You can minimize the pain of a grudge, even if you’re not ready to forgive.
There’s something deliciously perverse about holding a grudge. Sitting atop your high horse, you cast judgment on the person who has wronged you, wondering how someone could commit such a heinous act. Weeks, months, and even years can pass, and all the while you hold on to your little treasures of spite. Indeed, C. Ward Struthers, a professor at York University who studies forgiveness, vengeance, and grudges, suspects grudges are meant to be remembered since they function as self-protection. “When I’m faced with that person again, or another situation like that, [the grudge] can be re-invoked and I can use it to protect myself,” he says.
Struthers defines a grudge as a sustained feeling of hurt and anger that can dissipate over time but can be reignited when needed. Harboring negative feelings toward someone and holding a grudge are similar experiences, Struthers says, but not identical. When grudges form, your perception of the transgressor has changed and you see them as an inherently bad person with harmful intentions. Feeling slighted by a friend because they got you a cheap birthday present doesn’t evoke the same emotion as the disdain felt for a coworker who constantly undermines you in meetings.
Grudges exist on a spectrum, says Robert Enright, a professor in the department of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin Madison and a founding board member of the International Forgiveness Institute. Some grievances don’t impact your daily life, but you remember them nonetheless. These surface-level grudges are easier to relinquish, Enright says. Others take root in the soul and can grow into hatred.
Because grudges have the ability to shield you from future harm, Struthers believes once a grudge is set, it’s yours for life. (He does admit the research is scant in this area.) Enright believes, through forgiveness, even the most profound resentments can be released. Though feelings of bitterness may be deep-seated, it’s not exactly in your best interest to walk around brimming with rancor. Even if you’re not ready to forgive, understanding the process of how grudges are formed can help relinquish some of the power they hold over your life.
Holding a grudge is an ongoing cycle
The experience of grievance isn’t linear, but cyclical. After a series of interviews with grudge-holders, social psychologist Elizabeth van Monsjou, who was working in Struthers’s lab at the time, discovered common themes among the aggrieved. The journey of disdain, van Monsjou found, begins with wrongdoing — either perceived wrongdoing or an event where a person knowingly harms another. The person on the receiving end of the transgression begins to experience feelings of inadequacy — “How could someone do this to me?” — which leads to validation-seeking; the scorned person recounts the story to others who are, ideally, just as aghast. If the victim is unable to let go, ruminates over the event, and feels justified in their resentment, a grudge can form. “They have these thoughts and emotions, this negativity about the person who did them wrong, negativity about themselves, questioning lots of different things around this event,” van Monsjou says. “Then a breaking point leads to a grudge.”
Over time, the white-hot intensity of spite dissipates and the grudge doesn’t occupy so much mental space. This is, according to van Monsjou, the acceptance phase: “accepting that you’re holding a grudge,” she says. However, you might hear a song, say, reminding you of an unfaithful partner, and find yourself deep in the trenches of resentment once more. “That spurs the cycle again,” van Monsjou says, “where you move into that unmet need for validation, you try to seek validation, and then so on and so on until the next trigger.”
If you’re not ready (or willing) to forgive
Letting go of a grudge is not the same experience as forgiveness. Struthers sees forgiveness as a decision you make to replace a negative judgment of a person or situation with a positive feeling. By contrast, moving on from a grudge might conjure indifference instead of positivity; you don’t need to feel warm and fuzzy toward a person who wronged you to avoid letting negative feelings control your life. “In order to actually fully forgive someone, you can’t just let go and not care,” says Katina Bajaj, a co-founder and the chief well-being officer at Daydreamers, a mental health and creativity platform. “You have to actually feel positively toward that situation.”
To get to a point of nonchalance, you need more context about the wrongdoing — and the person who committed it. In the aftermath of a hurtful event, you might feel raw, confused as to why someone would mistreat you. While difficult, van Monsjou recommends stepping out of your own point of view and attempting to consider what motivated the other person. What do you think the other person thought about your actions? How did the wrongdoing affect their emotions? Try not to judge the other person for their behavior, van Monsjou says, which can help minimize feelings of righteous indignation. “If we do take the time to take on the perspective of the person who harmed us,” she says, “then it’s less about judging that person and more understanding what might have motivated or what might have contributed to the wrongdoing in that case.”
