To Stop Self-Retaliation, Embrace Self-Forgiveness
We can learn to stop hurting ourselves.
Posted January 20, 2026 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
It has been said that vengeance is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Every choice for payback is also a choice to coarsen our hearts. Since our hearts are inside us, they stay hardened not only toward others but toward ourselves. Retaliation is a form of suffering for both perpetrator and victim. An offender does something that leads to suffering in the victim. Then the victim reciprocates, and so the cycle of pain continues. Suffering becomes the cause and result of retaliation.
Retaliation is turning on others. Self-retaliation is turning on ourselves, self-sabotage . Let’s look at a prime source of self-retaliation: believing in and obeying the decrees of the inner critic . This is the scolding voice resident within us that may resemble put-downs or criticisms from childhood . This is the inner bully who pummels us, especially when we are most vulnerable. When we take that critical voice seriously, we become tyrants over ourselves. We then engage in self-harm or self-abnegation; we are turning on ourselves. To try to get rid of parts of ourselves that the inner critic or other people have deemed unworthy is to turn their aggression on ourselves. Self-acceptance is the opposite of such self- punishment .
The inner critic may want us to believe that we are isolated prey with nothing going for us. We mistakenly imagine we are trapped in our suffering. Hope flourishes when we realize we have resources. Our main inner resource is our own Buddha nature: a presence that is intimately with us and never lets us go, no matter how dark the day or how dark our deeds. Anxiety , fundamentally, is doubting that presence. Buddha nature may not tell us its name, but it names itself in our turning toward goodness because it is goodness, or rather, it is we who are goodness. Our true identity is wider than the inner critic has noticed. It is up to us to welcome our inner critic into the vastness of our Buddha nature, the radical wonderfulness of being human.
We also have abundant resources all around us, such as assisting forces in the form of supportive people. An assisting force is a healing third entity emerging from the dualism of predator (the inner critic) and victim—both of which are ultimately only ourselves. Our illusory world of wolves and lambs is beautifully balanced by the presence of assisting forces, those helpful sheepdogs!
As an aside, I notice a special power in these analogies from nature. They never fail to unearth a vein of hope in any of our human perplexities. Awareness of, wonder at, and trust in nature is a sanctuary of encouragement when the inner critic tells us we have nothing going for us. Nature’s way is always the antidote to despair since it includes the certainty of renewal, restoration, and revitalization, the causes of optimism . We see that floods encourage new growth, endings cycle into openings, withering spirals into blooming. The shy light of sunrise opens into the light of day. Human life can be an adventurous journey through a jungle of lush surprises and tiger-bright dangers that serve to strengthen us at every turn. Our fidelity to that path of hope is exponentially powerful as we face the inner critic, that would-be captain of despair.
Retaliation is aggression-provoked aggression. The inner critic is aggressive toward us, and we are aggressive in return, but toward ourselves. When a bully hits us, we might take it or run away. When the inner-critic bully hits us, we take it, hit ourselves, and stay put for more. As the judgmental inner critic takes charge more and more, we might retaliate against ourselves in ways like these:
These are all forms of self-loathing , which is another name for self-harm, and harming is, of course, what revenge is about. While it is important to tend our relationships with others, we also need to learn how to tend our own fragile hearts with compassion for the ways we take revenge on ourselves.
This post was adapted from the book Sweeter Than Revenge: Overcoming Your Payback Mind (Shambhala, 2025).
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David Richo, Ph.D., is a retired psychotherapist, now an author and workshop leader.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.