Making Sense of Injustice
How A Holocaust Survivor Found
Meaning in the Darkest Moment
By Damodar Roe
The Resentment Rollercoaster
Betrayal turns your mind into a rollercoaster. The details of what happened are like the track for your thoughts—following the evidence that exposes their hypocrisy and proves they were wrong. Every time you go over it, the case feels more clear. This redeems your sense of justice, but it also burns your heart and mind that they refuse to see the truth that you do. The world goes on like nothing happened, while you’re still waiting to correct the past. It’s exhausting and lonely to be right sometimes.
The resentment rollercoaster is anything but soothing. One moment you’re plunging into the depth of self-pity. You dwell on the damage that was done, and you feel like a victim who was crushed and forgotten. The next moment, you’re soaring up to the heights of self-righteousness. You picture your comeback, and feel like the avenger who will prove them all wrong one day. Each emotional turn feels authentic in the moment, but neither one brings you lasting peace or stability. Instead, you’re stuck trying to make sense of what honestly, makes no sense.
And when the ride gets too intense, you reach for relief. Sometimes you numb yourself with screens, substances, or fantasies. Other times the pressure bursts out in sharp words or vengeful actions. Each escape promises to give you freedom, but only leaves you with more guilt, shame, and the same unresolved pain and longing beneath it all.
That’s why the rollercoaster is an endless loop. It makes you feel sick and upset, but never goes anywhere. The way forward isn’t to deny the truth or admit defeat—but to find a better strategy. One where you can stand for what’s right without destroying yourself in the process.
In this article, we’ll explore how resentment fuels depression, addiction, and makes you lose sight of what’s important. Then we’ll look at the example of Viktor Frankl, a man who discovered a life-affirming sense of meaning even in the face of extreme injustice. His story shows us how it’s possible to exit the resentment rollercoaster and develop a sense of identity, purpose, and meaning that no one can take away.
The Dark Side of People-Pleasing
The endless loop of resentment doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Often, it begins with something that feels deeply heartfelt—like devotion, care, or loyalty—but it gradually twists into resentment when it isn’t returned. The bottom line is that resentment comes from unmet expectations. Sometimes those expectations were perfectly reasonable and agreed upon. But other times, we carry unconscious expectations into the world from our childhood relationship with our parents, teachers, or friends. For example, you might expect that if you show people deep empathy, loyalty, and care, then they will be grateful and return the favor. But what happens when they don’t? Or worse, they intentionally go against you?
At first, you insist it must be a misunderstanding. You think, “if they realized how sincere my devotion was, they would reciprocate.” So when they don’t, your devotion turns into denial. You persist in waiting for the acknowledgement you believe you deserve.
When the rejection becomes undeniable, you interpret their refusal as blindness or corruption. Because if they saw the sincerity of your love, they would have to return it. So when they don’t, your devotion turns into moral condemnation. You persist in seeing things in a way that proves you were right.
And when no one takes your side, you’re left alone in your convictions. You imagine and plan your revenge so you can finally get even. You think, “if they could feel the injustice I suffered, then they would finally recognize me.” You persist in the belief that others should suffer for letting you down.
In this way, the earnest wish for connection can transform into something dark—the desire for revenge. It might have come from a very deep, sincere, and valid wish that you have. But when you carry hidden expectations, other people might not realize the weight you’ve placed on them. They also might refuse to be bound. Either way, when expectations backfire, it reveals that our love wasn’t as pure as we originally thought. We need to be more honest about what we want, take it slow, and allow others to make their own choices without obligation.
The Victim Avenger Cycle
When your sincerity goes unreciprocated, it can create a lot of emotional havoc. It brings up feelings like humiliation and helplessness. But by the time it’s undeniable that they’re going against your expectations, you’ve usually already transformed that emotional pain into a new form of information that you can control.
