Resentment: The Weight We Carry in Recovery

Opening Ground Truth

I spent two years resenting my ex-husband for filing for divorce while I was at my worst. The resentment showed up in small ways—the tightness in my chest when I saw his name on my phone, the careful mental list I kept of everything he’d done wrong, the way I’d rehearse conversations we’d never have where I finally told him exactly what I thought.
It wasn’t until my sponsor asked me a single question—“What are you getting out of holding onto this?”—that I realized the resentment was doing something for me. It was keeping me from looking at my part.

The Resentments We Inherit and Create

Resentment in recovery looks different when you’re a mother. The stakes feel higher because everything you do affects your kids, and everything that affects your kids becomes material for guilt and anger. In early sobriety, I discovered I was carrying resentments I didn’t even know I had. Some I’d inherited—the cultural weight of being the daughter who was supposed to have it all together, the expectations that women carry about family and sacrifice and strength. Some I’d created through my drinking—the damage I’d done to my daughters during active addiction, the trust I’d broken, the memories I couldn’t erase.

The program calls resentment the number one offender, and in my experience, that assessment holds. We’re uniquely positioned to collect resentments because motherhood itself involves so much sacrifice, so many unmet needs, so much invisible labor. Add addiction and recovery to that mix, and the resentments multiply. I resented my ex for leaving when I needed support. I resented my mother for enabling me while calling it help. I resented the women at meetings who had partners and family money and didn’t understand what it meant to choose between therapy and groceries. I resented my older daughter for remembering too much and my younger daughter for the anxiety I’d caused her.

When I first worked through my fourth step resentment inventory with my sponsor, I filled pages. Person after person, situation after situation, old wounds I thought I’d forgotten. The exercise felt petty at first—who keeps track of this stuff? But the process of writing it down revealed patterns I hadn’t seen while everything was still swirling in my head. Most of my resentments centered on feeling judged, misunderstood, or abandoned. Most of them involved people who’d seen me at my worst. Most of them were rooted in shame I hadn’t acknowledged yet.

What Resentment Protects Us From

My sponsor helped me understand that resentment often serves as armor. When I held onto anger at my ex-husband, I didn’t have to sit with the grief of knowing I’d destroyed my marriage through my drinking. When I stayed resentful toward my brother for the look on his face in the ambulance that night, I didn’t have to feel the full weight of what I’d put him through. When I nursed resentments toward other mothers who seemed to have their lives together, I didn’t have to deal with my own feelings of inadequacy.

The inventory process asks us to look at three things: who we resent, what they did, and how it affected us. That third part—how it affected us—reveals what the resentment is protecting. When I wrote that my brother’s presence in the ambulance affected my sense of pride and my family relationships, I was really saying it forced me to see myself through his eyes. The resentment kept me focused on how unfair it was that he saw me like that instead of dealing with the reality that I’d put myself in that position.

The inventory also asks us to examine our part. This is where mothers in recovery often struggle the most. We’re so used to being told everything is our fault—bad mother, selfish mother, absent mother—that looking at our part can feel like piling on. But there’s a difference between taking responsibility for our actions and accepting blame for everything that’s ever gone wrong. My part in resenting my ex wasn’t that I caused the divorce. My part was expecting him to stay through something I wasn’t willing to get help for, and then using his departure as evidence that I was unlovable rather than dealing with my disease.

The Cultural Layer of Resentment

Growing up Mexican-American added another dimension to my resentments. There were cultural expectations about how women should be—strong but not too demanding, devoted to family, willing to sacrifice without complaint. When my drinking got bad, the shame in our extended family was palpable.

People talked.

I knew they talked because my mother would tell me, trying to motivate me to get better by letting me know what people were saying. The resentment I carried toward that gossip was layered with cultural shame—I wasn’t just a woman struggling with addiction, I was a woman who’d failed to live up to what we’re supposed to be.

The resentments around motherhood had cultural weight too. Good mothers sacrifice. Good mothers put their children first. Good mothers don’t pass out on the couch at four in the afternoon while their six-year-old calls 911. The gap between who I was supposed to be and who I’d become during active addiction created resentments in all directions. I resented my mother for her expectations. I resented the church ladies who asked about me with that particular tone of concern that was really judgment. I resented my ex-husband’s family for never accepting me fully, and then for being right about me when I proved every stereotype they’d held.

In recovery, I’ve had to separate cultural values worth keeping from cultural shame that serves no one. The value of family loyalty matters to me. The expectation that I’ll never talk about problems or ask for help doesn’t serve my sobriety. Working through resentments meant examining which cultural messages I’d internalized and whether they were helping or hurting my recovery. Some I’ve kept. Some I’ve released. The process required permission from myself to define my own version of being a woman in recovery, which felt like betrayal at first and like freedom eventually.

Resentment and Single Motherhood

The resentments specific to single motherhood in recovery are real and need naming. I resented having my kids every other week instead of every day. I resented my ex-husband for being able to move on, remarry, create a stable home with money I didn’t have. I resented the asymmetry of our coparenting—him in a stable situation with a good job and a new wife, me in a three-bedroom apartment working freelance and trying to build a writing career that might someday pay reliably. I resented that my sobriety anniversary means something profound to me but to him it’s just the date I stopped making his life difficult.

These resentments were particularly dangerous because they felt completely justified. He does have more money. The custody arrangement did come about because of my drinking. I am rebuilding from nothing while he maintained stability. The facts supported my anger, which made it easy to indulge. What my sponsor helped me see was that justified resentments are still resentments. They still drain my peace. They still keep me focused on what I don’t have instead of what I’m building. The work wasn’t about deciding my ex-husband was right or that my anger was unfounded. The work was about releasing anger that was poisoning my own life while leaving his untouched.

