Revenge
You feel revenge when somebody harms you by breaking the rules.
The negative mental effect of revenge starts, for example, when:
Revenge requires rule breaking.
You don't feel revenge if somebody harms you without breaking the rules. You do feel revenge, for example, if a stranger bumps you as you walk down the street. You do not feel revenge if you are bumped by another player in a contact sport. You do feel revenge if another driver cuts you off. You do not feel revenge if an ambulance cuts you off.
The more a rule breaker harms you, the stronger the revenge you feel.
If a robber mugs you for your wallet, you will feel moderate revenge. If the robber also gives you a black eye, you will feel much stronger revenge.
The stronger revenge is, the more likelier you are to retaliate. You are more likely to report a mugger that also gives you a black eye.
You stop feeling revenge when you retaliate against the rule breaker.
The negative mental effect of revenge stops, for example, when:
Revenge does not stop until you achieve eye-for-an-eye retaliation.
If another driver cuts you off in traffic, they have caused you minor harm - they just increased your risk of an accident and disrupted your placid mood. Yelling a profanity at the other driver should cause them a similar degree of disruption. If a drunk driver leaves you handicapped, yelling a profanity will not be enough to stop your revenge. The drunk driver will need to serve years in jail to equate to your handicap.
The need for eye-for-eye retaliation determines how much you retaliate. You keep feeling revenge until you have harmed the rule breaker as much as the rule breaker harmed you.
If you never retaliate, revenge never stops.
If you don't get someone back, you will keep feeling revenge towards them forever. Everybody can think of people who have harmed them years ago that they still remember today. Everybody holds grudges. Everybody has lists, most unwritten, of people that have wronged them over the years. These are lists of unstopped revenge.
Don Rickles was asked how his friend Frank Sinatra was doing given that he was getting older and was rumored to be losing his memory. Rickles responded, "Oh, he's got Sicilian Alzheimer's. He only remembers the grudges."
Forgiving does not stop revenge. You can say "I forgive you" but it won't stop the feeling of revenge in your head. It can only be stopped by retaliation.
People usually deal with unstopped revenge by harming innocent people.
At a given moment, there is a huge amount of unstopped revenge in all communities. People are frequently in situations where they are harmed by rule breaking and cannot retaliate against the rule breaker. The two big sources: bosses and parents.
Bosses often mistreat their employees. They humiliate them with criticism or jokes, for instance. And employees cannot generally retaliate without losing their jobs. So employees accumulate unstopped revenge with each day of humiliation.
Employees often deal with unstopped revenge at home. They stop their revenge by retaliating against family members. Parents who come home with unstopped revenge often take it out on their children. They have disproportionate responses to the tiniest rule breaking by the child. A child, for example, accidentally breaks a glass and the father flies into a rage striking his child. The unstopped revenge gets transferred to the child.
Pet abusers, bullies and haters feel unstopped revenge. People who seek to harm others are trying to stop their unstopped revenge. They have learned in the past that they stop feeling unhappy for a while when they are mean to others. And they pick victims that cannot fight back - pets, smaller people or posting anonymously.
The negative mental effect of revenge starts, for example, when:
- somebody cuts you off while driving
- somebody cuts in front of you in a line-up
- somebody spreads rumors about you
- somebody intentionally injures you
- somebody steals from you
Revenge requires rule breaking.
You don't feel revenge if somebody harms you without breaking the rules. You do feel revenge, for example, if a stranger bumps you as you walk down the street. You do not feel revenge if you are bumped by another player in a contact sport. You do feel revenge if another driver cuts you off. You do not feel revenge if an ambulance cuts you off.
The more a rule breaker harms you, the stronger the revenge you feel.
If a robber mugs you for your wallet, you will feel moderate revenge. If the robber also gives you a black eye, you will feel much stronger revenge.
The stronger revenge is, the more likelier you are to retaliate. You are more likely to report a mugger that also gives you a black eye.
You stop feeling revenge when you retaliate against the rule breaker.
The negative mental effect of revenge stops, for example, when:
- you yell a profanity at somebody who cut you off
- you publicly shame somebody for cutting in a line-up
- you spread rumors about somebody who spread rumors about you
- you injure somebody who intentionally injured you
- you have somebody who stole from you charged with theft
Revenge does not stop until you achieve eye-for-an-eye retaliation.
If another driver cuts you off in traffic, they have caused you minor harm - they just increased your risk of an accident and disrupted your placid mood. Yelling a profanity at the other driver should cause them a similar degree of disruption. If a drunk driver leaves you handicapped, yelling a profanity will not be enough to stop your revenge. The drunk driver will need to serve years in jail to equate to your handicap.
The need for eye-for-eye retaliation determines how much you retaliate. You keep feeling revenge until you have harmed the rule breaker as much as the rule breaker harmed you.
