A Home Workout on Resolving Grudges

How to socially survive the lockdown

If you are part of the 9 out of 10 people in the UK that share a household, you may find that, while some people struggle with social isolation, your life has involuntarily turned hyper-social. Time alone has become sparse, and the lockdown forms the perfect breeding ground for grudges turning into full-blown arguments. Arguing can be a healthy conflict resolution strategy. Yet, arguments arising from long-term grudges usually go catastrophically wrong.

A grudge is a silent form of conflict: Let’s say Grace hurts Frankie’s feelings by failing to acknowledge that Frankie has cleaned the house. Frankie is too embarrassed to admit that she feels taken for granted, and, instead of receiving an apology and being done with it, falls into a rumination spiral of negative thoughts: Who is usually doing the cleaning? Who contributes how much to the relationship? The longer Frankie spends in the cognitive loop, days or even weeks, the higher her expectations of Grace’s response.

At this stage, a simple apology can’t mitigate the situation anymore: Grace now needs to address the alleged cracks in the relationship’s foundation. Even worse, grudges create a desire to be compensated for our suffering in a tit-for-tat way. An apology, and sometimes even a promise of betterment, doesn’t feel like enough to make up for days or weeks of emotional suffering in the rumination cycle. We start sending the other person signals that they are in our bad books, giving them the cold shoulder, making it clear that they will have to put in a proportional amount of work to be forgiven.

Aren’t arguments healthy?

Arguments that arise from grudges often lack concreteness. While a grudge usually starts with a concrete situation, the rumination cycle often transforms the issue into an over-generalised assessment of the relationship, often involving ‘evidence’ from similar conflicts in the far past. To the offending party, these new accusations may seem to come out of nowhere. The argument ends up being unproductive and likely repetitive because referenced events lie in the far past and have run through our subjective memory filters over a long period of time. Successful arguments tend to refer to concrete and isolated events. Therefore, rumination over grudges serves no purpose for conflict resolution, not to mention the health risks arising from elevated cortisol levels.

How to stop holding grudges?

Rumination over grudges is a form of obsessive thinking, fuelled by emotions like fear and anger. Obsessive thought patterns tend to flourish particularly well when the issue at hand is close to our heart and when we have time to engage in it, i.e. ‘there is no bigger fish to fry’. Thus, to avoid obsessive thinking, it can simply help to have a lifestyle that keeps your brain busy enough. Physical exercise is also known to contribute to a balanced emotional life. However, what to do if all of these prevention methods fail? The good news is, there are plenty of psychological techniques to deal with obsessive thought patterns. Here is a concrete strategy.

Step 1: 🔴 Identify your triggers

Our brain is a thought machine, churning out thought after thought, some of which trigger an emotional response and manifest in our feelings and resulting moods. We are usually much better at spotting our moods than the underlying thoughts that caused them. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) teaches us to identify the thoughts that cause negative sentiment and sanity check them. Start by writing a thought record: Every time you find yourself in a bad mood because of a social situation, make an entry in a thought record worksheet. Describe the situation, your negative thoughts and sentiments, as well as alternative interpretations of the situation. When done repeatedly, this simple approach helps to eliminate cognitive distortions and opens your mind to alternative interpretations that eventually become automatic. Grace may just have been too stressed to notice the clean state of the house. Thus, the first exit ramp out of a rumination cycle is to simply find alternative interpretations that may be more plausible.

Step 2: ⚔️ Pick your battles

If the most realistic interpretation of the situation still seems hurtful, it may be tempting to expect compensation for your pain, such as an apology. However, everyone needs a window of tolerance: Things that we find hurtful, but are willing to forgive. Life is too short to obsess about every imperfection and nobody is perfect. Pick your battles! If necessary, make a list of your tolerables and your non-negotiables, the more concrete, the better. For instance, I choose to tolerate tasteless jokes to a certain extent, but I do not accept anti-social or discriminatory behaviour.

Step 3a: 🙋‍♀️ Raise your non-negotiables right away

If the issue is worth raising, avoid toxic argument patterns. A commonly used strategy to have healthy arguments is the I-message model, coined by Thomas Gordon over 50 years ago, which can still be found in modern psychology, e.g. in The School of Life and Psychology Today. The core idea of I-messages is to turn blaming statements, such as ‘You always expect me to clean up after you’, into statements describing how you are affected, such as ‘I feel like my time is less valuable than yours when I have to clean up after you’. The former statement triggers a cognitive defence mechanism in the other party, while the letter evokes empathy and understanding.

