Victim’s Manual
Lessions:
“All I did was call him names!”
How to Stop Being Teased and Bullied Without Really Trying
by Izzy Kalman, MS
Lesson Six
GETTING REVENGE
You have been suffering day after day for years because of the cruelty of other kids. The more you have felt hurt, the more you have wanted revenge. You certainly have spent a lot of time imagining ways to pay them back for all the pain they have caused you. You have probably dreamed of bombing them, of shooting them, of slowly roasting them over a bonfire, or at least of making them look like the biggest fools in history. Without a doubt, you would like to make them regret they ever thought of picking on you, and be so scared that they will never, ever be disrespectful to you again.
While I've been bringing you a lot of good news till now, I'm afraid what I'm going to tell you next won't make you jump for joy -- though you will soon realize that it really is for the best.
Getting revenge means that you have to give your teasers back all the pain they have caused you all these years. Try to add up all the pain you have had -- the thousands of days of being depressed, of keeping hurt and anger bottled up inside of you, of thinking there was something wrong with you, of not having friends, of not being able to concentrate on your school work, of getting in trouble for trying to force them to stop -- and you will realize that you would have to do something awfully terrible to truly get your revenge. Giving them back all this pain at once would either kill them or send them to the hospital for the rest of their lives.
You may believe that this is exactly what they deserve. And maybe they do. But how would you feel if your wish for revenge really came true? How do you think you would you feel for the rest of your life knowing that you were a murderer, or ruined someone's life forever. The truth is that there have actually been a few kids in the past few years who got revenge by shooting up kids in their schools, and you probably have heard about them. The most famous ones were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebald, the kids who committed the massacre at Columbine High School. Do you think any of them are happy now after getting revenge? Eric and Dylan killed themselves, because they knew that their lives would have been worse than hell if they had stayed alive after getting revenge. They also completely ruined the lives of their own family members. Some of the other kids who murdered also killed themselves after killing their victims. The rest are all in jail, and possibly wishing they were dead.
Do you want this to happen to you? Of course not! If you actually succeeded in getting true revenge, your life would be worse than it is now.
So how can you get revenge in a way that doesn't make your life worse?
There are four things you should understand.
Number One: You have to accept the fact that, without becoming a criminal, you will probably never be able to give back all the pain that your teasers gave you. So you might as well relax and save yourself the time and energy that it takes to dream of this revenge.
Number Two: Every minute you spend thinking about revenge is a minute that your teasers are continuing to defeat you! Instead of living your life for yourself, you are wasting your life thinking about them! They probably don't waste much time thinking about you. If you are thinking about them more than they are thinking about you, this means that they are winning. They are continuing to control your thoughts without even lifting a finger! You are doing the work for them!
Number Three: Accept that your teasers are not completely to blame for what they have done to you. Of course, you are very angry at them and want to see them punished for the terrible injustices they have committed against you. As far as you have been able to tell until now, you have been nothing but an innocent victim of cruel kids, and they deserve to pay for their cruelty. And its true -- you have been an innocent victim because you did not want your teasers to be treating you the way they have.
However, that doesn't mean that it is all their fault, either. As you learned in the beginning of these instructions, when you were getting mad at the bullies and trying to stop them, you were actually making them continue, just like Billy was making the pigeons come by throwing them bread crumbs. They were really just playing a game with you, but you couldn't see it, and you couldn't see that anything you did to win would automatically make you lose. By getting mad, you were forcing them to win. And since the normal thing is to want to win, they had to continue trying to get you mad.
Of course, you couldn't understand this at the time. But now you do. Can you really expect them to receive a horrible, horrible punishment when you were practically begging them to torment you? It's really not fair to them. It's like throwing bread crumbs to pigeons and then shooting them for the crime of eating the crumbs.
Number Four: This is the most important thing. The best way to get revenge is to turn your tormentors from winners into losers. From this moment on, they will feel like fools whenever they try to bother you! They will be shocked and disappointed to find that they can no longer beat you! Of course, this may not be as gratifying to you as seeing them carried off in an ambulance, but it is a much healthier solution for both you and your tormentors. You will also have the satisfaction of feeling that they respect you more than ever before. You may even discover that kids who once used to make fun of you all the time are now trying to become your friends! Ending the teasing and changing your life for the better is really the best revenge of all.
To help you with this step, it might be a good idea to repeat the following summary to yourself every once in a while, till it becomes a part of you.
I didn't realize it all these years, but I've been allowing myself to be made a fool. It wasn't my fault, because I couldn't see how it was happening. I'm smarter now, and they can no longer defeat me. My best revenge is for everyone to see that I've gone from being a loser to being a winner, and that I've grown up to be a mature, self-respecting person instead of a over-sensitive kid who used to get upset over nonsense.
Lessions:
