All I have ever seen from Toxic Tenants is their bitterness and resentment over the eviction they had. It permeates all of their writings and I have found I was feeling it over time as well. I had to find a way to release it from my system!
I don’t want this in my life anymore!!
Even their new sites against others are full of resentment and bitterness for not getting something they wanted. I had to find a way to let this go and it is an ongoing process…
They dragged me down with them, and I had to stop it. I am very grateful I am not like them!
Over the past few months, I have been working on releasing my own bitterness, as it wasn’t helping me. I have forgiven myself, not it is the time to try and forgive my Abusers. It has to be done for my own mental well-being!
“Did the person who hurt you consciously intend to treat you maliciously?” Yes, the person who hurt me did it deliberately and maliciously. Understanding that I had no control over that and allowing this person to continue to do what he does, is hard, but it had to be done. I complain to who I need to and that is all I can do. While everyone agrees with my assessments of their sites and their malicious content, it can’t be stopped.
Did they really have a personal vendetta against you? Yes, they did as they blamed me for their eviction, rather than accept their own acts of denying entry was the cause. They refused access. even said so in writing and in Word, and have a hard time accepting they couldn’t do that.
Or might their motive simply have been self-interested? Yes, as all they were interested in was maintaining their tenancy and getting control over entry. They wanted to decide who could enter and when and how repairs were managed.
“Typically, your offender’s prime motive wasn’t to gratuitously cause you pain but to achieve their own ends. And if they did wish to hurt you, might it be possible that their motive was retaliatory? They made up a lie 2 1/2 months later, hoping this lie would cause harm to my personal and professional life as I called them out for breaking the rules of the RTA and brought them to the Tribunal for it.
“That they perceived you as earlier having hurt them? They believe their own lies of a prior meeting where they claim I said inappropriate things to them that they made up to have something to use against me. They thought I should have given them some dates to pick from and to enter when it was convenient for them, not for anyone else.
In which case, their harming you back would have seemed altogether just to them.” It doesn’t matter if they thought they had the right, there is never any justification for making the websites they have online. They did this thing and I am left to adjust to the repercussions of their actions.
The root cause of my own bitterness and resentment is the domains they made that contain my name and pictures with their nasty false allegations. It is the act of creating these websites, not just in my name but also in others. It bothers me that it was so easy for these Tenants to do and that domain companies and hosting companies, allow it.
I came to see that my own well-being was being affected by this bitterness I got from them on a daily basis in their missives to HRTO and my own terrible feelings were growing. I had to back off from it all before it consumed me!! I refused at the time to read the Form 10s they sent, and I am glad I did, as it was just more of the same.
I had to get past all that and this is how I have been doing it, by following the guides in this post.
Understanding that they are Toxic with narcissistic traits, has helped me see they are very sick people who go out of their way to avoid any accountability for their own actions. They blame other people when things go wrong in their lives and go out of their way to blame others, making allegations based on their own personal views.
They makeup lies and eventually believe these lies, as it allows them to blame others rather than accept their part in it all.
They are ruining their own lives with their bitterness and resentment. They are creating a poisoned environment in their own personal lives and all the people they come into contact with. They will never get anywhere in life with their current beliefs.
They are destroying their own credibility with the Tribunals of Ontario with their frivolous applications and with the websites they created and leave online, hoping that they cause trouble for the person noted in the contents.
I have come to see that these Toxic people are very sick and need help. They will deny that of course. They prefer to blame other people for their bad lot in life, not seeing their own toxic behaviour.
It is for this fact that I can find it in my heart to forgive them for what they have done in my name. I do this not for them, but for me.
Over the past few months, I have been trying to put all this behind me and focus on other things and am finally at the point where I can do that. I have slowly been dropping all the habits I gained during this mess that helped me feel safe and am ready for new ones!
Time to move on and focus on living!!
The Cost of Bitterness
Yet the benefits of retreating into acrimonious victimhood—defaulting to bitterness—invariably carries a high price tag. It can:
- Prolong your mental and emotional pain—and may even exacerbate it
- Lead to long-lasting anxiety and/or depression
- Precipitate vengeful acts that put you at further risk of being hurt or victimized—and possibly engulf you in a never-ending, self-defeating cycle of getting even
- Prevent you from experiencing the potential joys of living fully in the present—vs. dwelling self-righteously on the past wrongs inflicted on you
- Create or deepen an attitude of distrust and cynicism—qualities that contribute to hostility and paranoid thinking, as well as an overall sense of pessimism. Such a bleak perspective prompts others to turn away from you
- Interfere with your cultivating healthy, satisfying relationships, and lead you to doubt, or disparage, your connection to others
- Compromise or weaken your higher ideals, and adversely impact your personal search for purpose and meaning in life
- Rob you of vital energy far better employed to help you realize your desires, or achieve goals that you coveted earlier
- Undermine your physical health. The chronic anger that is bitterness can raise your stress baseline, thereby taxing your immune system
- Blind you from recognizing your own role, or responsibility, in possibly having been vindictively harmed by another
- By keeping you in a paradoxical state of “vengeful bondage,” erode your sense of well-being.
