Pain turns into bitterness when hope drops out of it. Dr. Christina Edmondson, a college dean whose academic background is in counseling psychology and marriage and family therapy, gives the distinction in one phrase: bitterness is what she would call “a hopeless lament.” Grief that stays honest about the wound and still holds on to God is lament. Grief that keeps the wound and lets go of hope is becoming something else, and it will not stay the same size.
The definition is not a scolding. Most bitterness starts with something that really happened. The problem it names is quieter than anger and harder to see from the inside.
What separates lament from bitterness?
For Edmondson, lament is the acknowledgment that pain and suffering are real, held together with a hope that lives in a person, Jesus Christ. Bitterness, in her words, is “the reality of the pain, the suffering, detached from hope.” The pain is the same in both. The difference is whether it is still attached to anything.
That changes the question you ask about yourself. Whether you still hurt is not the test. Of course you do. The useful question is whether your hurt still expects anything from God. How much it hurts cannot tell you whether you are bitter. What the hurt is attached to can.
Bitterness also does not hold still. Edmondson puts it this way: “it’s enduring and it’s festering. So it grows, it gets more, deep seated and deep rooted into who we are.” Over time it stops being a reaction to one event and becomes part of how a person sees everything.
Its sources are mixed, and she is honest about that. Bitterness can be “a legit response to very real hurt and pain,” and it can also grow from “a misguided entitlement that we have.” Some of it comes from real injustice. Some comes from an expectation that life or other people owed us more than they did. A careful look at your own heart has room for either possibility without assuming the worst about yourself.
Is it bitter to say how bad it hurts?
No. This is where a familiar religious response can do harm. Many Christians have learned, from a sermon or just from the mood of a room, that faithful people do not stay sad, do not ask hard questions, and do not say out loud that God’s ways feel wrong. Edmondson names the gap directly: “We don’t have a lot of space for lament in general, in contemporary American church culture.” As a result, “people haven’t seen that model very well.”
Scripture models it plainly. Edmondson points to Naomi, who arrives back in Bethlehem after losing her husband and both sons and asks to be renamed. “Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me” (Ruth 1:20). Naomi is not voicing a calm trust that God is shaping her through suffering. In Edmondson’s paraphrase of the mood, it sounds more like “I’m blaming you God, like you’ve jacked up my life.”
Then comes the observation that matters most for anyone worried about themselves: “the women don’t stay there, though.” Ruth is narrative, so it records Naomi’s words without holding them up as a model. It also does not erase them or punish her for them. Her bitter speech stays in the record, and the story keeps moving until it ends in redemption and a child in her arms. Saying something bitter was not the end of Naomi’s story.
Job gives the other half of the picture. In the middle of loss he cannot explain, he says, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (Job 13:15). Edmondson reads this as an honest admission of deep pain alongside a decision to keep trusting a sovereign God. The Psalms do the same work as poetry, with David and others telling God exactly how bad things are.
Her practical counsel follows: “the goal isn’t for us to deny a negative feeling or a painful feeling.” And more bluntly, “if things are messed up, you should acknowledge that they’re messed up.” The danger lies elsewhere, in settling into the pain and, from there, denying that God is good and gracious. That is where she locates the beginning of bitterness, the point at which it starts shaping who we are and how we see other people. For anyone afraid of saying the wrong thing in prayer, she adds some relief: “God already knows our heart.” You are not giving him information he lacks. You are refusing to hide it from him.
What are the signs that pain is setting into bitterness?
Bitterness rarely feels like bitterness from the inside. It feels like clarity, like finally seeing a person or a church for what they are. So it helps to have signs you can actually check for, and Edmondson offers three.
The first is hope. She suggests “discerning whether or not we no longer have hope.” Hope here does not mean pretending. It lets you say this is terrible and this really happened, and then it adds something: “hope reminds us that this is not eternal.” That hope rests outside the situation itself. “We have a confidence in a person from the Christian perspective that is separate from our current circumstance.” If your confidence has collapsed entirely into your circumstance, so that the wound has become the only true thing, pay attention.
The second is whether you can be comforted. The warning comes “if we can’t be soothed and we don’t want to be soothed.” Edmondson compares it to drinking something that leaves a bad taste and then refusing the glass of water. “You wanna keep the bad taste in your mouth.” Grief often cannot be soothed for a long time, and that by itself is no sign of anything wrong. The sign is turning comfort away on purpose, because accepting it would feel like letting the offense go.
The third is the hardest to admit: “sometimes bitterness can give us a sense of power.” Staying unforgiving can make a person feel bold and in control. Edmondson calls it a fake power, one that “it’s actually turning inward and eating us up.” She gathers the warning signs together: not wanting to forgive, feeling entitled not to forgive, and “getting a sense of power and purpose from the victimization or from the pain.”
