Resentment, Desire and Somatic Healing

How unexpressed anger and fear mute our authentic desire.

We often talk about lack of desire like it is a mental problem. We say get a vision board, list your goals, find your voice. Well, it is to a small degree, but it’s more complex than that. 

For most people this is not the problem, they can do all of these.  The issue is their body doesn’t feel safe to ask for what they want.  This is a somatic issue.

For decades many people suffer their boundaries being trod on, told that to want is selfish, keep people happy, ‘keep the peace’.  We swallow our anger and become afraid to speak out loud what we are afraid of.  For some of us our brain develops a crazy logic that if we speak our fears, they will come true.  Over time the body adapts and it physically creates an armour so we cannot get hurt.  It creates an armour around the heart to protect it.

If you feel resentful of others for what they want and receive or achieve or if you feel completely disconnected from your own desire, the last thing you actually need is another strategy session.  You need to understand what your body has been holding onto to keep you safe.

Digital art Kellie Stirling - Woman wistfully looking out the window, her armour is protecting her heart and it is also keeping her from reaching out for exactly what she wants.

Why does the heart armour up?

Well it does this to protect our heart physically but also it does it to protect us emotionally, from our heart being broken.

When you were younger asking for what you want may have brought with it rejection, conflict or shame.  Saying ‘no’ might have come with anger, withdrawal or punishment.  Armouring of the heart may feel like a tight chest, clenched jaw, tight throat, tense shoulders and shallow breathing.  Sometimes people feel it as anxiety because there is so much repressed resentment, fear and anger.

One of my old teachers used to say resentment is unexpressed desire.  When your heart is armoured up because you have stopped expressing your desires they don’t go away.  The bury themselves deep in your unconscious.  When that buried desire meets someone who lives freely and is doing what we want, it ferments and bubbles up as resentment.  Clients often tell me with resentment they feel both frustrated and angry. 

It is easy to label resentment in people as bitter, selfish and bad, but actually it is a beacon of light.  Because what it is telling you about are the hidden wishes and desires that you buried a long time ago that someone else is now receiving.

• When you feel resentment for a friend who is taking time out for themselves, your body is saying to you I want a rest too.

• When  you resent a colleague who asked for a pay raise and they receive it, your body is saying to you, I want my worth to be seen also.

• When you experience a flash of bitterness for someone who is simply enjoying themselves your body is saying, why do I have to keep holding it all together.

Resentment and jealousy give you a very clear map of what it is you desire.

To open your heart and find your own voice you cannot skip over anger.  Many women especially were taught that anger is dangerous, destructive and unrefined.  They smother it over with guilt, anxiety and passive accommodation of others needs.

Anger, somatically, is very important for us body, mind and soul because it expresses our boundaries and it is the energy of self-advocacy.  It is the very clean intelligence spoken from the body that say ‘this is where I end and you begin” and  “This is what is okay and not okay for me’.

When you cannot express a clear no your body doesn’t know how to say a clear yes.  If your body doesn’t trust you to express your boundary, to speak the no, it will never feel safe enough to give you the green light to step into the open hearted, vulnerable expression of what you desire.

Often we are also working with shame.  Most people feel immense shame when they experience envy toward a friend, their own children or a colleague. Like I said at the start, this is complex.

The work to do is being able to feel the sensations in your body of the things mentioned here.  The tight jaw and shoulders, acknowledge the protection, say to your body ‘thankyou for keeping me safe’.  When I work with clients I always work on boundaries and desire at the same time through different exercises.  They are the opposite sides of a coin.  Then we start to develop greater capacity in your body for anger and fear, so you have more space to feel these very normal humour emotions.

We begin to slowly de-armour our heart, working somatically with all the points of tension in the body.  When we do this we open the door to deep, vulnerable connections with each other.  It is the pathway to greater intimacy with others and a deeper knowing connection with ourselves.

Finding our inner fire

How do we hold our power in service of what matters most?

A woman sits across from me and tells me she never gets angry and she thinks she might have a problem with boundaries. She says it like a diagnosis, almost like an apology. She wants to learn how to say no. She wants scripts, maybe. A formula. But what she's actually telling me, underneath the words, is that she has lost access to a part of herself.

I see this constantly in my practice. Women, often deeply competent, articulate, successful women, who can navigate almost anything except the felt sense of their own no. When we start to work somatically rather than cognitively, something interesting happens: the no doesn't arrive alone. It brings the yes with it.

This is not a skills problem, it is a capacity problem.

We tend to talk about boundaries as if they're a technique. Say this sentence. Hold this line. Don't over-explain. But boundaries aren't really built from the outside in. They're an expression of something underneath  your capacity to feel your own healthy aggression.

I don't mean aggression as violence or hostility. I mean it in the older, more honest sense: the felt charge of “I exist, I take up space, I will push back if I need to”. It's the energetic foundation beneath every no that actually lands not from anxiety, not from over-explanation, but from a settled, embodied place.

Most of the women I work with didn't lose this capacity through some dramatic event. They lost it gradually, often in childhood, sometimes through culture more than through any single relationship.  They learned early in their life that their fire made other people uncomfortable, so it got smaller, quieter, eventually unconscious.

