“Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself.” – Tony Robbins

Have you ever held onto a person or situation that wronged you and had it affect other areas of your life?

Grudges keep you replaying your hurt feelings and fueling the anger that wants the other person to feel pain. So many people are still holding on to pain from the past or even pain from their present relationship. It’s a very common problem that we see all too often.

In this episode of The Elevated Life, we’re sharing “The High Price of Holding a Grudge” so you can let the anger, shame, and resentment out and let love in. If you’ve been holding on to a negative situation that is no longer serving you, then this episode is a must-listen!

Tune in to hear:

✨ How grudges affect you emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually

✨ The uncomfortable conversation of forgiveness

✨ What you are really holding on to when you are holding onto a grudge

✨ How to recognize where you’ve been holding a grudge and forgive

The High Price of Holding a Grudge

Looking Through the Lens of Anger

The biggest reason why anger is so devastating is that it pulls you out of the present moment. It takes you into your imagination and into the past to relive something over and over again. Every time you go back into the past, you’re missing out on all the miracles happening in the present moment. You miss the love, you miss the joy, and you miss the gratitude. You miss everything that’s happening right now.

Creating a Cycle of Guilt

Often what happens with situations or people who have wronged us is that we recognize that we still feel the same way about it six months or a year later. We think to ourselves, “I can’t believe I still think about that. I can’t believe this person still has power over me. I can’t believe I’m still mad about that. This happened forever ago,” which begins the feeling of guilt. Since we couldn’t punish that person or thing, we instead turn inside and begin to punish ourselves. And that can create a whole cycle of guilt. What ends up really happening is that once you have enough guilt feelings about something, it starts to bleed out into the rest of your life.

The Internal Pain of Shame

Shame usually comes up because we think to ourselves, “how could I have let this happen to me?” Maybe it was your fault in the situation, and the grudge is against yourself towards something that you did or didn’t do in a situation. Guilt and shame go hand in hand. When we can’t punish the person, it’s back to the internal pain and hurting ourselves so that the anger can get moved so that the emotion can go somewhere so that someone can feel something about this.

Conducting an Emotional Scan to Recognize Where You’ve Been Holding a Grudge

Think about where you’ve been holding a grudge and take a moment to think and ask yourself, “Why am I still holding on to this? What is a lesson that could be learned here? What did this teach me? How did I grow? Where did I find new boundaries?” Start to begin searching for that silver lining of how this happened for a reason. This is one of the steps you have to take if you want to be in a successful relationship. This is a step that you have to take with all of your old relationships. It is the step that you take with your parents, with your teachers, with everybody, with everything. This is the biggest gift that we can give, not only to forgive other people but also to look internally and begin to love ourselves. Because once you forgive, you open yourself up automatically to love.

Repeating the Forgiveness Process

Forgiveness isn’t a process that is done once and is complete forever. It’s something that you have to repeat and do because sometimes things come up. Sometimes your brain reconfigures things, and now you’re suddenly upset about something that didn’t really matter before. But now it does. You have to repeat this process, and that’s okay to allow yourself that grace in space so that you can make it happen.

Highlights from this episode:

[01:13] – What you are really holding on to when you are holding onto a grudge.

[02:48] – The Three different ways that holding grudges show up in your life.

[04:08] – Looking through the lens of anger.

[05:13] – The cycle of guilt.

[06:27] – What happens when you don’t feel anger anymore.

[12:32] – Recognizing how anger and negative emotions manifest in your life.

[14:24] – How to address resentment and anger within your relationship.

[16:21] – Conduct a mental inventory and recognize, is there anywhere that I’ve been holding a grudge?

[20:28] – The power of forgiveness changes your outlook on life.

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