Resentment Is Information
What the anger underneath your functioning is actually trying to say-and it's not what you think.
Listen, I am a huge believer, having witnessed many women in ceremony, that the body holds onto information in ways we are still way behind in understanding scientifically.
P.S This is a podcast episode and it’s found here and in the links at the end. Available on wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Let’s think about the women whom I have chatted to and held through somatic practices for hours, and then suddenly, when we work with the fascia in the vagina, the information is there without us needing to be in our heads. We know exactly what we need- the body holds the receipts.
Often, resentment exists in the walls of the vagina-we are functioning but quietly angry and resentful of certain aspects of our lives. And the list of what we may be resenting is endless.
I’m going to explore an archetype with you to see if it lands.
Meet Claire.
Claire is forty-three. She has a good life. She knows she has a good life. Her husband reminds her. Her mother, when she calls, reminds her too. You have a good life, Claire.
She works four days a week, and she negotiated that; she’s proud of that. Her Monday off is often spent a little like this:phoning the wifi company- again, booking the MOT, managing the school admin, tracking which child needs new plimsolls. Yada yada. You get the vibe.
In case that’s not clear, Claire holds the invisible architecture of the entire family.
Her husband is a good man. He helps when asked. He loves her. He is thankful and says so.
And Claire loves him.
And Claire is quietly, persistently, almost imperceptibly furious.
But no, she doesn’t call it fury. She calls it tired. She calls it fine.
I’m FINE.
But in the car by herself, sometimes at the end of a day where she did everything and was thanked for nothing, something moves through her that she doesn’t name. Because naming it would mean something. And Claire doesn’t have time for what it would mean.
Here is the trap women walk into.
We have taught women that resentment is a character flaw. Evidence of ingratitude. Something to process, manage, and therapy your way through.
And women do. In 2026, they go to therapy. They read the books. They understand the invisible load intellectually. They can name it perfectly. We can label and name and therapize the shit out of our lives. And women are bored with being told about the next quick fix. Truthfully, that’s not what we need anymore. No fixes. We don’t need anything else to do. Look at Claire’s list. She’s at peak exhaustion.
Claire comes home and still does everything. And still feels the tension. But nowadays she just feels ashamed of the resentment she won’t name instead of still feeling that resentment- why? Because she’s done the work, so what does it say about her that her anger is still present?
This is the trap.
Claire’s mother calls and reminds her that she has a good life. Not a great one. A good one. What Claire’s mother is really saying is: if you admit the resentment, I’ll have to admit mine. And I can’t do that.
The resentment passes down. Unnamed. Held. Modelled.
What is resentment? Because it isn’t bitterness. It is not ingratitude. It is your system saying: something here has not been right for a long time. Resentment builds from anger, frustration, and a lack of feeling mothered and held.
It is the body’s most honest response to a sustained mismatch between what you give and what you receive.
The problem is not that women feel resentment. The problem is that we build entire lives on top of it without ever asking what it’s trying to say.
We literally sit on it. In the pelvis.
It’s held in the jaw and in the shoulders that never drop down.
What does your body do when you don’t say the thing that needs to be said aloud?
Claire (remember this is an avatar) came to work with me because she wanted a practical fix for a leaking pelvic floor. Pragmatic, efficient, she’d done some therapy, she just wanted the slightly more woo version of a physio. She could financially make it work, so why not? She didn’t want to be pissing herself at sixty, and this seemed a great path to sort her “weak” pelvic floor.
She did not come to this space to talk about resentment.
This work is a container for what needs to be spoken to from the body. The body keeps the information whether we want to know it or not.
We can ignore it, and it will manifest as it needs through a leaking pelvic floor, tight shoulders, a clenched jaw, or something else.
When Claire and I began working with the fascia, with breath, with the walls of the vagina, the resentment was right there. It had always been right there.
Claire was livid in our sessions. Directed at me at times. How dare you let this rise when I’m paying you to fix my pelvic floor?
But she knew. She’d always known.
Claire’s pelvis wasn’t broken. It was doing exactly what Claire had been doing for years. Gripping. Managing. Holding. Not letting go.
And this, IMO is where the real work begins
What have you been abandoning in yourself in order to keep everything else functioning?
This is not about the husband and what he did or didn’t do. It’s not about what needs to change in the schedule.
What it’s about is what Claire has been leaving behind of herself.
What all your usual self-help places ignore is the pelvis. They ignore the pelvis. They ignore naming what you actually need every.single.day. Nobody can do for you, and no one can tell you what you need.
Her husband loves Claire and wants to understand. But she can’t express it yet, not even to herself. Her mother adores her and hasn’t seen how she passed on the pattern she herself was never free of. The mother still rings and reminds Claire she has a good life, which, underneath it, is her own unspoken longing to have been told the same.
If Claire admitted her resentment, her mother could let go of holding Claire and turn to her own needs- her mother feels responsible for Claire’s resentment because she modelled ignoring her needs when Claire was a little girl.
This is not about blame. It’s about what gets inherited when resentment has nowhere honest to land.
Where can this resentment actually go? Nowhere- you don’t therapise and sleep off resentment- resentment lands, embeds and increases until it’s spoken to.
Over time, Claire softened. Not because anything dramatically changed. Because she was heard in it. Held in it. And her pelvic floor - the one she came to fix - well, that softened too. She no longer has a little bit of wee that comes out on the regular. The healing of the pelvic floor was a by-product.
I’m wondering what could change for you if you stopped managing your resentment and got curious about what it’s pointing to?
Resentment lands in the pelvis that braces. In the woman who functions beautifully.
This is exactly why the pelvic floor work I do is not about Kegel exercises. It is about asking the body what the mind has been too busy to name.
If you recognise Claire- if you feel your life should work and feels off- that’s where this work begins. The journey to discovering your needs through the fascia in your vagina is linked below.
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