Gotcha!

It’s so satisfying, isn’t it, to stick in the knife and twist it. Sweet revenge! Just desserts, serves the SOB right!

When our tender sensibilities have been sideswiped by some high flying, smart-ass, self-important dork, nothing feels better than smacking them down, giving them a taste of their own medicine, putting them in their place. Gotcha!

All too often I’d meet a new client in a white heat of rage, waving around some incendiary missive from a pompous lawyer. There was only one thing they wanted: revenge! Who could blame them?

There are two problems with “Gotcha!” The first has to do with the other guy, the second has to do with you. Let’s consider the other guy, first.

The person who offended you will be either Type One of Type Two. Type One is a normal human being, like you. Type Two is a narcissistic bully, like the Great Orange One. Type One, like you, has a conscience, the ability to feel remorse, and a basic ability to understand fairness. Type Two possesses none of these, seeing themselves as the glorious shining sun at the center of their own universe, with all us losers circling them worshipfully waiting to find ways to exalt them and be useful until thrown away.

Now if you are attacked by a Type One, someone with a modicum of a conscience and sense of fair play, and you slash back with compound interest, any sense of remorse or self-doubt they may have had vanishes as they now feel themselves victimized. Suddenly, they feel themselves the recipient of undeserved venom, and if they join the Gotcha Game, the whole thing spirals out of control until it goes nuclear. Your life is not your own, any more.

But if you can bite your tongue and count to ten, and all the other good things your mother told you, and respond in a measured way (or maybe not at all), the other guy is left with the memory of his attack, and if he is a decent type at all, will generally start feeling that maybe, just maybe, he was just a bit, a tad, a smidgin, too harsh. He will punish himself, although probably will never admit that to you. Only really, really big people come to you with an unrequested apology.

The Jesus I used to know before Fundamentalists got hold of him (http://www.xalibu.ca/blog/the-jesus-who-used-to-be) used to teach the importance of turning the other cheek, and the Bible tells us that “a soft answer turneth away wrath”. Nearly all the major religions have similar teachings, although their adherents don’t always follow them.

So there’s nothing new or surprising about the notion of avoiding Gotcha! and putting a little water in your wine.

As to the narcissist? Well, frankly, they’re probably beyond human help, so they’re not your problem. There’s no relationship to save. Walk away, put in your distance. But don’t slash back, because the cost to you will outweigh by an order of magnitude the immediate satisfaction you might feel. An offended narcissist will spend a fortune and all of eternity making your life miserable for having the temerity to doubt their divinity. You, on the other hand, have a life to lead.

I used to explain this to outraged clients with a parable: If you come home after a pleasant summer evening on the town, and discover that you’d left your door ajar and a skunk is exploring your house, you have two options. You can get aggressive and chase him out with a broomstick, or you can quietly close the doors to all the rooms, leave the back door open for a few more hours, and wait him out. By morning he’ll be gone. Your choice.

And if that story didn’t work, I’d ask for a $20,000 retainer. That usually worked.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a time and a place for a principled fight, perhaps even a World War. But those places are few and far between. Most of the time the only winners of wars are the arms merchants, the media, and the bloggers.

At the end of the day, the only person you need to concern yourself with is you. If you have a full life and a healthy collection of friends and family, you can shake off the occasional insult like a wet dog, and forget it. But if you let the insult soak into your soul and you feed it with vengeance, it will start to eat you like acid. It will invade every area of your life, you will force all of your friends to choose between you and the bad guy, and the memories of the insult will set up camp on the fringes of your consciousness, ready to flood you again and again with the anger and doubts of that first cut, but with compound interest.

Your choice.