The grudge you can’t put down may be the last thing still tying you to them.
Imagine a lawsuit that has dragged on for years. The plaintiff insists they want justice. They preserve every insult, rehearse every argument, and keep the defendant present in their mind through the case. Yet every chance to settle somehow falls through. Why would anyone keep alive a suffering they say they want ended?
The plaintiff’s hidden terror is settlement. If the damages are paid and the defendant leaves, the plaintiff has to go home. The grievance hurt, but it also organized reality: a wrong, a wrongdoer, a court, a possible verdict. It gave the self a role, an audience, an explanation, and a tether to the one who supposedly caused the pain. The case must never end because the case is the relationship.
Lacan’s name for what the plaintiff gets out of this is jouissance: not happiness but the satisfaction extracted from the very pain that appears to block happiness. Jouissance is suffering that has become a relational technology: pain preserved because it keeps someone, something, or some imagined judge in the room.
What the case pays
Jouissance begins where pain stops being merely aversive and becomes load-bearing. The bitter person does not simply remember the injury; they return to it for warmth. The grievance proves that someone mattered enough to damage them, that the world still owes them an answer, and that the Other is still implicated in their being. Like resentment guarded as treasure, handing it over would feel like losing the last proof that the injury meant something.
That is why closing the case is so hard to want. Completion removes motion, and without motion the psyche has to face the blank question underneath: what am I when there is nothing left to fix? So when one case is settled, it files another. The relationship becomes slightly wrong, then the body, then the job. Therapy can feed this too. “I cannot be happy yet because I still need to process my trauma” can be true for a season. Past that season, it becomes jouissance with clinical permission.
The court with no defendant
Often the defendant left long ago. The childhood bully made you feel impotent; the parent made you feel permanently judged; the peer group made your worth conditional. Those scenes mattered because they installed the template. But the bully no longer exists, the parent is not in the room, and the peer group has no jurisdiction. What remains is an internal court still holding proceedings after the defendant, judge and audience have gone home.
In a mianzi culture the court is especially well staffed: parents, relatives, teachers, school rankings, marriage markets and the invisible tribunal of “what people will say.” The child learns to run the tribunal internally, so leaving the room does not help; the parent can be silent and still speak inside the child. Here the suffering proves the court is still real, and keeps you inside the family’s structure after your body has left it. Letting it go feels at first less like relief than like betrayal.
So the way out is not to win the case and collect happiness as the verdict, because that keeps happiness at the end of a project and keeps the psyche generating projects. Baseline happiness is not the prize after the case is won. It becomes available when you notice that the case has been over for years and you have been keeping it alive for the satisfaction of prosecution. If the pain says “I am being dominated” but no one is currently dominating you, the pain is no longer information about the present. It is a loyalty ritual to the past.
The admission
None of this means the injury was imaginary. Pain is the wound. Jouissance is the psychic economy that grows around the wound and learns to feed on it. People still need motion and difficulty; the point is to stop choosing projects whose hidden function is self-punishment.
The useful question is not “why am I still suffering?” but what does this suffering let me keep? Often the honest answer is unflattering: the old defendant, the fantasy of a final verdict, the self-image of the wronged one. Freedom begins with admitting that some part of you has been getting exactly what it wanted from this misery. Not all of you, and not the part that wants peace.
That admission is not self-condemnation. It is the first honest withdrawal from the lawsuit. The judge disappears and the case file closes. What remains is not instant happiness, but something more workable: a life that no longer gets to outsource its shape to the wound.