If you never retaliate, revenge never stops.
If you don't get someone back, you will keep feeling revenge towards them forever. Everybody can think of people who have harmed them years ago that they still remember today. Everybody holds grudges. Everybody has lists, most unwritten, of people that have wronged them over the years. These are lists of unstopped revenge.
Don Rickles was asked how his friend Frank Sinatra was doing given that he was getting older and was rumored to be losing his memory. Rickles responded, "Oh, he's got Sicilian Alzheimer's. He only remembers the grudges."
Forgiving does not stop revenge. You can say "I forgive you" but it won't stop the feeling of revenge in your head. It can only be stopped by retaliation.
People usually deal with unstopped revenge by harming innocent people.
At a given moment, there is a huge amount of unstopped revenge in all communities. People are frequently in situations where they are harmed by rule breaking and cannot retaliate against the rule breaker. The two big sources: bosses and parents.
Bosses often mistreat their employees. They humiliate them with criticism or jokes, for instance. And employees cannot generally retaliate without losing their jobs. So employees accumulate unstopped revenge with each day of humiliation.
Employees often deal with unstopped revenge at home. They stop their revenge by retaliating against family members. Parents who come home with unstopped revenge often take it out on their children. They have disproportionate responses to the tiniest rule breaking by the child. A child, for example, accidentally breaks a glass and the father flies into a rage striking his child. The unstopped revenge gets transferred to the child.
Pet abusers, bullies and haters feel unstopped revenge. People who seek to harm others are trying to stop their unstopped revenge. They have learned in the past that they stop feeling unhappy for a while when they are mean to others. And they pick victims that cannot fight back - pets, smaller people or posting anonymously.
People often express anger when they feel revenge.
Revenge is a negative mental effect. Anger is a facial and oral expression that includes yelling, screaming, profanity, threatening, hand waving, furled brows and glaring. While revenge is an involuntary mental reaction, anger is voluntary physical behavior.
Anger seems to be an involuntary reaction to revenge - it happens without thinking when you feel revenge. It seems to be involuntary because it is a deeply ingrained habit, like walking or talking. You don't think about walking or talking - just do it out of habit. Similarly, you don't think about anger - just express it out of habit.
Proof that anger is voluntary: people don't always express anger when feeling revenge. People do not express anger, for example, when insulted by their boss. More proof that anger is voluntary: people often express anger when not feeling revenge. Mothers, for example, sometimes express anger without feeling revenge to manage their children.
Revenge and anger must be separated to be understood and managed.
Although they often occur in lockstep, revenge and anger are very different. Revenge is an involuntary mental reaction to reaching a conclusion about another person's behavior. Anger is a voluntary physical behavior intentionally chosen to scare or harm another person. As you'll read below, the methods for avoiding or stopping them are also very different.
Anger is just one form of retaliation.
There is a spectrum of behaviors that people use to retaliate. Anger is at the nice end of the spectrum. The more somebody harmed you, the more harmful your retaliation will be. If you insulted me, I will probably just give you the cold shoulder. If you cut me off in traffic, I will probably express anger by yelling a profanity at you. If you are a business partner who stole from me, I will probably sue you. If you harm me physically, I will probably use violence against you.
You are not broken or abnormal if you want to hurt people.
It would be logical to wonder about yourself if you frequently find that you want to harm others. Particularly when you are picturing behavior that is bound to be bad for you like assaulting others. Why would you want to do something that is stupid for you?
Don't worry. You are normal if you want to hurt people who made you mad. Everybody is programmed to retaliate against rule breakers. And that programming makes you want to retaliate even when it bad for you. Revenge is an emotion that specifically evolved to overcome your rationale conclusion that retaliation is bad for you.
Realizing that revenge is normal makes it easier to manage. You don't waste time wondering if you are broken. More importantly, you don't pursue solutions that assume you are broken - like pharmaceuticals or therapy. Instead, the best approach is to treat revenge as a bit of malware we all have. If you are aware of it, you can minimize how often it is activated. If it is activated, you can better resist the urge to retaliate.
Actively managing your revenge will make you happier and more successful.
You cannot escape feeling revenge entirely, but you can avoid much of it. And for situations when you can avoid it, you can develop the habit of not retaliating.
The more you can manage your revenge, the more problems you will avoid - from losing friends to going to jail. In addition to avoiding problems, you will be more liked by others. The people who can keep their cool when they are provoked are cherished by others for not escalating situations.
The first step is to avoid feeling revenge.
The easiest way to avoid feeling revenge is avoid revenge situations. Don't expose yourself to situations that you know are likely to annoy you.
Parking near the entrance to stores provides an example a revenge situation. You are likely to encounter somebody who parks too close to our car or dents your car with their door. You can avoid these situations by parking away from the entrance where there are many empty spots.
