Bitterness - development, symptoms and overcoming

Bitterness- When people are not happy anymore
A bitter man is an unhappy person. Anyone who is embittered has so hurt negative events in his life that he sees himself as a helpless victim and is unable to cope with the event. The sufferers interpret their current state as a consequence of this happening, feel it unfair and react extremely emotional when it comes to this trigger. Often it is not just a cut, but a process in which many minor and major injuries add up.

contents

• Cynicism, resignation and aggressiveness
• Offense and bitterness
• Biologically conditioned
• A "normal" feeling
• Revenge is sweet?
• Offenses are commonplace
• Process grievances
• Who is at risk?
• Cosmopolitanism as medicine
• Bitterness as a mental illness
• No forgiveness
• Ticking time bombs
• No conscious decision
• Features of bitterness
• Understand
• At the heart of life
• How to help?
• Social consequences
• Deeper and deeper into the abyss
• The posttraumatic bitterness disorder
• "Nörgelossis" - a psychiatric syndrome?
• Personal and social crisis
• Injury to others
• Danger to yourself and others
• therapy
• Empathy and tolerance
• Narcissistic bitterness
• change of perspective
• Break stereotypes
• Relativize claims

Cynicism, resignation and aggressiveness

For a clinically embittered person, the negative experience challenges his past life's work. He becomes cynical, his condition is both resigned and aggressive. Although he makes concrete guilty parties to his situation and curses against them, he also lacks the drive to do something himself. He varies between blame and self-blame. In addition, there are phobias, paranoia, often the victims get caught in the maelstrom of conspiratorial fantasies. Many clinically bitterness patients develop severe depression, which, however, discharges to the outside.

Bitter people blame others for their suffering. (Image: fotopro / fotolia.com)

Offense and bitterness

Every person experiences injuries in his life, big and small. The narcissistic hurt is even elemental to the development of an individual personality. This means that the child is "hurt" because the world looks different than his wishes. A healthy development proceeds in such a way that man now adapts his wishes to external reality and thus finds his place in the real external world, which exists completely independently of his psychic inner world.

A person who can not do this can develop a narcissistic disorder in which he designs fantasies about himself out of his injured childhood self and designs new patterns of his supposed grandiosity. Inwardly, in fact, he feels empty and helpless and represses this by advocating fictions about himself more and more aggressively.

Biologically conditioned

Everyday insults are part of our evolutionary heritage. As social beings, we need the recognition of others for what we do and also for the values ​​and world designs that we store in our memory as a life practice. When we are hurt, it means we are hurt by our self-esteem, our feelings, our values ​​or our identity. These are some of the most powerful affects in human cultures: murder from unrequited love; Wars to atone for a "shame"; Blood revenge over generations, the cause of which has been an insult, all have in common that they are based on an offense.

A "normal" feeling

Bitterness is a reaction to a difficult situation, such as flight or attack. A child can not defend itself if it is to do something the mother demands. So it does, but pouts. It now fantasizes about repaying the mother: "If I'm dead, then she knows what she's done." Pathological bitterness occurs when this behavior becomes chronic.

Revenge is sweet?

Chronically embittered will not benefit if they put their revenge fantasies into action. The experience does not go undone, and the person concerned does not gain any perspective for his life. On the contrary, feelings of guilt and shame now join the traumatic trauma.

Offenses are commonplace

There are many reasons for being offended: the woman of my heart favors my best friend; I am quit even though I have engaged in the job; less gifted fellow students make a career while I fall by the wayside; I invite a friend to dinner, stand in the kitchen all day, and he does not come. It hurts when people lie to me, whom I trust, just as when somebody writes the renovated apartment on the flags, even though he played World of Warcraft while I laid the tiles.

Insult can also come from intercultural misunderstandings and, worse, from ignorance.

Process grievances

Many people can handle everyday grievances. There are many ways to do this: we can discuss the situation openly with others, show that she has hurt us. Or we "sit it out": The German teacher, who makes my contributions in the classroom notoriously ridiculous, will not accompany me for a lifetime, in the place of ex-boyfriend, who has let us sit, comes a new partner.

