One of the many stupid feelings humans are capable of having is the private, repulsive rage of seeing someone getting support and sympathy for a problem no one helped you with when you were having it, either because you didn’t have anyone or because it never occurred to you that you could ask for help. Suddenly the world seems to split into two – the realm that contains people like them, the connected and loved – and the realm that contains you, the miserable and the alone, who must suffer in solitude. This is sufficiently horrible that you grasp for reasons or world-understandings to make this reality acceptable, and a mentally available one is that it is superior to be in the miserable solitude realm, that the problem is one that should be solved with self sufficiency and dignity. That this other person is pathetic for being aided and loved when you were not. Scorn is more palatable than confronting the notion that you could have received aid (if you had made different choices or been luckier), that you desperately wish you could have been aided but were not. Scorn is more palatable than the howling hunger for things to have been different for you. So your mind chooses scorn.
It is also a bad place to be. Human existence is full of such traps.
I personally find it really, really useful to stop, go “I am totally feeling this rage and resentment that I never got help and support about this thing. I’m feeling that because it was terrible to experience not having got the help and support, it harmed me, and I suffered, and that’s Absolute Shit.”
Then I remind myself that actually: I do not wish suffering on other people. And it can be both good that this person is getting that support, and also Shite that I, or people like me, DON’T. And it is the latter part that needs to be changed in the universe, or should have been changed (but is unchangeable now because I cannot go back in time).
But like: actually go all the way through this thought, sometimes out loud to other people. To tag up a friend and go, “I AM HAVING UNFAIR RESENTMENT ISSUES BECAUSE OF BLAH.”
And my friends will go, “yes it was totally bullshit that you didn’t get help and support and love.” And other validating things.
And then I will go make myself tea or something.
Going “yes, these feelings exist and I’m TOTALLY HAVING THEM, and now I need a cup of tea and to find something else to think about” tends to help. It’s when I try to Stop Having The Feelings - often without even acknowledging they’re happening - that I end up acting like an absolute garbage can, in ways I regret later.
For anyone who might find that thought process useful.
