book’s anti-work, anti-exploitation message (which I was super grateful for), and they asked me for some parting advice for anyone listening who still struggles with compulsive people-pleasing and over-extending themselves out of a misplaced sense of obligation. 

I advised that people get better at listening to dread. Here’s the clip:

As a masked Autistic person who used to only feel safe when I was busily placating others, I’ve found listening to dread really helps dislodge my priorities from the demands of others. 

It used to be that whenever another person requested something of me — a long, unstructured lunch date at a restaurant where I could barely afford to eat, help with coursework while I was barely fighting to juggle my own assignments, or attendance at a lengthy religious ceremony many miles away from home that was certain to make me miserable — my instinct was to say yes. 

I’d agree instantly without thought, and then spend weeks fuming and freaking out, wishing that I could get hit by a car or that someone near me would fall terribly ill so that I wouldn’t have to follow through on my agreement. Sometimes I’d impulsively quit at the last second because I couldn’t bear the pressure, inconveniencing everyone and not sparing myself a single moment of anticipatory anxiety or post-cancellation guilt.

I fell into this pattern for several reasons. The first was simple Autistic memory foaming, as the writer Attlee Hall calls it. Around other people, I felt so hypervigilant against any possibility of seeming difficult or anti-social that I tried to keep every conversation constantly moving forward at a positive and agreeable clip. I tried to overcome my Autistic lack of empathy (and how evil I believed that made me) by constantly taking the perspective of the other person, projecting myself into their situation so severely I couldn’t remember to take my own side. 

If a lonesome classmate desperately needed company, I had to be the one to provide it to them. If a stranger at the bus stop was too drunk to navigate his way home, I had to accompany him, even if he said things that made me feel deeply uncomfortable. When I violated my own best interests in these ways, dread was always the emotion that twisted inside me. I’d spend all night flopping around anxiously in my bed, remembering the loathed appointment weeks ahead in the calendar. If I was touched or spoken about in ways that felt wrong, a deadness reverberated throughout all of my body while I willed myself to joke and fawn through the pain. 

Dread struck me as an inexcusable emotion to have. I thought it made me weak-willed, depressive, and unmotivated, like an Eeyore that wasn’t so bafflingly tolerated by his friends. I thought I had to earn my right to be loved by being of service to other people and constantly providing them with emotional solace and entertainment. Eventually though, the load this put on my life became unbearable. I’d also started seeking out therapy for my inability to recognize my own emotions. It was then that I finally started listening to dread. 

There was a friend I’d known since graduate school who I always put off socializing with. She would make strange comments about wishing she had a body like mine, and would pull my hands across the table at the cafe and start painting them without asking my permission. She made me download a niche messaging app so she could bombard me with specialty emojis every day. Every time we got together, she talked for hours about how she was failing her classes and losing her paid research assistantship and being treated oddly by colleagues, and how none of this was her fault. 

Not only did I hate these invasive, one-sided hangs, I dreaded even running into her on campus. And so I decided for once that my emotions might provide me with useful information. And I told her directly that I didn’t feel like hanging out. 

Dread proved to be a useful barometer of when I was on the brink of exhaustion or had been trying to convince myself that I owed something to another person that I did not have it in me to give. There were people I admired in theory who didn’t know how to respectfully interact with me. And there were jobs I’d used to sign up for, thinking I could use the extra cash, that only drove me crazy with worry because they required driving halfway across the city at six in the morning, which invariably made me nauseated. 

I started walking away from these obligations. Whenever I felt myself dreading some upcoming duty, I tried to find a respectful way to back out. I also started noticing when I felt dread at how much I had to do — a condition I sometimes call “Calendar Madness” — and seriously reduced the number of demands in my schedule. 

I’m Pathologically Demand Avoidant. It Rules.

Though I am a big believer in the power of dread and extol its virtues often, I have recently heard from multiple neurodivergent people that dread is a confusing emotion to locate.

Since the airing of Glennon’s interview with me, several Autistics and ADHDers have messaged me, sharing that they feel dread in advance of social events every single time, including occasions that deeply matter to them or that they ultimately enjoy. Others shared that they experience dread before initiating any challenging task, so if they were to stop the moment they felt that emotion, they’d never make music, attend plays, or get any writing done. 

If dread casts a long shadow over every challenging or unfamiliar activity, what’s a disabled person to do? 

