To Grudge, or Not to Grudge, That Is the Question
One approach to letting go of a grudge is to name what happened, separate the incident from your interpretation of it, and avoid repeatedly dwelling on that interpretation. For teachers, that means treating a student's bad day as one moment, not a verdict, and giving yourself the same grace you'd give a colleague who is still learning.
I could lie and say I never hold a grudge. That would be a big, fat lie. The honest answer: I hold grudges. Some last a few seconds, some last a few days, and every so often one takes up residence for weeks before I finally deal with it.
The Difference Between a Five-Second Grudge and a Five-Day One
Most of my grudges are small and short. When a student makes a mistake on something we've spent weeks learning, and they seemed to have it down, I hold onto that flicker of frustration for a few seconds, sit with it, then let it go. Students may need more time, practice, or support, and a mistake isn't a personal reflection on my teaching.
The grudges that stick around longer show up when a parent, colleague, or family member says or does something that leaves me feeling wronged or unloved. Working through those takes real time: is the other person being deliberately hurtful, or am I reading more into it than they intended? More often than I'd like to admit, it's the second one.
Then there's the grudge that takes hours of contemplating, praying, and journaling to untangle. That's the kind nobody wants to claim they're carrying, but if you're being honest with yourself, you know exactly which one I mean.
Many people hold grudges from time to time. Call it a sting, a foul, a violation of the unwritten social contract between two people. Whatever you call it, in the middle of your righteous indignation, you're holding a grudge, just like me.
Why Letting Go Is Harder Than Knowing Better
For me, grudge-holding should be a solved problem. I've spent years in school studying psychology, reading psychology books, and talking with therapist-types and good friends who offer their own version of therapy over coffee. You'd think all that would put me on some higher plane of thinking, immune to petty resentment. If we know better, we do better, right?
Usually. More often than not. But not always. As a person of Christian faith, I know that holding a grudge runs against the moral code I try to live by: love others with all your heart, your soul, and your might. I should have picked that lesson up from the psychology classes alone. It took a higher power to actually convince me that I needed to deal with it.
In the classroom, being a grudge-holder is a rough way to spend a day, because kids are going to test your patience every single day. Add a little "they're out to get me" paranoia on top, and you've built yourself a self-created stress problem before lunch.
But every once in a while, a student comes along who rattles even the most patient teacher among us. They might be a sweet kid who works hard but pushes one particular button. They might be a behavior challenge who keeps you on your toes. They might ask "why?" more times in a day than you can count, or sit there completely unresponsive to everything you try. So how do we handle this as professionals in the classroom, especially a Special Education classroom, when we love our job, our students, and our peers?
What The Four Agreements Taught Me About Grudges
As I sit here thinking through the grudges I've allowed myself to hold this year, I keep landing on the same conclusion: it's all my own choosing. The people I believed had wronged me mostly hadn't. They shared their point of view and acted on what they honestly believed was right. If someone believes what they did was right, why do I expect them to change just for me? Maybe I'm the one who needs to consider that there's more than one way to do something.
In a Psychology Today piece on this exact subject, therapist Nancy Colier writes that our pain becomes a construction of the mind, and that feeding a grudge can eventually drain the empathy needed to release it. If grudges really are worse enemies than the original pain, as the saying goes, that's worth sitting with before I let a snarky comment ruin my hour, my day, or my week.
A friend once challenged me to read The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, a Toltec Wisdom Book by Don Miguel Ruiz. It named all the self-inflicted mess I'd been making, which made it uncomfortable in the best way. Years later, unpacking moving boxes, I found my old copy at the bottom of one and finally took the hint to reread it.
The Four Agreements are simple to read and brutal to actually practice for even one day:
- Be impeccable with your word.
- Don't take anything personally.
- Don't make assumptions.
- Always do your best.
Am I impeccable with my word? Not even on a good day, thanks to my usual foot-in-mouth tendencies. Do I avoid taking things personally? That one made me laugh out loud. Do I avoid making assumptions? Still no. Do I always do my best, at lesson planning, at record keeping, at staying organized? Some days. Not every day.
How to Actually Let a Grudge Go
Here's what I keep coming back to: I've found it helpful to think of part of a grudge as the story I keep retelling myself about what happened. The incident is over. The story is the part I still have some say over.
That reframe doesn't make letting go effortless, but it makes it possible on the days willpower alone isn't enough. When I notice I'm replaying something, I try to name what actually happened, separate it from what I've decided it means about the other person or me, and ask whether I'm still choosing to dwell on it on purpose. Most of the time, once I see the story for what it is, it loses its grip faster than I expect.
None of this makes me a finished project. Living by the Four Agreements is progress, not perfection, the same as anything else worth practicing.
Being the best teacher and the best person we're meant to be isn't easy. A break in the school year is a good time to decompress from whatever you carried this year and let the Four Agreements do their work again. Our students need us at our best, and so do we.
Learn more about special education degrees.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it normal for teachers to hold grudges against students?
Feeling temporary frustration with a student can happen. Teachers should recognize that feeling and avoid letting resentment affect how they treat the student going forward.
How long does it usually take to let go of a grudge?
There is no standard timeline. It depends on the person, the situation, and the severity of the conflict.
What's the difference between holding a grudge and setting a boundary?
A grudge keeps replaying the same story to justify staying upset. A boundary states what you need going forward and then stops relitigating the past. You can set a firm boundary with a colleague or parent without continuing to hold the incident against them.
Does holding a grudge actually affect how I teach?
It can. Carrying resentment into a classroom changes tone, patience, and how quickly you're willing to give a student the benefit of the doubt. Letting go of the small ones daily protects your energy for the moments that actually need it.
- Not every grudge is the same size - a five-second classroom flicker of frustration and a weeks-long conflict with a colleague need different responses, not the same one.
- Knowing better doesn't guarantee doing better - years of studying psychology don't make anyone immune to grudge-holding. It's a practice, not a personality trait.
- Part of a grudge is the story you retell yourself - the incident already happened, but I've found the story I keep telling myself about it is the part I have some say over.
- Ruiz's Four Agreements offer a blunt reset - be impeccable with your word, don't take things personally, don't make assumptions, and always do your best.
Working through something like this is easier when you already know what's next for your own teaching path. The programs listed here include options for adding an endorsement, specializing in special education, or moving toward a leadership role, many built for teachers who are already working full time.
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- Special Needs Prom: How One Student Led His School’s Grand March - April 20, 2021
- Behavior Management Training for Teachers: What to Ask For - October 9, 2020