The first form is moralized narratives. You take the facts of what happened and imbue them with a meaning that redeems you. What they did wasn’t just a choice, but a moral failure that becomes the defining feature of their character. Likewise, your own sincerity isn’t just effort wasted, but proof of higher loyalty and deeper virtue.
The second form is fantasized memories. You can’t change what happened, so you memorize it and reimagine the event going your way instead. In your mind, they finally recognize your worth, admit their mistake, and return in regret. The ending becomes what it should have been, even if only in imagination.
We turn to these strategies—controlling the story, claiming the moral high ground, and fantasizing about reversal—when we refuse to accept the reality. Instead, we transform the pain and turn it into proof that we are right. But this proof, and our absolute certainty in it, is a trap that keeps us swinging back and forth between victimhood and imagined vengeance, without ever bringing peace.
The Reactive Justification Trap
Resentment grows strongest in the gap between powerlessness and pride. On one hand, you feel like you deserve better than how they treated you. But on the other hand, you can’t change what they did in the past, and even to some extent in the present. The unresolvable tension becomes an internal friction and pressure that has to go somewhere.
You start to think that, since you don’t deserve to feel this way, you would be justified to take the edge off a little. So you engage in some habits that quickly and effectively make you feel pleasant. A common one for men is to look at pornography, because this stimulates the illusion of being wanted by beautiful women, and therefore high status. Then you start to think that, since they deserve to be exposed or punished, you’re justified to deliver what they’ve got coming. So you do or say something to damage them, and it’s often something you can’t take back once you’ve hit the send button.
When you justify your actions by pointing out the evilness of the person you’re reacting against, the danger is that person becomes the foundation of your moral judgements. You stop considering whether a choice is good or bad in and of itself, and instead, you suffice to say that whatever you do, at least you’re not as bad as the person you despise. But there’s no limit to what you can justify by pointing to the faults of others as worse than your own. And that’s no recipe for positively clarifying your own values and becoming the person you want to be. Reactive justification is a trap that only leads to choices that you yourself don’t actually respect.
The Impossible Rise of Viktor Frankl
If resentment is a trap of reactive finger pointing, Frankl’s life offers a completely different path: an example of how you can find meaning even in the face of unimaginable loss and injustice.
Before World War II, Viktor Frankl was a rising psychiatrist in Vienna. He had a thriving practice and a family he adored. He was a man with a future.
But then it was all ripped from him. simply because he was Jewish, he was thrown into a concentration camp, where his life meant nothing to the authorities in charge. From the very beginning, people were killed as a matter of sport. He was separated from his family, with no idea what happened to them. And even though he protested to keep the manuscripts of his life work, which he had poured himself into for years, they just mocked him and threw it away like it was worthless. From then on, he was recognized as nothing more than a number stitched on a filthy uniform: 119,104. Starved, worked without break, humiliated—every day he was surrounded by cruelty so absurd it felt like the world itself had lost its mind.
By every measure, Frankl had more right to be resentful than most of us will ever face. If anyone deserved to hate, to condemn, to plot revenge, it was him. And he did feel that way sometimes.
One day, after hours of backbreaking work repairing a railway in the snow, Frankl paused for a moment’s breath. A guard, perceiving only laziness, hurled a rock at him. He thought: “I am an educated man, a doctor. And here I am, treated worse than an animal.” One moment, they accused you of being lazy pigs for not helping each other. The next, they punished you for going out of your way for a comrade who was struggling. No logic, no fairness. Only humiliation for its own sake. Frankl could not help but see his captors as vulgar brutes—barely human in their crudeness.
But as time passed, he began to study how different people responded to the circumstances. He noticed that what made people survive wasn’t physical—sometimes the most well-built men succumbed to despair—but it was the ability to maintain a rich mental world. The thing was, if you hated the Nazis too much, then they pervaded every aspect of your life. So instead of trying to make sense of their actions, or prove in his mind how evil they were, he began a new kind of contemplation. It started with picturing the smiling face of his wife. Even while he was marching or following orders, he discovered a kind of spiritual freedom to connect with the feeling of love. It felt like a breakthrough victory.
