The difference between bitterness and warning others, don’t chase the snake.
Bitterness – you’re still running either hot with emotion or stone cold with no emotion when you discuss “that person, situation or scenario”.
Warning others – you’ve neither stuffed your feelings or let them control your actions. Your motivation is not about the “being wronged” or the person who did it. Your focus is understanding the damage that happens in that situation and hoping to decrease someone else’s pain.
Bitterness – you want others to know how poorly you were treated and how you were wronged. You may have every right and possibly need to feel that anger toward that person/situation.
There is a season of self protection that is affiliated with that anger. That anger may help you to 1) stand up for yourself, 2) realize it’s not okay for others to treat you that way, 3) learn what to look for so you can avoid people who treat you disrespectfully.
But staying in the anger, especially without using it to motivate you to move forward, begins to destroy you. The anger focused on another person, keeps you focused on someone who does not deserve your attention. And the negativity will destroy you.
Warning others – you take the emotions stirred up in you and reframe it into a positive for yourself and others. Examples of this: if you are bitten by a poisonous snake you can either chase the snake for revenge or you can go get treatment and live. Then you can pass that knowledge to others who may be in harms’ way.
Another example is a road that has been flooded and kept you from going where you wanted to. You can stand and curse the waters or you can use your headlights to help others see the problem, you can park your car with blinkers to warn others before they get to the problem, and/or you can call for others who can come block off the road and protect drivers.
Neither of these scenarios – bitterness or warning degrades or eliminates the pain you feel/felt or says what happened to you was okay. It just focuses on your right to choose where you want to go from there, what do you want to feel, who do you want to have the power in your life.
If you get up and do what it takes to heal, you have empowered yourself. If not, you are still at their mercy, saying they get to decide how you live your life.
Take the time and help to heal. Take back your life. Move from victim of something you had no power over to survivor to thriver, to more than a conqueror! Living your life fully is the best revenge.
Bitterness only robs from you and those who love you, it doesn’t affect them at all. They don’t deserve that much attention.
When you’re no longer focused on the abuser but on helping others, you’ll know you’ve avoided bitterness and moved to warning others in order to help them to either avoid or recover from the same pain.
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