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hey guys I'm Heidi PRI welcome back to my Channel or welcome if you're new here this month on this channel we're talking about integrity and today in particular I want to do a deep dive on the topic of
Heidi Priebe explains how resentment arises from unconscious 'relationship contracts' formed in childhood, and how to make them conscious and convert them into clear preferences.
Key Takeaways
- Resentment signals an unconscious expectation that someone else should meet a need or fulfill an agreement that was never explicitly stated.
- Making unconscious relationship contracts conscious is the path to resolving resentment.
- Authentic self-expression and clear boundaries both help prevent resentment from building up.
- Reframing rules as preferences allows people to communicate needs without demanding that others comply with unspoken terms.
What the video covers
- Resentment is distinct from anger: anger sets boundaries, while resentment is a state of wanting something from others that goes unmet.
- Resentment often stems from unconscious contracts: we do our 'half' of an expected bargain and then expect others to reciprocate without ever stating it.
- Two main categories of resentful contracts are identified: self-suppression contracts (not showing up authentically) and overextension contracts (not setting enough boundaries).
- Example 1: an employee who suppressed their true personality at work felt chronic resentment toward their boss, a pattern traced to childhood where suppressing themselves earned their needs being met.
- Example 2: a man who believed anger was immature suppressed his own anger and accused his girlfriend of double standards, though no explicit rule existed between them.
- Overextension contracts, such as 'if I always bail out loved ones, they owe me the same,' create resentment when others don't mirror the behavior.
- Converting unconscious 'always/never' rules into conditional statements and then into preferences reduces resentment and allows clearer communication.
- Making these contracts conscious lets partners discuss relationship dynamics openly, and sometimes reveals incompatible values, suggesting that some relationships may not be a good fit.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Integrity and Resentment
- 01:35Resentment vs. Anger and Unconscious Contracts
- 03:15Self-Suppression Contracts: The Employee Example
- 06:23Repression Contracts and the Double Standard
- 09:43Overextension Contracts and Boundaries
- 13:20Turning Rules into Conditional Statements and Preferences
- 18:20Making Relationship Dynamics Conscious
- 23:40Closing Remarks
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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resentment now the experience of resentment is something that we very often have when we are out of Integrity with ourselves so when we are not being true to our own beliefs our own values and when we are Outsourcing our autonomy
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to someone else now this is often very difficult to catch because at a first glance a lot of people confuse the experience of resentment for the experience of anger but these are very different things so when we feel angry
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we are in our no energy so we are setting boundaries we are rejecting what we don't want in our lives and we are getting clear about what it is that we want to keep ourselves away from resentment is a very different
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experience when we are in a state of resentment we are in a state of wanting It generally feels like we are doing a group project and we have done our half of the work but our partner simply will
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not hand in theirs the problem is that because a lot of us internalize rules about how we ought to behave and how other people ought to behave as a result of how we behave from a very young and
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very unconscious place we often grow into adulthood not really clear on what our expectations of other people are and so when those expectations are UNC conscious and yet we are still fulfilling what we feel on a very deep
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unconscious level to be our half of the bargain and then expecting someone else to do something specific as a result if they don't do that thing as a result we end up sitting around with a whole bunch of simmering resentment towards that
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person we are waiting for them to do what we think that they should do based on what we are doing so what we're going to talk about today is how to make those unconscious contracts that we have for
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how other people ought to behave in response to how we behave conscious for ourselves so without further Ado we'll get into some of the different types of resentment I believe that there's two main categories of resentful feelings one are feelings that arise when we are
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doing too much suppressing of our authentic selves so I call these self-suppression contracts somewhere along the line we have decided that suppressing ourselves is going to get us something specific out of other people and then the other type of contract is contracts of
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overextension so these are areas where we've decided I will always behave in xway air go other people have to always behave in a certain way as well and we'll get into a whole bunch of examples of what these look like but essentially
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in the first category we're not showing up with enough authenticity and in the second category we're not showing up with enough boundaries so let's look at some examples of these things so whenever I think of resentment and self-suppression I think of a a
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conversation that I had with someone years and years ago where they were very frustrated with their boss and felt kind of chronically resentful and preemptively annoyed every time they had a meeting with this person who was meant to manage them and I asked them some
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questions about the scenario just kind of trying to get at what were their job requirements did they feel like they were being held to unfair standards and something really interesting surfaced which was that the thing this manager was asking of them was essentially just
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to meet the basic demands of the job and these were demands that this person had explicitly agreed to meet when they had been interviewed but for whatever reason they felt chronic resentment every day when they got up to go to
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their job and what we eventually surfaced the more we kept talking about it was that this person felt as though to go into their job in the morning they had to completely and totally suppress their true personality and put on a
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totally fake personality that the role required of them and this felt for them like an extraordinary amount of effort so much so that anything on top of that including some of the basic requirements of the job just felt totally
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overwhelming for them to meet so they were essentially spending so much energy on repressing themselves that they had almost nothing left over to give to the job the problem is that their boss had no idea this was happening because they
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had walked into that interview and contorted themselves into the exact type of person they thought their boss wanted them to be got hired to be that person and then went into work every single day as a false version of themselves and