It’s also possible the transgressor didn’t intentionally hurt you, Enright says. Maybe their child was sick and they forgot about a charity event you organized — something that was meaningful to you but, at the moment, not as significant to them. “As you’re putting a context to it,” Enright says, “you’ll begin to see maybe this wasn’t such a big deal and I can move past, I can move on.”
The process of perspective-taking adds nuance to black-and-white thinking — thought patterns that reinforce the idea of inherent badness a person possesses to have wronged you. “If you only see things as all good or all bad, you’re going to be mentally inflexible,” Bajaj says. “But if you’re open and adaptable, and even curious, you’re going to be able to hold a bunch of different perspectives.”
Even if your resentment stems from an incident long in the past — say, harboring ill will toward a bully from high school — consider how the person may have matured and evolved throughout their life. This thought experiment doesn’t forgive their words or actions, but it allows you to view them as someone capable of growth. “With grudges, it can be really easy to get into that fixed mindset of ‘this is just who people are,’” says licensed clinical psychologist Lauren Cook. “Holding a hope that they have made better decisions and treated people better, that might help us get a little better sleep at night.”
To release the deepest grudges, you need to forgive
You may reach a point where the grudge has become a familiar bedfellow, but an emotion without a purpose: a motivation that no longer serves you. Releasing a grudge might mean letting go of the person who caused it, Cook says, by ending a relationship with a friend who betrayed your confidence, for example. “Sometimes we hold the grudge as a way to delay a grieving process,” Cook says, “because it really hurts to lose someone.” Accepting that a relationship has run its course can help lessen a grudge’s impact.
However, the strongest antidote against grudge-holding, Enright says, is forgiveness. Forgiveness is a solitary and conscious process, and the person who hurt you doesn’t necessarily need to apologize or take responsibility. To truly forgive someone, you have to decide to do some emotional work, like digging deep into the psyche of the person who hurt you. “What kind of wounds does this person have to have wounded you?” Enright says. Then, Enright says, consider your shared humanity: You and the person who wronged you are both unique human beings with meaningful lives.
This process may take time and patience; to find commonality and empathy for someone you perceive as an aggressor or manipulator is no small feat.
“That,” Enright says, “is when you actually begin to conquer the grudge that could conquer you.”
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As Trump spread his stolen election lies, Fox was terrified of alienating its own audience, emails and texts show.
Who really runs Fox News?
Some liberals have a mental model in which the network lies to and misleads its audience, propagandizing them to support Republicans and the right. But an ongoing defamation lawsuit from the voting machine company Dominion against Fox News tells a more complex story — one in which the network’s key players feel compelled to supply the conspiratorial content the audience is demanding.
A new filing by Dominion’s attorneys released Thursday cited a trove of Fox emails and texts they had obtained in the discovery phase of the lawsuit, as well as testimony from top executives and hosts, to lay out a narrative about what happened in the tense weeks after Election Day 2020, when then-President Donald Trump was spreading lies about the election.
As they discussed coverage of Trump’s falsehoods, Fox’s top executives and primetime personalities were explicitly terrified of alienating pro-Trump viewers, panicked about losing the “trust” of the audience, and anxious about competition from the further right and more conspiratorial Newsmax.
Almost everyone at the network, it seems, understood Trump’s allegations about a stolen election, and particularly his attorney Sidney Powell’s wacky tales of malfeasance from Dominion, were nonsense.
But an intense culture of what one might call “political correctness” took hold — in which challenging Trump and Powell’s claims could only happen with the utmost care and sensitivity, for fear of offending the tender feelings of Fox viewers.
More broadly, in understanding how lies and conspiracies spread on the right, it’s important to reckon not just with the suppliers of this coverage, but also the demand. There’s an intense desire for it among viewers that organizations like Fox calculate they have to satisfy in some way. And if Fox doesn’t provide it, those audiences will just seek it out elsewhere.
The terror of losing audience trust — and competition from Newsmax
The way Dominion’s attorneys tell the story, the problem really started when, late on election night, Fox News’s decision desk called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden — and no other networks joined them.
The Fox call was consequential, seriously undercutting Trump’s hope of portraying the election outcome as genuinely in question. It also was, probably, premature. The consensus among other decision desks and election wonks was that Fox called the state too quickly, considering how much of the vote remained uncounted and where and whom those uncounted votes were coming from. Other outlets left Arizona uncalled for more than a week as counting continued, and Biden’s lead shrank there. Biden eventually won the state by a mere 0.3 percent margin.
