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Bitterness: Poison for the Heart

By Lee Jampolsky

When Glenn Hovemann asked me to read several chapters of A Course of Love that speak specifically about bitterness, I was hesitant at first. A Course in Miracles had been familiar ground for nearly fifty years, and even though many people I respect had asked me to read ACOL, I still had read relatively little of it. As a psychologist and a student of ACIM, I knew something about the ego and the workings of the mind, but had never given bitterness much thought as important in itself. Then Glenn read me a sentence that made me want to hear more:

“Bitterness is to your heart what the ego has been to your mind.” (ACOL T3:6.5)

ACIM does speak of bitterness, although not with the sustained attention I discovered ACOL gives it. What most intrigued me was the way ACOL places bitterness in the heart alongside the ego in the mind, a parallel I had never considered before. What most people on a spiritual path discover early on is how the ego is forever at work judging, separating, blaming, assigning meaning to absolutely everything that happens. We know a bitterness in our thoughts as a byproduct of the ego’s contortions, but what happens in the heart can be more easily overlooked because it is more of a raw and directly felt pain.

Something hurts, and the heart feels the hurt. Fear-based thinking and the pain of bitterness then begin feeding each other. The ego goes to work to tighten the knots of fear, telling us what the hurt means, who is to blame, what it says about us. All of this to justify the bitterness we feel, and often to increase it. Year after year, those fearful and harsh conclusions magnify the original hurt.

Bitterness gives the ego a larger story to tell,
drawing us deeper into the original hurt,
until we turn away from the Love
that can still help us find our way through.

Perhaps this illuminates why ACOL makes such a striking parallel. Left unrecognized, the ego can become so established in the mind that its fear-based stories obscure our awareness of Love and of who we truly are. Bitterness can take a similarly powerful hold within the heart, obscuring our goodness. Neither is who we are and, in truth, neither can change what we are.

ACOL connects bitterness to blame, vengeance, and resentment, but also to something less obvious: the expectations we carry about our lives. The unspoken and often unconscious agreements we make with life, with God, and with ourselves can become a source of bitterness when life does not keep its end of the bargain. ACOL suggests that much of this is fueled by what it calls the “desire for reward.” We may not think of ourselves as bargaining with life, yet consider how familiar some of these bargains sound:

If I love you, you’ll stay.
If I am a good person, I won’t be betrayed.
If I care for my body, it will stay healthy.
If I do everything I can for someone I love, it will be enough to keep them safe.

The poet Brendan Behan said, “A false sense of security is the only kind there is.” It is not hard to see the fallacy in universally believing these bargains. What is harder to see is how constantly the ego tries to convince us that there are guaranteed ways to make ourselves secure, rather than embracing the uncertainty that comes with impermanence.

Yet there is also something tender in these hopes. We want our loving to matter. We want our goodness to make a difference. We want our tears to have meant something.

“The idea of reward transfers to ideas related to comparison as well, as lack of reward in one instance and reward given in another, is the cause of much of the bitterness that exists within your hearts.” (ACOL T3:6.3)

Comparison alone is not the trail leading to bitterness. Neither is disappointment. But the ego rarely leaves disappointment alone. It begins telling us how things should have been: I should have been treated better. They should have loved me more. And how life should not have been: This should not have happened to me. I should not have had to go through this. When the ego joins these judgments to blame—someone is responsible; life has treated me unfairly—bitterness can begin to harden around what hurts.

This does not mean denying what happened or sugarcoating it while we are still in the middle of the pain. We’re human and some experiences leave us grieving, angry, frightened, or deeply wounded. I have sat with parents whose children died. I have walked with people carrying suffering that began before they were born. Some betrayals call for changes and there is no cruelty that should ever be made acceptable through spiritual explanation. Love does not ask us to pretend or call the unacceptable acceptable.

But moving toward forgiveness and healing does initially require accepting that what happened, happened. Then, the choice comes in discovering that even here, in the presence of what we wish had never happened, we can still Love. In time, Love guides us toward the deep forgiveness ACIM speaks of: “Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred.” Love gently releases the bitterness by helping us see beyond the story the ego made of what happened.

The deeper question is what happens within us afterward. Bitterness not only holds animosity toward the past; it can make any generosity toward the future seem naïve and dangerous. ACOL helps us see that bitterness has to do with our feelings even more than with our thoughts. Something hurts first. Then the ego begins telling us what that hurt means, sometimes turning the pain itself into another reason to defend or attack.

We are all abundantly familiar with that mind. Why did this happen? Who was responsible? What could I have done differently? How do I protect myself? For some, the person put on trial is most always themselves. There can even be a strange refuge of control in self-blame. If I caused what happened, hidden somewhere inside the accusation is the belief that I might have had the power to prevent it.

This is one of many places ACIM and ACOL come very close to one another. ACIM links bitterness with vengeance and the loss of mercy:

“And bitterness, with vengeance justified and mercy lost, condemns you as unworthy of forgiveness.” (ACIM T-25.IX.9:4)

ACOL speaks to what happens when bitterness becomes attached to the meaning we have given our past suffering. Yesterday begins telling us what to expect tomorrow. A heart carrying bitterness as protection from betrayal enters the next relationship before the other person does. What we could not prevent, the ego can turn into a belief in our own helplessness. We become careful with hope, suspicious of the vulnerability that comes with Love. Here, the ego achieves its goal: the past has acquired a future.

“Bitterness is the cause of this inability to make a new choice and what keeps the cycle of suffering in motion.” (ACOL T3:8.7)

There is freedom in discovering the heart itself never truly becomes bitter. Bitterness may cover Love and create an inability to make new choices, but it cannot alter Love. Beneath all that happens to us in life, Love remains alive in the present moment. We do not find Love by denying what happened. We do not awaken Love by resisting what we feel.

I pause and realize our hearts are never meant to choose between accepting what has happened and loving deeply. We can see all that is happening with the world, grieve our losses when they come, and still be filled with awe and a love of being alive. My heart, and I imagine yours, has far more room than we know.

I smile as I think of this as the freedom bitterness cannot imagine. The simple truth is the past can be acknowledged without taking over the present. What happened does not deserve the rest of our lives.