My answer is to listen to resentment. 

A clenched fist. Photo by Ian Noble on Unsplash

When I tell readers to trust their dread, I am speaking of the constant, grinding, low-grade sense of discordance and misery that proceeds an activity that runs counter to our values or registers as emotionally false. If your family expected you to complete a religious coming-of-age ceremony for a faith you didn’t believe in, you know that feeling of dread. This feeling is distinct from the high-arousal emotional panic of something like social anxiety, which might make you want to avoid a public religious confirmation ceremony, even if you believe in it and find it valuable.

I recognize that for highly anxious people, distinguishing between panic and dread can be quite difficult. Not everyone gets the noticeable dead-inside feeling that I do when I’m in an acute state of dread. And the last thing I want to do is advise my fellow Autistics to avoid any situation that provokes any anxiousness at all. It is important that we develop tolerance of distress and broaden our social & experiential horizons with new experiences, because we do need social support and life will force us to cope with change whether we like it or not. 

And so, for those who already feel dread almost all the time, including in desired situations that align with their values, I recommend searching for feelings of resentment instead. 

Resentment is a feeling of demotivation and perhaps sluggishness, but it typically comes with a strong cognitive component: when you are feeling resentment, you will think negatively about the people who made a demand of you, begin arguing with yourself about whether or not you should follow through with the demand, and will likely begin fantasizing about ways to make the demand stop. This emotion typically has elements of dread and anger built into it, though if you are not comfortable acknowledging your negative emotions, you might not realize it yet. 

When a person pushes through feelings of resentment, they won’t feel relief or any sense of personal benefit. Even after the resentment-inducing experience is over, they’ll continue to feel bad, perhaps even wronged or “dirty.” Performing a resented activity multiple times also won’t make it any easier. In contrast to simple social anxiety, resentment only builds and intensifies upon repeated exposures. 

Think of the emotions you’ve felt and the thoughts you’ve had during your commute to the absolute worst job of your life. That’s resentment. 

As much as is practically possible, you want to avoid putting yourself in situations that provoke the emotion of resentment. And when you do find yourself feeling resentful toward another person or a situation that you’ve landed in, you should practice articulating yourself and building an escape route out. 

There are a variety of interpersonal, emotional, and psychological benefits to trusting our feelings of resentment, particularly if we have a history of acquiescing to every request made of us and permitting others to broach our boundaries. Here are just some of the common results of listening to resentment— and some tips for honoring your resentment more. 

Avoid Overbooking Yourself

Anxious people and people who fawn tend to over-extend themselves to an extreme degree. Because they fear angering or disappointing anyone close to them, they wind up taking on a whole host of obligations that they really can’t hold, and the stress of keeping up with everything spills over into their pre-existing sense that they’re forever on the brink of getting in trouble. Social anxiety and excessive demand work together to create a feedback loop of constant apologizing, rushing around, and falling behind. 

One of the best ways to break out of this cycle is to notice the obligations that you resent the most, or the periods of your life when you feel downright resentful of everyone around you needing so goddamned much. This is one of the most overt possible signs that you need to pump the breaks, and it comes with the easiest fix: find some plans to cancel or say no to. 

Recently Kylie, an AuDHDer living in Australia, agreed to help her ex-boyfriend go clothes shopping before a date. Kylie’s ex is an insecure person who interprets every rejection as a sign that he’s an awful person who will never find love. He also has a lot of body image issues that get triggered while shopping, and repeats downright fatphobic things about himself that Kylie finds hard to hear because she’s in eating disorder recovery herself. 

Kylie feels guilty for having dumped her ex, and to an extent feels she’s responsible for helping him find love. But driving across town to simmer in her ex’s painful self-loathing is an activity that makes Kylie hate him more. She dreads spending her precious free time in this way, and downright resents her ex for making her do it. But her ex isn’t actually making her do it. Kylie is guilting herself into agreeing to go on these doomed shopping trips. 

It would be much better if Kylie would trust her resentment, spare both herself and her ex negative encounter, and say no to the shopping trip invitations. 

Don’t Convince Yourself to Say Yes

A surefire sign that you are crossing your own boundaries and taking on an obligation that you resent is when you notice yourself constantly looking for a reason why you have to do what another person wants you to do. If you keep having to remind yourself of how nice someone really is deep down, or a kind thing they did for you years ago, or telling yourself that you’ve already said yes to a request, and so you must follow through with it, you’re trying to repress dread and resentment at your own peril. 

