RESENTMENT rarely arrives as a dramatic event. More often, it slips in quietly, through a comment taken personally, a correction misread as an attack or a disappointment replayed until it hardens.
One of the most uncomfortable truths about resentment is that offence is, to a significant degree, a choice. Not the initial sting, perhaps, but the decision to keep it alive.
When we allow offence to settle in the mind, we hand over an extraordinary amount of power to other people, letting their words or actions govern our inner lives.
Offence, when sustained, does not remain a feeling; it becomes a structure. Like a fortress, it gathers justifications, rehearsed arguments and defensive reflexes. Psychologically, this is well documented.
Chronic offence is closely linked to defensiveness, heightened stress responses and long-term anger.
Studies associate prolonged resentment with elevated blood pressure and chronic stress, showing that what begins as a mental posture eventually finds a home in the body. As the philosopher Epictetus observed, “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
Defensiveness is particularly corrosive because it disguises itself as strength. In reality, it narrows perception.
When we are offended, we are less capable of taking risks, admitting error or facing failure with clarity.
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Growth requires exposure that is to feedback, to uncertainty, to the possibility of being wrong. An easily offended person cannot remain open for long. Every challenge becomes a threat and every disagreement a personal slight.
Resentment also thrives on misunderstanding. The mind is remarkably skilled at filling in gaps with worst-case narratives. Perceived criticism is magnified, neutral silence is interpreted as rejection and correction is mislabelled as betrayal. Pride quietly steps in to defend the ego, not the truth.
As Mark Twain once warned, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Offence feeds on certainty that has not been examined.
Another danger of sustained offence is division. Teams fracture, families become strained, and communities weaken when individuals retreat into their own emotional fortresses. Unity does not require uniformity, but it does require the willingness to stay engaged even when discomfort arises. A divided group cannot move forward with coherence. Resentment isolates and isolation makes perspective harder to regain.
Crucially, offence distorts vision. When resentment takes root, it produces a kind of blindness that is the inability to see nuance, intention or possibility. People become reduced to caricatures: adversaries rather than complex individuals. This is why spending time around honest, grounded truth-tellers matters. They challenge internal narratives without inflaming them. They help distinguish between genuine harm and wounded pride.
Letting go of offence does not mean excusing harm or silencing accountability. It means refusing to rehearse mental scenarios that deepen misunderstanding. It means choosing curiosity over assumption, clarity over emotional speculation. Love, like offence, is a choice, a deliberate orientation towards understanding rather than control.
As James Baldwin wrote, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
As we enter the New Year, the question is not whether offence will come, because it will but whether we will carry it forward. Resentment is heavy, inefficient, and unnecessary. The future belongs to those who travel light.
- Rutendo Kureya is a medical student at Saint Petersburg State Paediatric Medical University, Russia. She is passionate about issues concerning the state and welfare of fellow Zimbabweans. She can be reached at [email protected]. Mobile: +7 996 274 9866 Facebook: Rutendo Kureya. She writes here in her personal capacity.
