Resentment Isn’t a Flaw. It’s a Compass. | Sarah Denio
Resentment is a compass, not a flaw.
For Gloria Steinem, who spent a lifetime questioning the rules women were told were simply the way things were. She died yesterday at 92, leaving generations of us with more freedom to question, choose, speak, and live as ourselves. May we keep interrupting the “of course”.
We have a strange habit of treating women’s resentment as a personal-development problem. If you’re resentful, you should be more mindful of your tone, communicate better, practice gratitude, let things go, take better care of yourself, watch your facial expressions, work on your mindset. In other words, the prescription is almost always some version of: feel differently about the situation and don’t let it show.
But what if your resentment isn’t evidence that something is wrong with you? What if it’s evidence that something about the way you’re living is no longer serving you?
Women who are holding too much don’t necessarily need another strategy for becoming more peaceful about it. What they need is permission to question why they’re carrying it in the first place. That’s the conversation I think we’re missing.
Resentment isn't an emotion to clear, reframe, forgive, or breathe your way out of. I think it’s the light flashing on the dashboard, indicating you feel like somewhere along the way your needs became negotiable while others became your responsibility.
Maybe the problem isn’t your resentment. Maybe your resentment knows something you haven’t been able to face head on…yet.
We’ve been taught to distrust women’s resentment
There are plenty of emotions women are encouraged to have: compassion, gratitude, empathy, patience, understanding. Resentment most definitely doesn’t make the list.
A resentful woman makes people uncomfortable because resentment carries a message others may not want to hear: This arrangement isn’t working for me anymore.
That’s much harder to explain away or fix with a quick solution. Circumstantially, if you’re tired, you may be advised to address it with a vacation, a massage, better sleep, a meditation app, or a more efficient calendar. But truly, resentment raises more disruptive questions. Why am I the one who has to remember all of this? Why am I automatically responsible for making this work? Why are others allowed to have limits while mine are treated like inconveniences? Why do I have to ask for help with things that never should have been solely mine to manage?
And for the women involved, perhaps the question nagging inside: Why have I been participating in an arrangement I no longer want? That doesn’t fit neatly into the agreement we’re asked to buy into, that you can feel better without anything around you having to change. Sometimes feeling better requires changing the damn arrangement.
Being “the capable one” isn’t necessarily the compliment it’s made out to be
Being “the capable one” isn’t the compliment it’s made out to be; it’s exhausting.
If you’re the person everyone depends on, you probably didn’t wake up one morning and consciously decide to become responsible for everything. It happened slowly.
You were good at handling things. You noticed what other people missed. You anticipated problems before they happened. And chances are, much of that capability began long before anyone called you accomplished. You likely learned early on to pay attention, anticipate needs, or take care of things independently because support wasn’t reliable, or that’s how the “good girl” your caregivers expected you to be needed to perform. Those patterns helped you get your needs met, stay connected, or create a sense of safety when it was needed at a younger age.
Then the world rewarded you for them. You became the person who could be trusted to get things done, so you got more: more responsibility, more decisions, more emotional labor, more invisible tasks, and more people turning toward you when something went wrong.
Because you could handle it, few stopped to consider whether it was yours to handle, or the impact it had on you when you did.
Capability has a way of becoming obligation. The competent employee gets the project no one else can manage. The responsible daughter becomes the family organizer. The mother who knows where everything is becomes the keeper of everyone’s schedules, needs, preferences, appointments, forms, birthdays, and emotional temperatures.
At first, it may even feel good to be needed. But over time, “You’re better at this” can quietly become “You’ll take care of it.” Being dependable can mean you’re not allowed to set and hold boundaries that serve you. Everyone’s confidence in your competence can become the very reason others blindly forget to care for you.
Then one day you’re standing in the kitchen furious that someone has asked you where the scissors are, and you wonder when exactly you became such an angry person. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you’re just tired of being the human infrastructure.
Resentment is what happens when “being good” stops feeling good
Many women have spent decades being rewarded for versions of themselves that are remarkably convenient for everyone around them. Be helpful. Be easygoing. Be responsible. Don’t make a fuss. Anticipate what people need. Be a team player. Don’t disappoint anyone. Be grateful. Be strong. Handle it.
None of those qualities is inherently bad. Caring about people isn’t the problem. Being responsible isn’t the problem. Generosity isn’t the problem. The problem is what happens when those qualities stop being choices.
Helpful becomes a problem when saying no makes you feel guilty. Responsible becomes a problem when you unbalanced ownership of things that are not actually yours alone. Easygoing becomes a problem when you swallow your preferences so others aren’t uncomfortable. Strong becomes a problem when it means you are expected to need less.
And “good” becomes a problem when it requires you to abandon yourself politely enough that nobody’s offended, or even notices.
That’s the conditioning I think we need to be much more suspicious of. If you’ve been taught that love, belonging, success, or approval depend on being agreeable, useful, accommodating, and endlessly capable, resentment makes perfect sense.
It’s a part of you that’s stopped cooperating.
