I’m going to be telling you all about how it is that you can stop yourself from holding a grudge because grudges are not nice. If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say holding a grudge I mean holding on to bad feelings directed towards somebody else who has probably upset you or wronged you in some way. Hanging on to that bad feeling is not good for you and it doesn’t affect them. It’s just bad for you. Let’s talk about how we can avoid hanging onto a grudge. There is a saying ‘holding a grudge is like drinking a poison and expecting the other person to die’. This means that you’re just harming yourself. It’s saying you are only harming yourself when you hold a grudge, the other person doesn’t care that you hold a grudge. It’s not affecting them, the bad feeling is only in you. It doesn’t make any sense for you to continue to keep that grudge.

I’m going to give you some strategies for getting past the grudges that you hold so that you can just move on with your life and put your time and energy into something that is far more worthwhile than a grudge. The very first thing is we want to go bigger picture and what that means is instead of being super focused on the grudge that you’re holding kind of zoom out and take in more information about what’s going on in that situation and what’s been going on around it and what has happened since it because the chances are since whatever it is that caused you to hold a grudge happened other stuff has happened like there are far bigger things for you to be thinking about!

By zooming out, maybe you see that since that situation happened you’ve made a new friend, you’ve passed a test, you have gone back to school like a ton of stuff has happened since you began holding the grudge. The grudge might seem smaller now and less important. The other thing you can do is just look at how much you have grown and evolved and maybe changed as a person. It’s quite possible that that situation itself helped to change you, maybe it helped you to realise that you shouldn’t trust people as easily as you did back then. It’s maybe helped you to realise that you can find better friends or  it’s helped you to realise that sometimes you are better off being alone for a while than having dodgy friends.

The other thing to remember is that ‘time is a healer’. Time will gradually start to shift the way that you think and feel because again you learn and you grow and your perspective changes. For example, situations in the past, when you were four or five years old, may have annoyed you but no longer annoys you now. Eventually, you will get to that same point with this thing at some point in the future. You’re going to be like ‘It doesn’t matter anymore’.

The final thing is there’s also a saying but the best form of revenge is success. One of the best things you can do to send a message to the people that you might hold a grudge towards is that you’re just going to keep moving onwards and upwards. You’re going to keep succeeding. You’re going to keep working hard and focus on being happy within yourself.  When they see you, they see you doing well. They see that you are not concerned with them, they see you moving on and flourishing and becoming super successful at whatever you do and that is one of the best ways you can use up that energy that you might have previously been channelling into holding a grudge and making something very helpful come out of it instead.

The two things that I want you to take away from this article are holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to get sick is unhelpful and the second thing is that success is the best form of revenge. If you seem insistent upon getting back at that person that you hold a grudge towards then do it by making yourself super successful. 

You might one day thank them in for future for making you motivated to succeed well!  

By Gemma Bailey
www.childtherapisthertfordshire.nlp4kids.org