Do You Resent Them, Or Yourself For Allowing It?

Jun 28, 2026

Read Time: 4 min / Or listen on the podcast

I was driving home from Sedona last weekend, watching the sun melt into the open road. No traffic. No noise. Just me, wifey, and the desert. The sky was gorgeous.

We had been listening to music for hours, and I was craving some mental stimulation from a podcast. I scrolled, and there she was. Esther Perel on the Oprah Podcast.

If you don’t know who Esther Perel is, WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE!? She’s one of my absolute favorite psychotherapists who has spent the last 40 years working with couples and writing about love, desire, and the conversations we don’t know how to have. Her book Mating in Captivity just got rereleased for its 20th anniversary. Such a good read; you can check it out here.

And no, this is not a sponsored link. Haha. But maybe one day Esther and I will have some type of collab…Putting it out in the Universe 😉

So, I was listening to the conversation, and Esther started talking to this woman in the audience. Married twenty years. Five kids. A lot of disappointment. A lot of hurts. She said her husband had been working really hard to repair things between them, but every time a small thing happened, it reminded her of the bigger things.

She couldn’t let it go. Esther listened. Nodded. Asked her a few questions. And then she said, “Can I ask you something?”

The woman nodded.

Esther: “Do you resent him… or yourself for accepting it?”

OOoooooOOOOoO. That one hit hard.

It was such a clean, surgical sentence. The audience gasped. I gasped. Oprah gasped. Because anyone who has ever felt resentment toward someone they love already knows the answer (even if they’ve never admitted it to themselves).

You’re not really angry at them.
You’re angry at yourself for what you tolerated, what you allowed.

Her answer to Esther? Both.

The resentment isn’t the problem.
The resentment is the symptom.

Here’s what most of us get wrong about resentment. We think it’s a reaction to what someone else did. We think if the other person would just change, apologize differently, stop doing the thing, then the resentment would go away.

But resentment isn’t really about the other person.

Resentment is what happens when you watch yourself say yes to something you actually wanted to say no to. It’s what happens when you swallow your needs to “keep the peace,” when you abandon yourself, over and over again.

The fight you keep having isn’t about “the dishes,” or the comment they made. It’s about the way you chose silence, even though you really wanted to speak up. Every time you said “it’s fine” when it wasn’t. Every time you accepted a version of being treated that some deeper part of you knew you didn’t deserve.

Why We Hold Onto It (the part nobody wants to admit)

Later in that same conversation, Esther was talking about why we hold onto the grudges. Why we won’t let it go even when the apology has been offered! Even when the other person has changed. Even when staying angry is making us miserable!

We hold onto the grudge so tightly because we feel, “If I accept their apology, all my suffering was for nothing.”

Esther continued, “And in order to give it its proper “respect,” I have to hold onto it. Because if we don’t, then I’m saying that what they did wasn’t so bad after all, and it can be forgiven.”

But that’s the ego. Our ego thinks that forgiveness or letting go of the pain means the pain didn’t matter. The belief that if we forgive, we’re erasing what happened. I’ve seen it over and over again with my own coaching clients. They think that by “remembering” (aka holding onto) what happened, they make that experience “mean” something. But holding onto your pain, your anger, doesn’t honor the wound…it just keeps reopening it.

Your suffering is never for nothing. It often teaches you something. Maybe it revealed where you were abandoning yourself. Maybe it showed you where you were tolerating things that weren’t normal. The best thing you can learn is knowing that it’s possible to let go of the grudge and keep the lessons. You can forgive and not condone their behavior. Hell, you can forgive and let them back into your life!

Two Ways to Interpret What Happened

Sh*t will always happen. It’s part of the human experience. And over time, the resentment can feel like a shield keeping you safe. But in the end, it’s actually keeping you stuck. It’s keeping you in a victim mindset, preventing you from connecting with your personal power.

I believe there are two ways of looking at life:

Life can either happen “to you” or “for you.”
Both will write a story for your life.
Only one will give you freedom.

So What Do You Do With It?

Just to be clear, I’m not here telling you to “just let it go.” That’s dumb. You hate when people tell you that. And people hate when you tell them that! . Anyone who has ever genuinely been hurt knows that “just let it go” is the most useless thing to say to someone while they’re “in it.”

But I will offer this.

The next time the resentment rises (and it will), get curious instead of righteous. Don’t argue with it. Don’t shove it down. Sit with it for a second and ask:

Who am I actually angry at?
What did I want to say that I didn’t?
What boundary did I want to hold that I didn’t?
What am I afraid will happen if I stop carrying this?

The answers might surprise you. The resentment toward your partner might actually be resentment toward the version of you who kept showing up the way you did. The grudge against your parents might actually be grief for the relationship you thought you were going to have with them.

This is where the rewrite begins. Not in deciding to forgive them. In deciding to stop punishing yourself. To stop reopening the wound and finally let it heal.

The woman on the podcast had some major “ah-ha” moments after her exchange with Esther. And that’s the power of conversation, awareness, and a really good question.

So I’ll leave you with the one Esther asked in the beginning:

Are you resenting them? Or yourself, for accepting it?

Do You Resent Them, Or Yourself For Allowing It?

Why We Hold Onto It (the part nobody wants to admit)

Two Ways to Interpret What Happened

So What Do You Do With It?

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