The Angel of Resentment

I’ve prayed a lot about forgiveness over the last two years. I’ve thought a lot about it, read a lot. Most of what’s been written on forgiveness in Christian circles assumes the goal is reconciliation in ongoing, otherwise healthy relationships. There’s not as much written and preached on forgiveness in situations of abuse and abandonment.

I still don’t know what forgiveness looks like in that situation. I do know what it doesn’t and can’t look like. More on that later. But today I want to talk about resentment.

Resentment gets a bad rap in most Christian (and Buddhist, and secular…) doctrines on forgiveness. It’s the thing you’re trying to avoid. It’s the thing that will warp you and make you a bitter and unhappy person in the long term. I don’t dispute any of that. But personally I found resentment an absolutely essential part of my healing process, and I’ll try to (briefly) explain why in case it’s helpful to anyone else trying to recover from narcissistic abuse and discard.

I’ll begin with an intriguing op-ed piece I read in the NY Times by philosopher and law professor Scott Hershovitz. Ostensibly it was about why people should stop leaning on Taylor Swift to forgive Kanye West. Hershovitz argued that in situations in which there’s not an ongoing relationship to salvage, “moving on,” which was what Swift said she had done after Micgate, was the moral equivalent of forgiveness. But Hershovitz went a step further and championed resentment as prerequisite to “moving on.”

Wrongdoing sends a demeaning message that shouldn’t go unchallenged.…That message is typically something like ‘I count, but you don’t….’ When you resent…you protest that message. You insist, if only to yourself, that you do matter. The alternative is to acquiesce in your own mistreatment…. Resentment is about self-respect — and self-protection.

Scott Hershovitz, “Taylor Swift, Philosopher of Forgiveness“

When I read this sentence, it gave me chills. I suddenly remembered for the first time in years something that had happened several months before West grabbed Swift’s mic at the VMAs. I was struggling with anxiety and depression, so I went to therapy, and during this process it came out that a major factor was my husband shouting and cursing at me and calling me names. I have no idea why the therapist didn’t tell me I was being emotionally abused and counsel me to get out of the marriage, but she didn’t. She didn’t even use the word “abuse” (which unfortunately contributed to normalizing it and gave me yet one more excuse to gaslight myself into thinking somehow it was my problem, that my husband abusing me was something I could fix, that if I just tried harder…). However, the therapist did teach me something that ended up being really useful in that situation and others: a “boundary image” I could use to protect myself emotionally and give myself the time and space to respond appropriately to a threatening situation rather than to simply react.

She suggested an image like a Venetian blind that I could mentally close to the point where I could still interact with the situation but feel protected doing so. I didn’t choose that. For whatever reason, what I saw, what I chose, was an angel with huge golden wings, in full bronze armor, who stepped in front of me and slammed his massive shield down between me and my husband, as in “Thou shall not pass!”

When I read Hershovitz’s article, the angel came flying back to me. And I finally knew his name: the Angel of Resentment. God had sent him to help protect me when I had given up protecting myself. I remembered that in the months after my husband discarded me, the Angel flew back into my thoughts every time I got angry at abusive things my husband was doing, or had done over the course of our marriage. And every time he came, the Angel helped me place one more stone to rebuild the shattered walls of my own personal Zion of self-respect, self-love, and self-worth–the walls that are always eroded by an abusive relationship.

Forgiveness, Hershovitz concluded, is the “releasing of resentment.” And indeed, there came a time in my recovery process when I thanked the Angel and let him go. I don’t know if that counts as forgiveness. Maybe so, maybe not. I know what it meant to me at the time—that my walls were high enough, I was finally strong enough, that I could trust myself to defend my own heart.