Grudges are bad for your health and your relationships. A grudge prevents you from getting what you want; leading to self-sabotage. Grudges are dangerous patterns to hold onto because they can cause the disintegration of relationships, depression, anxiety, physical disease, and unwanted behavior. You can grudge against yourself, your body, other people, and even historical events. Even though it seems as though the grudge is against another person, it is actually a self-destructive pattern that leads you to wreck the values you hold most dear. Values like communication, loyalty, love, truth, freedom, monogamy, and safety are common grudge territory.
According to Judith Swack the originator of HBLU, a grudge starts with a good person with good values. Along comes someone who violates or insults those values. The emotional response is one of outrage, but the knee jerk behavior is some sort of withdrawal. The withdrawal behavior gets anchored to the value that was violated. After that, every time the person reaches for what they value, they are compulsively triggered into the withdrawal behavior which prevents them from achieving what they value. The grudge traps you into violating your own belief system by reacting without thinking.
The Infidelity Grudge
A man came to see me after discovering his wife was cheating on him. He was understandably angry and hurt and unsure of how he wanted to resolve the situation. He felt conflicted about leaving his partner. After all was said and done, he still loved her. On the other hand, he was uncomfortable with the message he would send if he didn’t end the relationship. He didn’t want to feel like a doormat and he certainly didn’t want to risk her cheating again. The trust was severely damaged. He was depressed.
He told me the story of searching for her phone and finding the compromising text messages. He’d screenshot them and sent them to her, along with a text that he expected her to move out. He was so angry that he left and went to the gym. He felt numb. The anger and refusal to speak to her felt better to him than the devastation he truly felt. He buried his pain and pushed her to leave their home. Now months later, they were at a crossroads as they talked about how to move forward. Permanent separation or reconciliation.
How do we find a grudge?
We discovered he was holding a grudge and it was causing some of the depression he was had. He traced it back to the exact scene where he found the messages, confronted her with them, and turned his back on their relationship to go burn off his anger at the gym. That was the pivotal moment. Using the method for clearing grudges, we brainstormed and found the values that felt violated to him. They were: loyalty, honesty, and equality. We moved on to list the opposite of those values. They were: cheater, hypocrite and property.
I asked him what he could have done differently? “Which of your values did you violate, I asked?” “Me?” He asked. “I think I did a pretty good job.” “I wasn’t going to just let her get away with it.” “I wanted her to see I wasn’t crushed.” “She can’t just treat me that way and get away with it. We just stood there looking at each other. For a moment it seemed like we had reached an impasse. Then I said, “You say you value loyalty, but you weren’t very loyal to the relationship.”
Healing a grudge
I could see the emotion wash over him. If you were honoring your value of loyalty, you wouldn’t have walked out like that. That’s not what a loyal partner does. What would you have done’? He thought for a minute, fighting back tears because he finally realized his role in his own pain. “I would have told her to come home immediately so we could talk.” “I would have told her how much she hurt me and tried to see how we could work through it.” “Yes”, I said. “You would have honored your values rather than reacting to your pain and anger.” We muscle tested to be certain that was right. “Yes. I should have done that instead.” “Wow, what a terrible price to pay”. I explained he was just trying to protect himself from pain, but he ended feeling even worse.
Loyalty was extremely important to him but it was tainted, so he felt angry just thinking about it. This is how self-destructive grudges are. I balanced that new behavior for him with a technique to lock it in and the negative emotion disappeared.
Understanding grudges
Grudges form as a reaction to the experience of trauma. The grudge is a “pulling away” behavioral component to the emotional reaction of outrage. The emotion is incidental. In terms of grudge structure, only the willingness to defend your own values matters. As is always the case, you may not be able to control the things that happen to you but you are always responsible for your reactions to them.
HBLU allows you to find the reactions you may not be aware of and correct them in a matter of minutes. This fosters a deep level of understanding and shifts the way you feel about your experience. Healing occurs on the conscious, unconscious, body and soul level of your being and symptoms disappear. Symptoms are your body’s alarm system telling you that one thing is wrong. Many therapies simply teach you to cope with symptoms or use medication to mask symptoms. HBLU interviews the symptom uses muscle testing to find the root cause of it and heals it with a corrective, energetic intervention. You know an issue is clear because your subjective experience of distress is a zero and your body muscle tests clear. No traditional therapy can promise that.
