Revenge

“You can rent the space inside my mind.”
— She wants Revenge

Recently I read, somewhere or other, that revenge is simply part of the human condition. No matter how “good” or spiritual, or mature we are, all of us at some point or another wish to lash out, hurt, punish or get even with people who have hurt us or wronged us.

We want revenge.

Certainly across many conversations I have found this is true for many of us who are struggling to find our way through the complexity of family estrangement. We want to see family members hurt or suffer the way we have hurt or suffered. We want them to know how painful their behaviour has been. Inside ourselves we may become both judge and jury – and decide that we will not rest, be satisfied or heal until we are certain that circumstances have appropriately caused the other person to suffer and we ‘get even”.

Ironically, we can never truly know what is going on for the person we believe has wronged us. We don’t know if they are sorry or whether they have hurt and suffered in their turn. We don’t know what brought them to the point of causing us hurt and we will never truly know the long term implications that their choices and decisions will have had on their lives. Even if we had them on their knees in front of us, declaring their remorse and begging our forgiveness – it will not undo what was done, and there are no guarantees in apology.

Maybe it is true. Maybe the desire for revenge is a normal part of being human, however, it doesn’t mean that we have to fall victim to it or act upon our desires for it. Sure we can feel angry or hurt and we need to pay attention to these feelings but what is the goal? Do we want our attention caught up in fantasies of retribution, or do we want to move forward, put our focus on what is good, healthy and actually working in our lives? There is another saying that “what we put our attention on grows”.  What is it that we want to be growing in our lives?

Revenge locks us into the past. As the quote above says, the desire for revenge allows someone who has hurt us, to take up or rent space in our thoughts, our hearts and our lives. From this place we can only see other people (and ourselves) as one dimensional, static creatures. People become nothing more than the mean thing they have done to us, and we become nothing more than their perennial victim. Absolutely we can hold others accountable for their actions and behaviour. We can expect them to be responsible. What we cannot do is force this to happen.

Some people use estrangement as a means to extract revenge. They create impossible distance as a means of showing the other person that their behaviour is unacceptable. When they discuss estrangement it is very clear that the objective is to punish. Seeking revenge through estrangement will not make you feel better. It will not help you to build a better life for yourself. It will not help you achieve your goals for healthy, happy relationships or for peace of mind and healing. Seeking revenge will do the opposite. It will hold us back, trap us in the past and in our pain.

We don’t have to travel down this road. At any time we are ready to put a greater value on our well being and healing than we are on our past we can stop. Walk away. Refuse to become mired in anger or hurt. We unhook from these perhaps natural, but toxic nonetheless, desires to see others hurt. We can trust that life will have a way of working on those other people and their behaviour, that we don’t have the time, energy or resources for. We can hope that they will learn their lesson, but we put our attention to the task of learning ours.

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Wrestling With Anger

“Anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not easy.“

~ Aristotle

Anger and problems with anger are certainly not limited to family estrangement issues – and yet, without exception if there is estrangement in a family, there will also be anger.

In our closest relationships, we experience the opportunity to feel the deepest love, but to also feel the greatest anger. Our experience with anger in our family and the way we have come to deal with it, generally follows us into our wider relationships. As such, it makes a lot of sense to explore our relationship to anger whether we are trying to work through family estrangement issues, or simply working to have better relationships in general.

At the most basic level, anger is an emotion, and emotions are feedback. We want to build the capacity to identify when we are feeling angry and learn how to interpret the message that anger gives. For instance, anger may tell us when our rights and boundaries are being violated, or our needs are not being met. Anger might be a message that we are overlooking or not paying attention to important issues in our lives, it might also be prodding us to consider whether we are compromising too much of ourselves – beliefs, values, goals or dreams in order to make someone else feel comfortable. Anger can tell us we are over doing, over giving, over compensating for someone else. It may also tell us that other people are over doing or over giving to us, at the expense of our own sense of value, competency and growth. Anger may ask us to address inequity in all its forms.

All of these various messages from anger are intrinsically valuable. If we cannot feel our anger, we generally miss out on all the important feedback it brings into our awareness. Anger encourages us to stick to the things we most value and believe to be true for ourselves. Anger teaches us to say, no to anything or to anyone who devalues our sense of self-worth. Anger is not unusual, or dysfunctional. It is not a feeling we need to sidestep, repress or avoid. Everyone feels angry from time to time; young people, old people, men, women, religious people, non religious people, black people, white people … no one is immune to anger. For most people anger will present no particular problem. They will notice anger, feel the feeling, identify the cause, sort a solution and let it go. However, this is usually not the case in families impacted by family estrangement.

In estranged families anger can easily become an ever present undercurrent, particularly if the reasons for estrangement has to do with issues like addiction, abuse, significant intolerance or any serious, ongoing problem. In relationships marked by these sorts of problems, anger can become a constant. Some people choose to estrange rather than deal with the ever present hum of anger; but many of these people go on to find that even though the person is no longer present, the anger still hangs on. The problems remain unsolved, the anger unresolved and festering. Consider Carol’s comment, ” My mother has been horrible my whole life. I haven’t seen her for 12 years and its better that way because I still want to slap her, I couldn’t actually do it but I’d want too”. This is a woman who has not had any contact with her mother for 12 years, but yet, still feels enough anger to want to hit her. Has becoming estranged resolved Carol’s hurt and anger? Using estrangement to side step anger can be a damned if you do, damned if you don’t undertaking. To stay is to feel anger, to leave is to feel anger.

In families marked by estrangement, dealing with anger is frequently an issue. There can be certain rules in the family about who is allowed to feel and express anger, or rules about what ways of expressing anger are acceptable or unacceptable. Many families encourage the repression of anger and punish people who directly and openly talk about their anger. In estranged families the person who owns anger is often the scapegoat, the black sheep, the problem child. In some families, when people get angry, violence follows. To live with violence, is to live with anger.

