Opposite of anger is love!! So if I can not find love I am angery!! Opposite of resentment is Acceptance!! If I don't find the love from my anger I am not accepting any love and I will carry around a resentment. I think I get even more confused than understanding the diffeence because Opposite of Fear is Faith, Am I holding a resentment because of fear and that I am lacking faith. I think when I did my last 4th step I read Triangle of Self-Obsession almost eveyday for awhile, I found that most of what I carried around with me was Anger, Resentment and Fear, (I heard this at a meeting) If you got in my way I ARFed all over you!! ARF, ARF, ARF!!! (these words by Todd)
I'd love to hear your input....Forgiveness is easier said than done..I truly believe my biggest resentment is myself...am doing my best today to work on today so that i don't have a "new" resentments
Well,,, I looked these words up in my dictionary,, and came up with some different things. ..
The opposite of anger is - patience, forbearance, gentleness, peaceableness and self-control.
I have been told that we can be angry at someone we love,,, so love and anger are not the opposites.
hatred mean enmity... friends and enemies are opposites. I have been told that having anger at someone means that we care,, but that hatred can be cold, unfeeling,, absence of love or any care.
resentment is related to anger and is about what we consider to be an injury or wrong done to us,,, and the opposite would be acceptance. breaking the word re-sent-ment down,,, it means to feel again.... to keep on feeling anger about an injury instead of being able to let it go and move on.
and what does love mean?
in recovery,
amanda
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do your best and God does the rest, a step at a time
Stan,,,, yes,,, I learned Spanish, which also comes from Latin and it is fascinating. I do like to study words, concepts, language and culture. But the reason that I was interested in these particular words goes back a couple of years,,,, to my feelings about my father, who was very violent and abusive,,, and my mother, who was totally messed up. I thought I hated my father because I felt so much rage, but when I really looked at it it was that I felt betrayed by someone I had loved and trusted. I thought that I felt nothing for my mother, but it turned out that I really did hate her to the point of totally rejecting any feeling for her whatever. The resentments came in where I was still consumed by all this years after I left home and they both died and the mental blocks that cause interfered with all of my other relationships too.
btw I got to wondering one day about the word 'love' in the Christian concept and got to what the verb form of 'charity' is, which took me on a fascinating journey through Latin, Greek, and French to come up with cher and finally with 'cherish'. We lost that because we like to give to 'charity' without cherishing the people at the other end of it.
love in recovery,
amanda
__________________
do your best and God does the rest, a step at a time