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then any criticism that they faced felt like adding salt to the wound because they felt like they were already doing so much just to keep their real personality hidden that it was unreasonable for them to expect to do
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anything more so something I asked this person was when you were a child what was it like in your family what happened if you suppressed your personality and acted like the person your parents wanted to be and very quickly they went
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oh then all of my needs got met as long as I was pretending that I liked what my parents liked and I was interested in what my parents were interested in they took care of everything for me and so
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this is the unconscious contract that this person internalized if I suppress myself and put on the face of whatever personality I think is going to appeal to the people in charge I will get all of my needs met
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I don't have to do anything extra so they walked into a job with this attitude and then got confused when their survival needs which as an adult looks like Financial Security were not automatically getting met by virtue of
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the fact that they were suppressing their true personality so this type of contract that they had this contract of I will suppress myself and then you owe me security kind of follows the formula of I will suppress myself in xway and in
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return you will give me why on a deeply unconscious level this was what they believed to to be true about the world so other versions of this contract might look like if I suppress my true personality and act like the type of
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person I think you want to date you owe me a commitment you owe me security but this is not the only type of contract we might have in the arena of self-suppression so we'll look at a different example I once had a friend
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who was getting chronically frustrated and resentful towards his girlfriend who felt very comfortable when she was angry expressing her anger and telling him what she didn't like about the relationship and he felt as though any expression of anger on her behalf was
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irrational and an overreaction and I asked him what happens in your relationship when you get angry with your girlfriend and he went well I don't get angry anger is immature and so he was walking around with this contract I will suppress my
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anger in the name of acting mature and other people have to also suppress their anger so because I suppressing myself in this way everybody else ought to do the same so this is another type of unconscious repression contract we might
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have with ourselves if I repress myself in xway everybody else ought also to repress themselves in xway because that is the right way to be so this person felt like they were doing the right thing in their relationship by keeping
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their own anger inside and that their girlfriend was doing the wrong thing by expressing ing her anger and so a term that came up a lot in conversations with his friend was the term double standards he kept claiming that his girlfriend had
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double standards and I asked him did she tell you that she's not okay with you getting angry and he went well no and I went okay have you tried getting angry and has she told you that's not fine I
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don't want you to do that and he goes well no and so I asked where is the double standard and when he really went looking for it in his relationship he could not find clear evidence that there was a double standard because he had
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never tried expressing his anger to see what would happen but my bet is that somewhere in that person's history there was a double standard so maybe when they were a child their parents felt perfectly comfortable expressing anger towards them but they weren't allowed to
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express anger in return so they grew up with this contract that I am not allowed to express anger but other people for some reason feel like they can and that's not fair hence the resentment towards other people for doing what they
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believe they were not allowed to do in their version of a fair world no one would Express anger instead of realizing that actually in a fair World they could express themselves the same way everybody else expressed themselves and
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this type of contract is not limited to anger right I actually used to get really frustrated when I saw people expressing themselves in a very emotive way because I grew up in in a very avoidant very German family environment
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where expressing emotion was pretty much always met with rejection of some sort and I used to get really frustrated when I saw people in the world who were really free and emotive and expressive and eventually I had to surface that I
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had the unconscious contract if you show too much emotion you get rejected I have to suppress my emotion and everybody else should suppress their emotion as well so this is another one of those self-suppression contracts I suppress X
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so everybody should suppress X and if they don't I'm going to feel resentful towards them and when we surface a self-suppression contract it opens up space for us to start thinking about what it could be like if we would allow
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ourselves to break our own rules that we internalized very young and start showing up more authentically bringing in more anger bringing in more of our authentic personalities bringing in more emotionality bringing in more self-expression and this might require
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us to change our environment sometimes so if we have been hired for a workplace role based on a false personality that we presented to the interviewer we might need to go find a different job that is better suited to our personality if we
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find that bringing our real self into that first workplace just does not work so well or if we have self- selected our way into relationships where there are true double standards in order to bring more of our own energy into
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relationships we might have to change something about how we're picking Partners but but the antidote to this type of resentment is always more self-expression so bringing in more of ourselves so that we stop unconsciously expecting other people to behave a
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certain way based on the fact that we are suppressing ourselves which by the way they often cannot even tell that we are doing so a lot of the time we have all of this resentment pent up in our
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minds towards other people who have no idea whatsoever that we are not being authentic with them in the first place so this can be a really tricky and Insidious one but tackling it tends to take us a really long way towards living in a more
