I’m letting people who hurt me in the past live rent free in my mind.
One episode involves a former landlord that tried to run me over in an intersection with no traffic cameras.
Another one involves a manager that fired me for informing that one of his favorites yelled during night shift and ignored alarms to talk. He fired me the next day, used the exit interview to tell me everything I didn’t do right (but kept quiet about his favorites, even though I did the job like them), still had the utmost confidence on his favorites, accused me of being lazy and instead of simply firing me and keeping neutral he chose to take it personal, proceeded to try to scare me insinuating I wouldn’t work for his system again, when that failed, tried to humiliate me and then fired me. This was in an non union hospital.
When I think about it I get angry. Id like not to be so thin skinned, but here I am.
What you are trying to do falls loosely under cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), doing some research on that might help you tunnel down to something useful and actionable for you.
For myself, I use compartmentalisation. Effectively stick it in a mental box. My brain will periodically/randomly pull it out to play with. When this happens I ask myself 3 questions.
Do I have the time/mental resources to deal with this.
Can I gain any new understanding by going back over it.
Do I gain anything by hanging on to it?
The first is to effectively let you put it off. You can tell your subconscious you can deal with it at a better time.
The second is stripping the meat from the bones. If you were taken advantage of, how do you protect against it? If the situation occurred again, what would you do differently? You won’t get everything at once, it takes time to find all the improvements.
The last is the kicker. What do you still gain? If you still have lessons to learn, that fine. If it will be actionable, keep wary. Eventually though, you’ll find there is nothing left of value to gain, and it’s become redundant. Stick it back in its box. Eventually your subconscious will get bored bring it up to the same, unemotional, results and it will fade. It might crop up later, if a new situation arises, or new information becomes relevant.
The goal of this is to strip the event of its value, and discard the rest. E.g. your old boss in the example, do you honestly care enough to want to put effort into any sort of revenge or retaliation. Likely no, it’s not worth the costs. Can you learn anything more from the situation? How do you spot people like him in the future? What would you do differently? What landmines did you step on, and how can you avoid them in the future. Once you have all this stripped out, the remaining anger will become hollow and fade. There will be nothing worth the effort of being angry.
This whole process takes time to both learn and apply. It’s worth putting the effort in, however. You’ll still feel the anger, but you can consume it, rather than letting it consume you.