by Samuel W. Connelly

Created on: January 31, 2008

Resentment can be described by many words: anger, ill will, hurt, brokenness, heart break, etc., but with one good word picture, resentment is a wound. the wound can be really huge or very small, but resentment, like a wound, must be handled or it will fester and become diseased.

What causes this wound? It can be an array of things; wife makes more money than her husband, so her tries to hide his jealously towards her for his own personal feelings of failure as a husband. Wife finds a woman's phone number in her husbands pants so she quietly allows her heart to be broken by suspicion. Wife thinks the diamond on her wedding ring is too small. Husband feels his wife is not being intimate frequently enough, so in his mind he build the case that she is not faithful to him or not interested in him anymore. Wife takes care of the kids, and grows cold towards her husbands lack of help.

There are many, many birth places for resentment in the hearts of both the husband and wife. The real problem here is that both the husband and wife can grow to resent the other for the resentment they feel from the other person, so they;re response is resentful, which only adds to the already festering wound.

I remember sitting with my finance in a pre-marriage counseling session with our pastor. He told us that around 95% of couple that came to him in a last ditch effort to save their marriage have come to the point of divorce because of resentment. In most cases both the husband and wife had gunny-sacked the issues for too long and finally they exploded on each other. (Gunny-sack is where one person feels resentment towards the other and instead of handling it, they bury it deep inside. Over the years this builds and builds as more and more feelings are piled on it.)

Wounds that go uncared for get worse. Soon they become diseased,fester, spread, and some become gangrenes (dead). When that wound finally gets gangrene- those parts are dead and killing the areas around it, it has to be cut off, or amputated. Resentment works the same way. It first hurts, and if it is not handled properly and quickly it gets worse and worse and can end up killing the relationship.

How do you present this?

1.Keep open lines of communication as a constant in your marriage.
2.When you suspect your spouse is not honest about something, or hiding something, talk to them. But keep the mindset that your hunch could be a personal issue and not fact. Be ready to be wrong.
3. No mater how bad the situation seems to you, talk about it. It is better to be humiliated of find you're wrong, than to loose a marriage over something relatively small.

Handle issues quickly and throughly, don't put it off till another time. And don't go to bed angry at the other person. It is very important that no matter how angry you are with each other, sleep in the same bed. You'll be surprised at how one night's sleep on the couch out of anger can build a huge nearly impenetrable wall between two hearts.

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