When you’ve been hurt, you will react. Part of your initial reaction is mobilizing to defend yourself. In your reaction, how can you tell if it is revenge or resentment?
Emotional Recovery – is it revenge or resentment? <<– listen to the audio here
Hi, this is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio. I’m glad you’re with me today. The topic we’re going to be dealing with in this session once again deals with emotional recovery. But today’s question is, is it revenge or resentment.
When you’ve been hurt, especially a personal hurt like an affair, you’re going to take it personally. And many times when people have been hurt personally they want to hurt the other person personally.
Part of your initial reaction in terms of dealing with the hurt will be mobilizing your resources, mobilizing your thinking, mobilizing your emotions, and other resources to defend yourself.
When something like an affair happens it’s an emotional all hands on deck. You get everything that you’ve got available to be used. And it’s only natural that you respond this way.
This is a crisis that will take many resources to be able to deal with. When we sense a threat we mobilize. You were done wrong and you’re mobilizing in response to that. Something bad happened to you, or you see the threat of your marriage and your family on the horizon and you are taking action before that goes south.
When you’re mobilizing and you’re dealing with your initial reaction, you realize that you were done wrong, somebody took something that did not belong to them, and in your reaction to what happened many times it’s going to be important to understand whether or not your action is revenge or resentment. I’m going to be talking about that in a little more detail, how you can tell the difference between revenge or resentment.
The solution is going to be, first of all, to learn the difference between revenge and resentment. I’m going to go through some ways to tell the difference.
First of all, resentment is defensive. With resentment this is where you are defending what is yours. Revenge, on the other hand, goes on the offensive. It wants to find ways to hurt the other person, or to hurt them before they hurt you. This type of stuff, that’s typically revenge.
It boils down to the question of whether or not you are going to protect what is yours, versus a desire to go out and hunt other people down. This may help you get a clearer idea of the difference between revenge and resentment.
Resentment I see as more of the healthy part of the response, whereas revenge is the unhealthy part.
Number two, resentment is temporary. Typically when we’ve been hurt we have that resentment during the time that we are recovering from it. Revenge, on the other hand, seems to go on forever. Long after the affair is over. If there’s still a part of you that is wanting to hurt and to hurt others, that’s the revenge part.
It’s not going to take you in any good places.
Number three, resentment doesn’t mix well with pride, selfishness, or meanness. When mixed with these emotions it can turn into a nasty kind of revenge, which I call ‘malicious revenge’.
This is where you’re no longer wanting to hurt the person to defend yourself, you are just doing it to unleash. You’re doing it just to have somebody to vent on.
That’s never a good thing. Because typically when you are just venting for the purpose of hurting someone else, that doesn’t lead to anything good. It doesn’t lead to anything constructive. It doesn’t bring healing to your marriage.
Because in affair recovery you are going to want to be healed from what happened. And when you go off on these revenge trips, trying to hurt your spouse or hurt the lover or hurt their family, or sometimes you may even want to hurt your own family, that does not yield positive results. You do want to protect what is yours, that’s one thing. But going off on a revenge trip, that is something else.
In going through these differences between revenge and resentment I’m hoping that it cleared some things up for you. Because I know after the hurt of an affair there’s a swirl of emotions. A lot of emotions all at once, they don’t make sense. Well, that’s because they’re emotions. They’re not logical by their very nature.
Being able to tell the difference between something that is good for you versus something that is very bad for you is often hard to do. IT’s almost like you’re in the deep end of the pool and your’e just treading water. And I’m hoping by going ahead and giving you this distinction you’ll know when you start crossing over the line into the unhealthy part of the revenge aspect.
This will clarify a little bit of that, and lead you on the way to emotional recovery. Sorting things out, this will start you on your way, and I’m hoping that now, rather than things being gray, it’s a little more black and white. You can see a little more clearly, rather than just being totally lost in that ocean of pain.
This will get you started on your way.
As always, feel free to leave feedback on what you got out of the session and how helpful they were. You can also stop by my website at www.surviveyourpartnersaffair.com for more information on what you can do about getting past your spouse’s affair, or getting past your affair if you’re in that situation.
Until next time, this is Jeff .
Thank you for dropping in.