But the Fox personalities’ real concern was not so much with the facts or technical details of election wonkery as with the optics. In getting out on a limb and calling Arizona for Biden when no one else was doing so, it appeared to Fox’s pro-Trump viewers like the network was shivving Trump.
“We worked really hard to build what we have. Those fuckers [at the decision desk] are destroying our credibility. It enrages me,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson wrote to his producer on November 5. He went on to say that what Trump is good at is “destroying things,” adding, “He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”
On November 7, Carlson again wrote to his producer when Fox called Biden as the winner nationally (this time, alongside the other major networks). “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real,” he wrote.
The fear of alienating the audience was particularly acute because another conservative cable network with a more conspiratorial bent, Newsmax, was covering Trump’s stolen election claims far more uncritically. “An alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us,” Carlson continued.
Fox News anchor Dana Perino wrote to a Republican strategist about “this RAGING issue about fox losing tons of viewers and many watching — get this — newsmax! Our viewers are so mad about the election calls…” And Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott told another executive that the political team did not understand “the impact to the brand and the arrogance in calling AZ.”
Fox Corporation chair Rupert Murdoch later emailed Scott that Newsmax “should be watched, if skeptically … We don’t want to antagonize Trump further, but [Rudy] Giuliani [should be] taken with a large grain of salt.” He added, ominously, “Everything at stake here.”
Scott also exchanged texts with Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s son and the Fox Corporation’s CEO:
Scott: “It’s a question of trust — the AZ [call] was damaging but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them”
Murdoch: “Yes. But needs constant rebuilding without any missteps”
Scott: “Yes today is day one and it’s a process.”
So as Trump pressed forward with his stolen election lies and his attempt to overturn Biden’s win, Fox made it an immensely important, existential priority to regain the trust of pro-Trump viewers. Fox News president and editor Jay Wallace wrote to Scott that he was “trying to get everyone to comprehend we are on war footing.”
When some at Fox then deigned to fact-check Trump and his allies’ false claims, top talent and executives deemed this “disrespect”
As Trump continued to dispute the election results, and as he and allies like Powell and Giuliani spread false and increasingly bizarre claims about election fraud, a pattern unfolded.
First, a Fox anchor or reporter would attempt to fact-check these claims and find them wanting. Then, they’d quickly face furious blowback from executives or the primetime hosts, who viewed these attempts to stay grounded in factual reality as a threat to the “brand” and a sign of “disrespect” to their viewers.
Dominion’s filing lists several examples of this:
Jacqui Heinrich: On November 12, Trump tweeted that coverage from two Fox hosts, Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, confirmed his claims about votes being “stolen.” Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted in response that this was “not what top election infrastructure officials said,” citing their claims that there was no evidence any votes were changed or compromised.
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Internet Archive
Carlson sent Heinrich’s tweet to fellow primetime hosts Hannity and Laura Ingraham, writing: “Please get her fired. Seriously… what the fuck? I’m actually shocked… It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
Carlson and Hannity both complained to top executives, and Scott, the company CEO, later wrote: “She [Heinrich] has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted.” Heinrich then deleted the tweet.
Some of the outrage here may have been because Trump had praised claims from Fox opinion hosts, and Heinrich appeared to be rebutting them. But the concerns were also framed around how viewers would respond and how the company would be hurt.
Neil Cavuto: On November 9, Cavuto, an anchor, cut away from a White House press conference, saying press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was making an “explosive charge” of election fraud, but that “unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this.”
The “brand team,” led by top executives at Fox News’s parent company, the Fox Corporation, took notice, warning top corporate leadership that Cavuto’s comments posed a “Brand Threat.” Hannity also complained about Cavuto in a text to Carlson and Ingraham.
Dana Perino and Kristin Fisher: On November 19, after Fox aired a press conference where Giuliani and Powell made wild allegations about Dominion, anchor Dana Perino observed on-air that the voting company might sue Powell, and White House correspondent Kristin Fisher tried to fact-check the claims, calling many of them “simply not true.”
Fox News’s @KristinFisher responds to @RudyGiuliani’s voter fraud press conference:
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) November 19, 2020
“That was certainly a colorful news conference from Rudy Giuliani, but it was light on facts.
So much of what he said was simply not true or has already been thrown out in court.” pic.twitter.com/Lp33n4QJu5
