How to Exact Revenge
on The Narcissist, or something to that effect was the name of a VLOG I recently stumbled upon on
YouTube. I watched some of the video. To watch some is better than none,
I thought, since most of me outright disagrees with the philosophy of taking
revenge upon the narcissist.
But, I have always been the sort of person who tries to
listen to other people’s ideas in pursuit of growth. And I find that I most often need some sort of stop-gap on
low self-awareness when I vehemently disagree with someone’s ideas. So I had a
listen.
And not being one for commenting on YouTube, I’ll respond here.
While my own experience has demonstrated that healing from
narcissistic abuse involves liberal amounts of "space allowing" for difficult emotions,
including the desire for revenge, I think a distinction needs to be made
between allowing space and allowing too
much space. I believe that the pursuit of revenge creates too much space,
lending itself toward a particular sort of imbalance, ultimately stunting the healing
process in one’s self--forget the narcissist as reference point altogether.
By itself, the emotion
of revenge is nothing more than intense anger coupled with a strong desire for
justice. Typically, the desire for revenge surfaces when we perceive that we
have been the recipient of intolerable injustice.
In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with that.
But, in order to pursue said revenge strategy, we often have
to go much further. We often have to foster, even conjure a deliberate imbalance in ourselves—in
our own emotional alchemy, often by cutting off other emotions that might get
in the way of executing said strategy
such as kindness, empathy, and compassion. I suspect the reason behind this
fostering is due to the fact that intense strategies like revenge demand Herculean
amounts of energy to drive them to completion. Therefore, the energy we might
have for other emotions gets requisitioned to our ORS--Omnipotent Revenge Strategy. Our
potential energy that we damn up behind Hoover in order to exact our revenge
strategy ends up finding its own way. It's worth remembering that once water is released below the damn, it has no agenda--as mere kinetic energy it just flows onto whomever and whatever is caught in its path. Such massive flowing energy might just land on us as we fall casualty to our revenge's course--just as un-damned water knows only to flow into empty space.
Furthermore, ironically enough, with revenge we often have
a misguided notion that we are "taking back control." In all actuality, we are surrendering
control as we knot and tether and tie ourselves back up to the narcissist. We reattach ourselves by making
our well-being dependent upon his painful experience just as it was before! We want him to hurt, to suffer, only now we
think seeing him wounded will somehow help us heal. This is akin to suffering a gunshot wound and thinking that shooting the perpetrator rather than going to the hospital will make the wound stop hemorrhaging. In so doing we push our healing locus
of control outside ourselves and give it back to the narcissist who gladly
takes it once again from us. We make our healing journey about him, which is furthering his narcissistic supply line. Why the hell would we want to feed that beast again?
Put simply, this is not the path to healing our wound. In fact, this is likely the path to turning our wound gangrenous.