This is a potentially damaging act of self-coercion, and it most frequently arises in people who do not believe their own emotions matter or believe that their reactions to things are somehow fundamentally “unfair.” Lots of masked Autistics and ADHDers self-coerce, because they’ve been told all their lives that their feelings make no sense and are inconvenient to deal with, and therefore must be incorrect. 

If everyone you’ve ever met has asserted that doing the dishes is easy but you’ve found it almost insurmountably difficult and unpleasant, you’ll eventually stop believing your perception of reality. If you find something hard that is objectively ‘easy,’ then you must be the weakest and most selfish person in the entire world! Ignoring how you feel is your only chance at redemption. Your every feeling and thought must be questioned. Your life would completely fall apart if you were to stop doing things that felt bad to you. 

The self-coercive voice in my head is both loud and insistent. Years ago, an actor in Chicago’s live literary scene invited me to perform in his show. It was a gig that exposed me to the widest audience I’d ever had at that point, but it was completely unpaid. After that, the actor kept inviting me to write for him, and though I resented the unpaid labor, I kept telling myself that I had to say yes. He took a chance on me when I was newly starting out, I told myself. Performing with him bolstered my confidence. Everyone does gigs like this. This is how you develop a reputation as easy to work with. 

The more pressure my self-coercive voice puts on me, the deeper the resentment is that I’m trying to suppress. Eventually, I am going to fold and stop performing labor that is unrewarding, excessively stressful, thankless, or unpleasant. It’s far better if I turn down requests gracefully, rather than giving myself no choice but to say yes no matter how I feel. 

Stop Trying to Solve Others’ Problems

Many fawners and people-pleasers develop codependent relationships, wherein they attempt to both control and take responsibility for how another person feels. 

When you’re swept up in a codependent dynamic, every negative emotion the other person expresses is an emergency that you must jump in and ‘solve’ — even if they don’t want your help, cannot be helped by you, or desire their own space to let negative feelings just be. Taking responsibility for ‘fixing’ every moment of anger, anxiety, frustration, fear, or depression that another person feels is a surefire path to resentment. It also can be intrusive and stressful toward the other person. 

Jo is a mother of four in her mid-fifties, and recently diagnosed with Autism. Because of sexist societal pressure, she always took it upon herself to do all the laundry, prepare all the meals, deep-clean the house on a weekly basis, and look after ‘all’ the needs of her family. Her sense of self bleeds into the needs of her children and husband, and she evaluates her own performance in life based on how happy her family seems. It’s a common coping strategy for women who are masked Autistics — sublimating every desire into being of service to others, never feeling adequate except when receiving completely positive feedback. 

Two of Jo’s adult children suffer from depression, and one is chronically unemployed. Jo sends her son job postings and interview tips all the time, and calls him up, demanding to know why he hasn’t found a position. She puts on elaborate holiday meals, but when her kids seem unenthused and visibly depressed, she internally freaks out at their lack of gratitude. She gets on her knees to scrub the floorboards and breathes heavily with frustration, angered that her husband doesn’t maintain the house to the standards she has quietly set but never articulated to anyone else. 

Jo resents her family and the rhythms of her daily life, and it’s because she chose to take on responsibilities that really cannot be hers. It is understandable why a covertly disabled woman of her generation was hoodwinked into taking on other people’s problems for them. But so long as Jo continues to reaffirm that choice, she’ll keep feeling stressed and miserable. 

A meme of Captain America saying “You CHOSE to do that.” 

Jo cannot make her kids feel positively all the time. (They also do not owe her the continual performance of happiness). She can’t control her son’s destiny. (And he might not ever be suited for work). She certainly can’t get help cleaning the house without asking for it. (And who knows if anyone else in the house even cares about the floors being that clean). 

Jo’s resentment could help teach her to separate the ever-changing emotions and needs of other people from her own self-concept — and it might just bring her family a whole lot more peace and freedom from the pressure to mask, too. 

Recognize How Negative Emotions Feel for You

Psychiatry takes it as a given that Autistic people lack the ability to locate our own emotions, a ‘condition’ they call alexithymia. However, a growing body of research suggests that alexithymia is quite a common reaction to repeated trauma, particularly the trauma of having one’s emotions punished and ignored. More on that here: 

Is it Alexithymia, or is it Dissociation Fueled by Trauma?

