Should I retaliate when he/she hurts me?

One of the questions I recently was asked was how can one become so strong that he does not care to take revenge or give it back. I will put forth my views as they unfold.

When someone does an act that is hurtful and unfair in our mental model, our instant and immediate thought is we have to react to that person in a way that he feels the pain equally or even more. This engages our emotions and thoughts quite a bit. Should we follow these thoughts and use our thinking, and invest our time and energy, we are likely to find ways to inflict pain back on that person. The process involves expending a lot of our personal resources for creating an intense impact, that gets the message across to the ignorant or the mean person in question. And no rewards for guessing what it elicits! More aversion, more negativity, and instead of getting the message across, it turns counter-productive. The opposite person becomes more reactive, angered, and aggressive because he senses/learns you are doing it on purpose with an intention to make him realize something. People don’t like being preached/advised or wish to accept they were wrong; their act has a positive intention for them, may not be for you but every negative behavior also has a positive intention for one or the other. So when the person understands that you are giving him the taste of the experience you had with him, it augments the negativity he has.

What we started off as efforts to make the other person understand, ends up in us becoming the persecutor in other's eyes. When the person thinks your acts are damaging him, he is also likely to engage in pain-inflicting activities again as a reaction. Revenge-taking may be very satisfying for some time but is generative unless we consciously disengage from it. When we fast forward to our future and look back, we would have spent a lot of personal time, and relationships and lost the opportunities that we could have had, in this process. Our privileges and life situations also may not be the same later.

What was the original intention! It was to make the other person understand how you felt. Did it really turn out that way! Happens only in movies. Now let's do a rewind. The opposite person hurt you. He has been unfair. You want to do something about it. Now, take a deep breath, calm down, and look at the larger picture of your life. Like a bird on the tree in front of your house that is watching the events happen- What is important in your life- beyond what the person did to you, an objective that gives meaning and is fulfilling to your life even after the opposite person ceases to exist?

When you channel your energy, time, and the privileges you currently have to follow that objective going past the person, the event that happened, it is likely you reach where you actually want. You have risen above the phase where the effect of the earlier hurtful incident has diminished even if that incident was a fact in your life. You have?liberated your life.

In the former response where you seek to engage in revenge, you have allowed the opposite person to hurt you?not once?but as long as you were caught up in those thoughts and engaging in reaction.?You gave him the access?to hurt you every day. In the latter, you reduced his power and ability to hurt you only once. You evolved. You denied him the access to hurt you again and again.?You became wiser.?You became stronger and mightier.?Also, in the former instance, you spent your resources on something where there is no trade-off. A person seldom realizes his mistake through others and more, from his own insights. You investing your resources to make him understand has a little chance to create the desired impact while?investing the same resources on a worthwhile objective?that far surpasses a person who is a spec in the larger picture of life and the Universe?definitely makes an impact. It makes you much more powerful. You are at a level where the person and his likes cannot touch you because you have grown internally.

Resilience is a very powerful quality.?We have some amount of control over what others do to us. But how we respond is a lot more in our control. Many stories of pain have later resulted in rising above and living for a larger purpose which is very satisfying for the person but has also done well for the community.

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