DailyJim: How seeking vengeance can be so damaging to our own health

Hello everyone welcome to another daily gym i'm recording live from mombasa kenya today tuesday february 25th 2025 and what i want to talk about today is how vengeance.

Can be so damaging to our health maybe i'll change the title anyways the idea is that vengeance can really destroy us more than even the other people that's a better title. I think a lot of us when we get hurt we want the other person to feel hurt and a lot of times we want them to hurt in the same way that we felt hurt and so we try to make them feel hurt in the exact same way so instead of telling them we try to cause pain to them and ideally we cause the same pain we say but that's not possible and what ends up happening is that even if we could cause them the same pain. Maybe it cancels out for a moment, but then we worry that they would cause the same pain to us in the future or more pain. And so we can get trapped in this idea of thinking that they might seek vengeance on us. Now, if we've sought vengeance on them and we think they might seek vengeance on us, now we're stuck because we can get trapped in this cycle of fear that even if they never seek vengeance on us, we may assume that they will. We may assume that they will plot to do something to cause us pain. And that cycle of fear can trap us. So that's one aspect. Just being stuck in the fear can really trap us and drive us crazy. And I think we see examples of this all the time, especially with authoritarian leaders in society at the high levels. Maybe the biggest examples we can see, but I think it happens in families and friendships all the time.

You know, you do one thing, and you think these people are going to come out to get you, and so you squash them. But by squashing them, you think these people are going to come out and get you even more, so you squash them more. And then it can be a snowball effect, I think if that's the right term, where you end up causing more and more violence to satiate or to squash your own fear, but then you get stuck in fear. Fear doesn't go away, it actually grows.

The other thing is that it can just cause pain. Think about being in a physical fight with somebody. If they punch you in the face, okay, maybe you don't know how much they hurt. You only know how much you hurt. And you say, well, I need to punch them in the face. Now, if you punch them in the face, you may see that their face contorts. You may see the physical or like the emotional pain that they're experiencing. And then you feel pain. They may fall down and hit their head, and you feel even more pain and regret and guilt at the pain that you've caused them because you wanted it to be equal. You didn't want it to be too much. And your hand may physically hurt because you punched them in the face. Maybe you punched them in the mouth and their tooth caught your fist, or you maybe busted a knuckle. You can actually have physical pain by trying to cause somebody else pain. And a lot of times when we're in vengeance, we don't realize this. We just want to go out and we want to cause the other person pain. I think an example of this right now, to be honest, is in the U.S. government. I think there's a lot of vengeance going around where people are like, we want to get rid of USAID, we want to get rid of this department, these guys are evil, they're screwing us over. Wait a second, wait a second. Do you realize how much pain it might cause you to cause them pain? No probably not because most of us haven't been trained in real in fighting we don't know, how much punching somebody else can hurt ourselves and i just wish we had more experience with this because i think we tend to have two main styles of fighting one is to run away and the other one is the punch and often we punch and then run away um we do both but very rarely will we stand there embrace it take the punch and still stand there and embrace the other.

And when we punch or run away, especially, we don't realize how much pain it's causing the other person and how much pain it's causing ourselves. And how sometimes that pain can be disproportionate to the action. It's like the physical example of somebody kind of nudges your shoulder and you take a bottle and you break it across their head. What? Why? They push your shoulder and you hit them over the head with a bottle. That's not proportionate response. What else is going on in your life that you think that this person is the one that caused you all of this harm and all this pain in your life? They're not. But we don't have the skills, we don't have the training, we don't have the culture that teaches us how to recognize that. And so, so much of my work and so much of my life, if we want to call it my life's work, really is to help people recognize these things and recognize that if somebody punches you, Punching them back is going to hurt both of you more. Yeah, it might hurt the other person, but you know, they probably punched you because they felt hurt. This cycle of vengeance, it's like counterpunch. We don't punch people. We counterpunch. We counterattack because we assume we got attacked first.

And so i say this in light of what's going on the political scene especially in the u.s it's like, i think we've elected people that are almost hell-bent on vengeance and they say it's not so it's about efficiency but it's they have, a tendency for vengeance if somebody wrongs them they want to wrong the other person even more if They perceive that they've been wrong. They want to take the other person out. And, well, the whole point of this talk today, the main point is that seeking vengeance on the other person can be counterproductive for ourselves. It can hurt ourselves more than we may ever imagine.

And it's still been running away. So sometimes, and most of the time, I would say the best thing is to realize that everyone's trying their best. Everyone's hurting. And if we punch back even harder, it may just make the situation much, much worse for both of us. Even if you think you don't care about the other person and you want that other person to experience harm or you think you want them to experience harm, um seeking vengeance can cause so much more harm so much more fear so much more pain so much more anger confusion um guilt than you may ever admit or imagine so just to pay more attention to that think about the times when you've sought vengeance against somebody else and think about how uh, much fear, frustration, or guilt, or regret that it actually caused you. Because it's probably a lot more than you think. All right, talk to you soon.