People who mask their disabilities tend to consider negative emotions threatening to acknowledge. I used to fully believe, for example, that a state of sensory overload meant I was a bad person. I got so damn angry when the wind was blowing in my face and the sun was beating down on my eyes. I hated other people when they made too much fucking noise, be it chattering or laughter. Clearly I was fundamentally evil and couldn’t let anybody else ever find out. 

Ignoring my anger and frustration only meant subjecting myself to upsetting stimuli further. Not taking my stress levels seriously led to me working myself to the bone. I even stopped noticing hunger and sadness. My misery was just an inarticulable morass of badness that I didn’t know how to solve. 

Noticing and listening to resentment is a useful way out of this. And that’s because resentment is acute, targeted, and somewhat cognitive in nature. It can be hard at times to tell what is making you sad or angry, or where that emotion even begins. But when you feel resentment, you will have negative thoughts about a specific person or situation. How dare my boss talk to me that way. Why the fuck is this bus always so goddamned late when I have a painfully early doctor’s appointment. I don’t even want to be going there. That bitch is eating crackers again.

An ancient Your E-Cards meme that reads: “Once you hate someone, everything they do is offensive. ‘Look at this bitch eating those crackers like she owns the place.’”

Heavy maskers and people-pleasers try to convince ourselves that we aren’t feeling negative emotions. But resentment will appear in our behavior and the contents of our thoughts. Notice when you find yourself angrily cleaning the litter box as loudly and sloppily as possible — are you cross that your roommate hasn’t done it in a month? If your partner assumes you’ll pay for dinner for the twentieth time, do you make a big, long show of pulling out your debit card and passive-aggressively say, “Well, I guess I’ve got it again..,”? Do you imagine throwing your sibling’s poorly trained Bichon Frisé down a sharp cliff?

If so, you are experiencing resentment, baby! And that’s not a bad thing. One of your body-mind’s loudest possible alarm bells is going off and trying to protect you. Now you can try to address it, and work on noticing signals of oncoming resentment earlier and earlier, improving your emotional sensitivity over time. 

Even if you find that you can’t “feel” your feelings in an intuitive way, you can notice when your thoughts become negative, spiteful, annoyed, or hyper-focused on tiny faults. That’s a sign that you have unspoken needs and boundaries that deserve to be voiced. Resenting a person means that there’s some core unfairness in the relationship or the situation that needs to be sorted out. And resenting some element of your environment means that you’re uncomfortable with all that’s being demanded of you and how little support has been provided. 

Express Yourself Directly

So far, we’ve spoken a lot about the art of noticing resentment and validating it within the privacy of your own head. But since most resentments involve an interpersonal imbalance of some kind, you will have to learn how to express what you feel. The good news is, if you’re already resenting somebody you’re probably expressing those feelings in an ineffective, passive-aggressive, conflict-avoidant way, and learning to use your words more effectively will benefit everyone involved. 

Let’s return to the example of the sibling with the annoying Bichon Frisé. If you’ve gotten to the point of envisioning the dog’s violent demise, you’ve probable stifled a few smaller irritations before. Did you tell your sibling that it’s totally fine the dog piddled on your white rug even though it wasn’t? Has it been yapping at a high pitch that pierces your ears? Did you start cleaning up after the dog and babysitting it for hours every week for free?

When expressing your feelings, focus on the specific behavioral changes that you need now, rather than the months or years of resentments that you’ve allowed to quietly build. Your past refusal to articulate yourself is not the fault of another person, and you don’t have a right to cash in on “feelings debt” just because you lied about how you felt in the past. 

Keep your requests, limits, boundaries, and potential consequences specific and fixed in the present: 

“I don’t want that dog in the house anymore.”

“I can’t dog-sit anymore.” or “I can watch him on Saturdays, but not Sundays and Mondays.”

“If you don’t train him better, he needs to stay in the yard.”

“I’m putting in ear plugs because the barking is painful.” 

“If you can’t afford to keep the dog, I can’t solve that problem for you. I can only help in x and y ways.”

“If you want me to keep taking the dog to vet’s appointments, I need gas money.” 

Expressing your needs to another person is not you punishing them, or making up for the pain of the past. It is merely prevention of upset in the future. Try identifying situations that could cause you future resentment and name and circumvent them before they begin. Here are a few other example scripts:

“That doesn’t sound fun to me. I hope you can find someone else to go to that show with you.” 

