The Bitter Revenge
Honorato Winkel
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The sad truth is that it is nothing more than a false sense of entitlement. Unfortunately, over time their negative energy will transform them from the once loving, confident, happy wife to the unrecognizable fearful, insecure, angry ex-wife whose main purpose is to seek bitter revenge on her ex-husband. Many women are willing to spend outrageous legal fees in the hopes of gaining some cruel satisfaction in watching him suffer financially. Playing the role of victim to her circumstances, she is often unaware that engaging in unnecessary monetary power struggles, sometimes for years, resolves nothing. It is only the symptom of a deeper-rooted fear. In fact, it serves nothing more than to encourage even MORE fear!
Reiki Rita does not feel that all women who seek alimony do so out of a desire for revenge. We fully understand that alimony can be the only thing between a woman or man and poverty. If you sincerely need alimony to survive and remain financially secure, we encourage you to seek alimony.
In all its permutations, revenge aims to redress a perceived injury and punish the perpetrator. Ironically, revenge can also act as a deterrent in preventing further injury. In situations in which laws or government are weak and where gangs, militia groups, or bullies rule, the law of the jungle prevails: Be careful who you mess with or else (or, in less friendly terms, kill or be killed). The warning may suppress further violence but also reinforce an authoritarian or coercive regime.
The answer from various disciplines suggests not. Behavioral studies indicate revenge does not grant the euphoria of satisfaction but instead sets up cycles of rumination and ongoing distress.1 The diaries of school shooters and mass murderers testify to the obsessive nature of revenge. Venting anger through the written word or social media does not seem to alleviate the impulse toward violence.
Who seeks revenge and why is shaped by our individual personalities and cultural heritage. Most of us do not succumb to acting out our revenge. Some people, when slighted, are not tempted to retaliate and instead move on. Scientists speculate we may have evolved an adaptive internal scale that weighs the costs of revenge against its benefits. In his book Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct, experimental psychologist Michael McCullough contends that we may have evolved a secondary system of forgiveness that enables people to suppress the desire for revenge in favor of forgiveness. This internal system supports forgiveness and allows for the repair of a relationship.4
In some cultures, a desire for revenge arises out of public shame, while in individualistic cultures like our own, vengeance is sought when we believe ourselves or our rights have been dismantled or ignored. In societies that value collective identity, revenge can be evoked in response to the mistreatment of someone in our tribe or group: dishonoring my brother dishonors me.
If the instinct for revenge is automatic and universal, how do we control its destructive urge? As thinking animals with the capacity to evaluate our thoughts and imagine future consequences, we are free, unlike the bear, to objectively assess and regulate our behavior. We can discern behavioral patterns that are troublesome and need to be disentangled from the motivating revenge stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and others. In each situation that inspires revenge, we can reevaluate our narrative and rewrite the ending. Perhaps we can ask ourselves, Instead of revenge, what would my forgiveness look like here?
Revenge is one of the possible responses to a transgression, a way to take control over the offender and making them suffer. Nevertheless, research has shown that avengers delude themselves into thinking that they will feel better when they have acted. Actually, taking vengeance protracts the negative emotional states, contributing to negative feelings and ruminations. So far, no study has investigated the mediational role of Negative Affect in the association between revenge and depression, and revenge and anxiety. 274 adult participants were tested with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the State-Trait Anxiety Scale (STAI-Y), the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS), and the Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory-18 (TRIM-18). Mediational regression analyses showed that participants who were more vengeful were also more likely to be anxious and depressed. Therefore, interventions aimed at reducing vengeful feelings and ruminations, could be an effective resource for well-being in clinical settings.
We confirm that this work is original and has not been published elsewhere nor is it currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. All authors approved the manuscript and this submission. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Now, new research from Washington University in St. Louis is adding a twist to the science of revenge, showing that our love-hate relationship with this dark desire is indeed a mixed bag, making us feel both good and bad, for reasons we might not expect.
Its findings are based on three experiments in which about 200 people in each experiment were asked to fill out online questionnaires rating the intensity of moods and emotions triggered by their reading of brief news accounts, including one that described the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces as a retaliation for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Psychologists sometimes use the terms emotion and mood interchangeably, but there are important differences, as evident in the current paper. Emotions usually relate back to some clear and specific trigger and can be intense but are often fleeting. Moods, on the other hand, may come about gradually, last for an extended time, and are often of low intensity.
In this study, Eadeh and colleagues used sophisticated linguistic tools along with a standard mood inventory to tease apart the differences in self-reported emotions after reading a revenge-related passage. This analysis replicated previous findings that showed reading about revenge put people in a worse mood, but it also found that the same experience was capable of generating positive feelings.
To further test these findings, researchers repeated the experiment using different reading passages selected to avoid wording or content that might predispose readers toward a particular emotion or mood. To avoid stimulating patriotic emotions, for example, the Olympics control passage was swapped for a generic description of food allergies. The Osama bin Laden passage was altered to remove wording that explicitly described the killing as retaliation for the 9/11 attacks.
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Some studies have found that retaliation can make the victim of a transgression feel better. But other work suggests that people overestimate how good revenge will make them feel, or that they actually end up feeling bad.
Perhaps it does both, reasoned the authors of the new study: you might feel good straight after taking revenge, but the very act of retaliation could remind you of the original transgression and make you feel a bit miserable. If that's the case, then you'd expect that "sweet" feeling to be an immediate, fleeting response, which might not show up if you just ask people about their feelings. So instead, the team decided to test people's responses to enacting revenge using a more indirect measure.
Participants played a game testing their reaction times, supposedly against two other players via the internet (unbeknownst to the participants, these other "players" weren't real). Before each round, they had to nominate one of the other players to be blasted with noise if they won. But if they lost, they either received a sound blast themselves from the winning player, or saw the other losing player receive the sound blast. (In reality, who won or lost was determined solely by the computer).
The team found that people were more likely to rate Chinese characters as pleasant after they punished the player who had been picking on them than after they punished the non-provoking player. But this was only true of participants who showed "revenge-seeking" behaviour (i.e. those who chose to blast the provoking player more often with noise). So the results suggested that revenge-seeking people do feel more positive after taking revenge against someone who has wronged them.
But an alternative interpretation was that participants felt worse after punishing the non-provoking player. To figure out whether this was the case, in a second study the team added an option to not punish either player. Revenge-seeking participants again rated the Chinese characters as more pleasant after punishing the provoking player compared to the non-provoking player. But, interestingly, their response was even more positive when no-one was punished.
There are some obvious limitations to the study. As the authors note, it's unclear exactly what processes are at play when rating Chinese characters (in fact, some researchers have argued that people's responses on this test are not as "implicit" as assumed). And of course, transgressions and acts of revenge in real life are going to be very different from this artificial, lab-based task. Still, it's an interesting piece of research that shows that our feelings and behaviours are far more nuanced than the old sayings imply.
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