stew in one's own juice

To brood over one's unpleasant emotions, such as guilt, anger, or anxiety, in isolation. Kevin was in such a foul mood at dinner that I left early and just let him stew in his own juice. I can tell the suspect is racked with guilt. Let her stew in her juices for a while, and she'll confess.

Suffer the consequences of one's actions, as in He's run into debt again, but this time we're leaving him to stew in his own juice. This metaphoric term alludes to cooking something in its own liquid. Versions of it, such as fry in one's own grease, date from Chaucer's time, but the present term dates from the second half of the 1800s.

Abandoned to suffer the consequences of one’s own actions. Chaucer had a version of this expression in The Canterbury Tales (The Wife of Bath’s Tale): “In his own gress [grease] I made him frie for anger and for very jalousie.” A closer equivalent was Henry Carey’s version (Advertisements from Parnassus, 1656): “He could not better discover Hypocrites than by suffering them (like Oysters) to stew in their own water.” The exact modern wording dates from the second half of the nineteenth century.