“If stay out that late, it will ruin my whole week.”

“I’m in a lot of pain, so I can’t move heavy furniture. But I could pack some boxes.” 

“I’m not free that week.” 

“If I take on this project, I’ll need to pass Task A and Task B to someone else.”

“Can you pick up that trash?”

“Sorry, no can do.” 

“I don’t enjoy doing that.” 

“If I say yes to this I’ll only regret it. I want to spare us both the frustration.”

An added benefit of communicating more directly is that it often forces others to do the same. If you stop jumping to fix your loved one’s problems before they even request your help, they’ll have to learn how to articulate their needs. Or they may figure out a solution on their own, and you’ll learn you never needed to mind-read and insert yourself. 

Do What You Want Without Apologizing/Convincing

Many neurodivergent people who find boundary-setting challenging believe that they must perfectly articulate their limits to others, and convince other people that they have a right to their boundaries. But this assumption still hinges on seeking the approval of external parties and attending to their emotional reactions more than the feelings you’re having yourself.

While communicating directly about your feelings and needs has many benefits, there are situations where your behavior will send the clearest message. Remember: boundaries are a thing you do, not something you can convince others to respect. If you experience a ton of unresolved resentment, it may be because you’re behaving passively and expecting others to maintain your boundaries for you. But you can break this pattern by doing what you want and need to do, and letting others sort their own reactions to that out.

Recently, an uncle of mine came visiting all the way from England. Though he’s a 50-year-old father of two with his own business and who lives fairly independently, the moment he arrived in town he kept asking me to solve very basic logistical problems for him. He kept texting me questions while I was at work: How could he get to his AirBNB from the airport? What was the sales tax in Illinois? How did the train work? Was it going to rain all day? All easily Googleable questions.

I love my uncle, but his impulse is to access information socially rather than from a reliable source. He shares this impulse with a lot of non-Autistic people, and I find it pretty baffling and inefficient. I could have tried to convince my uncle that his repeated questions were verging on performed incompetence and disrespecting my time, but convincing him to never be a person who asks Googleable questions isn’t something I have control over. What I could do, however, was not leap in to solve his problems or answer all his questions for him.

And so I didn’t. When my uncle asked a question related to our spending time together (such as when I was available to hang out), I answered him in detail and was attentive and encouraging. When he asked me some question he could just as easily solve on his own, I just ignored the text for a few hours and went about my busy day. He always sorted out the problem, and I spared myself a lot of energy and potential resentment. Since I felt secure in my own ability to enforce my boundaries, we had a lovely weekend together.

Recognize Injustice

Resentment can often signal an unbearable injustice that our bodies and minds are screaming to have corrected. Even if it is impossible to right the injustice you’re facing on your own, you should take notice of the resentful feelings you’re harboring and the toll that the situation is taking on you, and then strategize ways to get out from under it. 

Autistics, ADHDers, and other neurodivergent people are frequently pathologized for responding to systemic mistreatment the same ways that anyone else would. Asking for help gets called “social manipulation” or “malingering.” Feeling pain when we are alone is labeled “rejection sensitive dysphoria.” Not seeing the purpose of certain tasks is “executive dysfunction,” and so on. 

The Biological Causes of Mental Illness Cannot Be Separated From the Social Ones

It’s plainly evident that we are held to different standards from other people. Yet when we protest against those standards, we only get punished more. And so many of us learn to swallow unfairness after unfairness, once again telling ourselves that we’re simply being too weak or negative to keep up. 

But resentment allows us to give a name to the mistreatment we are facing. If we hate our employer, drag our feet into school as slowly as possible every single day, or feel a whole-body sickness entering the welfare office, there’s probably something deeper going on than us being selfish complainers. In fact, there’s probably an entire network of unfair procedures and rules that are designed to keep people like us down. We deserve to honor that, and to recognize that the system we’re living under is unfair.

Last year, my Jesuit employer (who professes to be supportive of LGBTQ people) refused to pay for my gender-affirming top surgery. I followed all the requirements for getting such healthcare funded perfectly: I visited a psychologist to get a letter of support, I had a doctor who’d known me for years vouch that the procedure was necessary, and I applied for coverage months in advance, in a state where all health insurance plans are legally required to cover the surgery I was getting. My employer still refused, citing a religious exemption that even my insurer was pretty sure was illegal. 