Estranged families may have all sorts of ideas about anger, things like:

• Good people don’t get angry
• Anger is dangerous
• Anger is a bad feeling, and people who feel it are bad people
• It’s not okay for people to get angry at me
• If someone is angry at me, it means they don’t love or care about me
• People will leave if I get angry (and in estranged families, they sometimes do!)

If we belong to an estranged family we may have lots of issues with anger, both allowing ourselves to connect with, feel and express our anger, but also the other way round too. It can be nearly impossible to tolerate other people’s healthy expressions of anger if we’ve got an unhealthy relationship with anger ourselves.  I’ve heard people say that they were worried that if they started feeling angry, they would be unable to ever stop feeling angry. There are also people worried that feeling anger might lead them to say or do things that they will be unable to control or will regret down the line. Other people shared with me that when someone they are in relationship with gets angry, they have an uncontrollable desire to leave and never come back.When dealing with anger is confronting, we resort to flight or flight to deal.

Estranged families are families also marked by blaming. When we feel angry we may blame other people for our feelings, for making us feel the way we do. If we feel angry they must have done something wrong. Or conversely, we may have been blamed for causing someone else’s anger and then internalized the responsibility – if someone is angry with me, I must truly be a terrible person. Family estrangement complicates feelings, and this is particularly true with anger.

We need to remember anger is “just a feeling”. Like other feelings it comes up and alerts us to pay attention. If anger is observed with curiosity and compassion, felt with openness, and acted upon with consciousness to restore equity and insure our integrity and self worth – it will gradually, naturally,  ebb and disappear. We will not disintegrate from feeling angry, and no one ever melted because someone else felt angry at them. The trick then for people who are experiencing estrangement is not to avoid anger, but rather to allow and accept it. The task  is to befriend anger and learn to hear what the feeling has to share with us.

Things to ponder …

• Do you know what your beliefs about anger are? Write them down.
• Think of a time when you recently felt angry. Can you identify what anger’s message might have been?
• What risks or losses might you face if you were to allow yourself to feel angry?

~ * ~

Family, The People We Love To Hate

“Holding anger is a poison…It eats you from inside…We think that by hating someone we hurt them…But hatred is a curved blade…and the harm we do to others…we also do to ourselves.”
- Mitch Albom

Awhile back I was speaking to an elderly friend who told me that he hates his sister. In fact, he said, if his sister were to die, he wouldn’t care in the least. We were sitting nearby a couple of other people at the time, and I could see the shock on their faces. I imagine the shock not only related to the fact that he was expressing such strong emotion (which can make even the most prepared of us feel uncomfortable) but also because his feelings were directed toward a family member. We are not supposed to dislike, let alone hate, family members and we sure aren’t meant to say that we do. It also might not feel so good knowing that family members think so negatively toward us either.

But it happens.

We don’t get to control the way other people think, feel or even sometimes, behave toward us. We can, however, definitely control how we think, feel and behave.  So let’s think about it a bit … does it serve us to hate, even if the other person has been really horrible, abusive, or otherwise vile?

I haven’t found hatred a useful way of moving through things. In fact, when I really think about it I can come up with a few good reasons to let go of hating. I’ll share them with you.

1 – When I hate I may feel temporarily empowered or even energized, but across time it takes a lot of energy to hate.  If you have ever sat with hatred, you will well know what an energy vampire hatred is. Hatred gets in the way of us doing and creating other things. When our energy is directed toward hatred, it cannot simultaneously focus on joy, love, caring, creating. Hatred breeds more of the same and not much else.

2- Hatred is attached to believing that the other person is only ever one dimensional – the one dimension we hate. In actual reality people are multi-dimensional. Though they may have behaved badly, maybe even done so over and again – that is not all they are or do. Hatred is a one dimensional response to a multi-dimensional challenge.

3- I might not be right. I am usually pretty damn sure I am right before I get to hating, but the fact is, I can never know the whole story, or see the total picture. I spoke about this some time back in my post, Once Upon a Time. We are constrained not only by the ‘facts’ as we understand them, but also by the stories we tell ourselves (or others tell us) and the meanings that we make of them. Considering the vast limitations of our knowing, hatred is misguided at best.

4- I am not without guilt. I have made mistakes. I have treated others poorly. I have said and done things I am not at all proud of. I would deeply appreciate compassion; room to make amends, be something different, do something more. Does anyone deserve less than what I would hope for myself? How can I feel I deserve one thing, and yet refuse it to another person?

5 – We can never know what has brought another person to the place they are. I am not suggesting that anything excuses bad or abusive behavior – but I am saying just as we are products of our lived experiences, relationships, understandings, thoughts and feelings .. so too are other people. There is a long line of events that lead to now, or then. If we could see them, we could perhaps develop compassion instead of hatred. The least we can do is assume there is more to the person and their behavior than we could ever know or imagine. It is the same in reverse for ourselves.

6- Hatred is a stain, a blot on the tapestry of relationship. We don’t only contaminate ourselves and our own lives with hatred – we very, very often spread it to other people. We share our opinions, understandings and stories along with the associated feelings – which leads to other people creating their own stories. In very short order hatred can burn out of control across an entire family system. It takes only one person with a match to start that fire. Will you allow that firebug to be you?

Things to ponder ….

• Do you hate? If so, who do you hate?
• Do you think your hatred impacts that other person?
• Are you hated? Do you feel, or think, other people in your family hate you?
• Does this hatred impact or affect you?
• If you sit quietly and allow yourself to fully feel hatred, how does it make you feel? Are you willing to continue to feel that way?
• Does your hatred have the potential to start bigger fires? Have you already lit the match?