Processing these resentments meant grieving. When I finally let go of my anger at my ex-husband, I had to feel the sadness underneath—the loss of the marriage I’d wanted, the family structure I’d imagined, the version of motherhood where I’d be there every day instead of every other week. The resentment had been keeping that grief at bay. Once I released it, the grief moved through and eventually lifted. What remained was acceptance—not approval of how things are, but acknowledgment that this is my reality and I can build a life within it.

The Daily Work of Resentment Release

Eight years in, I still collect resentments if I’m not paying attention. The difference now is awareness and speed. I can feel them forming—that familiar tightness when my older daughter makes a comment about how things are easier at her dad’s house, the defensiveness when my mother offers unsolicited parenting advice, the flash of anger when I see social media posts from mothers who make recovery look effortless and aesthetic. I have tools now for addressing these before they calcify.

When I notice a resentment building, I write it down. The physical act of putting it on paper externalizes it, gets it out of the mental loop where it gains power through repetition. I use the format from the fourth step even for small, daily resentments: who, what they did, how it affected me. This creates clarity. “I resent my daughter” becomes “I resent my daughter for saying Dad’s house is nicer, which affected my pride and sense of being a good enough mother, threatening my self-esteem and emotional security.” The specificity reveals what’s actually happening—I’m taking her comment personally, I’m making it mean something about my worth, I’m forgetting that she’s fourteen and teenagers say things.

Then I look at my part, which usually involves unrealistic expectations or taking something personally that wasn’t about me. I talk it through with my sponsor until I can release it. Sometimes release happens quickly. Sometimes it takes weeks of returning to the same issue, peeling back layers until I reach the core. The goal isn’t to never feel resentful. The goal is to process resentments before they become permanent residents in my mind, shaping how I see myself and others.

What We Model for Our Children

One reason resentment work matters so much for mothers in recovery is what we’re modeling for our kids. My daughters watched me drink. They watched me pass out. They lived through the chaos of my active addiction and the early fragility of my sobriety. Now they’re watching me build a life in recovery. What I show them about processing anger, setting boundaries, and releasing resentments will shape how they handle their own emotional lives.

I want them to see that you can be angry about something and also work through it. That you can acknowledge hurt without camping out in it. That people will disappoint you and you can survive that disappointment without becoming bitter. When my older daughter gets angry with me—and she does, teenagers are supposed to—I try to let her see me working through my own emotional response. I don’t want her to learn that mothers don’t feel anger. I want her to learn that we feel it, we name it, we deal with it, and we move forward.

This modeling extends to how I talk about their father. I could spend every custody exchange radiating resentment. I could make subtle comments, roll my eyes, create an environment where they feel they have to choose sides. Instead, I work on releasing my resentments toward their father so that what my daughters see is a mother who can coexist peacefully with their dad despite a painful past. They need that more than they need me to be right about everything he did wrong.

The Stakes for Recovery

The program’s assertion that resentment is the number one offender isn’t theoretical for mothers in recovery. Resentments create the emotional conditions—self-pity, righteous anger, feeling uniquely wronged—that once made drinking seem reasonable. In early recovery, I had to avoid situations and people that triggered overwhelming resentment because I didn’t yet have the tools to process those feelings without wanting to escape them. Longer term, I’ve developed the ability to sit with difficult emotions, examine them, and release them without needing to numb them.

I’ve watched women relapse over resentments they’d carried for years. A mother who couldn’t forgive her own mother for enabling her. A woman who stayed furious at her ex for getting custody. Someone who held onto anger at the judge who mandated treatment. The resentments didn’t directly cause the relapse, but they created an internal environment where sobriety felt like suffering and drinking started to look like relief. Addressing resentments isn’t about being a better person or achieving some spiritual ideal. It’s about removing the emotional kindling that makes relapse possible.

For me, protecting my sobriety means protecting my peace. Resentments destroy peace. They keep me in the past, focused on grievances I can’t change, maintaining relationships with people through anger instead of connection or healthy distance. The work of identifying and releasing resentments is how I maintain the foundation that makes everything else possible—my relationship with my daughters, my writing, my ability to sponsor other women, my capacity to show up for my life even when it’s hard.

The Practice of Letting Go

Recovery has taught me that I can hold people accountable and still release resentment toward them. I can acknowledge that someone harmed me without needing to carry anger about it forever. I can set boundaries with people who aren’t safe without resenting them for being who they are. These distinctions matter because they allow me to protect myself without poisoning myself.

Letting go doesn’t mean forgetting. I remember what happened. I remember the 911 call, the divorce, the extended family gossip, the moments when I needed support and didn’t receive it. What I’ve released is the ongoing mental rehearsal of those events, the careful maintenance of my case against others, the comfort of knowing I’m right and they’re wrong. Those things cost more than they were worth.

The quality of my sobriety depends on this practice. I protect my peace fiercely because I know what it cost me to find it and what I’d lose if I gave it up. Resentment is seductive because it feels powerful—righteous anger, justified fury, the satisfaction of being wronged. What it actually does is make me small, bitter, and separate from the peace I’ve worked for. Eight years in, I choose peace over being right. Not because I’m enlightened, but because I’ve learned through painful experience what matters most.

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The work of processing resentment is ongoing, especially for mothers navigating recovery, single parenthood, and cultural expectations. If this resonated with your experience, subscribe for more honest writing about the real challenges of building a sober life. I share what I’m learning from eight years of recovery, one imperfect day at a time, writing for women who need to know they’re not alone in this work.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​