What is surprising to most people is that they find that when we rebuild that capacity, what comes back isn't just the ability to say no. It's the ability to feel everything more fully, including joy and pleasure.  They start to get better at expressing what they desire because with the feeling of safety and what a NO feels like, also comes the kind of full-bodied yes that doesn't come with a flicker of guilt attached to it. The same nervous system gate that was clamped down on anger was clamped down on delight. You can't selectively numb. When you reclaim capacity for one exalted state, you tend to reclaim it for all of them.

So I know you are probably thinking right now, what does healthy aggression actually look like?

This is the part people misunderstand most. They hear "healthy aggression" and picture confrontation; raised voices, conflict, some kind of fire-breathing transformation.

Often it looks like almost nothing at all.

A woman with real capacity for her No can say "no thanks" and feel completely unbothered by it. No story. No spiral. No rehearsing the conversation for three days afterward. The protective response did its job, quietly, and then it was finished. That ease, that lack of charge, is the proof of capacity, not the absence of it.

Drama only enters when the no didn't get to happen early enough, or often enough, for the system to trust that it would be heard. The fire isn't supposed to need to roar. It only roars when it's been ignored.

Culturally we view anger in women as shameful. Why?

I find myth genuinely useful here, not as decoration but as a way of making meaning out of something the body already knows. Lilith is one of the oldest stories we have of a woman exiled not for wrongdoing, but for refusal.  Lilith was the woman who refuses to extinguish her fire to make others comfortable.  She said I will not shrink myself to belong.

If you haven’t heard of Lillith, she was an interesting  woman.  According to early creation myths, Lilith was the first woman created from the exact same soil as Adam. She refused to be subordinate or lie beneath him because she knew they were spiritual equals. As an archetype she asks you to examine where in your life you are settling for less than true equality.

That's the pattern so many women carry quietly: the sense that their fire, their refusal, their full-throated aggression was never met with curiosity. It was met with the message that maybe we are too much. So our nervous system does what any intelligent nervous system does under threat it adapts. We got smaller and found ways to be palatable instead of present.

Reclaiming Lilith isn't about becoming dangerous. It's about no longer mistaking your own aliveness for a threat. It's recognising that the parts of you that got exiled your appetite, your refusal, your fire were never the problem. They were simply too much for the room you were in at the time.  Lilith represents the wild, untamed truth of your soul that refuses to be tamed, managed, or approved of by others

Many women find that Lillith arrives for them in perimenopause.  I want to talk about this because I think it explains so much of what shows up in midlife that gets pathologised instead of understood.

In perimenopause and menopause, something arrives that I think of as the muse, the essential self, the part that was exiled long ago and has been waiting, patiently, for the conditions to change. In perimenopause, the hormonal conditions do change. Hormonally, developmentally, something shifts and the lid that's been sitting on decades of suppressed fire starts to lift, often whether a woman is ready for it or not.

If there's no capacity built underneath that shift, it doesn't arrive as clarity. It arrives as leakage. Rage that seems disproportionate to its trigger. Reactivity that surprises even the woman feeling it. This isn't pathology, and it isn't really about whoever happens to be standing nearby when it surfaces. It's decades of unspoken no finally getting loud enough to be heard, because the quiet no, when we felt safe, was never honoured in the first place.

This is the real difference between healthy aggression and what we usually call rage. Healthy aggression is directed, contained, proportionate, it knows what it's responding to. Rage without capacity is undirected. It escapes containment because the container was never built. The fire was always there. It just never had enough space on the inside of us to hold it.

Women who've done some of this capacity work on connecting with healthy aggression before the hormonal shift tend to meet their muse as something like a homecoming. Women who haven't can get ambushed by her, by themselves, in a way that can feel disorienting and even frightening.

I want to come back to where this started, because I think it's the part that matters most. The more capacity I've built for my own deep no, the more grounded I feel. Not more guarded. Not more isolated. More grounded, more able to actually be present for my life, because I'm not spending energy holding a lid on something that wants to move.

This is the real promise of healthy aggression. It isn't about becoming harder, or more combative, or less relational. It's about widening your capacity for the whole range of being alive, your no, your yes, your fire, your joy. Capacity for life, really, in the broadest sense.

The fire was never meant to burn anything down. It was only ever meant to keep you warm enough to stay present to your own life, all of it, not just the parts that were easy to feel.  I think this is the bigger change we learn to work with in midlife. How do we tend to our inner fire and keep the embers burning.  This makes me think of Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth, whose sole role was to keep the hearth burning.  

What I love about Hestia is that she wasn't the goddess of achievement, seduction, battle, or even transformation, she was the keeper of the sacred flame.  The fire that allowed everything else to happen.  In Greek mythology, she stayed at the centre. While the other gods and goddesses were caught up in dramas, quests, rivalries, romances, and wars, Hestia tended the hearth.  There is something profoundly midlife about that.  It is not about withdrawal from life but a movement toward our essence.  The developmental challenge of midlife is coming back to the truth of who we are.

We start to ask ourselves what truly matters now? What is worth investing my energy in?  What keeps my inner flame alive?  From a nervous system perspective, this is such a different way from how our culture frames and portrays vitality.  In popular culture, it is portrayed as worship of the bonfire.  Constant activity, productivity and performance, the endless quest for wellness and self improvement.  Hestia reminds us that endurance comes from a different kind of fire.  The hearth fire is steady, reliable, warm and sustainable.

So Lillith energy invites us to find our fire and build capacity for it and Hestia energy invites us to know how to hold is wisely. To ask ourselves, how do I become a trustworthy keeper of my own inner fire?