Review: How to Hold a Grudge: From Resentment to Contentment—The Power of Grudges to Transform Your Life

How to Hold a Grudge: From Resentment to Contentment—The Power of Grudges to Transform Your Life by Sophie Hannah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I finished this book way, way back in September. I wanted to try out Hannah's method before I wrote a review. That part was okay, but then NaNoWriMo happened, other stuff happened, and I ended up with no energy nor will to write the review until now.

I've received an awful lot of advice, studied the Book of Job, discussed at length with Pastors, therapists, clinicians, peer mentors, how to deal with bad stuff, but none have provided as practical and effective a method as Hannah does in this book. None have seen grudges as a way to face a wound head on and heal it enough to live without it constantly filling you up with pain. And it's a far, far better text on how to heal from psychological and emotional injury than the books I've been prescribed or have seen because it doesn't shame one for holding a grudge, it doesn't judge for reacting normally to psychological injury -- i.e., it doesn't label anger as bad and needing management but as a marker that something bad has happened to you and you need to address that wound.

But the reason for four stars is because this book is structured badly and in a confusing way. It needed a good textbook editor. (I used to edit medical textbooks.) I don't know if her usual editor edited this book or if it was a combination of textbook and fiction editors, but this kind of non-fiction book requires a different editing approach than fiction. The lack showed. And so when I finished the book, I had to go through the various chapters where she mentions the steps to process a grudge and then put them in order in a notebook so that I could actually follow her advice.

The other problem with this book is that Hannah is used to holding and processing grudges. This is her way of life. She accurately estimated how much time her method consumes, but she didn't address how a person unused to spending time on processing grudges could keep at it even though once it becomes automatic, it's only an hour. This isn't just about developing a new habit -- as difficult as that is -- it's also about developing and maintaining a novel way to repair psychological and emotional abuse and harm. It also requires a person to face fully what happened; most people don't like facing reality. Even I, who faces reality so as to understand it because I need to understand to cope, avoids a lot. Doing this kind of work consumes energy in the short term and requires commitment in the long term. Although it frees up energy in the form of lifting a burden, when the burden is great and longstanding, it takes going back again and again to the grudge in order to continue the healing process. Hannah explains that that's sometimes necessary and discusses how to know when it is. Still, it takes discipline.

My neurodoc was impressed with how effective Hannah's method was and encourages me to use it. But after the energy suck of NaNoWriMo, being sick, and bad news prevented me for months from writing out my grudges and processing them, I have a mental block to getting back on the grudge-processing horse. I think if Hannah had spent a chapter discussing the difficulties of adopting a novel method, of sticking to it, and what to do if forget or cannot for awhile, this would've added greatly to the doability of her method. The book is short enough that adding a chapter on this critical issue would not have been usurious.

For those with therapists, a therapist could use this book as regular homework. Personally, I think it would be a superior form of CBT (cognitive-behaviour therapy) homework because the goal would be to incorporate it as a habit. There's something to be said about the physical act of writing a grudge, processing it, filing it, and reviewing occasionally to see if it's still needed or can be thrown out. CBT isn't showing long-term effectiveness as much as its followers claim, but a practical habit like this would reinforce CBT's new ways of thinking and keep one from allowing new wounds to fester. But it does take outside encouragement and accountability to develop and maintain.

And then there's all the new concepts about grudges to remember and incorporate. That brings up questions despite how her descriptive writing makes it as easy as possible to learn the concepts. Hannah started a podcast to answer grudge questions. My problem is that I'm not naturally a podcast listener. So how to find answers to my questions? Traditional publishers don't take advantage of ePub technology to expand a book beyond its text, but if they did, they could include links to her podcasts in the relevant sections. Smashwords allows authors to update their ebooks and push out updates to readers; a traditional publisher could do the same by adding links to Hannah's newer podcasts and pushing out updated versions of her ebook to retailers who could then notify purchasers. I won't hold my breath. But if they could get around their resentment of this "new" technology, they could give readers an easy way to listen to Hannah's podcasts and have their questions answered as they're reading the book. This would probably help readers incorporate her method into their daily lives. Linking to a related Twitter feed or website page could help, too.

Hannah's style of writing draws one in. You can see why she's a bestselling fiction author! Her examples are vibrant and easy to visualize and thus to comprehend. Her method is imaginative. It isn't dull and serious like so many self-help and psychological textbooks, for it grew out of her as a story teller. For her, a grudge is a story about a harm that was done to you. Holding that story so as to be able to process its truth about the harm, the person who harmed you, about yourself, and about your relationship, is why her method is effective.

A grudge is a story you want to remember with lessons that point to and remind you of your values, that creates new thoughts and/or new behaviours that then create positive energy, ie, erase anger and bitterness, and lead to being empowered, wiser, and entertained, that tell you you matter in the world. (Using Lindamood-Bell's visualizing method, I remembered 90 percent of this. Which is incredible since I haven't thought about it for two months.)

That definition is why it's good to hold a grudge and process it from a raw grudge that contains anger, sadness, hurt, bitterness, into a processed one that at worst leaves you feeling neutral and at best grateful and remaining within a healthy relationship (if you want to; sometimes it's healthier not to) with the person who caused the grudge. I highly recommend this book to bring healing to your wounds and reconciliation to your relationships.

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