The Cure for Bitterness
Virtually every writer who has weighed in on the subject of bitterness has discussed its ultimate remedy: forgiveness. Forgiveness alone enables you to let go of grievances, grudges, rancor, and resentment. It’s the single most potent antidote for the venomous desire for retributive justice poisoning your system. If this impulse hasn’t infested you physically, it’s at least afflicted you mentally and emotionally. Learning to forgive your “violator” facilitates your recovery from a wound that, while it may have originated from outside yourself, has been kept alive from the venom you’ve synthesized within you.
If anger intimates an almost irresistible impulse toward revenge, then forgiveness is mostly about renouncing such vindictiveness. It can hardly be overemphasized that when you decide to forgive your perceived wrongdoer, you’re doing so not so much for them but for yourself. It’s your welfare that’s primarily at stake here. As already suggested, the longer you hold onto your anger, the more you’ll sink into the destructive quagmire of ever-cycling feelings of hatred and resentment. The more, over time, your anger will “mature” into bitterness.
It’s as though you’ve somehow cultivated your anger as some sort of analgesic and, rather than devoting yourself to actually healing from your hurt, you’ve instead become addicted to numbing it through a painkiller. And the irony of this situation is that to have your painkiller (your anger) continue to work, you must keep your wound fresh and open. Yet if you’re ever to transcend your wounding experience, both your pain and its painkiller have to be allowed to “expire.”
As I’ve bulleted above, any bitterness still dominating you will only augment the injury you’ve already sustained. What’s your choice? In your mind, or with family and friends, you can continue to berate or castigate the one who harmed you. Or, you can choose to become not problem-focused but solution-oriented and contrive to put your ill-treatment behind you. This might seem like a no-brainer, but in fact, it may not be that easy to relinquish your “superior” position of righteous victimhood. Here’s what you need to be reflecting on:
Did the person who hurt you consciously intend to treat you maliciously? Did they really have a personal vendetta against you? Or might their motive simply have been self-interested? Typically, your offender’s prime motive wasn’t to gratuitously cause you pain but to achieve their own ends. And if they did wish to hurt you, might it be possible that their motive was retaliatory? That they perceived you as earlier having hurt them? In which case, their harming you back would have seemed altogether just to them.
Your protracted anger or rage is essentially interpretive. If you’re to move beyond your acrimony, you need to amend your negative assessment of their behavior. To the degree that you might actually have contributed to their actions, it might be time to ask yourself whether you conceivably had some blame for their harming you.
Alter your attitude to free yourself of the bondage that, regrettably, is inherently linked to your bitterness. You need to be willing to regard the other person anew—not as villainous, which may conveniently have served to justify your bitterness, but as insensitive to your feelings or general welfare. Being able to reperceive them in this light can’t help but facilitate a crucial attitudinal shift softening your resentment.
It’s also key to realize that even if the other person has been guilty of intentionally hurting you for no reason other than their own perverse satisfaction, it still makes sense to forgive them. Whether they’ve displaced their rage toward someone else onto you, or whether they’re totally devoid of any empathy or common decency, your bitterness nonetheless causes you far more harm than it does them. Your taking personally what they did also represents an irrational distortion of their motives. In such instances forgiving them is really about letting go of your retaliatory rage simply so that you can move on to enjoy whatever satisfactions life continues to offer you.
The simplest plan that I’ve seen for implementing the intention of regaining your emotional equilibrium through abandoning your resentment and bitterness is from James J. Messina. Here, considerably abridged and reworded is his five-step plan:
- Identify the source of your bitterness and what this person did to evoke your resentful feelings
- Develop a new way of looking at your past, present, and future—including how resentment has negatively affected your life and how letting go of it can improve your future
- Write a letter to this person, describing [their] offenses toward you, then forgive and let go of them (but don’t send the letter)
- Visualize having a better future having neutralized the negative impact of resentment
- If bitter, resentful feelings remain, return to Step 1 and begin again.
Concluding Quotations on Bitterness
I think the following quotes forcefully sum up many of the points I’ve tried to make here. So I’ll close this piece with them:
“Anger is a short madness.”—Horace
“It is hardly possible to build anything if frustration, bitterness, and a mood of helplessness prevail.”—Lech Walesa
“I know from personal experience how damaging it can be to live with bitterness and unforgiveness. I like to say it’s like taking poison and hoping your enemy will die. And it really is that harmful to us to live this way.”—Joyce Meyer
“Something my mum taught me years and years and years ago, is life’s just too short to carry around a great bucket-load of anger and resentment and bitterness and hatred.”—Kevin Rudd
And finally, alluding to just how seductive the retaliatory self-righteousness of bitterness can be, this simple edict: “Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.”—Martin Luther King, Jr.
© 2015 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/evolution-the-self/201501/don-t-let-your-anger-mature-bitterness
