Living with a mental health condition is hard enough without also carrying the weight of someone else’s cruelty or indifference. When you’ve been genuinely wronged, the desire to get even can feel completely rational, even righteous. It isn’t a character flaw. It’s what happens when pain goes unacknowledged and the person who caused it faces no consequences.
What makes this harder for many people is that trauma rarely arrives alone. One difficult experience is often followed by another, or several land at once, and the cumulative effect is different from any single event. Your capacity to hope shrinks. The future starts to feel fixed rather than open. You stop imagining things getting better and start focusing entirely on getting through the day. That’s not weakness; it’s what chronic stress does to the brain over time, and it affects how you see everything, including your own options.
The pull towards revenge, or at least towards some form of justice, is rarely about cruelty. It’s about wanting to feel less powerless. When something has been taken from you, whether that’s your sense of safety, your trust in someone, or simply your belief that the world operates fairly, the urge to reclaim it through force of will makes a certain kind of sense. The difficulty is that staying focused on getting even tends to keep your attention locked on the source of the pain rather than on anything beyond it. The anger feels productive because it’s energising, but it circles rather than moves forward, and over time it costs more than it gives back.
Therapy is one of the more reliable ways through this. Not because a therapist will push you towards forgiveness or tell you to look on the bright side, but because having a consistent, non-judgmental space to process what happened can gradually loosen the grip it has on you. You don’t have to arrive composed or with anything figured out. Emotional well-being isn’t a fixed destination; most people move between periods of genuine stability and real difficulty, and both are legitimate.
Physical activity helps too, even when it feels like the last thing you want. So does anything creative or absorbing, whether that’s writing, painting, music, or something else entirely. The point isn’t distraction. It’s giving your nervous system somewhere to put the energy that resentment and hurt generate, rather than letting it accumulate.
Rebuilding your social world matters more than it’s often given credit for. Not performing recovery for people who don’t really understand what you’re going through, but finding those who do, whether that’s one trusted friend or a group of people with shared experience. Isolation tends to reinforce the sense that your situation is hopeless, and it makes the pull towards destructive responses stronger.
Forgiveness is worth mentioning, though it’s widely misunderstood. It isn’t about excusing what happened or deciding the other person deserves your goodwill. It’s closer to a practical decision to stop spending your own energy on someone who has already taken enough from you. Some people find their way there; others don’t, and that’s fine. What matters more is whether you’re moving, however slowly, towards a life that has enough in it to hold your attention.
And at some point, if things go reasonably well, the shift happens not through a single moment of resolution but gradually. The person or situation that consumed so much of your mental space simply starts to occupy less of it, not because you’ve achieved some spiritual milestone, but because you’ve built enough of your own life that there’s less room for it. That’s not a moral achievement; it’s just what recovery sometimes looks like from the inside.
Living with a mental health condition while also navigating betrayal or injustice is genuinely difficult, and anyone who tells you it’s straightforward hasn’t been through it. But the version of you that exists on the other side of this, calmer, more grounded, less at the mercy of what someone else did, is reachable. It takes time and it isn’t linear, but it’s there.
If you’re struggling right now, please talk to someone. You deserve support, and you deserve to feel better than this.
Rev. Dr Phillip Fleming is the chief executive officer and director of the division of peer support services at Mindful Living. He holds credentials in peer support, EFIT, and an honorary Doctor of Divinity.