If we feel hurt by a person, it can be very helpful to talk about it openly. (Image: Antonioguillem / fotolia.com)

Some people have a "thick coat". They are not upset by deliberate insults and defamation, but instead focus on their projects. This path is often successful.

In others, positive experiences mask the insults. When "friends" talk bad about them behind their backs, the other friends they can rely on will be able to make up for it. The hurtful sayings of one teacher are compensated for by the fair behavior of another.

But sometimes people can not deal with insults, the hurtful events burn into their psyche - they embitter. Now they are in jail. The offending experience persists, those affected constantly revolve around it. They blame others, the spouse, the boss, the friends. They suffer and find no way out of suffering.

Who is at risk?

Bitterness arises when our "basic beliefs" are shaken. So the stiffer the corset of values ​​and norms and the more we focus our lives on it, the deeper the injury will be if it does not take effect. Narrow-minded people with a limited framework in which to organize their work and private lives are at high risk of bitterness when this social cage breaks down.

Typical mission statements are "Achievement will be rewarded", "Marital fidelity to the death", "Everyone gets what they deserve", "who works hard, comes to success", "There is a compensatory justice in life".

The loyal employee, who lives only for his one company, is left in nothing if he is terminated after 30 years, without blaming him. The faithful FDJ secretary was left in the black in 1990 when "his GDR" suddenly ceased to exist. The prematurely married woman, who gave up her own career for marriage and children, has no options if the spouse leaves her.

Cosmopolitanism as medicine

A rigid framework of values ​​and standards massively increases the risk of bitterness. Critical thinking, cosmopolitanism and intercultural experiences, however, are good "remedies" to prevent this disorder. If you have a plan B in your head, putting your life on several pillars, you will be less in danger of embittering than someone who makes one-sided ideas of how "the world should be" the basis of his life.

Bitterness as a mental illness

Bitter people are commonly considered socially incompatible. They are a burden to others because they do not give their fellow human beings any positive input. They are self-pitying and passive-aggressive. They nag without engaging in constructive solutions to their problem. Put simply, they tear others mentally down.

Those affected pull others down with their self-pity, constant nagging and subliminal aggressiveness. (Image: Kim Schneider / fotolia.com)

It is scarcely known, however, that bitterness can develop into serious mental illnesses. Bitterness is more psychologically destructive than a pure depression or anxiety disorder.

No forgiveness

An embittered person can not forgive others who hurt him real or supposedly. This is also a huge problem for him, because forgiveness also means closing wounds. However, as the victim blames other people for his suffering, he makes himself a passive victim, and the resulting inability to act extends to areas of life that have nothing to do with the original insult. The pathologically embittered eventually makes his own life dependent on the humiliation suffered and does nothing to improve his own life.

Ticking time bombs

Affected people can not control the onset of their emotions. They feel their backs to the wall and emotional outbursts are the helpless attempt to regain control. Despite mingles with fainting, anger with resignation, pharyngeal fantasy with autoaggression. In the end, murder or suicide can stand. Every third patient with a traumatic trauma develops concrete fantasies to punish the "bad guys".

The victims also isolate themselves socially. They live in a psychic hell.

No conscious decision

The bitterness leads deeper and deeper into a wrong path. 24 hours a day, 365 days a year can be pondering who was malicious and when to me, without me in the least advance - on the contrary. Instead of healing the wounds of the psyche, I always sprinkle salt into it.

People who suffer from deep bitterness no longer understand that reconciliation is as much a deliberate process as having "open bills." It would already be the first step in healing to realize that it is a conscious decision - no matter how it turns out.

Also to become clear about which person has hurt me why, how and when, without forgiving him, can already lead to bitterness. To reserve one's revenge and to rebuild one's life in the here and now is already a constructive process.

Features of bitterness

Bitterness proves to be a fictional punishment of the aggressor through acts of self-destruction: "I kill myself, maybe you will realize what you have done". This self-destruction also runs slowly through damage in one's own life to show it to "those".

Typical of disorders that develop as a result of bitterness are self-doubt, lack of appetite, listlessness and sleep problems. There is also a deep sense of powerlessness.

