Bitterness at its Core

I was a bitter person.

I was a bitter person for a long time, convinced that I had missed many opportunities, in large part because of what other people had done to me.

If my mother had not abused me, if my father had raised me right, blahb, blah, blah. . .

On and on it goes in this world, and many professionals are more than happy to coddle people's sense of bitterness and entitlement.

What is bitterness, really, at its core?

It's the sense that we worked so hard for something, only to find that we do not get what we are working for. We feel bitter also when we see that so many people seem to have it so god, and yet we do not. Bitterness also stems from the root of entitlement, that the world owes us, that people around us owe us everything, that we have suffered, and we never deserved to suffer.

The most bitter people, I have found, are victims aggrieved, who have no direct record of wrong. The young Northern California girl Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped for eighteen years, repeatedly raped and abused by her captor, forced to bear two children, living in hidden captivity in Northern California.

She was rescued in 2009, and within one year, she was reunited with her mother, who had never given up looking for her. She received a twenty-five million dollar indemnity from the state of California, she has two beautiful girls (even if their father was virulent child molestor), and she even became a celebrity whose story has helped many to recover or to break away from abuse.

Yet Jaycee's mother remains bitter to this day, still hurt about all the years that she lost with her daughter, all the pain that she went through because her daughter was taken from her, and there was nothing that she could do on her own to get her back.

Amazing but true, and very tragic indeed -- the one who was kidnapped and abused has no bitterness at all, yet the mother has not ceased to be bitter.

What's going on, then? Bitterness, cannot be about being harmed, it cannot be about someone harming us, doing bad things to us. Bitterness cannot be about the sins which others have perpetrated aganist us.

Based on this example, I submit that bitterness has everything to do with all of our own efforts coming to naught, that for all of our striving, we get nothing for our efforts.

What then can we do about this?