At this very moment many of you are able to recall an incident from your past with your partner that was so hurtful to you, so devastating, that you can feel the tears stinging your eyes.  You want to rage against the person who hurt you deeply.  You think your anger might act as a kind of mystical curse on your partner.  You hope it will make your partner suffer.

When you choose to bear anger at your partner, you build a wall around yourself.  You become trapped in an emotional complex of such pain and agony that negative energy begins to dominate your entire life.  Your resentment can literally become so pervasive as to crowd every other feeling out of your heart.  What's more, your emotions do not remain specific to your partner.  Bitterness and anger are such powerful forces that once they enter your heart, they change everything about you.  They redefine who you are.  If your heart has turned cold from your feelings of bitterness, for example, then that is the heart from which all your emotions spring.  That is the heart that you will show to your children, to your parents, to your fellow human beings---and yes, to your partner.  In effect, you make it almost impossible for yourself to love, and to be loved.

In many ways, your inability to forgive your partner---and yes, to forgive yourself for the destructive things you have done---is what gives rise to so much discord.  If you have been betrayed by your partner, the last thing you want to show is love.  You don't want to look like a weakling who's basically asking your partner to steamroll right over you again.  You want to bring down consequences on your partner to make him or her pay.

What I', saying is that if you wallow in your resentment, if you refuse to forgive and move on, then you're going to tear up your life.  At the beginning of this book I told you that the key to fulfillment in your life is to take back your power, to choose how you feel, to create your own experience.  If you choose to carry on your resentments, then you guarantee yourself a life of misery.

Here are other ways this particular spirit infiltrates your life:

• You are consumed with such anger at your partner that you'll explode over the smallest disagreements or difficulty.

• You feel so bitter that you take a pessimistic view of life in general.

• Your body feels so physically unbalanced---the condition is called heterostasis---that you often experience sleep disturbance, nightmares, poor concentration, and fatigue.  You develop severe headaches, back spasms, even heart attacks---all because your body's chemical balance is dramatically disrupted because of your stress.

• You cannot read a book or watch a television show or movie without finding something in it that reminds you of your resentment.

• You keep in your memory bank all the imperfections in your partner, you remember all of the mistakes and failures he or she has made, and you bring them up constantly.

• You interpret many statements and actions of your partner in a negative fashion, based on the slimmest thread of evidence or often no evidence at all.

• You think you shouldn't yet forgive your partner because he or she is not acting sorry or apologetic enough.

• You think you shouldn't yet forgive your partner because he or she has not done enough things for you in order to pay penance.

• You try to control your partner through shame rather than seeking to inspire your partner.

But the only escape route is through forgiveness---to take the high moral ground and forgive the person who has hurt you.  You forgive not for the other person.  You forgive for yourself.  If you become the emotional leader in your life---and, in turn, the emotional leader for your partner---I promise that you will get more of what you want and less of what you don't want.  It is not too late unless you say it is too late.