The bitterness must compulsively repeat the triggering event in the mind and we must assume a serious mental disorder if they can not get out of this cage without professional help. Whether they like it or not, the memory is always in the mind of those affected. They bury themselves in their misery and cement a defiance.

Understand

Consciously or unconsciously, they refuse to understand the other side. Understanding does not necessarily mean accepting or making friends, it only means a change of perspective in order to understand from the point of view of others what it has done.

Bitter people refuse to look at the situation from a different perspective, but remain in their frustration. (Image: MATT in Photo / fotolia.com)

It does not have to be about freely telling others about guilt. But when I understand the motives of the "bad guys", I can separate my own life from the traumatizing events and learn from it for the future.

The bitterness, however, first accuses others and secondly self-reproaches, but no longer focuses its energy on learning from bad experiences. What's more, he blocks his life by remaining trapped forever in the incident as the company around him moves farther and farther away from himself.

At the heart of life

Bitterness means hopelessness and tunnel vision. All spheres of life are affected, tragically also those who have nothing to do with the incident. One feature is that it hits the patients' vital center.

To guard against this, it is important to keep a variety of life options open, for insults are especially biting when they are in the area of ​​life where we invest the most energy, passion and feelings.

A typical area for bitterness is the profession. For example, the triggering event for a politician may be sawing off by party intrigues. He spent his youth distributing leaflets at party stands in every weather and turning the sausages at street parties; Instead of the quarry pond, he spent the summer at county council meetings and in working groups. He chewed on the graybread of local politics, and he was tricked out in the crucial election for the state election candidate.

In case of emergency, such victims do not seek alternative fields or start a new beginning, but embitter. They withdraw from politics, stick to the event, generalize it according to the motto "politics is a dirty business, and man is fundamentally bad".

Bitterness can also develop in social relationships. Take a woman who spends decades of her life being a good mother. She nurtures her children wherever she can, barely has a life of her own, always thinks first of all of her offspring and then of herself, directing her entire life toward the well-being of the children. Then the 18-year-old son steals the silverware and disappears. She suffers an accident, sits in a wheelchair, and the now grown daughter does not even visit her. The sufferer has the feeling that her lifetime achievement as a mother was worth nothing. She keeps asking herself, "What have I done wrong?" And wakes up at night with hatred for her children.

How to help?

Affected lose social contacts. Nobody wants to maintain a long-term relationship with someone who always tells only of their own suffering, reproaches and repeatedly told the same traumatic stories, without the friends and acquaintances have anything to do with it.

For the bitter, the situation is now getting worse. Without contact with other people who could give him positive input, he loses himself more and more in his labyrinth of reproaches, misfortune and loneliness. They now feel everything that happens in the outside world as directed against themselves. This extreme sensitivity is hard to bear for other people, but they are the ones who suffer the most.

The physical consequences are similar to those of depression. Those affected neglect their own health, they are highly addicted to addiction, they become overweight, and the risk of classic diseases as a result of mental stress and unhealthy lifestyle follow - from hypertension to heart attack.

Those affected increasingly lose touch with the outside world and are therefore in a high risk of addiction. (Image: Aliaksandr Marko / fotolia.com)

Social consequences

The condition leads to those affected obstructing life perspectives. A person who is embittered because he has lost his job revolves around the real or perceived injustice but does not seek a new one. When he comes into the opportunity to start a new job, his new boss disturbs the circling around the past, which has nothing to do with the new work, probably so much that he is immediately thrown out again.

In addition to his own blockages, the Bitter acquires a reputation that excludes him from professional and socially fulfilling relationships. If acquaintances of him close to start a new project, they will not involve the "whiner" who "breaks everything".

Deeper and deeper into the abyss

The attitudes associated with bitterness make it increasingly impossible for the person concerned to gain a foothold professionally - even and especially where he knows his way around. With someone who constantly complains that everything "does not make sense anyway", who has lost the hope of positive development, even depreciates people with a positive point of view as "naïve", nobody wants to start a business, no matter how good this person is professional.

In private relationships it looks similar. The ex-husband, whose wife has blown with the best friend finds no new partner. Instead, he plagues himself with allegations against his missing wife, drowning in revenge fantasies and remains alone.

