Friday night, 7 PM, Upper East Side. James leaned against my office doorframe, designer suit rumpled from a day of closing deals that made his bank account smile while his heart ran a deficit. “I did something vindictive to my little brother over a bottle of cologne, and I can’t figure out why I’m still obsessed with making him pay.” Three martinis later at the corner bar, we’d unraveled something far more valuable than his Tom Ford Oud Wood. 🍸
We’ve all been there—finding ourselves in that moment where our reaction to someone else’s behavior seems wildly disproportionate, even to ourselves. The cologne theft was merely the match that lit a forest fire of resentment that had been meticulously assembled twig by twig for years. 🔥
THE PUNISHMENT RARELY FITS THE CRIME ⚖️
When we extract vengeance that exceeds the original offense, we’re rarely responding to the actual incident. We’re responding to an emotional byte—that perfect storm of physical sensations, emotional charge, and the stories we tell ourselves about what happened. The $150 cologne wasn’t about the money; it was about territory, respect, and perhaps childhood dynamics playing out in adulthood.
I see this pattern constantly in my practice. The executive who blows up a relationship over a missed dinner reservation. The lawyer who ends a friendship because her birthday was forgotten. The consultant who can’t forgive her partner for buying the wrong brand of sparkling water.
Ridiculous, right?
Except it never feels ridiculous when we’re the ones doing it.
THE ECONOMICS OF EMOTIONAL RETALIATION 💰
We operate on an invisible ledger system in our relationships. When someone violates our boundaries—even in seemingly minor ways—our inner accountant starts calculating debts owed. But here’s what I’ve noticed after 25 years watching smart people make emotionally bankrupting decisions:
The people who most aggressively collect emotional debts are usually running from their own emotional creditors.
When you find yourself imposing consequences that make you uncomfortable even as you enforce them, ask yourself these questions:
- What frame am I viewing this through? A one-time mistake or a pattern of disrespect?
- What need of mine was actually threatened here? Security? Recognition? Control?
- Would I find this response reasonable if someone did it to me?
- Am I punishing this person, or am I punishing a feeling inside myself?
- What was my relationship with punishment growing up?
THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN JUSTICE AND POWER 🛡️
We often confuse setting boundaries with exercising power. True boundaries protect you; they don’t punish others. That distinction gets blurry when we’re operating from rigid emotional scripts—those automatic response patterns that feel inevitable but actually represent choices we’re making unconsciously.
Last month, a client realized she was leveraging the same disproportionate consequences her father had used on her. “I became the thing that hurt me,” she whispered, the recognition washing over her face. 💔
The most enlightening question isn’t whether you’re justified in your response—it’s why that particular response feels so necessary to your emotional survival. What invisible structure in your past created that script?
When we respond with outsized vengeance to minor infractions, we’re not teaching lessons. We’re revealing wounds—wounds that deserve attention, compassion, and the gentle awareness that comes with meta-emotional intelligence: understanding not just what we feel, but the systems creating those feelings.
What emotional frame are you bringing to your conflicts? Because I promise you this—the size of your reaction reveals the size of your unresolved pain far more than it reveals the size of the other person’s transgression. 🎯
The most powerful boundary you’ll ever set is the one between the hurts done to you and the hurts you pass on.
— Lola Adams, noticing that our most disproportionate reactions are almost always proportionate to something—just not the incident at hand 🌟
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3288255/
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_teach_siblings_to_resolve_their_own_arguments
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.936253/full
https://raisingchildren.net.au/school-age/behaviour/friends-siblings/handling-fights
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1880&context=sociologyfacpub
https://ladcfamilies.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/LADC-Sibling-Rivalry-Handout.pdf