Consult Your Resentment
Resentment is a diagnostic instrument: it tells you either to speak up or to grow up.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 94%
Peterson's line — consult your resentment, it is revelatory — is the compressed version of rule 11 in Beyond Order: do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful or arrogant. The input is any felt resentment. The mechanism is a binary diagnostic: resentment signals either that someone is treading on your territory and something must be done about it, or that you need to grow the hell up and stop complaining. It is not obvious which, and Peterson is emphatic that you need to figure it out. The output is either a difficult conversation or an admission of immaturity, both of which resolve the emotion. What makes this more than folk psychology is his account of the cost: resentment is a stressful emotion in which the body hyper-prepares for conflict, so you burn psychophysiological resources continuously, and resentment for unlived life can be harboured for a very long period during which all it does is corrupt you.
Origin
Peterson developed this over twenty thousand hours of clinical practice listening to people, and formalised it as rule 11 of Beyond Order, where resentment sits alongside deceit and arrogance in what he calls the evil triad. He also traces it to the story of Cain and Abel, which he reads as being entirely about resentment.
Core principles
- 01Resentment is a bad emotion but an extraordinarily informative one, so the correct response is to read it rather than to suppress or indulge it.
- 02Resentment tells you one of exactly two things: someone is treading on your territory and something needs to be done about it, or you need to grow the hell up and stop complaining.
- 03Which of the two it is is not obvious in the moment, and figuring out which is the actual work.
- 04Unresolved resentment is corrosive over time — you can harbour resentment for unlived life for a very long period and all it does is corrupt you.
- 05Resentment carries a physiological price, because your body hyper-prepares for conflict and you burn off psychophysiological resources maintaining it.
- 06The target state is a resentment-free existence, which in practice means taking up enough space in the perpetual competition for time and attention.
- 07Peterson places resentment inside an evil triad with deceit and arrogance, which is why he treats it as urgent rather than merely uncomfortable.
How to run it
- 1
Register the resentment instead of routing around it
Treat the emotion as a signal rather than a personal failing. Peterson's framing is that resentment is bad but useful — you can learn a lot by noticing that it occurs.
Pro tip Write down the exact incident, not the accumulated mood. Moods are undiagnosable.
Watch out Suppressing it does not remove the physiological cost; you keep paying for it while learning nothing.
- 2
Run the two-way diagnostic
Ask whether someone is treading on your territory and something needs to be done about it, or whether you need to grow the hell up and stop complaining. Peterson insists it is not obvious which of the two it is, and that determining it is the actual work.
Pro tip Test the immaturity branch first — it is the one your self-image will hide from you.
Watch out Defaulting to the territory reading every time is how you end up resentful as hell and self-righteous.
- 3
Check whether you are protecting a flattering self-image
Peterson notes it is easy for people to think that they are better than they are, and that when a shot lands in public you may not notice you are angry precisely because that sort of thing is not supposed to upset someone as good as you think you are.
Pro tip The tell is a grievance you can feel but cannot articulate a legitimate claim for.
- 4
Say the thing, as an open question
His scripted example: tell your partner that they said something snarky at dinner which you did not think was appropriate, then add that you might be hypersensitive and touchy and immature, or maybe they hit a weak spot, or maybe they are playing a power game — why don't we figure that out.
Pro tip Building your own possible immaturity into the sentence is what makes it a diagnostic conversation rather than an accusation.
Watch out People do not like conversations like that. Peterson concedes they are messy and that he has a horrible aversion to conflict himself.
- 5
Look for resentment attached to unlived life
Some resentment is not about another person at all but about a domain you never entered. Peterson's practical remedy in that case is blunt: maybe you need a new job.
Pro tip Ask what you would be doing if the resented obligation vanished. That answer is often the real content.
- 6
Aim at a resentment-free existence, not a resentment-tolerant one
Peterson's stated target is to aim at a resentment-free existence, which means taking up enough space in the perpetual competition for everyone else's time and attention rather than conceding your domain and then stewing.
Pro tip Treat lingering resentment as unfinished work rather than as a personality trait.
Watch out Living with it is sometimes unavoidable but never optimal, and it is very unpleasant.
In the wild
Peterson builds the worked case from a partner who puts you down in public and does not show you the respect he argues married people owe each other categorically. Because you want to think you are better than you are, that sort of thing is not supposed to upset you, so you do not notice it, you do not say anything, and you do not fix it. His alternative is to open the conversation directly: we were out for dinner and you said something snarky which I did not think was appropriate — now I might be hypersensitive and touchy and immature, or maybe you hit me in a weak spot, or maybe you are playing some power game, why don't we figure that out.
→ The resentment gets diagnosed rather than accumulated, and the relationship keeps the categorical respect Peterson argues it depends on.
Peterson reads the Cain and Abel story — one paragraph long — as entirely about resentment. Cain's sacrifices are rejected. You make sacrifices to improve your future on the basis of faith that if you conduct yourself a certain way fate is likely to smile upon you, because why else make the sacrifices. Sometimes the reward is not forthcoming, and he asks whether that will make you bitter: in all probability yes, and the question is how bitter — bitter enough to destroy the ideal.
→ Fratricidal murder with a genocidal twist compressed into a paragraph, which Peterson uses as the maximal case of resentment left undiagnosed.
At sixteen Peterson sat on the board of governors of his local college, surrounded by conservative local businessmen — mostly immigrants, because northern Alberta was only fifty years old — while simultaneously working for the socialist NDP. Interacting one-on-one, he respected the businessmen because they had made something of themselves. Talking to the activists he thought instead that they were resentful as hell, knew nothing, had never done anything, and were noisy and self-righteous.
→ Cognitive dissonance that eventually moved him off his explicit ideology, and a lasting diagnostic for resentment that has been laundered into moral language.
Common mistakes
Assuming the resentment is always someone else's fault
The two-way diagnostic collapses into a grievance generator if you never seriously test the grow-up branch. Peterson's observation of the activists — resentful as hell, noisy and self-righteous — is what that looks like at scale.
Harbouring it because the conversation would be messy
Peterson admits he has a horrible aversion to conflict and that people do not like these conversations. But he has learned that some things, if you do not address them, just get worse — the avoided conversation buys a worse fight later.
Treating resentment as free
Because the body hyper-prepares for conflict, resentment burns real psychophysiological resources and hurts you physically. Carrying it for years for unlived life does not preserve the peace; it corrupts you.
Not noticing it at all
Peterson's subtlest failure mode: because you want to think you are better than you are, an insult that should upset you gets filtered out before it reaches awareness. You cannot consult a resentment you have refused to feel.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone in a long-running relationship, marriage or job where the same irritation keeps recurring and has never been named out loud.
Not ideal for
Acute crisis situations where the resentment is a rational response to obvious abuse and the answer is exit rather than diagnosis.
From the transcript
“consult your resentment it is revelatory”
“resentment tells you one of two things one is that you're that someone's treading on your territory and something needs to be done about it…”
“you can you can harbor resentment for for unlived life for for a very very long period of time and all it does is corrupt…”
“it's very much useful to to aim at a resentment free existence and that means i suppose that you're taking up enough space”
From the episode
#502: Jordan Peterson on Rules for Life, Psychedelics, The Bible, and Much More