Who is bitter, who is frozen.

The posttraumatic bitterness disorder

Bitterness has only recently been recognized as a psychiatric syndrome, with the intricate name "posttraumatic bitterness disorder." The term names the cause of this condition in this clinical sense.

The cause of the disorder is a traumatic experience, which also explains that sufferers, as in other traumatizations, have to replay the event associated with the trauma over and over again.

"Nörgelossis" - a psychiatric syndrome?

Bitterness as a mental disorder was investigated by doctors after reunification. There is a cliché about "Nörgelossi" who always sees himself as a victim, does nothing himself to change his situation, and blames everything and everyone who blames the GDR and the West for his personal misery.

This cliché also has a serious background, and sometimes shows up in psychiatric clinics. In the 1990s, more and more East Germans came there - permanently sick, with different or no diagnoses. Most of them said they were entitled to a pension.
These East German patients had a lot in common: They saw themselves as victims, so they did not want to be helped, fluctuated between aggressiveness and resignation, revenge fantasies and self-destruction.

The psychiatrist Michael Linden's team recognized a new psychiatric syndrome - the post-traumatic bitterness disorder. As a disturbance it differs massively from the mere "Nörgelossi", the "Jammerliese" or the "Meckerfritze".

Those affected are not psychologically stable with a negative attitude to the environment, but their condition combines depression with hurt. Their behavior is similar to that of other traumatized people - they avoid the place that reminds them of the incident, like their former workplace, they feel oppressed and become aggressive when they talk about what happened. Like other traumatized individuals, there are triggers that trigger a flood of negative emotions associated with the trauma.

The bitterness disorder is similar to the post-traumatic stress disorder. But the clinical picture deviates. The stress disorder is mainly caused by real or perceived threats to life and is characterized mainly by anxiety disorders; the bitterness is caused by mental injuries.
In Germany, this probably affects up to 4% of people. It is not yet recognized as a disease by the WHO.

Psychiatrists recognized a new psychiatric syndrome in East German patients after the fall of the Wall. (Image: philipk76 / fotolia.com)

Personal and social crisis

The bitterness disturbance especially with East Germans was no coincidence. Many people in the former GDR were injured because a decades-long career, including the social identity designed for it, no longer counted from one day to the next.

Helmut Kohl promised them "blossoming landscapes" just like the GDR bosses a "paradise of the working people". Instead, they lost their jobs, flew out of their homes because they could no longer pay the rents and felt cheated in every way.

The following bitterness rages just as much among Hartz IV victims in western Germany, who often after many years of work as disenfranchised pushed back and forth, as befits the job centers and wage pushers just in the junk.

In general, bitterness in the sense of agony depression accumulates after social changes. In Switzerland, for example, the number of patients increased after the 2008 financial crisis: people perceive their dismissal as unfair and can not process it.

However, even natural disasters can lead to aggravation depressions. Thus, people whose homes were destroyed by Elbe flood, developed these symptoms. On the one hand, they are responsible for no fault of their own; on the other hand, they blame the government, the civil protection services or the neighbors for causing the disaster such a damage.

Injury to others

As with a termination or the end of a relationship, bitterness here means that those affected see themselves as victims and do not understand that they can help themselves. If someone gives them this option, they will react aggressively and hurt those who show them constructive ways out of the crisis.

For his social environment, he becomes a burden. He is unbearable for himself and unbearable for others. He sees the friends a happy life, he makes it bad. Soon he has the reputation of being a "stalker": he "pollutes the air" when others feel comfortable.

The son tells of his new job, of the friendly colleagues and the good atmosphere, the bitter man intervenes and says "you'll be surprised". Gets the daughter of her new love, he comments "divorce is expensive".

He sees himself as a victim, but becomes overtaxed by others. He is deeply hurt and hurt others. At some point nobody wants to have anything with him anymore.