I could have challenged my employer on this in court, but I didn’t want to wait years for the chest of my dreams. And so I coughed up the $10,000 from my own savings, got the surgery, and glumly kept reporting to work through every day of my recovery. I didn’t even feel safe telling people at work what kind of procedure I’d gotten, given the University’s belief that it ran counter to its religious values. 

Some months later, a cis gay coworker of mine started pushing for my employer to have a float in the city’s annual Gay Pride Parade, and I just about wanted to claw my eyes out. I resented my employer for profiting off an image of itself as tolerant of queer people. I hated that my surgical expenses and the discomfort of recovery were invisible to everyone around me. And I found it pretty damn hard to put any real effort into my work. And so I didn’t. 

Resentment couldn’t rescue me from institutional transphobia or Supreme Court decisions that allow for religiously motivated discrimination. But it could allow me to realize that my bad feelings weren’t my fault. I created a firm mental separation between the organization and what I could emotionally give to it. I think about my job as little as possible. I invest no trust in the place. Instead, I trust my own perceptions, which makes me far more difficult to exploit. 

If you resent a powerful institution for treating you unfairly or taking too much from you, that’s probably a pretty accurate gauge on reality. In our ageist, authoritarian society we tend to treat cynics as if they’re immature teenagers who won’t get over their own egos and fall in line. But teenagers are really onto something a lot of the time. They’re highly capable of questioning rules, but lack the legal freedom to escape those rules’ dominion. They can be angry and difficult because they feel stuck. 

As we grow older, many of us remain institutionally controlled and boxed in, but we learn to justify the rules that dominate us, becoming more pleasant and docile. It’s a powerful act of unmasking to let ourselves remain angry, resentful, and dread-filled when those emotions are warranted. As disabled people (and other marginalized groups) fight for our freedom, we have to begin with the freedom to be dissatisfied within our own minds. 

Get Acquainted with Your Dark Side

Honoring resentment instead of stuffing it away is an important form of “shadow work,” getting comfortable with the sides of yourself that might be unpleasant, unfair, taboo, or difficult to deal with. 

Because neurodivergent people experience such intense social precariousness, we often hate any element of our personality that could make ourselves more difficult to love. We expect ourselves to be flawlessly patient, upbeat, and helpful to others, and think we must constantly earn acceptance through good behavior — but every human being has a darker side. If we attempt to mask all negative impulses in us, we will never achieve real intimacy with someone else, and we’ll never be able to voice our true emotions either. 

Resentment is a great negative emotion to begin shadow work with, because no matter how ugly its manifestations are, its existence is understandable, and often justified by some external event. Eventually, we can work on accepting that violent or hateful thoughts will sometimes just occur to us, and that we can be curious about where they’re coming from, or just let them be. 

A good friend of mine, Margot, used to be abused by one of her professors. He made sexually inappropriate comments about Margot’s body when they were in private, and when she tried to report him, he retaliated by lowering her grade. It was a small college, and administration was unhelpful, so Margot was forced to attend multiple courses with this professor. Years later, she sought therapy for the trauma of this experience. 

“Just write down all of your negative thoughts about this professor as often as you like,” the therapist advised. “Do not censor yourself. Really get the feelings out.”

The words that came pouring out of Margot were vivid fantasies of vivisecting her abusive professor and his wife. Every day she narrated to herself a violent retribution for all of her years of abuse, describing the incisions she would make into her professor’s body and the cries of regret he made while dying an agonized death. Margot told me she wrote different versions of the same murderous story over and over, filling up an entire notebook until she got it “right.” Then she moved on to a boyfriend who had cheated and left her. 

Image of a man writing in the dark by Steven Houston, courtesy of Unsplash.

Margot is a conscientious, dependable friend who volunteers every weekend at a rape crisis center. She mentors other neurodivergent people who struggle professionally, teaching them how to network and editing their cover letters for free. When we interact she is caring and gentle, but she’s also defended me with the courage of a mother bear when I needed it.

There is no overt connection between the person that Margot chooses to be in her daily behavior and the snarling murderer of her fantasy life. Her most negative thoughts and emotions cannot hurt anyone, so she allows them to simply exist within her. Margot is a master at shadow work, understanding that she contains a multitude of competing ideas and feelings, and not beating herself up for choosing to walk the darker path in her own mind sometimes. 

