Great post! I agree that love and grief are different sides of the same coin. Strange as it may sound, love and hate usually are too. Maybe love and resentment as well, as you mention resentment. If you didn't care about someone, their actions would mean nothing to you. It's the dashing of our expectations that is the issue and we only have expectation if we are in some kind of relationship and we care. An example of love and hate being so close to each other is the sudden change from love to hate that we sometimes see when a couple separate. They switch from love to intense hate. After several years, there's no longer any hate and the love has gone too, they other person is just a memory. Also I like your comment about changing your thinking in order to change your emotional responses. My take is this - our beliefs determine our thoughts and our thoughts determine our emotions. If our thoughts and emotions aren't working for us, we can choose to change our beliefs to find some more suitable ones and the ensuing thoughts and emotions will change too. I have test-driven this successfully. My wife died after an illness, i was devastated when I realized she was going to die. One of her daughters decided that the substantial assets I had from before I had met and married her mother were fair game so she started legal action. My take, and that of many others, is that she wanted my money to which she had no entitlement. A further irony is that I had rescued her from bankruptcy twice and had looked after her financially for years. During my wife's illness, she and a sister took advantage of their mother, my wife, and essentially helped themselves to her cash when visiting etc. The litigating daughter's sisters and my wife's sisters sided with me. It was all about greed but I also felt betrayed. After 7 years of courts and legal fees, the pile was much reduced. She eventually gave up having gained nothing. I hated her with a passion for awhile but now feel some general love, no hate, but I choose not to have her in my life as she's a toxic person. The last time I spent time with her I saw that she had a long running drinking problem. A sad messed up, misdirected soul who is doing life the hard way, arguably well-deserved (he said with almost no rancor). I ended up depressed, grieving and drinking. In a dark hole. Now I am rebuilding my life and my assets with a new business, and I have done this mostly by working on creating new beliefs that work for me, having discarded some old ones.