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authentic capacity now the second type of contracts we want to take a look at today are contracts of overextension when we are overextending ourselves what we are not doing is setting enough clear boundaries so I used to have a contract for myself that
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went when someone I love is in trouble I will always bail them out that's who I am that's who I like to be but the problem is that if I had loved ones who I felt like were not taking enough care
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of themselves and were not acting proactively to prevent crises from happening down the line I would get super resentful when a crisis did arrive and I automatically considered myself responsible for going to them and tending to the crisis but in reality it
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was always my responsibility to set boundaries about that so this type of unconscious contract follows the formula of I will always do X so you need to do why I will always support you through crisis so you need to take reasonable
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precautions to make sure that you do not end up in crisis or I will always take your opinion of me to heart so you have to have a positive opinion of me and where the antidote to this comes in is
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when we learn to use discernment so instead of having that word always in there once we make these contracts conscious to ourselves we can start replacing the word always with something that is more conditional that makes more sense and allows us to set clean
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boundaries so I could have that first rule become I will always show up to help the people I'm close to if I believe that they are also really trying to help themselves this allows me to support people rather than continue to
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enable them if they are not interested in taking responsibility or I will take my family members opinions of me to heart if I believe that they have taken the time to actually deeply get to know me and are
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not just projecting what they want onto me so I will use my discernment to try to figure out where someone's judgments are coming from before I immediately adopt them so the always in the original statement changes to an if and on the
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flip side of that if is a lot of boundaries that we might need to set whether those are practical in nature I will not give you money to bail yourself out of a situation that you could have prevented or emotional in nature I won't
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take on this opinion of me if I don't believe that the person presenting it to me was operating in good faith and then the other type of overextension boundaries look like I always do X so you always have to do X I am always
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reliable and on time so other people have to always be reliable in on time I am always emotionally present and supportive of the people in my life so the people in my life have to always be present and emotionally supportive
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towards me if not I will continue to be emotionally present and supportive and I will will start harboring resentment towards them for not doing the same so once again what we want to change here is that if not statement so I will be
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emotionally supportive towards the people in my life if they are emotionally supportive towards me if not I will be as emotionally supportive as feels good for me but I will draw boundaries around the relationship if I find myself growing resentful that they
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are not doing the same for me so this is about exercising choice and autonomy in the types of relationships we form I really enjoy being reliable and dependable I need to be out there actively looking for other people who
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also genuinely and authentically like being reliable and dependable otherwise I'm trying to shove the whole world into this contract that not everybody is going to fall into so in my own life I have friends who I know if I make a plan
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with this person there is a 95% chance that plan is going to happen barring some form of emergency or illness and then there's friends where I know that if I make a plan with them there's maybe a 50% chance it's going to happen or
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that it's going to happen at the time we agreed on and so with those friends I'm just not going to hold those plans as tightly I'm going to make a backup plan for when we agree to hang out so this is
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about taking the word always out of these statements about how we will behave and instead adjusting for the context of the situation or the relationship that we are in but we're going to talk more about that soon so
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the next part of this video is going to be talking about how to surface these unconscious contracts for ourselves and then what to do with them once we figure out what they are so to surface our contracts what we want to do is
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first just pause anytime we find ourselves feeling resentful and get really curious about what's going on so let's say I text someone and they don't text me back for several hours but I see that they've been online what I want to
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do is stop and just write down in a journal or in the notes app on my phone what I think this person should do and this is the time to not hold back you are allowed to be irrational in fact it
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actually works best if you give your irrationality airspace now what this does not mean is that we are believing our own stories about our way being the best of all possible ways we just want to get clear on what it is that we're
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unconsciously believing so that we can make it conscious so I'm going to want to sit down and go this person should always text me back in a timely manner or this person should always respond to my text if they are online
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and then once we've really gotten out what it is that we think the other person should do we want to do the second half of this statement so the first half is they should dot dot dot the second half is because I dot dot dot
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so this is about figuring out why we feel justified in expecting this behavior from someone else so something like because I always respond to their texts right away and then we want to look at what type of a statement we're
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making so they should respond to my texts right away because I always respond to theirs right away is in that last category I always do X so they should always do X and now we know what type of contract we're working with as
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well as what type of antidote we need to be looking for and that's an easy example but we can find some absolutely Bonkers contracts inside of our unconscious minds I have found some truly bizarre ones but that's actually a
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really good thing because the really bizarre unconscious contracts that we're holding on to are often the things that are messing up our lives the most so you might surface a contract that says something like I will suppress my entire
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personality in order to be in a romantic relationship with you and then you must win me the love of my family by Charming them at every event that I take you to that involves my family because unconsciously the reason why we might be