What if your resentment is a part of you that refuses to disappear?
We often talk about resentment as though it is purely corrosive. And yes, resentment that goes unexamined can harden into bitterness. It can erode relationships and turn every forgotten task or careless comment into fresh evidence in a case that has been building for years.
But that’s exactly why I don’t think we should rush past it.
Resentment tends to accumulate where there has been too much giving without enough choice, acknowledgement, appreciation and reciprocity. It shows up where you have been saying yes when you want to say no, doing for others what they could do for themselves, making other people’s disappointment something you are responsible for preventing, or continuing to meet an expectation simply because it has existed for so long it feels insurmountable to change.
That’s useful information.
Your resentment may be pointing toward the places where you’ve learned to disappear from honoring your own judgment and agency. And that makes resentment more than an unpleasant emotion. It makes it a compass.
A compass is not a verdict
What is my resentment actually trying to show me?
Using resentment as a compass does not mean assuming that every time you feel resentment cropping up, someone else is wrong. Of course not; that would be an equally unhelpful way of using it.
The feeling is simply important information for you to closely consider.
Sometimes someone truly is asking too much of you. Sometimes the division of labor is wildly unfair. Sometimes a workplace or relationship has been built around your willingness to absorb more than your share. And sometimes the system simply evolved around what you repeatedly made possible.
You filled the gaps, so people stopped noticing the gaps. You rarely asked for help, so people assumed you didn’t need it. You stepped in because you can do it faster, so nobody learned how to do it without you.
That doesn’t mean you created the problem all by yourself, and it certainly doesn’t mean you deserve to be stuck with it. It means your freedom isn’t going to come from waiting for someone else to suddenly realize how much you’ve been carrying. You may have to stop carrying some of it.
That’s where the reckoning begins.
What resentment is trying to show you
When resentment shows up, the first question does not have to be, How do I get rid of this feeling? A better question may be, What is this feeling trying to show me?
What am I doing that I no longer want to be doing? What am I carrying because somewhere along the way it became “my job,” even though I didn’t consciously agree to that? Where am I saying yes because saying no would make someone uncomfortable? Where am I stepping in because I don’t trust what will happen if I don’t? What expectation am I obeying that I never actually chose?
And one of my favorites: What am I resentful that others allow themselves to have?
Maybe they rest without earning it first. Maybe they ask for help without delivering a five-minute explanation. Maybe they leave work unfinished, disappoint people, spend money on themselves, take up space, or simply say, “I don’t want to,” and somehow believe that is enough.
Pay attention to what makes you bristle. Sometimes envy and resentment are pointing toward a freedom you have not yet given yourself.
It’s not selfish to stop abandoning yourself
One of the most effective ways to keep women overfunctioning is to suggest the alternative is selfish.
Either you keep doing everything you’re doing, or you become uncaring. Either you’re a devoted mother, partner, daughter, friend, or employee, or you start letting people down. Either you carry it all, or you drop everything and become one of those people who only thinks about herself.
That’s the voice of fear. But fear is perfectionism wearing fancy shoes.
There’s a vast amount of territory between self-sacrifice and selfishness. You can love people deeply without making their lives your responsibility. You can help without automatically rescuing. You can care about someone’s disappointment without reorganizing your life to prevent them from feeling it.
You can be generous and still have limits. You can let another capable adult solve a problem differently than you would solve it. You can allow things to be imperfect. You can drop a ball and discover what happens when it’s not in your hands.
And you can decide that something you have willingly done for twenty years is not something you are willing to do for twenty more.
Changing your mind is allowed.
Resentment may be asking you to choose
This is ultimately why I believe resentment can be such a powerful compass: it points toward the places where choice has gone missing.
Not necessarily because someone stole it from you, although sometimes that happens. More often, expectations, conditioning, habit, competence, love, fear, and responsibility get tangled together until what was once a decision starts feeling like a given.
Of course I’ll do it. Of course they need me. Of course it’s easier if I handle it. Of course I can’t say no. Of course this is just what being a good mother, leader, daughter, partner, friend, or woman looks like.
Resentment interrupts the of course.
It asks: Do I still choose this?
What is my resentment pointing toward that I’ve been conditioned not to see?
That question can change everything.
You don’t need to burn your life to the ground to listen to your resentment. You don’t need to quit your job, leave your marriage, stop caring about your family, or become someone entirely different. You may simply need to stop complying.
Maybe you have a conversation. Maybe you disappoint someone. Maybe you ask for help before you’re desperate. Maybe something gets done badly by someone else. Maybe something doesn’t get done at all. Maybe you start making decisions based not only on what everyone else needs, but first and foremost on what you actually want.
Resentment doesn’t necessarily tell you where to go. That’s not what a compass does. It tells you which direction you’re facing. And if you’ve spent years being admired for how much you can carry while privately exhausted and increasingly livid about it, that may be enough to begin.
So before you categorically try and become less resentful, I want you to ask a different question:
What is my resentment pointing toward that I’ve been conditioned not to see?