The Dangers of Fear and Resentment

How these common emotions destroy your body and mind, and produce debilitating mental and physical illness

Fear

While fear is a critical component of navigating through life, it is also one of the most destructive things a person can experience. Left unchecked, fear will absolutely destroy everything beautiful and meaningful in our lives. It doesn’t matter what we’re afraid of - if we’re living in any state of fear, we can expect to experience the following:

1. Drastically decreased cognitive ability (memory, creativity, decision-making, processing speed, problem-solving, etc.)

2. Overwhelming resentment and negativity towards others and self

3. Inability to form and/or maintain healthy relationships

4. Enormous decrease in physical health (immune system, cardiovascular damage, gut issues, rapid weight gain/loss, decreased fertility, permanent damage to the nervous system, accelerated aging, and countless other things)

5. Total loss of emotional regulation and ability to develop emotional fortitude and proficiency

6. Impulsive and destructive behaviors towards self and others

7. Constant fatigue and countless mental illnesses

8. Inability to perceive reality objectively

9. Extreme hormonal dysregulation

10. Loss of empathy and compassion for yourself and others

11. A deep and unhealthy yearning for safety

12. A drastically increased propensity to experience trauma

13. A willingness to allow others to control and direct your life for you, including things which will destroy your autonomy and freedom

14. Drastically reduced ability to erect, maintain, and enforce boundaries

This list is far from comprehensive, but I promise you that, if you are experiencing prolonged fear on a day-to-day basis, for any reason at all, then you can expect to experience every single thing on this list without exception. It doesn’t matter if you believe you have every reason to feel afraid, your body and mind will still suffer the consequences.

It is also important to remember that fear is not always obvious to us, and even severe fear can be elusive and easy to miss. Fear, once it has persisted within us for long enough, will effectively integrate into our very nervous systems and physiology – corrupting our identities from within. It can learn to drive us without us even recognizing we are being driven by it.

Fear is both a body and mind poison and, if you allow yourself to regularly experience it, there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent yourself from integrating it into your nervous system and suffering the consequences. Living in fear is not living at all, it is surviving, and a person who is surviving can only exist in a constant state of survival. Do you want to live life as if you are constantly on the verge of death?

There is only one thing that can meet or exceed the negative consequences of living in fear, and that thing is resentment.

Ideology, Beliefs, and Resentment

Can ideology (a system of ideas and beliefs) lead to trauma, depression, and anxiety? Yes, absolutely, 100%, without question. In fact, there is significant evidence to suggest that several ideologies in circulation today are some of the leading causes of the drastic rise in depression, anxiety, trauma, and narcissism. As with fear, only our belief systems can support states of chronic resentment, and adherence to one or more ideologies is the only thing that can give birth to and sustain these systems of belief. The ways in which the things we believe impact our lives cannot be overstated.

Ideology is often associated with economic and political theory, but it absolutely can and frequently does exist outside of those spheres. Ideology is simply a system of ideas, ideals, and beliefs, as well as the study of their origin and nature. All of us live in at least partial adherence to one or more ideologies, as our belief systems guide us through life and shape our perceptions of our experiences. I won’t name any specific ideologies here, but I believe it is important to keep ideology in mind, as the impact it has on us can be absolutely devastating to our physical and mental health.

In recent years, reality-mocking ideologies of criticism, victimhood, tribalism, resentment, and identity manipulation and obsession have absolutely exploded in popularity, and have caused damage to individuals and society on a level rarely seen in all of human history. This is hardly surprising, as those who consistently and eagerly engage with and embrace these things are all but guaranteed to experience profound misery and helplessness. Perhaps the most tragic and shocking result of this explosion of popularity is the overwhelming amount of narcissism, fear, and resentment it has produced, as well as total ignorance of, and even welcoming of said resentment, fear, and narcissism, as if they were virtues; a sign of living a good and meaningful life.

There are too many reasons for why this is occurring to comprehensively cover in just one post… So, instead of attempting to cover them all, I am going to provide you with some information about resentment, as well as some signs that one or more of your ideologies may be fostering it, and insidiously and surreptitiously causing you untold suffering as a result.

Resentment is the feeling we experience when we are bitterly angry, and convinced that we have been unfairly victimized in some way, typically repeatedly, over time. There is no shortage of things which can cause resentment, but many of them will cause it solely as a result of the corruption of one or more of our belief systems and the effects they have on our perceptions of and relationship with reality and the people who take part in it.

Like fear, resentment is a mind poison that, if left unchecked, will destroy every single thing that makes life worth living. When we live in resentment, we are literally incapable of expressing compassion or empathy for those whom we have decided are to blame for our resentment (ourselves included), and we utterly dehumanize those we perceive as being responsible. Our resentment is effectively a commitment to a campaign of revenge and an application of what we often mistakenly perceive to be “justice”, whether truly deserved or not.

When we thoroughly resent someone, we lose the ability to both see and treat them like human beings, which means we also lose the ability to fairly and objectively determine a just course of action. When we resent groups of people, we default to tribalism, which is an ancient, evolutionary line of defense for protecting oneself and the people in our tribe whom we believe to be in danger; the groups we believe are being victimized. Tribalism is an evolutionary protective measure for surviving life during exceedingly difficult times, not for living and prospering in it.

Unfortunately, the depreciation of the value of self-honesty, self-responsibility, and individuality all but guarantee the birth of chronic resentment and extreme levels of narcissism and tribalism. We grow accustomed to and exceptionally comfortable with seeing ourselves and others as little more than part of a group; with blaming others for more and more of our problems, seeking external validation for our beliefs and actions and, as a result, fostering our resentment. When our first response to a difficult experience is to point the finger of blame at anyone other than ourselves, we are willingly abandoning our agency and putting it in the hands of those whom we have chosen to blame; of our perceived enemies - whether we realize it or not. In doing so, we commit to a life of self-induced helplessness in which we only live to survive, and our window of resentment expands to accommodate anyone and everything which we can convince ourselves had any part in causing us, or those in our tribe, pain.

