Bitterness

...and letting go of it.

Hello again!

I have some ‘stuff’ to deal with at the moment and it helps me to talk with you about it, because I know there are many of you who’ve gone through (or are going through) things similar to me, and a problem shared is a problem halved.

I find myself being confronted by bitterness. Whenever someone brings up the subject of the man I used to be married to, my brain immediately jumps to the bad stuff that’s happened.

I was once told by a counsellor that I had to take off my rose-tinted glasses and see what was really going on in my marriage. I was a person who always tried to see the best in situations, always believed that things can change for the better, and always thought to myself - it will be better tomorrow.

But hundreds, possibly thousands of tomorrows later and nothing had changed, neither would it. I had to walk away from my life because it had become a toxic place where I felt crushed and unloved. But even then, in the hours before I left, I was baking cakes and making granola, and cleaning the house, just to make sure everyone was okay. Except me.

The story of my life.

Then, when I had the time and the space to review my life and the brokenness of my marriage, I could see all the opportunities that had been wasted, all the love that had not been reciprocated, all the pleasing and making myself smaller that had just served to make me feel like trash.

Bitterness set in.

Emotional definition of bitterness:

A chronic state of resentment, hostility, and unexpressed anger, stemming from deep hurt, betrayal, or unfair treatment by others. It can damage personal well being and strain relationships over time, and is a cousin-emotion to resentment.

Your emotions can only take you over if you feed them, and unfortunately I’ve been feeding that bitterness beast very well. Not only because I was ‘stewing in my own juices’, but receiving nasty emails and messages full of spite from that man only proved to me how very relevant and necessary my bitterness and resentment was.

So when his name was ever mentioned, or I let some unpleasant event percolate in my mind, the bitterness beast grew. Bigger and bigger, like a sapling, then a tree, and it now feels like one of those huge sequoia trees in California, so big, you can hardly see the top.

Photo by haseeb riaz on Unsplash

And it feels good to vent, to finally speak up about all my years of unhappiness. I lived a lie for so long, pretending we were the happy family, everything is fine and dandy, smile for the cameras. But then the doors close, we are alone in the house, and out the window went all the masks of decency and gossamer clothes of respect. I never said a word. I believed it would get better, I prayed that it would get better, but deep down I knew it never could.

But the thing with continual venting is that the door or the lid that keeps a tight rein on the bitterness and frustration gets thrown open so many times, I think it actually doesn’t close properly after a while. Then it takes just the slightest thing and - BAM - out pours all this anger and inexplicable rage. It’s happened recently at work, I won’t go into details, but needless to say someone did something (not to me, but to a work friend) and it echoed very strongly of behaviour I had put up with for years, and I got so angry! I’m thankfully in control of my mouth and didn’t say anything while it was happening, but man, did I let rip after they’d left?! My work colleagues looked a bit perplexed as to why that had upset me so much, and I went home later that day wondering the same thing.

It comes down to bitterness.

In the world of food in which I reside, eating bitter things is actually very good for your gut health. Think rocket leaves, cacao, citrus, cranberries, green tea, turmeric. These things can increase the level of digestive juices from the stomach, pancreas and gall bladder, to better break down and absorb food.

But to harbour bitterness in your soul, that is definitely not beneficial for your health.

To put it in the words of someone much cleverer than me;

Harbouring bitterness is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. The more we feed bitterness in our hearts, the more it brings death to us.

Bitterness is poison dipped in honey. It tastes sweet going down, then it kills us from the inside out.

Wow.

Ouch.

‘Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ, God forgave you'. Ephesians 4: 31-32

Get rid of it!

Get the heck out of my life!

But how? How do we get rid of something that feels so good? When I vent, it feels like I’m giving an old itch a really good scratch, like a really, really good scratch. Oh man, I’ve been wanting to scratch that itch for years.

But the itch doesn’t go away. It flares up at the slightest provocation. And it must be scratched. My whole being cries out VENT YOUR SPLEEN!!! but I know I should reduce it. It’s like a muscle memory or a subconscious reaction, it reacts one way, but it can be retrained to act differently. I need to fill my mind with positives, to dwell on the beauty in creation, and to seek correction when I jump to the old ways of handling things.

I know I will more than likely carry all this bitterness with me for the rest of my life. I carry a lot of good memories of my 28 years of marriage, even though he now thinks there were no good times. I know there were so many happy years, periods of contentment, two gorgeous kids, moving around Australia with his work, happy dogs, the whole thing.

And maybe, in the end, when I am healed and have finally forgiven myself for staying for so long, I might be able to let go of the bitterness. I might be able to hear his name, or remember something and just let it slide past. Yep, that was how it was. It became toxic, I became lonely in my own marriage, but there were good times, and there will be (and are!!) good times ahead.

There will come a day when I can forgive myself, and maybe even forgive him, because to forgive is to set a prisoner free, and then to discover that the prisoner was you.

Thanks as always for reading,

Maggie xx