Next, he reconnected with his sense of humor. Then the simple that joy comes from being kind to others. Gradually, Viktor discovered more spiritual avenues for his mind. He thought about how he might use his realizations to help others once he was finally freed. He prayed. He contemplated the meaning of life. What he realized was that when you give into resentment, you become consumed by thoughts of the enemy. You lose your values, your self-respect, your inner freedom, and your ability to consciously choose your response. You become the animal they treated you like. But no one can force you to twist your soul into hatred. Even if they rip everything else away, they can never take, unless you allow it, the last of human freedoms: to choose your attitude and actions. Viktor stopped fearing death and cared only about making the most of the life he still had.
His view of human nature changed, too. Before he saw himself and his fellow captives as victims to an evil regime of maniacs. But then he began to notice discrepancies in that story. Sometimes prisoners jockeyed for positions of relative superiority, and then tried to humiliate others by comparing them to their former selves. Sometimes he saw Nazi guards, though mostly cold and cruel, engage in an act of unnecessary kindness—like giving their own ration of bread to a starving prisoner. He realized that no one is inherently good or bad, but our moment-to-moment choices make us so. And that’s why it’s so important to choose good, even when the way others treat is evil.
In his own words:
“The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation, he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.”
A New Meaning For Old Experiences
Resentment feeds on comparative meaning. First, you compare the way you see yourself with the way you were treated. And you feel like it’s an injustice if they don’t treat you the way you deserve. Then the comparisons multiply. You notice how hypocritical they are, how easily they move on, and how the world rewards them while you are left wounded. You compare the person you know with the way others seem to treat them, and you see how unfair it is. The obsession drives you crazy. And each contrast sharpens the injustice: you deserved better, but they stole your dignity and ignored your pain.
It’s really easy to remain stuck there. But what Frankl discovered was a different way to make meaning. Rather than looking for meaning in the insults and mistreatment of his captors, he found intrinsic meaning in his mind, choices, and actions. This shift is profound for one simple reason. You ultimately can’t control what other people think or do. But you can control what you think and do. And by finding meaning in the area of your natural control, you become a free man again.
The secret is to ask different questions:
When something bad happens, the instinct is to ask, “Why me?” But this is the question of a victim who feels self-pity. Instead, Frankl asked, “What is life asking of me right now, in order to live meaningfully, no matter what happens?”
When people are cruel or hypocritical, the instinct is to ask, “How could they do that?” But this is the question of an avenger who feels self-righteous anger. Instead, Frankl asked, “What kind of response reflects the person I want to become?”
Lastly, after a betrayal, the instinct is to ask, “When will I get justice so that I can finally rest?” But this is the question of a powerless person. Instead, Frankl asked, “What can I control and what is simply my fate?”
From Victim to Victor
There are two imagined roles that keep us stuck on the resentment rollercoaster: the victim and the avenger. They might seem like opposites, but both serve the same purpose: to entrench the pain as opposition and harden you against the enemy.
When you identify as the victim in the story, you a kind of feel self-pity that tells you, “I didn’t deserve this.” It softens the sting of humiliation by giving you the moral high ground, thus you not worthless, but mistreated. In this way, identifying as the victim and feeling pity for yourself is a kind of protection against shame. But it comes at the cost of making wait helplessly for someone else to make the situation right.
Therefore, to combat this sense of helpless waiting, you assume a new role. You identify as the avenger in the story, and you feel a kind of self-righteousness that tells you, “I am better than them.” This lifts you out of the pit of despair by restoring a sense of purpose. But this locks you into a world of comparative meaning, alienates you from your original values, and makes you do things that erode your self-respect.