Imagine you carry a metaphorical “bucket of reasons for my resentment” around with you everywhere you go. Now imagine your system of beliefs (your ideology) encourages you to eagerly and self-assuredly relegate all discomfort to the bucket, without question or even minimal scrutiny. Every time you encounter something undesirable, whether in your life or the life of someone belonging to your “tribe”, you simply toss it into the bucket as evidence of your and/or their victimhood and resentment. As you move through life perceiving all discomfort as evidence of you and your tribe’s victimhood (throwing all of it in the bucket where you have been convinced it belongs), what happens to the bucket? Well, the bucket grows heavier with each passing day, making its presence increasingly impossible to avoid, and self-validating its perceived necessity in your life as well as your excessive use of it. Meanwhile, the bucket continues dragging you down into increasing states of misery, all of which must necessarily be blamed on anyone other than yourself (thrown into the bucket).

A person who continues carrying and adding to this bucket for long enough will come to experience discomfort and resentment throughout the day, perhaps every day of their lives, as well as a grossly distorted representation of reality, as their reality has been corrupted by the enormous weight and presence of the bucket. Where does that discomfort and resentment go? Into the bucket, of course! The bucket is feeding on life and perpetuating itself, and the continued filling of it validates its perceived necessity, and increasingly defines the experience of reality for the person carrying it. Eventually, nearly everything must be thrown into the bucket, as such a person has become incapable of providing reason for their increasingly negative experiences in any other manner. The bucket becomes so real and ever present to them that even things which have no business being added to it are done so with a narcissistic righteousness. The bucket becomes all they know, and so they cherish it while it enslaves them.

I can tell you right now, if you refuse to take responsibility for both your successes and failures, then you are guaranteed to live a life that is ultimately guided by the people whom you have decided are at fault, and you will find yourself spending most of your time hating, fearing, resenting, and trying to punish them for the perceived injustices, instead of working on yourself. This quest will never, and can never end. You have granted your perceived enemies power over you, and you will not get it back until you take it back by accepting responsibility and committing to accepting what are often extremely painful, but absolutely necessary truths about yourself and reality. If you cannot do this, your resentment will grow rapidly, and you will come to hate and fear a great many things that have absolutely nothing to do with your successes or failures.

The longer you allow it to go on, the more convinced you will become of the truth of your beliefs, as experiencing an invalidation of the massive levels of resentment and other negative emotion you have invested will cause your cognitive dissonance to go into survival overdrive, and you will quite literally lose your ability to perceive and exist in harmony with objective reality. Since accepting the truth (allowing your beliefs to die) would be too painful, and even traumatic, your brain will do whatever it can to hide it from you, and so you will continue to live in a grotesque mockery of reality for the sake of preserving your survival. No one wants to accept they are the victims of their own beliefs, anger, fear, and resentment and, the stronger they become, the more difficult it is to accept. Remember, the more emotional investment we place into our beliefs, the harder they become to let go of, even when unequivocally necessary.

Don’t believe me? Has anyone ever tried to talk you out of being afraid of something? Why is it so hard being talked out of our fears, or being told that perhaps they are unnecessary? Because, if they end up being correct, we experience profound shame. We inherently recognize the absolute poison that is fear, and having someone point out to us that we have been poisoning ourselves, when we didn’t realize it, can be deeply shameful. We don’t want to see how obvious it was because of what that might say about us, and because of how painful it may be to admit to and change. We are quite literally trapped by our own beliefs and emotions.

If you subscribe to ideologies that primarily seek to achieve harmony by criticizing and destroying anything and everything that could be perceived as preventing people from achieving happiness (this is possible with literally anything), then you will allow those things to do just that, and you will experience it as if it were real and true. You will overdevelop the skill of blaming everything other than yourself for all of your negative experiences, and eventually live a life governed by fear, anger, and resentment. We all feel compelled to engage in the things we are skilled at, even if they are destroying our lives.

This is not at all to say that there does not exist things which can make achieving a happy, purposeful, and fulfilling life far more difficult than it should be. Those things undeniably exist, and they always will in some capacity. The problem occurs when we start automatically allocating everything that could conceivably be perceived as getting in our way, into the camps of external blame (into our convenient buckets). Far more often than not, we grant those perceived injustices power over us because it’s far easier to blame others than it is to blame ourselves. If we live lives governed by the pursuit of blame, then we will find reasons to validate it, whether they truly exist or not, and whether they are deserving of blame or not. When this happens, our resentment and fear will be perpetually fed and encouraged. If we live life as hammers, then everything becomes a nail, even when all the nails have gone.

The more emotionally and cognitively compromised we become (which is exactly what happens when we blame everyone other than ourselves, and live in fear and resentment), the more things we will blame for our unhappiness, even if it’s of our own doing. These things feed each other in an endless cycle, and the only way to break it is to take self-responsibility and reclaim our power and agency over that which we previously blamed for stripping us of them. This experience will almost certainly be deeply painful, but the alternative is guaranteed to be far worse. Remember, if you cannot love and take care of yourself first and foremost; if you cannot pursue achieving self-responsibility and honesty, then you are opening yourself up to be taken advantage of, and you are far less likely to be of use to the people you love and wish to help, except to be taken advantage of in some way, even if it may seem harmless.

Short of total, physical and mental enslavement, no one can stand in the way of your happiness unless you allow them to. If you come to understand and embrace this truth, you will become unstoppable.