Thursday, and still explaining Monday

Here's an example. On Monday the head of department announces that the team leader job has gone to a colleague who joined two years after you. Nobody warned you. By Thursday you've told the story to your partner, two friends, your sister and the person at the next desk. Each telling has picked up a detail, such as the way the head of department didn't look at you, or the lunch those two had in March.

You haven't asked your manager why you weren't chosen. You haven't asked what would make the answer different next time. You've decided that asking would be pointless, and anyway it's their job to explain themselves to you.

A second example. Eight years ago your parents helped your brother with the deposit on a flat. They didn't help you. You've never said this to them plainly. It comes up every Christmas all the same, inside your head if not out loud, and it decides how long you stay.

A third. Your ex left, and some of the debts were in your name. Three years on you still describe your finances as "what he did to me". There's an envelope from the bank on the shelf in the hall that you haven't opened.

And a fourth. A friend has rung you twice since you moved away, and you've kept count. You're not going to ring her, because it's always you who rings.

If some of these are familiar, look at how each one went. First there was a wrong. I'm taking your word for that, and in all four examples I think the person has a fair complaint. Then came the sense of being wronged, which I'll call the grievance. It may have arrived as a thought, such as "that wasn't fair", or as a hot feeling in the chest with no words. It arrived without your permission, and it was probably accurate.

Then you did something. You gave the next move to someone else. It became the manager's job to explain, the parents' job to notice, the ex's job to pay, the friend's job to ring. Until they do, you go over it, you tell it, and you wait. I'm going to call this handing over.

The grievance and the handing over feel like one event. They're two. The grievance is a feeling, and you don't choose it. Handing over is a thing you do, and my argument in this book is that it's a habit. It can be looked at and changed without anybody having to pretend the wrong was all right.

The usual explanation, when other people give it, is character. You're "negative". You "play the victim". I don't think that survives a look at your actual life. You probably don't hand over everywhere. When the boiler breaks you ring someone. If your child were treated badly at school you'd be in the office by nine the next morning. The handing over shows up in particular parts of your life, and usually they're the parts where you were hurt worst, or where making a move feels most dangerous. Something that selective is more likely to be learned than built in. Chapter 10 looks at where.

Habits last because they pay, and this one does. When the next move belongs to someone else, nothing that happens next can be your fault. You're spared a conversation that might go badly. People who hear the story are kind to you. In the story you're the one who behaved decently. These are real benefits, and the next chapter goes through them one at a time. I'll try to show that each is smaller than it looks and costs more than it seems to.

You can see one of the costs in the first example. The next team leader job will come up in a year or so. The person in that example will go into it knowing exactly as much as they know today about why they lost the last one.

Let me say what this book doesn't claim. It doesn't claim you brought your troubles on yourself. It doesn't claim you should be over it by now. It doesn't claim the people who wronged you shouldn't answer for it, and chapter 5 is partly about how to make them, where that's possible.

Before you go on, try one thing. Pick a grievance that's more than a month old, and write down what happened in two lines, with the date. Underneath, write one more line saying what you've done about it since then, apart from thinking and talking. Don't judge the answer. You'll use it in later chapters.