Finding one of these in yourself does not mean you have failed. It means something needs attention while it is still small.
Can staying quiet make you bitter too?
This is the part of Edmondson’s thinking that surprises many readers. We usually picture bitterness as loud: the grudge, the rant, the cold shoulder. She describes a quieter path. “That’s one of the ways in which bitterness manifests itself, is that there is a wrongdoing that takes place, and we opt not to disclose it.” Then she adds: “We just eat it.”
Her illustration comes from her work on racial microaggressions. With students she uses a Jenga tower, where each block pulled out stands for a small insult or indignity. Eventually the tower falls, and that collapse is often the only moment others notice. They see the fall and miss all the missing pieces. Her counsel is that “we have to do something about each of those pieces, each of those indignities.” She also observes that “one of the most painful things about racism for black Americans, is that people simply deny our experience.” From her work with people who have been abused, she says that kind of denial is part of what makes pain linger until it takes over a person’s whole identity.
The implication reaches beyond race. If you have spent years absorbing wrongs without naming them, your bitterness may have less to do with refusing to forgive than with never being allowed to tell the truth. Edmondson treats truth-telling as part of the cure and warns against efforts to “deny the truth, which is a means of grace.” Saying plainly that something was wrong is the honest first half of lament. It does not start a grudge.
Why is it so hard to see this in myself?
“Community is essential,” Edmondson says, because “it’s really, really hard for us to see ourselves.” Other people often see what we cannot. She imagines a trusted friend agreeing that you have been wronged and then asking, “dear brother, dear sister, is bitterness taking root?” The friend might press further: “Or would you feel better just letting it ferment in you?”
Hebrews 12:15 carries the same concern for a whole congregation, telling believers to watch “lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled.” The verse treats bitterness as something that spreads from one person into a body of people, and it makes the body responsible for noticing.
Edmondson attaches a condition that hurt people should take seriously. This kind of honesty only helps “when there’s a relationship of trust and respect.” Someone who has dismissed your pain has not earned the right to diagnose your bitterness. Look for the friend who believed you first.
Fear is part of why bitterness hides so well. After being hurt, we tend to “paint with a broad brush” and end up “putting a whole group of people in timeout.” Edmondson ties this to 1 John 4:18, “perfect love casteth out fear,” and observes that “much of what we are talking about is the fear of being hurt again.” She does not promise the danger will pass. Of the people who hurt you, she says frankly, “those people just might cut up again. As a matter of fact, they probably will.” Her claim is narrower and more believable: fear of the next injury does not have to decide every step you take.
Does avoiding bitterness mean acting like it is fine?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight answer. To someone who has been badly hurt, talk about bitterness can sound like one more way of saying get over it. Edmondson’s own account rules that out. She insists the wrong be named, grants that bitterness can be a legitimate response to real pain, and treats denial of someone’s experience as part of the injury.
Forgiveness is still part of Christian faith for her. Because Christ has forgiven the worst in us, she says, we can and must forgive others. That is a real obligation, and it can land hard on someone whose wound is fresh. But an obligation can be carried out over time. Forgiveness often comes slowly, sometimes in pieces, and being not yet able to forgive is different from deciding to hold on to the debt. The second is what Edmondson’s signs describe: the grudge kept on purpose, the entitlement, the power drawn from it. The first is ordinary grief still at work, and it can be brought to God honestly while it is unfinished.
Forgiveness is also not the same as restored relationship. Speaking about racial reconciliation, Edmondson says “we have to seek reconciliation in unity, but that requires repentance and truth.” Reconciliation depends on the other person telling the truth and changing. Forgiving someone does not require returning to a person who is still causing harm. If you are being abused now, your first need is safety, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233. Seeing a counselor or therapist is not a failure of faith. God works through trained people. If hopelessness has started turning into thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
What does bitterness finally do to a person?
Edmondson’s sharpest warning is this: “the temptation is for you to become what it is that you hate.” She goes on, “You become obsessed with it, consumed by it.” She connects it to Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:1, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” and to the way harsh standards we apply to others come back on us. Bitterness slowly takes the shape of the wrong it fixates on. Others notice, too. In her view, “people external to the Christian faith have a right to critique us based on what we show behaviorally.”
This is why the hope test matters so much. A person who has lost hope has nothing left to measure the wrong against except the wrong itself, and so it fills the whole frame. Edmondson finds the alternative in the historic Black church, which in her reading faced people trying to kill them and chose forgiveness “as an expression of a steadfast hope that was bigger than white supremacy.” That hope did not deny the injustice. It kept the injustice from becoming the largest thing in view, because it looked past it to the God of justice.
You cannot always control how long a wound hurts. You have more say over whether it stays a lament, spoken honestly to a God you still expect something from. Naomi came home and said the bitter thing out loud. Her story did not stop there, and yours does not have to either.