Rage, loathing, hatred, seething jealousy, pathetic insecurity — these are not bad feelings. They’re typical, to-be-expected consequences of having a dynamic, social mind. Every human experiences them, and since they do not determine our behavior, they do not reflect who we are morally. We can observe these emotions as they move about within us, and even derive a sick pleasure from entertaining them at times. 

Even in their most disturbing forms, our affect has important information to offer us. Margot’s murder-fantasies, for instance, reflect the depth of her mistreatment and her unrealized desire to be heard. If we imagine ourselves killing a spouse or abandoning our children, that may signal that our currently lives our untenable and we’re longing for an escape that feels so far away it’s hard to envision practically. Even resenting ourselves can be a sign of painful cultural conditioning, or frustration that is deserving of help. It’s not unusual to fantasize about suicide when a person is resentful of their lot in life. 

Sometimes by merely allowing your most extreme emotions to exist, they will eventually quiet down into something more legible. This is especially true if you’re undergoing a meltdown or a trauma trigger — something real provoked your upset, and you’ll be able to think more clearly about how to address it after you’ve allowed the storm to run its course without judgement.

Remind yourself, when you start feeling resentment, that your emotions are not a “betrayal” of anyone. What happens privately inside of you can never cause another person direct hurt. No emotion is “unfair,” even if it seems ridiculously heightened. What matters is our behavior — which is why our final tip today will contemplate the ways that resentment can negatively impact our actions. 

Stop Emotionally Manipulating Other People

When a person feels that they are not ‘allowed’ to experience any negative emotions, they often view themselves as completely powerless, even while exerting strong pressure on everyone around them to not “make them feel” unspeakable anxiety and dread. If a negative emotion is the end of the world and proof that you are a terrible person, you will view anyone who ever inspires bad feelings in you as dangerous, and potentially take actions that censor others or prevent conflict from happening, even when it’s necessary. 

This phenomenon is strongly related to what’s sometimes called “white fragility” or the prevention of real talk. A person of any background can easily be guilty of this, but it’s especially likely to be weaponized by white women and other white neurodivergent people who believe themselves to have no control over their own emotions and behavior, because they’ve so deeply internalized an identity as a victim. 

How Do I Overcome White Woman Fragility Brain? How Do I Build Solidarity with Activists Who Kinda Suck?

It might be terrifying to realize that your own history of emotional censorship has led to you exploding at other people for expressing negative emotions of their own, or that you’re so dependent upon others seeming happy that you discourage any airing of complaints. However, confronting these behavior patterns and uprooting them is crucial to building a more functional relationship to your own resentment. 

Resentment often signals an imbalance in a relationship, but sometimes this imbalance is caused by us actively over-extending ourselves, not someone taking advantage of us. For example, if you put in long hours at work when you aren’t obligated to, and rush to complete tasks that are not urgent, you may resent your colleagues who clock out at quitting time and enjoy their full lunch breaks. Your coworker isn’t the one taking advantage of you — you are, and perhaps so is your boss. Criticizing your coworker for leaning when there’s time to clean won’t make matters more just. It will just exhaust you both and tear you apart. 

Similarly, if you’ve appointed yourself the role of peacekeeper of the family, you might find yourself sneaking around mending tensions the moment one relative is pissed off at the other. But controlling the emotions of other people is not your job, and some anger is very worthy of existing. It’s not your problem to solve if one sibling never wants to be around the other again. If you release the pressure from yourself to make everyone happy, you will also stop emotionally surveilling and manipulating everyone else. 

Listening to resentment means taking responsibility for getting your emotional needs met, rather than suppressing them and pretending as if they do not exist. Instead of hanging your self-worth on others’ satisfaction, ask for what you need in order to feel satisfied. Do you need attention? Affection? A distraction? A place to cry? A cat to pet? A new job? To switch majors? Someone to take out the damn garbage once in a while? A long walk in the woods away from everyone else’s input? 

Trusting resentment also means accepting that moody storms and outbursts of annoyance are natural, and enrich the human experience. Incredible bonding can happen through communal protest. There’s beauty in a shared cry. Absolutely nothing beats the nasty pleasure of quietly hating the same person as your best friend. 

So go ahead and entertain the sides of yourself that seem the most taboo and stigmatized. It will help you be a better comrade to your fellow disabled and “mad” people as much as it helps you unmask.