revenge / grudges

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I hold on to everything longer. Grudges, criticism, embarrassment, what have you. I can't count the number of times my family has told me I have to "just get over it" or "move on".

I don't think I take revenge out on people, and I don't see this as an AS vs NT thing, either. Grudges? Yes. Revenge? No.

kinda same

Thanks for that advice.
I don't promote violence, but the schoolyard can be a nasty place for a little boy. And I'll tell my son anything that will help him.
Almost seems unfair to send them out 'unarmed'.

I wonder in a way if the psychological violence and nastiness is harder for AS girls to deal with.

give him these lol

I am glad you lost your revenge list. It does you more harm than it does the people who have wronged you. I just let most things slide and let the law handle anything that's really serious. Letting the law handle things keeps you out of trouble.

The way I see it is:

"Why get into trouble for them?"

If you let them ruin your life completely they win and you lose which might be what they long to hear anyway; that you have made a complete mess of your life and ended up like they thought you would.

I look at revenge the same way I did when I was involved in sports. Sure we all get wronged, but on the field, the guy who takes revenge is the one who gets caught. Of course, I do tend to remember things for a long time.

The opposite of empathy is Solipsism, the philosophical idea that "My mind is the only thing that I know exists." Solipsism is the position that knowledge of anything outside the mind is unjustified. The external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist, therefore excluding the need for empathy.

The most sublime form of revenge is to forgive your adversaries (it drives them nuts). The second-best form is to simply outlive them.

I do not believe in "letting go" so I guess that means that I hold a lot of grudges. I do not know how to let go without acting like it didn't happen, and I could do that either because that would be a form of dishonesty and makes things unbearably confusing.

Interesting point. Maybe I should investigate this. I could just be a Solipsist NT.....

Due to my very good memory, I hang onto everything, both good and bad. I've never adhered to the "forgive and forget" mentality - I could never forget, especially because after a while it proved dangerous to do so when some people I knew would take advantage of me further if I put things out of my mind or when other people would remember things happening differently and try to say they happened a different, more self-serving way. And without the forgetfulness, I rarely managed complete forgiveness, because unless someone has REALLY good reason for doing something bad to me (which might be the case 5% of the time), it'll always be there, reminding me of what they're capable of doing to me again if I'm not careful. It takes up a long time for me to really, honestly hate and never trust someone again, as a lot of bad friendships and stressful family relationships taught me to overlook the bad things about a person that might get me hurt until it gets too much to stand, but once I get to that point, there's almost no chance of going back. When a person repeatedly, relentlessly, almost purposely destroys every ounce of faith I have in them and then leaves me to pick up the pieces once they're done with me, I see no reason to give them a chance ever again. I've often gotten the "just get over it" and "let it go" reactions for some of the people who have betrayed me, but the way I remember things, an event can still burn me years later. I don't understand how it wouldn't.

Revenge... I admit I haven't gotten the chance to pull off a really good one, but I'm not against it so long as it's proportional to what someone did and it will make them think twice about doing it again. In a way, it's like retroactive self-defense, as often someone who will do something once will do it again, if not to you than to others. And if you take your pain and use it to make sure that no one else has to go through that same thing at the same person's hands, I say that's a productive way of dealing with it. Besides, leaving a matter unresolved is just so ugly, and I don't trust the world to handle it as so often it seems evil is rewarded indefinitely, or at least not given fitting enough punishment.

However, both of the other confirmed Aspies I know seem to not hang onto things nearly as much as I do, sometimes in surprising ways, and only one of them has a vengeful side to them, so I don't know if it's so much a matter of AS as it is one of temperament, personal belief and experience that brought one to a certain philosophy and way of doing things.