Don't Let The Bastards Get To You

Forgiveness is the sweetest revenge.
- Isaac Friedmann

It seems strange to put the words forgiveness and revenge into the same sentence, especially to relate them to each other.

The kind of quiet forgiveness that most of us would think of would not apply in this situation, I believe. That is, carrying around a grudge instead of letting a hurt drop and forgetting about it won't cause anyone any revenge.

Letting go of hurts by others will be a great release and relief for you, however. Carrying a grudge has a negative impact on the immune system. The immune system is very sensitive, so that when the brain senses a hurt of some kind that is an emotional hurt instead of a physical one it will send energy to the source of the hurt, taking it away from the immune system.

Forgetting the grudge allows the immune system to rebalance, setting you up once again to be ready for an attack by microbes.

Simply forgiving someone for a hurt you perceive might do nothing for the other person because the other may not even know he has hurt you. Or he may not care if he was that kind of person to hurt in the first place.

To achieve the kind of revenge Friedmann talked about would require you to obviously tell the offending party that he had hurt you and that you forgive him for his hurt. That will make him realize that he has done some harm that he likely didn't intend.

However, will making the offending person feel guilty make you feel any better? As much as we would all like to believe it would, it doesn't work that way for most of us. If we didn't like being hurt, we won't think well of ourselves for causing guilt (a form of hurt) in the other person.
So is there no way out of hurt when someone else has done something against you? There is a way, but it's not easy and it takes considerable practise to master the skill.

While we would all like to believe that others are as sensitive and caring as we are, the fact is they are not. Few people are sensitive to the hurts of others. After a suicide, murder-suicide or mass suicide, those close to the perpetrator almost always can think of ways that they should have noted that would show that the person was not mentally stable. But these clues were not noticed or not registered as important at the time. They weren't sensitive to the most obvious kinds of problems a troubled person had.

With so many insensitive people around, we would have to have all of them feeling guilty about their misdeeds if revenge were to be taken in full. That can't happen or the world would be a sadder and likely more dangerous place as a result.

Some people are just plain stupid. Stupid people do stupid things. Some of those stupid things hurt others. If one of those stupid things hurts you, realize that it came from a stupid person and forget it.

Otherwise it's like bumping your head on something at home then putting your fist through the wall to make the building pay for hurting you. The building seldom feels guilty and the perpetrator of your hurt won't either.

Stupid people do stupid things. Get over it. You don't have to like them or have anything to do with them if they are that way. Surely you have more productive ways to invest your life than to try to make stupid people hurt for being stupid.

They won't get better. You can by learning this technique.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to help you indentify the stupid people and stay away from them.
Learn more at http://billallin.com