The problem isn’t the longing behind these mindsets. You do need care and reassurance when you’re hurting. You do need strength and courage to move forward. The problem is the strategy. Self-pity and self-righteousness try to give you comfort and courage through comparison — by measuring yourself against those who hurt you. But comparison only takes you in circles.
We need better ways to comfort ourselves and then gather the courage to take action. And this is where self-compassion and self-encouragement step in. They meet the same needs—comfort and courage—but they draw on intrinsic meaning instead of comparison.
Self-compassion is not self-pity. It doesn’t shrink you into helplessness or keep you waiting for someone else to repair the wound. And it’s not self-indulgence either—it doesn’t excuse harmful choices or let you off the hook. Self-compassion is simply the willingness to acknowledge your own suffering and meet it with care. Instead of waiting forever for the wrongdoer to fix things, you make it a priority to care for yourself or find someone who can help.
Self-encouragement is not bravado or empty pep talk. It doesn’t make you bigger by making someone else smaller. Self-encouragement is the quiet conviction that even in difficulty, you can take the next step forward with integrity. It allows you to say, “This is hard, but I can rise to the occasion. I can choose the virtues I stand for even here.” Instead of hating the wrongdoer, you refuse to let them define you. You move forward positively with your life, not letting anyone stop you.
Conclusion
The resentful mind is already a master at finding meaning in experiences. You take scraps of memory and turn them into stories of right and wrong, victim and villain, proof and verdict. That ability to interpret and connect events is a real strength—but when it’s fueled by resentment, it chains your personal worth to the recognition of those who hurt you. And this is a trap that keeps you trying to make sense of what makes no sense.
But when you take that same strength, you can use it to break free from the emotional rollercoaster of resentment. Viktor Frankl’s life is an incredible example of this. The key is to take care of the emotional wound with compassion, rather than neglecting it while focusing hate on the perpetrator, and to take action with integrity rather than looking down on others. That’s what Frankl did, even in the worst possible circumstances, and it transformed him from a victim to a victor.
We hardly encounter such appalling hardships. But the same opportunity is still there in any situation. You don’t have to excuse the wrongdoing or pretend it never happened. But you can decide what it means to you. It could be a stain that you fight forever to remove, it could just be an event that means nothing about you, or it could even be the very challenge which makes for an adventurous journey of personal growth. The most empowering perspective is always to find meaning in your own choices, rather than those of others, and take your next step with courage. Because when you do, you realize that your dignity is not as something that others must return to you, but something they never had the power to take away in the first place.
Thanks for reading!
Escaping the grip of resentment is no small task. The traps are subtle, and they feed on your best intentions. You wait for others to admit fault, hoping their recognition will heal you. Or you cling to accusations, replaying the case until it feels airtight, yet all the while postponing the deeper work of healing and thriving. These habits offer a temporary sense of control, but in truth, they delay healing and prolong your suffering.
In this article, we explored how resentment sustains itself through comparative meaning-making, how it morphs into the Victim/Avenger Cycle, and how it fuels the Reactive Justification Trap. These are not just metaphors—they reflect real cognitive and emotional mechanisms identified in philosophy and psychology. Friedrich Nietzsche described ressentiment as a form of inverted value-creation, where one’s worth becomes dependent on the condemnation of the other. Modern psychology frames similar dynamics in terms of maladaptive coping strategies, moral injury, and the cycle of addictive behaviors that temporarily soothe pain but erode self-respect. Viktor Frankl’s example shows us the opposite: the movement from comparative to intrinsic meaning, from reactive justification to proactive freedom.
This shift is possible. But it rarely happens alone. The mind is skilled at replaying old loops, and the dignity you long for is easily entangled with the very patterns that keep you stuck. That’s why I invite you to reach out if this article resonated with you. I offer a free two-session consultation where we’ll map your specific resentments, identify the traps keeping you bound, and design a personalized path forward.
You don’t have to stay on the rollercoaster. With the right support, you can step off and reclaim a sense of self-respect, meaning, and freedom that no one can take away.