Retaliation

I had to read in the self help book Feeling Good that people don't feel as if they deserve to be retaliated against for whatever misdeeds they may have committed against the reader.  Yes, I had to read that in a book, and it's true.  This notion of certain people I have, in the world we live in, would not respond well to my efforts to obtain some equal measure of justice for whatever they did to me.  People simply don't work that way.  This insight offered by Dr. David Burns, in Feeling Good, goes a looong way towards giving me a measure of peace and allows me to let go of the loads of pain people in the world we live attempted to, and sometimes succeeded in their attempts to, inflict what they felt was a justified measure of pain upon me.  Someone's got to just let it go, and, as usual, it falls upon dangerous, mentally unstable Richard Alexander to function as the adult in the room.

Forgiveness of these people does not constitute acceptance of these people, fortunately, or I could never go through with it.  I'm not obliged to be friends with anyone whom I suspect, rightly or wrongly, of trying to be some abuser towards me.  I'm not obliged to try and be some good guy and try and work things out with this or that attractive woman I suspect wanted to just function as my tormenter for a time, and I certainly don't have any obligation to accept such a person to the extent where I would actually try to date them.  That is all.