Is Bitterness Holding You Back Socially?

Pretty much everyone who went through an 'uncool' phase in their lives is at least a little bit bitter about some things that happened to them in the past. This is understandable, and for the most part it doesn't affect how they live their lives today. Others can't let go of their bitterness though, and it holds them back. This article is about mild to moderate feelings of bitterness. I've never been one of those extremely bitter people though, so I can't really comment on that.

Things socially awkward people are often bitter about

Here's what I can come up with. I'm not saying either way whether it's justified to feel this way or not towards these things, just that they seem to be areas of resentment a lot of people share.

People:

Certain groups of people (e.g., jocks, cool kids, frat boys, snobby cheerleaders, etc.) who directly picked on you and gave you a hard time.
Groups of people who didn't directly pick on you, but were known to look down on those like you.
Groups of people who left you alone, but made life hard for your peers.
Groups of people who weren't outright mean to you, but who would never want to be friends with you.
Groups of people who weren't outright mean to you, but who were totally indifferent to your existence.
Groups of people which everything seemed to come so easily to, which indirectly threw your own problems in your face.
The opposite sex.

Activities:

Sports (team sports you were forced to play, sports in general, spectator sports everyone's life seems to revolve around).
Pop culture (terrible pop bands, mindless television shows, etc.).
Partying (drinking, house parties, night clubs, dancing).

Society:

Society in general.
The "mainstream".
Being an introvert in an extroverted world.
Living in a shallow, superficial, materialistic, anti-intellectual society.
Your entire country.

Your social issues:

Just being sick of having to socialize in general.
Being sick of small talk and other socializing you see as pointless.
Resenting the fact that you're not good at, or even that interested in, something most people place a lot of value on.
Resenting people for not accepting you for you.
Resenting people for always suggesting you improve yourself in one way or another.

What you can't have:

Certain groups who you would like to be accepted by, but you don't think they'll ever want to be friends with someone like you.
Certain types of men or women who you're attracted to, but don't think will ever be romantically interested in you.
Certain lifestyles you'd like for yourself, but don't think you'll ever have access to.
A certain skill that some people have, but which you don't think you'll ever get for yourself.

The negative effects of bitterness on your social success

While I can understand how a reasonable person could get bitter about something, holding on to this feeling too strongly or for too long just screws you. Your thoughts can get pretty irrational and it usually just helps keep you in your rut.

You're not as happy in general

You're angry and resentful. Your mind keeps dwelling on the ways you've been wronged in the past. You could be having a great day, and then something will remind you of an old wound and you'll be annoyed and lost in your head for the next three hours. You get down at how life isn't fair. Being unhappy isn't good for your own...uh...happiness. Being unhappy itself, not just bitter, also hurts how you relate to people in a lot of little ways. Pretty obvious stuff.

You're no fun to be around in general

Overall bitter people aren't good company. They're prickly. They're negative. They're moody. They're prone to ranting about whatever it is they feel has wronged them. They make irrational statements. They're like broken records, always having to rehash their issues from the past. You never know when they're going to turn on you for being 'one of them' and not 'understanding what they've been through.' You can't hang out with certain people when they're around because they set off the bitter person's baggage in some way.

You negatively stereotype and write off entire groups of people

Are some jocks assholes? Yep. But is every guy who likes sports, or dresses a certain way, or has a certain type of humor worthy of your hatred? There's a lot of sports fans out there, are they all caricatures? Most jocks are decent people if you give them a chance. Some people who look like jocks on the surface actually have a lot in common with you. They could even be closet Guitar Hero or World of Warcraft fans. It's just that they like sports too, and that influences how they come across superficially. When you're bitter you're too close-minded to find that out.

You see what you want to see and hold certain groups to higher standards than others

Continuing the previous point: Part of being prejudiced is that you look for information that agrees with what you already believe and ignore what doesn't. If you're at a bar and you see a jock do something obnoxious, well that just goes to show that all jocks are loudmouth idiots. But you ignore the fifty similar guys who are behaving themselves, or the people from other subcultures who are being annoying in the same manner.

You create self-fulfilling prophecies

In Social Psychology a self-fulfilling prophecy is when you expect someone to act a certain way, and then you unintentionally treat them in a manner that brings out the very behavior you expect to see. The classic example is you think someone is a snob, so you act aloof and rude towards them. They think you're a jerk and ignore you. You then go, "See, I knew they were like that! They just snubbed me!" Or the opposite could happen, where you think someone is really friendly, so you act happy and excited to see them, and they naturally respond by being nice back to you.

You see where this is going. If you're bitter towards certain types of people, you may unconsciously act in ways that agitate them and cause them to be hostile towards you, confirming your preconceptions. I knew a goth girl who resented preppie, frat boy types. And whenever she was around them she'd be really rude and interpret the most harmless things they did in the worst possible light. Naturally they weren't all that friendly to her in return, which played into her view that they were all jerks who didn't understand people like her.

You develop an us vs. them mentality

Other people are the enemy. It's introverts vs. extraverts. The shallow mainstream vs. the misunderstood intellectuals. The cool kids vs. the uncool kids. Everything becomes black and white. You fight little wars in your head. If they do A, then you have to do B on principle. For this point and the others, once you've decided a certain type of person is your foe, you'll tend to act and think in ways that locks you into your bad relationship to them.

You avoid good things because of the unpleasant associations they bring up

Your friends invite you to come over to watch a hockey game. It'll probably be fun to spend time with them, but sports make negative thoughts bubble to the surface and you choose to avoid anything that has to do with them. Or you meet someone cool, but she has some of the mannerisms of the girls who used to pick on you in high school so you don't pursue a friendship further. If you gave dancing a chance, you would really enjoy it. But it makes you think of that party where everyone was dancing and having fun and you stood on the sidelines and felt like a loser. You keep hearing this one concert hall is fun, but it's supposedly a place where frat boys hang out so you wouldn't be caught dead there. You can miss out on a lot of fun things just because they're associated with something you're bitter about.

