How to stop worrying about resentment

“Perhaps you could say more about how to stop worrying about the frightened, resentful folks?”

I’ll try.

We tend to surround ourselves with friends and partners who respond positively to what we’ve been conditioned to show and negatively to what we’ve been conditioned to hide, since when we first met them, we showed what we show and hid what we hide. If the relationship worked well enough under those circumstances to lead to friendship or romance, it’s often because they liked what they saw and didn’t lose interest when they didn’t see what was hidden.

People also become friends and lovers for reasons other than liking each other; for example, they are thrown together by circumstances, or they over-emphasize physical attraction, or they have an arranged marriage. When this happens, each person tries to impose his or her definition of himself or herself within the relationship by showing or hiding various aspects of the self, and relationships then work well or work badly depending on what is accepted and what is rejected. Showing, hiding, accepting, and rejecting are thus the relevant behaviors that determine how our interpersonal world suits us.

In this respect, it’s not surprising that so many partners resemble a parent. After all, it was our parents who first conditioned us to show certain things and to hide others. To the extent that a partner has the same taste in humanity as your parents, you are likely to experience less conflict around who you are with that person (and less freedom around deciding who you want to be).

The thing to do, if you don’t want to just be a doll created by your parents, is to decide what your own values are, which aspects of the self you think should be treasured, and which managed. Of course, you can only choose among values you have encountered, so if you want to be free, you have to meet a lot of people with different values from yours, possibly by traveling to a lot of different places, possibly by having intimate conversations with the people you happen to meet nearby. You can also get a wide sampling of values by reading literature, history, and philosophy without ever leaving your computer screen. The greatest of these is literature.

Cognitively, the best way to achieve freedom is to learn critical thinking and to apply it to all propositions, not just scientific truths, but also to all propositions about yourself, whether they be emotional, spiritual, or behavioral. (Critical thinking is, in short, a verbal method of testing and contextualizing propositions that values evidence and logic.) Emotionally, the best way to achieve freedom is to spend time with people who value different aspects of yourself from those that you value and to see whether your values are really just ways of pretending that you are not who you are as opposed to ways of ordering and organizing all of who you are. Psychotherapy, when done right, is a place to discover and accept all the aspects of yourself, so you can behave according to your values rather than according to what you are afraid to discover about yourself.

So the way to stop trying to please people who fear or resent you is to treat your happiness, creativity, humor, and insight as you would like a four-year-old child to be treated at home and not as a four-year-old child ought to be treated at a funeral or other ceremonious occasion. Enjoy rather than hush yourself. Then, when someone resents you, you will react as you would react had the person just told you that your four-year-old niece’s fantasy play in her own room was “inappropriate.” You would tell your niece to pay no heed to the strange lady (and then, I hope, your niece would add to her game a disapproving bystander, to whom unexpected and embarrassing things would happen: “And this is the lady that thinks the funny girl is unladylike, but a bird flew by and now she’s a poopyhead”).