The high cost of taking revenge

We are born to protect ourselves and achieve goals. Most of us feel that those who oppose us must suffer. Many women are unable to deal with realities of life. They express their anger openly. Others secretly. Some women feel ignored, cheated, abused and lack healthy options except the need to win at all cost when they are offended. Some are also embarrassed as they are made to appear foolish before people, if they are wromnged. To some, revenge is the only way out.

Revenge is a powerful emotion that leads people to do extreme things as they show feelings of bitterness, aggression and intolerance. Some withhold their responsibilities like giving out money for housekeeping. Some use sex as a weapon against their partners. Some also get into infidelity. Today, it is common for some women to threaten that if their husbands get into an affair, they will do same.

Some women completely ignore their partners and develop negative biases towards them. In some cases both men and women show hostility verbally. Some women are emotionally or physically harmed that in the end, some see separation, divorce or even death as a way out.

Alhaja Halima Bello, principal in one of the government school in Abuja has this to say, “revenge initially feels powerful, justified and satisfying. You may feel vindicated to see your spouse suffer, but soon it gives birth to disappointment, sadness, shame and guilt. Revenge is never bitter, but see it as a sweet thing to do, but it never heals. Instead, it gets you into prison and ties you more to your past hurt. It is actually poisonous because its effects far outweigh the momentary satisfaction. It only gets you into taking more revenge because you never feel satisfied with whatever revenge you must have carried out in the past. So why undergo the whole stress if you have to spend the rest of your life taking revenge for something that happened 20 or 30 years ago?

“The better we overlook some of these hurtful issues, the better for us. Revenge can even lead you to kill because no matter what u do, you are just never satisfied so the only satisfaction you might get is to eliminate the person form the surface of this earth. That again is a temporary satisfaction. So, what are we saying, why all the stress. It is definitely not worth all the trouble,”.

You never achieve full sense of satisfaction. You only hurt yourself more than the one the revenge was take on. In addition, you may vent your anger on innocent people. An angry wife who decides to separate from her husband may create a bleak future for the children they both had.

Revenge is never a solution. It is always another problem from another immediate one. It is not for you to revenge. If a dishonest partner leaves you, be happy because it could have been worse to be hurt for a lifetime. You can never correct a wrong act by doing the wrong things because two wrongs never make right.

We think the choice of partners is ours, but marriages are, indeed, made in heaven. God knows the end from the beginning. If He has to get you through a painful experience to get you out of a certain danger, He will do it because He loves you. Sometimes our partner or friends hurt us to remind us of our own imperfections and tests. We should learn to use hurts as opportunities of personal growth.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge.

Ayodele Peter, a Sociology Lecturer at the Nasarawa State University says “planning revenge and holding grudges against someone is basically just giving your power away to that person. Because in reality, you will be spending all of your energy looking for ways to get even with the person and the other person couldn’t care less what you are doing anyway.  Don’t let problems get that far in the first place but if it did getting even is not the best alternative because at the end you would end up not achieving anything. It just makes things worse and the problem just continues and never ends”

Anger grows and ends up concurring your heart and soul as long as you harbour it. Whoever annoys you, you do indeed give them the energy to hurt you. Revenge hurts the giver more than the person they are planning to hurt.

In all that have been said about revenge above, the most important is the order given by God that if one must take revenge at all, it must exactly be the same with the offence committed. Those who understands this order in its contextual form say that God is only asking us not to take revenge at all, for it is His exclusive right, the reason being that there is no way someone can take exact revenge of the same wrong done unto him or her. For instance, if someone assaults you physically and goes ahead to injure you, and you insist on taking revenge of inflicting injury, the injury must be the same. Is this possible?