Keep Your Bricks
"I just have all this vindictiveness toward him and I want to really give it to him. I want to drag him through the mud. I want to make him see what he's done."
Vindictive actions are common because this desire is common. The desire to rub someone's face in what they've done, what they have done wrong, most especially the wrong they have done upon me. The desire to see them suffer, to punish, to extract remorse and repentance.
This is emotional energy. Those who endorse reactivity say there is a natural course of action which is inspired by each emotion in turn. In the case of blame, frustration, upset, the natural course is to enact vindictiveness.
Vindictive actions are common because understanding of what else we can do with that energy, that resolve, that burning desire, is rare. When we don’t put energy somewhere effective, it builds up and tears the system apart from within.
Only those who have claimed responsiveness, which is the skill of bypassing (reserve, really, but I like to be inflammatory sometimes) paired and tempered exquisitely with intention and expression, are able to see there are many ways we might use emotional energy in any given circumstance.
"Keep your bricks," I told her.
The vindictiveness is like a pile of bricks. If you throw them all at him, you won't have any left to build that WALL that will keep him out forever after.
That wall can't go up outside of us. We can't ask someone else to build it from the bricks we have thrown at them, though they might choose to do exactly that. But then they'll build what is in service to THEMSELVES.
They might choose to use those bricks to pave a path for themselves straight back into your life. After all, you're out of bricks—you don't have the resources to keep them out.
That energy you want to launch against another, that is YOUR SACRED ENERGY.
There's nothing wrong with launching it, all I would wish for you is that is a choice you make informed by all your options.
Please know—you may keep your bricks.
You may reserve that vindictive energy and use it to your own purposes, to serve your own prosperity right here and now.
You may write that angry letter you want to send them just to yourself, or better yet, scrub down the whole kitchen.
You may make promises to yourself about where you will show up and how, with the energy you want to use to secure a promise or an apology from someone you no longer trust.
Use the bricks of vindictiveness to weight your own promises or build a whole damn wall that you LIKE, one to your exact specifications, welcoming love and keeping out whatever doesn't feel like love to you.
Vindictive action may seem right or wrong based on how much we subjectively believe a person "deserves" it,
but the real reason to reserve vindictive action is to preserve my own sacred energy.
The real reason to reserve vindictive action is to keep my energy circulating within the system which directly benefits me, ensuring and securing my ongoing prosperity of experience.
