‘Revenge is the fool’s weapon!
Right, but a bigger fool is the one who does not take revenge’
These were “memes by stupid kids”, as I was, where I grew up.
We would assemble in gangs and, if someone from another gang did something to someone from ours, we had to take revenge. It did not matter that after two days the gangs formed different, that we forgave each other as if we would wipe clean everything that happened. The “tooth for tooth” principle risks leaving all of us toothless many times.
On a different scale, we see similar manifestations in the business environment. People hold a grudge, they do not forget what someone did to them three years ago, they do not forgive.
Any relationship with people, at the office or in our private lives, with friends, family, comes with the risk of being hurt. Maybe our parents were tough with us, teachers behaved badly, put us in unpleasant situations in front of the class, we had colleagues and friends who sabotaged us or a boy/girlfriend who left us. When we let a person get close to us, we become vulnerable.
Of course, protecting ourselves from predators helped us survive. But we risk reaching an endless stream of revenge, of negativity, which harms our mental and physical health.
I remember that a long time ago, when I was angry, upset with someone and I would tell my psychotherapist how I would punch the one who had hurt me, and she would say: ‘ You can react better than that’. I think about it every time I get angrier than I should.
When we can’t forgive someone, those feelings become like a poisonous organism that we keep inside ourselves and which grows, taking more and more space, with the risk of destroying us from within.
Hate, distrust, suspicion, the need for revenge create the right environment for elevated stress, anxiety, depression, neuroticism, heart problems, immune system deficiencies.
What do people who have difficulties forgiving do:
Analyse and analyse again – they turn every subject on all sides, no matter how far from the present they are. It is as if they wear VR goggles in which all the negative aspects of their lives are run, so that they do not forget them.
They lack empathy – a method to heal the need for revenge, hatred, is to think from the other’s perspective, to try and understand his/her reasons. Empathy develops a lot in childhood, and if the parents were not present or they were rather abusive, children have difficulties understanding someone else’s perspective.
The feeling of not having enough– many people often compare themselves with others, they complain that they do not have enough, they are envious of the wealth, status, and success of others. No matter how much they have, these people complain so much, that you might come to believe them and tell them: It’s alright, I am going to help you. This feeling of shortcomings comes from the lack of affection in childhood, which makes them concentrate on what they do not have.
Forgiveness does not mean accepting abusive, inappropriate behaviors, or staying in toxic relationships. It means to free ourselves from the hurtful and painful memories.
We can’t erase the past. It is there and is part of our personal history. We will not even be able to forget, we’re not amnesiacs. But we can work with ourselves so that we choose not to get into such situations, to control how we look back and how we look into the future, to create a state of inner peace, to forgive ourselves, to accept who we are. That was all we were able to do back then, maybe we made mistakes, maybe we were in the wrong place, but the other’s mistakes and our own do not define how we can and want to be. Those are just specks of shadows in the play of lights that we want to build in our future lives.