You see changing yourself as selling out and 'letting them win'

People may give you a hard time or not appreciate your natural personality. Society may be biased towards certain types of people. Still, there may be legitimate things about your personality and social skills that could stand to improve. You'd probably be happier with your life if you did work on these areas.

When you're bitter you can be really stubborn about this. Changing means conceding that the enemy was partially right. If changing means becoming a more like them in some way, you feel like you're selling out. If you have an us vs. them attitude, it feels like they're 'winning'. No one's keeping track of course, but it can seem very important in your mind.

You stay in a rut, but think it's your noble destiny to be there

If your life isn't in the best place, being bitter can help keep you there. You can end up painting this scenario in your mind where it's good that you are where you are. You're nobly sticking to your true principles. You haven't given up your values to seek success at a game you don't even care about. You've held your ground where others have failed. You're an example to others. This thinking can take on a martyr tint to it as well, where you get some sort of mental reward out of seeing yourself as a victim.

You create a new, self-deceiving value system based entirely around your strengths

It doesn't feel good to live in a world where you're judged negatively for being bad at the things most people value. Even if you tell yourself you don't care, it probably still bothers you on some level. To protect their egos, some people create a new personal value system that rejects everything they're not good at, and which places importance on the things they are good at. Being fun and outgoing is pointless, being intellectual is everything. Fashion is shallow, being creative and thoughtful is what really matters. With the rules rewritten, suddenly they're cool and worthy again. Social skills-wise, people who aren't good at it downplay its importance.

Everyone does this to a point. You couldn't really cope in the world otherwise. It can get bad though when you overdo it and start deceiving yourself. Like I mention all the time, some socially awkward people can be prone to developing a false sense of superiority over everyone else. Someone's new value system may not reflect the way the world works either. Is being smart really the be-all-and-end-all of life? Are you really above other people because you know more about the evils of the mainstream media than they do? Should you really downplay the importance of getting along with people just because you're not naturally good at it?

You achieve more than you normally would, out of a desire to 'show them'

This one isn't really bad, though I guess it doesn't have the healthiest underpinnings. Some bitter people will do a lot with their lives because they want to spite the people who picked on them in high-school, or who didn't believe in them. What's the saying? "The best revenge is living well"? What's the other cliche? That the smart, unpopular kid works hard to become the next Bill Gates so at his high-school reunion he can throw all his money in the face of the jerks who teased him, and who now all work in grocery stores? The only downside of this is that being successful probably won't give you the satisfaction and feeling of revenge you want. No matter where you are today, nothing will change the fact that when you were fourteen people made fun of you. Still, not a bad side effect.

So how do you get over your bitterness?

Overall I don't have a ton of suggestions and I think it's easier said than done. You can't just magically stop caring about legitimate bad things that happened to you in the past, or which bother you now. In a way it would be wrong to not care that you were treated unfairly once. But still, you've got to take the edge off your feelings, even if you never get rid of them entirely. The two things I can think of are:

Expose yourself to the things you're bitter about

This isn't the easiest advice to take, but I've had a lot of personal success exposing myself to the things that I've felt bitter towards. Prejudice is partially based on ignorance, right? So I tried to learn about the things I felt resentful towards, and tried to give them a fair chance. If so many people seemed to like them, how bad could they be? I did this with sports and found that they weren't so bad. I even started to like some of them. Yeah, I had some bad experiences in gym class as a kid, but it wasn't because volleyball was inherently evil. Once I had built up some experiences telling me that sports were okay, my mind couldn't feel as bitter towards them.

I try to do the same thing with people. Like many guys who were dorks in high-school, I sometimes feel resentful towards the 'popular kids'. I wasn't bullied all that much, but they hardly loved me either, and it was annoying to see them have it so easy. After high-school I had a reflex where anyone who had the slightest 'popular' trait (e.g., a certain style of dressing) was branded a douchebag until proven otherwise. Over time I tried to give people like this a chance. Talking to them with a friendly attitude, most of them turned out to be pretty good people. Sometimes they'd surprise me with how well we clicked, even if we seemed so different at a glance. I realized that they weren't all scum just because I felt insecure about my own social status in the past, and was jealous of their success in this area. With enough time around them I also started to see they have their flaws and insecurities like everyone else. By emulating some of their traits, I did better socially myself. Again, over time I built up this history of life experiences that told me, "Cool people aren't that bad." It won't ever totally erase how some of them made me feel years ago, but at the same time now it's impossible for me to see all of them as being the same mass of jerks.

Sort out your other problems and live a good life

The target of your bitterness can sometimes act as a scapegoat for other problems in your life. You're really unhappy about other things, but for some reason your mind wants to blame it all on the fact that the world doesn't appreciate people who are quiet and reserved. Similarly, when you're in a bad mood for other reasons, your mind naturally gravitates towards other negative thoughts. It's funny, when I'm happy I'll intellectually acknowledge, say, that our society is too materialistic, but it won't emotionally bother me. But as soon as I'm in a crappy mood, suddenly I'm outraged and grumpy about the same problem and I can't let it go.

The more I sort out my issues and get my life where I want it to be, the less things get to me. I still acknowledge certain things as being problems, but they don't irritate me as much as they used to. When I was relatively unhappy in the past, I carried around all these things that bothered me. I couldn't watch a T.V. show without getting worked into a tizzy about the hegemony of the mass media.