Step 3b: 🏁 Forgive

If you decide to forgive a hurtful incident, how do you actually avoid going down the cognitive spiral of obsessing over it anyway? After all, you have still been hurt and not compensated for it. In fact, the other person may not even have a clue they did you wrong! Here are a couple of techniques to get you through it.

💭 Learn from your thought records

This adapted chapter from the book Psychology Tools for Living Well compares toxic thought patterns to a fire. It is not important what started the fire, i.e. where the toxic thoughts came from. To extinguish the fire, it only matters what keeps it going: heat, fuel and oxygen. In the same way, obsessive thinking can be stopped by finding fuelling factors in the ‘situation’ column of your thought records. Do you tend to obsess over angry thoughts when you are hungry? Or maybe at night, when you can’t sleep? Maybe the solution is just to address your eating and sleeping habits.

✍️ Externalise your thoughts

Obsessive thinking is often driven by the fear of forgetting that you have been wronged. A first step to calm your mind is to write down your thoughts, a method that is also recommended in The OCD Workbook. You can set a reminder to re-evaluate those thoughts in a week. More often than not, your perspective on them will have changed.

☮️ Accept your thoughts

The OCD Workbook also explains that obsession over thoughts is often caused by the feeling of not being allowed to have those thoughts. We may blame ourselves for feeling resentful towards our partners or family members. We may feel ashamed to want more attention from our friends. However, we are not accountable to anyone for our thoughts. Mindfulness helps us develop the skill set to simply watch our thoughts without judgment. When you learn to accept your thoughts as they are, they will no longer linger in your mind for very long.

🌍 Grounding exercises

Grounding exercises help you to bring your attention back to the present, away from ruminating over past events. Most common techniques include deep breathing or focussing on how your body feels from head to toe.

🤡 Defusion techniques

Defusion techniques create a distance between you and your thoughts, thereby weakening the thoughts and their ability to suck you into a rumination cycle. You can try to rephrase your thoughts to ‘I notice I am having the thought that …’ or ‘My brain gives me the thought that …’. Other methods include visualising your ‘grumpy self’ as a silly character saying these thoughts out loud. I, personally, find it helpful to imagine my irrational thoughts spoken out by Marvin the Paranoid Android.

🛑 Use visual cues

Visual people may use a change of scenery or mental images, such as a stop sign, to interrupt a rumination cycle. Visual cues help to break out of cyclic neural patterns and activate other parts of the brain.

🎲 Distraction

Distract yourself from your thoughts. If it feels uncomfortable leaving the thoughts unaddressed, fall back onto writing them down first. If it feels futile to even attempt distracting yourself, remember that one of the most common cognitive distortions is negative prediction: We tend to predict failure of an action before even trying when we are in a negative mindset.

⚖️ Pros & cons list of holding a grudge

We often think that grudges and worries come ‘for free’, i.e. we forget how much energy and time they cost. Make a full-blown pros & cons list. Being angry at someone may mean you will be in a bad mood every evening for a week. It may have the upside of obtaining an apology or a gesture of good will from them. However, is that really worth spoiling a whole week for?

🎁 Compensate yourself for forgiving

Our brain is seeking to receive compensation for our suffering, but it may not actually care where we get that compensation from: Tell what happened to a friend or treat yourself a little! Run a nice relaxing bath, allow yourself some video gaming time or a massage, but only under the conditions that you will not resume ruminating.

🔬Hypothesis testing

We are often hesitant to forgive because we are afraid to encourage undesirable behaviours in others. According to CBT, we need to be exposed to our fears to eliminate them: Try to do the exact opposite of what your feelings tell you to. If your partner failed to acknowledge your cleaning efforts, be extra friendly. You may find they still show gratitude next time, without you trying to teach them a lesson.

No matter what techniques you end up applying, the most important step is to muster the courage to try. This step alone puts you in the right mindset: You are willing to overcome your emotions for the benefit of the relationships in your life. Give yourself some credit for that!