"Embittered is the hard-to-reconcile one who holds on to anger for a long time, he seals the excitement within him and only stops when he has retaliated ... This kind of people is a heavy burden for himself and closest friends." Aristotle

The bitterness makes everything bad, injures others and thereby puts itself off to a social offside. (Image: JackF / fotolia.com)

Danger to yourself and others

The revenge fantasies of the person affected not only annoying, they can become real danger for fellow human beings. To provoke aggression, it is enough for someone to even remotely remind the patient of his or her trauma - completely independent of the object of revenge itself. It suffices if a person successfully works in a job that resembles the one from which he or she Bitter was quit to attack this man as a "traitor". Most of the victims do not even know why he "lashes out" on them.

Not only in their own interest, but also in the interests of others, therapeutic help is required. Bitter are ticking time bombs - not only suicide, but running amok can also be a result of bitterness.

therapy

Bitter people are difficult to treat. The suffering is high, which generally increases the willingness to go into therapy, but the insight is missing. One of the symptoms of bitterness is that those affected are unable to change or change anything about their "fate".

One of the few ways to help them is wisdom therapy. This is about developing the psychic abilities to master life crises. It's about the abilities that the patient lacks.

Empathy and tolerance

For example, empathy and tolerance help to understand other people's actions. Understanding, that's what the patients have to learn, does not mean that they have to be indebted at the same time. A victim-perpetrator compensation, in which victims and perpetrators of a crime such as assault sat down, for example, in the presence of a therapist, serves not only the perpetrator, but also the victim. Understanding his actions does not make the crime good, but frees the victim from paralyzing perplexity.

Bitterness does not mean to be able to laugh except out of glee. Humor, on the other hand, creates an emotional distance to what is happening and thus allows freedom for the person concerned, which opens up new perspectives for him. The well-worn saying "humor is when you laugh anyway", puts it in a nutshell.

Empathy means to empathize. Important is the change of perspective. How would I have acted if I had been the employer, the "traitor"? If a human being is "alien to something human" in the imagination, it is easier to let go of one's own misfortune. Pathologically bitter people in studies showed strikingly less of the "wisdom competences" than not bitter.

Narcissistic bitterness

Bitterness is not just about objective crises like losing a job or the failure of a relationship, but also narcissistic circles around unreal constructions of a grandiose "me". These are unfortunately in the neoliberal propaganda to the sole value that leaves more and more people in the impasse their own desires run.

If such a person suffers from a bitterness, because the world is not there to fulfill his every wish, it is very difficult to get him out of this impasse. Such a person may be in the grave rather than admit that he is not as great as he presents himself as a consequence of alcohol and drug abuse.

If he shows a spark of willingness to cope with his bitterness created by false fantasies, he can learn in therapy that the world owes him nothing, so there is no culprit and he is not a victim.

change of perspective

In wisdom therapy role-playing games serve to break up the encrustation of those affected. Thus therapist and patient talk about fictional situations that have to do with the core problem. Patients now take the role of "bad guys".

Role-playing teaches those affected to change their perspective.
(Image: reichdernatur / fotolia.com)

At the same time, they discuss their own ideas of marital fidelity, dismissal at work, etc., and then discuss the views of others. This creates an emotional distance to the traumatizing experience.

In such wisdom training, bitterness may look a bit out of their shell, but other and long-lasting therapies are needed to deal with the trauma that preceded the disorder.

Ideally, they learn through training that values ​​and norms can be relative, that there are not one, but innumerable lifestyles, and that people have to make their own decisions over and over again in life. To accept that insecurity is part of life and that one can bear contradictions is the condition for patients to get out of their psychic prison.

Break stereotypes

Bitterness therapies are based on behavioral analysis as well as automatic thoughts and schema analysis. Such schemata are one of the core problems of those affected, without them being aware of it.

Then it's about redefining areas that are burdened with problems and acting in the world, rebuilding social contacts, and gaining experience that shows those affected that they are not passive victims, but that they can work in the outside world. In addition, they learn to perceive their own emotions, to name them, to accept them and put them in context.

Relativize claims

Essential, especially for narcissistic bitter people, is to relativize one's own claims and to distance oneself from oneself. The method of solving "unsolvable problems" has proven itself. Conflicts are presented to those affected, in which they should act on the basis of exercises with humor, empathy and emotional agility. In the end, they then transfer these skills to their own situation. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)
Specialist supervision: Barbara Schindewolf-Lensch (doctor)