Do you remember the last time someone hurt you, betrayed you, or you discovered something about them that made you realize they were not your friend, were not on your side, and that their actions were deliberate?
You may want to avenge your honor, make them pay, get revenge, show them how it feels to be treated that way, and get them to acknowledge your pain and then apologize for it.
You want retribution, a punishment that matches the damage and harm they caused you.
You want resolution, to fix the situation and move on, often with them not repeating their behavior.
You want restitution, for them to give you something to make up for what they did and for what you lost.
While you are fully justified in feeling this way and in wanting revenge so that your pain is boomeranged right back to its originator, it’s a waste of your time and energy and it won’t have the effect you want.
No matter how hard you try, how much effort you make, and how noble your efforts are or how well supported they are by the facts, you won’t have any effect on the person who caused your pain. Because they do not care about your pain or about causing you pain.
For two reasons, one because they want to cause you pain and second because your pain is their revenge against you.
It is hard to acknowledge that people will cause us pain deliberately, but it’s true. Sometimes they do it out of jealousy, out of revenge, out of spite, or just because they are a sociopath and a bad person.
They use guilt to manipulate us emotionally and shame to convince us that we are a bad person and our pain is our own fault. Sometimes they find you tough to be around and they want to find a way to get away from you without having to tell you, so they will hurt you in some way. I see this often in cases where a spouse cheats on their partner, listen to the podcast for that story.
But mainly the pain they cause you is a reflection of their own pain and what you see is just the tip of a very large iceberg.
Sometimes the cause of the pain and betrayal goes deeper, it’s part of a karmic cycle you are in and you’re playing the part of the wounded or abused party in this lifetime. In other lifetimes you were the abuser and you caused them pain.
These cycles go back and forth for lifetimes, each person playing a different role while the cycle never gets resolved because everyone wants revenge, everyone wants the other person to pay for their actions, and each person wants to be proven right and they want the other person to acknowledge it in several different ways.
While pain and revenge cycles can go around and around for a very long time, there comes a time when someone has to end it. And that requires one person to set aside their desire for revenge, and to stop the cycle without seeing the other person pay for their actions, or even getting restitution or retribution.
We need an unconditional letting go of our pain, betrayal, wounding, hurt, and desire for revenge without getting anything in return other than our energetic and emotional freedom. That is what makes giving anything unconditionally so hard.
When someone betrays or wounds us we get emotionally involved, our feelings are hurt, we feel angry and are emotionally upset. Our desire for revenge is fueled by our quest for vindication – we want justice but more than that, we want the other person to tell us that they apologize, feel bad, are sorry they hurt us, and that we deserved better treatment.
Even though we know this is never going to happen but we need for it to happen because we are more than emotionally wounded, our very being has been attacked, dismantled, nullified, and rejected. We have been shamed by someone we thought would be more considerate of our feelings. We have been made to feel guilty about being ourselves and maybe even taking care of our needs.
If we look at the need for revenge from an emotional perspective, it makes total sense. We want to feel better by having someone tell us that they were sorry for hurting us. While that doesn’t make the pain go away it does answer to our need to be vindicated – we did deserve to be treated better and they just admitted it.
But if we look at it from an energetic perspective, revenge does not make any sense at all because we have to put ourselves at the energy level of our pain to turn it back to the other person.
Think about that. While revenge feels good emotionally, and that is a very temporary feeling, the energetic process does not feel so good and it takes longer to recover from. Think about how you feel when you get revenge on someone. It may feel good for a little while but then you may feel remorse or sadness because you put yourself at an energy level that is not a good fit for you.
And what is worse, you have given your karmic cycle with that person another spin and you’re off on another karmic interchange again. Karma repeats until one person stops the wheel from spinning.
But who stops it? Why does it have to be you? Why can’t the other person acknowledge their wrongdoing and make things right between you?
I have thought about that a lot since I have had a lot of karmic issues in my lifetime, with friends and family. And I tried to be accommodating of the other people so that they could see how much better the situation could be if everyone got along. So I tried to make them feel good, did my best to be supportive, and to show them that I was willing to meet them halfway and not have conflicts between us.
And it was a disaster. The more I tried to be nice the meaner they were. The more I tried to accommodate their needs the more demanding and unreasonable they became. They shut me out when I opened up, they insulted me when I tried to praise them. They spread rumors and lies about me that caused problems with other people.
My attempt to win them over with kindness and compassion, to address them on an emotional level failed. And they failed no matter what I did because the issues were not about emotions, they were about energy.
What I did not realize at the time that there was a deeper cause of the rift and the root cause was the difference in energy frequency and vibration. Trying to resolve it on an emotional level was never going to work because the emotions were the effect, not the cause, of our energetic differences.
What I needed to do was to remove my energy, to get an energy divorce, to stop trying to fix a problem that I did not have the ability to fix because it had nothing to do with me. Their pain was the source of whatever issues they had with me and I could never change that until they decided to stop attacking me with their pain and do their own healing work.
This is why revenge is never a good idea, why retribution is an invitation to endless karmic cycles, why the desire for restitution just revolves into an endless struggle of wills and endless battles over who is right and who is wrong, and who is responsible for apologizing and fixing the situation.
There comes a point when we have to let go of our need for the satisfaction of revenge and let the Universe take care of it from a different perspective. Meanwhile we need to address our own need for revenge, retribution, restitution, and resolution by building our self esteem, healing our energy gaps, making ourselves whole again and hanging out with people who are not engaged in karmic cycles with us.
We cannot end karma with revenge and trying to get validation of our own hurt emotions but we can end it with removing our energy from the situation, by not allowing ourselves to try healing emotional wounds that have an energetic source and by realizing that sometimes the best way to handle a situation is to let the universe dispense its own unique brand of divine retribution that far exceeds any revenge we could exact on anyone and somehow manages to address everyone’s needs and lessons in the most perfect way.
Letting the universe take over in these situations is the best bet because the Universe has a way of creating a win-win situation out of what appears to be a losing proposition all around. Let me share a story about that with you, which you can hear in the podcast.
The solution to discord and pain and betrayal is not about unconditional love (meaning loving the truly unlovable) and tolerating bad behavior. It is about unconditional acceptance and then loving someone, sometimes from a safe distance, because they will never give you what you want, which is sometimes their revenge.
Being able to let go of our need for revenge, retribution, restitution, and resolution comes down to a single choice – are we willing to let go of a painful past and step into our own joy without getting what we believe we deserve – and we probably do – and move forward in our lives knowing that the universe will take care of the revenge in its own way and we won’t have to get our hands dirty or disturb the karma wheel again.
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