The Difference Between Justice and Revenge
I have had multiple conversations with people throughout the years, especially when it comes to my current situation about whether or not to get “revenge” or be the bigger person and walk away from the situation. I have never been a person who has ever felt that I needed to get “revenge” for anything even if I had been wronged. It has generally been easy for me to walk away from a toxic situation and let karma take care of it. In my previous posts, I have mentioned how getting fired, especially from an environment like I was in, was a challenging situation in a number of different ways. One of the challenges here was that it was not so easy to just walk away this time and I wasn’t sure why that was. I knew there was a major injustice that took place for me personally, but I also knew there was a greater systematic problem woven deep into the culture of hockey which I provided evidence for in last week's post. This is about justice, not revenge.
According to Psychology today “ Revenge is mostly about “acting out” (typically through violence) markedly negative emotions. Justice is as logically, legally, and ethically defined—isn’t really about “getting even” or experiencing spiteful joy in retaliation. Instead, it’s about righting a wrong that most members of society (as opposed to simply the alleged victim) would agree is morally culpable.” I DO NOT enjoy any of this. In fact, a major factor in me waiting over a year to speak up about what happened was because I was in a heightened emotional state and I needed to work through those emotions and heal the wounds before I made a decision on how to proceed. I also spoke with numerous people during this time, including CEOs, about my situation to make sure that I was seeing the situation clearly. After telling my story over and over again to various people, the reaction was the same generally consisting of emotions of disbelief and disgust of what was allowed to and continues to transpire in a so called professional setting.
The conversation around revenge and justice needs to be reframed. This has been and will always be about justice, not about revenge. Wanting a wrong to be made right isn’t revenge and that exact mindset is why women do not report or speak out about things that have happened to them because they know that it may be perceived as an act of revenge. Maybe instead of putting the onus on the victim, the perpertraters should be held accountable.