Assuming you can't avoid revenge situations, you might be able to avoid feeling revenge by not reaching the revenge conclusion. The revenge conclusion requires that the other person caused you harm and that they did it by breaking the rules. If you can re-interpret somebody's behavior as not harmful to you or not rule breaking, then you will not feel revenge.
Unsignalled lane changes provide an example where behavior can be re-interpreted to avoid the revenge conclusion. Unsignalled lane changes often cause drivers to feel revenge - they harm you by surprising you and they break the written rules of the road. First, you will not feel revenge if you are not surprised by the lane changes. If you are not surprised, you are not harmed. If you are not harmed, you don't feel revenge. Second, you could adopt the unwritten rules of the road which say not signalling is okay. If not signalling is not rule breaking, you don't feel revenge.
The second step is to resist retaliating.
The best way to resist retaliation is to make doing nothing your ingrained habit. You need to replace the anger habit that is currently ingrained in you with the do nothing habit. Like all deeply ingrained habits, it is not easy to change. However, it is easier than quitting the habit of smoking. There is no positive reinforcement to deal with. You can use revenge situations as opportunities to develop your habit. When somebody cuts you off, for example, see how you well you do nothing.
The do nothing policy applies to both actions and words - say nothing. When feeling revenge, it is impossible to have a constructive conversation. They always descend into an insulting exchange that makes things worse and sometimes escalates to violence.
Resisting retaliation is much easier if you never imagine retaliating. People always imagine how they will retaliate before they do. They usually imagine the retaliation repeatedly. So when they feel a surge of revenge they just act on impulse following the images of retaliation that have become ingrained in their minds. This is when people claim they acted without thinking and can't explain their behavior. They did think about what they did - not when they did it, but many times before.
If you never imagine retaliating, you won't retaliate when your revenge surges. Instead of imagining retaliating, imagine doing and saying nothing. And then do nothing when revenge surges.
If you do nothing, you will be left feeling unstopped revenge. It may lead you to harm an innocent person or retaliate disproportionately to minor rule breaking. Being aware of your unstopped revenge will help you avoid getting angry with an innocent person or retaliating disproportionately to minor rule breaking.
If you do nothing when feeling revenge, you will feel pride when you first do it. The pride will help offset the unstopped revenge.
You should worry about people who feel revenge towards you.
People who feel revenge towards you are programmed to harm you even if it harms them. They will, for instance, key your car if they think you took their parking spot. They are risking a criminal charge to stop their revenge.
If somebody also feels unstopped revenge, you could receive a disproportionate response. When somebody goes postal, it is because a small incident unleashes years of unstopped revenge which can only stopped by being very harmful to others - including murder.
Saying sorry is a smart way to stop another person's revenge.
Sorry is an amazing word. It costs you nothing to say it - really. People are reluctant to say it because it makes them feel humiliation, but humiliation is not real. It does not cost money or harm you physically.
Saying sorry stops a lot of revenge. Everybody thinks it's painful to say sorry. So everybody accepts it harm that achieves eye-for-an-eye retaliation and therefore stops revenge. Hearing sorry reaches insides people's heads and deactivates the revenge malware instructing them to harm you even if it harms them. This approach is particularly good for dealing with irate strangers. Saying sorry publicly turns off their revenge like a switch. Try it sometime. You will be pleasantly surprised. So will the irate person.
Of course, saying sorry only stops weak or moderate revenge. If you injure somebody, for example, you are not going to stop their revenge by just saying sorry.
If you do say sorry, never qualify it. Do not say, for example, "if I offended anyone" before saying sorry. It says to others that you don't think you did anything, but if others think I did something I apologize to them. People qualify apologies because it reduces the humiliation they feel and they think it doesn't make a difference to the people hearing the apology. It does make a difference to them. You are diluting the apology and they know that. As a result, the apology does not stop their revenge.
If sorry is not enough, you should consider letting people retaliate against you.
In many situations where you have caused substantial harm, saying sorry is not enough. Your victim will continue to feel unstopped revenge. If the person is not somebody you'll interact with again, you probably don't have to worry about this. If you do plan to interact with someone in the future, you do have to worry about this - particularly if you will be interacting with them frequently, such as a family member or co-worker.
In these situations, it may be wise to do more than just say sorry. It may be wise to allow the other person to retaliate more seriously. If you do and it stops their revenge, you will be able to move on and enjoy a harmonious relationship. If you don't, the relationship will be acrimonious and the other person will retaliate by being uncooperative or passive aggressive.
Instead of years of acrimony, you could suggest appropriate punishments to stop their revenge. If you promised to check on your brother's dog while he was away and it died, you could give him a large payment that acts like the fine a criminal would pay. If you disclosed to others that a co-worker has an STD, you could tell the co-worker to reveal to others that you have a DUI conviction.
For more about emotions, visit: Happiness Dissected