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dating someone who we're suppressing our entire personality to be around is because we want something out of them that we don't consciously understand we want and as soon as we make it conscious it starts sounding Bonkers you should be
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winning me the love and approval of my family because I am suppressing myself to be with you is not a contract that it would make sense to ask anybody to agree to but this is why we need to make these
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unconscious things conscious for ourselves and we have to allow ourselves to be extremely brutally honest with ourselves about what it is that we're feeling resentment towards so some more examples of what a you should because I statement might look like are they
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should never complain about their work even if they're unhappy with their job because I never complain about my work even though I'm unhappy with my job they should load the dishwasher as soon as they're done eating because I will
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always clean the kitchen if it's a mess they should propose to me because I am pretending to love all of the things that they love they should make x amount of money because I make x amount of money and here's what's interesting
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about all of this what I am not implying is that any of these are necessarily things that you have to drop but when we're walking around with something as an unconscious contract it feels like we are right and the other person is wrong
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if they are not fulfilling their part of it but once we surface these things and make them conscious for ourselves we can convert them into preferences so all of these statements start sounding different if we voice them as preferences I like making a
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certain amount of money and I have a preference for dating someone who makes a a similar amount of money I have a preference for keeping the kitchen clean so I want to find roommates or people to live with who also want to keep things
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clean I have a preference for being reliable and on time so I'm going to prioritize friendships with people who also try to be reliable in on time I want my future spouse and I to do a lot of the same activities together so I'm
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going to prioritize trying to find someone to date who authentically likes the same things that I like all of these are not not only perfectly reasonable but they put the power back in our hands because instead of deciding that
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everyone has to act the way we have decided is the right way to act we can go out actively searching for people to bring into our Lives who just naturally share our preferences and wants and this is exactly how secure people operate
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it's not that they get along with everyone else who's secure it's that they have their desires and preferences consciously available to them so they go out into the world and in most cases they're explicit and honest about what
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it is they're looking for what matters to them what's important to them and then if someone else does not share those preferences they don't decide the other person is bad or evil or has to change they just adjust their own
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boundaries accordingly so someone who they have really different values from they can acknowledge just might not be the best person for them to live with or be really close with or form a long-term relationship with and this is why it's
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very rare to find a secure person who's carrying around a ton of resentment because all of these contracts that are unconscious for those of us who are insecure are conscious and right on the surface for them so they're able to act
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with autonomy around their wants and needs so step two of this process once we surface with those unconscious contracts are is we start making them explicit for other people so the two questions we ask ourselves at this step
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are one can I make this contract overt and give someone the option to say yes or no to it and two if I do that and they say no how could I adjust my own boundaries so that I'm no longer feeling
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resentful in this relationship so what would allow me to accept this person exactly as they are without growing resentful towards them does that mean that I just need to readjust how I am showing up in the relationship so I
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don't feel like I'm getting taken advantage of maybe if I feel like I'm constantly doing things for this person and they're not reciprocating I should be doing less for them and putting that energy somewhere else into relationships where there is more reciprocity and I
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also want to note here that you might be surfacing some of those really weird contracts that it would feel bizarre to bring in right but it can actually be a really good exercise to bring them in anyways with the caveat that this is
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some strange unconscious thing you've been carrying around that you've now made yourself aware of now this Dynamic that was always underlying your relationship is consciously available to both of you and so you can talk about the problems in your relationship at the
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level that they actually exist at and so this is what we can do to work with this in the short term but in the long term what we want to make sure we're doing is figuring out how we can design our lives
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around contracts that give us more autonomy so this might mean realizing the ways in which we've been suppressing ourselves because we think it's the only way to be in connection with people and finding new environments or new people
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to be around where we don't have to do that where who we authentically are and the way that we actually want to show up is what they genuinely like or it might mean getting much better at boundary setting and at figuring out when it's
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appropriate for us to do these actions that we like to do like showing up for the people in our lives or being open and emotionally honest versus when it's time to protect ourselves in that area and how can we find more people who just
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enjoy showing up in the same way that we do so a great place to start is just surfacing as many of these contracts as we can figuring out which category they fall into and then figuring out how we could
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behave more autonomously by either doing more self-expression and or more setting boundaries all right I'm going to leave it at that for today but as always any questions or thoughts that you've had as you've gone through this video please
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leave them in the comment section below I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really soon oh
Topics:resentmentrelationship contractsintegrityself-suppressionboundariesunconscious patternsauthenticitycommunicationpersonal growthemotional health
