Ever wish you were better at processing grudges and releasing resentments?
This episode is for anyone who has ever found yourself replaying an old wound years — or even decades — after it happened.
In this heartfelt and deeply personal episode, Margaret and David take a look into what happens when we hold onto grudges — and how we can learn to truly let them go.
Resentment Can Stick Around for Years
The conversation kicks off with an honest exploration of how unresolved pain from past experiences quietly — and insidiously — shapes the way we show up in our relationships, at home and at work.
David opens up about harboring resentment toward a colleagues, while Margaret shares a vivid memory of being humiliated and abandoned at a high school dance. She found herself still carrying that resentment years later when their paths crossed again.
Sound familiar? Many of us have been surprised by how long an old hurt can linger.
Processing Grudges — Or Holding Onto Them
The duo explore the hidden costs of carrying grudges: the emotional space they consume, the hypervigilance they create, and the way they cause us to filter future interactions through the lens of past pain.
Hurt Versus Anger
Our hosts make an important distinction between anger and hurt. Sometimes we walk away from an conflict or difficult experience with anger. Margaret reflects back to her high school dance memory, and recalled how her anger can feel “righteous” and even empowering in the moment. Anger can cover the deeper feelings underneath — humiliation, embarrassment, sadness — which can be more complex and harder to sit with.
Other times, we are in relationships where we have felt injured and hurt — and that’s what we carry with us.
Both hurt and anger can lead us to carry heavy burdens of resentment.
Does the Other Person DESERVE Forgiveness?
At the heart of letting go, of processing grudges and releasing resentments, lives forgiveness. David and Margaret talk about what forgiveness actually means and, crucially, what it doesn’t mean.
Forgiveness is not about absolving the other person or waiting for an apology that may never come. It is not about forgiving another person directly, forgetting what happened, or acquitting others of their missteps or impact.
Rather, forgiveness of another person is an internal process — one that you do entirely for yourself. It is a choice to release the negative charge and feelings that you are carrying about another person or interaction.
David draws on Jesus’s teaching about forgiving “seventy times seven.” In other words, genuine forgiveness can take many repetitions before it fully takes hold.
Sometimes, the work of forgiveness involves forgiving yourself, too — because often, as Margaret points out, our resentment toward others is rooted in anger at ourselves for not speaking up or setting a boundary when it mattered.
Won’t Others Walk All Over Me?
David shares his own experience of working through a particularly painful incident of professional sabotage. With coaching, he learned he could process his grudge against his colleague without losing his healthy instinct to protect himself going forward. He still understood not to trust that person in the same way again, but releasing the resentment made him feel lighter.
Get Started on Letting Go of Grudges
The episode closes with a step-by-step forgiveness journaling practice that listeners can use on their own.
The process involves:
- Describing the event
- Acknowledging your own role
- Naming what you really wanted to happen
- Consciously releasing the pain by writing about releasing the hurt
- Finding the gift or lesson the experience left behind
- Complete and release the hurt by thanking the other person for the lessons.
- Repeat as necessary!
Margaret and David also suggest pairing the practice with physical release techniques — like shaking it out or burning what you’ve written — to help the body let go alongside the mind.
Whether you’re carrying a fresh wound or one that’s been with you for years, this episode offers both compassionate perspective and real tools to help you move forward. If you need extra support working through the forgiveness process, Margaret and David warmly invite you to reach out.