Do you remember that friend that you had in kindergarden who abandoned you as her best friend and became friends with the girl you didn’t like? What about the boy in primary school who kept on teasing you and pulling your hair. Do you remember the teacher in secondary school who hated you and always gave you bad marks for your assignments. How you hate them for what they did to you. Leaving scars for ever.

These ‘wonderful’ memories may be filed under grudge. With other words, it’s a feeling you hold against another person. That felling is of ill will or resentment. There are even some stronger words that could describe a grudge. Those would be bitterness, rancor, malevolence, hatred, malice, spite. Lovely list that. And the online dictionary has a great explanation. A grudge is a feeling of resentment harboured because of some real or fancied wrong.

I am sure you have your very own list of grudges that you have carried around with you. Some will be as old as the one you picked up in kindergarden. Some will be new ones. I discovered mine when I attended a group week-end retreat many years ago. The purpose was to learn some new ways to deal with life issues.

One of the exercises we did, was to write down as many of our own list of grudges that we could think of, and put next to them the number of years we had carried them around with us. Then we added those years up and some of us discovered that we had thousands of years of grudges that we had nurtured and kept going.

Then we were asked to have a clear look at each of those grudges and determine whether the person who we felt had given us this grudge actually knew that we were offended, hurt and angry at what they had done to us. With other words, did they know what they had done to make us carry this grudge. And of course it was a totally justifiable grudge.

In all honesty, I guessed that the people on the list I had put together, had no idea that I was angry at them, or that they had offended or hurt me. And in some instances the person, such as my mother, was not even alive anymore. But I was still furious at her for something she had said to me years ago.

That was a bit of an eye opener. What purpose did those grudges have then, if the person who had been the instigator of them, did not actually know about them. Surely the only reason one would carry a grudge was because the other person would know how much they had hurt us and how angry we were at them. And with all this anger, they would feel guilty and remorse for the horrible things that they had done to us. They would suffer as we did. But no, they didn’t know.

During that week-end I learnt that the real issue behind carrying those grudges was the fact that it allowed the holder of the grudge to behave badly. With other words, when I was three years old, my friend left me for another friend. This means I can treat other people badly because they are going to leave me for other friends anyway. Or, my mother said something horrible to me, so I can be horrible to my daughters. After all that is what mothers do, don’t they.

I was reminded of this issue in an article by Karen on her excellent site Live the Power. She was writing about a person who had been complaining bitterly about her situation. Nobody could understand how terrible life was for her and nobody could ever imagine how bad it was. And most of this horrible situation was definitely somebody else’s fault this person was whining.

So how do grudges affect you? They can make you feel miserable. And you are entitled to be miserable because of all of the horrible things people have done to you. Life has been awful. Nothing works for you. So you are not even going to try. And as for being happy, that’s a joke. It could never happen to you. In any case what’s the point of being happy, somebody is going to come along and spoil the day/outing/job - fill in your own occasion - as they have done in the past.

That is the reasoning behind grudges. What they do to our lives though is something else. We hand over the responsibility for our life to the person who has caused the pain in our lives. We feel that we cannot do anything about our lives because the other person has hurt us, made us fall, caused us to miss out on an education, career and the list goes on.

You would wonder why we allow this to happen? Because it is easier and less scary. By not taking responsibility for our lives we don’t have to make any decisions that could involve taking a risk. We don’t have to try out for a new job. We don’t go out on dates anymore. We don’t do all sorts of things. We are entitled to bale out of life because we have a grudge. So what grudges are holding you back from living a happy life?