"Who would I be without it?"

You're at a dinner, sitting next to someone you've never met. Within twenty minutes they know about the divorce, or the firm that got rid of you, or what your family is like. You didn't plan to tell them. It's simply how you explain yourself these days. It accounts for the flat you live in and the job you do, and for why you're on your own.

Over the years a grievance can stop being something that happened and become part of how your life is arranged. At that point the thought of giving it up brings real fears, and I'd like to take them one at a time.

The first fear is that if you stop, it will mean the wrong didn't matter. It won't. What happened stays true whether or not you arrange your life around it. It's a fact in your history, as fixed as the town you grew up in. Plenty of people who were seriously wronged will tell you it was the worst thing that ever happened to them, and they have lives with a good many other things in them too.

The second fear is losing the explanation. If the redundancy isn't the reason you're not where you expected to be by now, then what is? That's a frightening question, and I think it keeps more people in place than anything else in this book. My answer is that the explanation can stay, for the past. "That's why the last five years went the way they did" may be entirely true. The question is whether it also explains the next five. It can't unless you let it, because the event is over.

The third fear is losing people. Some relationships run on a shared grievance. It might be the alliance with your sister against your parents, or the group chat of former colleagues who all hated the same boss. If you stop supplying your half, things will change. My suggestion is to try changing the subject and see what's left. A good relationship will have plenty besides the grievance, and it may improve. A few relationships will turn out to have had nothing else. That's a real loss, and I won't pretend otherwise.

The fourth fear is having to try without cover. While the grievance explains your life, no failure is quite your own. Without it you might apply and be turned down, or go on the date and be bored, or start the course and find it hard. That's the true price of what this book proposes. Set against it are the costs from chapter 2, which you've been paying for a long time already.

It helps to know where the habit came from, because it usually made sense there. In some families the person who suffered most got the attention, and children in those families learn very early what brings care. In others, a parent narrated their whole life as a list of things done to them, and the child picked up the style without anyone meaning to teach it. Some people spent years in a home, a school or a marriage where they really were powerless. For them it wasn't a mentality at all. It was an accurate description. Gabay and her colleagues suspect the roots lie in an anxious kind of attachment to early carers, though their evidence for that is a correlation in adults. However it started, the habit was a reasonable response to the place you were in. You've moved on from that place, and nobody has gone back to check whether the habit still fits.

One more thing, and this is my interpretation. Under a long grievance there's often a loss that hasn't been grieved. A grievance holds the matter open, as if there were still a ruling to come. Grieving means accepting that the matter is closed. The marriage isn't coming back, and the childhood you ought to have had can't be given to you late. When people stop waiting, that sadness tends to arrive. If it does, it doesn't mean you've gone wrong. I'd take it as a sign that the waiting is over.

Try something once, in private. Tell your history to yourself in a version where the wrong gets a single honest sentence and everything else is about what you did. You're not swapping the true story for a false one. Both versions are true. You're finding out how the other one sounds.