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How to Hold a Grudge

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How to Hold a Grudge

From Resentment to Contentment – The Power of Grudges to Transform Your Life

Scribner,

15 min read
6 take-aways
Text available

What's inside?

Best-selling author Sophie Hannah says holding grudges can make you happier and teach you valuable lessons.

Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Well Structured
  • Engaging

Recommendation

Best-selling crime novelist Sophie Hannah explains how to hold grudges happily. A self-confessed “grudge guru,” Hannah provides a grudge grading system and a way to process the frustration of a grudge into life lessons. With creativity and tongue-in-cheek humor, Hannah shares many of her own grudge-worthy moments and her pathway to healing. She also includes input from experts in the field. Even if you might handle some scenarios a little differently, Hannah provides a healthy way to react and to identify and process your frustrations. Her approach seems particularly helpful for business- and work-related grudges.

Summary

Examine how and whether you hold grudges.

Traditional definitions of a grudge are negative, but grudges don’t have to be. Holding grudges can increase your ability to forgive. A grudge is a true story of something that happened to you and caused you pain or injury. It springs from an event that you continue to hold onto for some time. After the first spike of emotion ends, don’t fill your head with ideas for revenge. Valid grudges should help you feel wiser and more powerful and – if you’re lucky – make you laugh.

Follow the “Grudge-fold Path” – whereby you “hold a grudge, and then forgive and move on while still holding your grudge” – to learn how to use grudges to make your life healthier and more positive.

Taking the grudge test can help you determine whether and how you hold grudges. The way you respond to certain scenarios shows which of four types of grudge-holders you might be. Consider this scenario: You tell a friend that her sister (also your friend) scratched your car, lied about it and refused to pay for damages. Your friend implies that it doesn’t ...

About the Author

Books by award-winning crime novelist and poet Sophie Hannah have been adapted for TV and published in more than 50 countries. She was short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize in poetry.

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