"I resent them, and I hate myself for it"

The resentment is the part nobody says. You're in the kitchen doing the thing you've done every week for a year and a thought comes, clear and ugly, that you wish you didn't have to, that you're forty-eight and your weekends aren't yours, that she never asked how the interview went. Then the second wave, which is worse. What kind of person thinks that about their mother.

Losada's fifth kind of guilt was guilt about having negative feelings towards other people. It's on the questionnaire because it's common. Most carers feel it. And Cicirelli's finding gives it a cause. Obligation predicts burden. Resentment is what burden feels like from the inside. If the care is running on the debt, resentment is not a character flaw showing through. It's the ordinary product of doing a great deal you didn't choose, for reasons that don't warm you, and it would appear in almost anyone under the same conditions.

That doesn't make it pleasant, and I'm not going to tell you to welcome it. I'm going to tell you what it's for. Resentment is information about the arrangement, not about you. It says, this amount, given this way, is more than I can give freely. That's a useful sentence. It tells you where chosen care would need to sit, which is somewhere below the current amount or with some of the current amount handed to someone else. The person who never feels resentment has usually either chosen their care or stopped noticing themselves, and the second is not the better state.

Notice what self-hatred does with the information. It buries it. You resent, you punish yourself for resenting, you add a visit as penance for the resentment, and the added visit raises the resentment, which raises the guilt. That's a loop, and it's the loop that ends in the carer breaking. The way out is not to stop resenting by force. It's to hear what the resentment is saying about the amount, and change the amount or the way it's given, so there's less to resent. Chapter 20 does that. An earlier book in this series, You wouldn't say it to a friend, is about the self-hatred half, if that's the part that's loudest.