How I Explained ‘Revenge’ to My Daughter

Hot potatoes & the stories we consume

“Did you hit your brother?”

“Yeah, but only after he scratched me. And it really hurt!”

You’ve heard something like this before. Ouch followed by ouch followed by ouch.

Sometimes I let my kids work it out. Sometimes I intervene.

And sometimes I am thoughtful enough to revisit this eye for an eye dynamic after things have calmed down.

I once explained to my daughter that the game she is playing with her brother could be called hot potato.

“You know that feeling,” I said. “When your brother hurts you and there’s all this energy inside you? Like you have squeezy fists and you want to yell and hurt him right back?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s like he just threw a hot potato at you, and it’s burning you all over. You don’t like the feeling. You want to get rid of the feeling—to get rid of the hot potato. So you throw it back at him. And now he’s burning all over. And then what does he want to do?”

“Throw the hot potato back at me.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s the game. And until you realize you’re playing that game, you can’t get out of it. It just goes on and on and on.”

She stared out the window.

“What might you do instead of throwing the hot potato at your brother when he scratches or hurts you in some way?” I asked her.

“I could throw the hot potato on the ground so it doesn’t burn anybody,” she says.

“Yup, that’s one option,” I replied. “Anything else?”

“I could say to him that I don’t want to play hot potato and leave the room.”

“I like that. Anything else?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Can I tell you something?”

“What?”

“I sometimes play hot potato and don’t even realize it until later,” I said. “And then I tell the person that I realize I was playing a game I don’t want to play and try to make things right with them. But in the moment, I can forget how to play another game.”

“Why do you forget?”

“In our culture, we get told a lot of stories about games like hot potato. And a lot of those stories are about pointing a finger and calling someone the bad guy. The happy endings are confusing because they celebrate when the bad guy gets hurt or kicked out of the community and can’t come back. It’s like the good guys won because of the way they threw a hot potato.”

“Like Ursula in the Little Mermaid?”

“Exactly,” I said. “She gets stabbed and dies—hottest potato you can imagine. Unfortunately, when we feel hurt, those stories aren’t helping us. They only show us how to hurt back. The stories that I feel we need to pay more attention to are the ones that show us how to stop playing games like ‘hot potato’. Remember when we were watching The Santa Clause 2, and Jack Frost froze that girl’s parents?”

“Yeah.”

“I asked you if you wanted to see Jack Frost get banished from the North Pole forever or if you’d rather see them turn him into a friend. Remember what you said?”

“I wanted them to turn Jack Frost into a friend.”

“Right,” I said. “Me too. And that’s what they did. Instead of kicking him out, and having to make another movie where he comes back and keeps playing hot potato with them, they stepped outside of the hot potato game and showed him love and warmth. Maybe they recognized his true gift. And that they could benefit from his gift being used to serve their community. If they kicked him out, his gift for the community would have been lost.”

My daughter gets this on some level. At school, there was a boy teasing her. All I said was, “you know this energy. You know it from a boy in your last school and you know it in your brother. I trust you to figure this out.”

Next day she told me how she responded to the boy when he started acting up. She said to him, “it seems like you’re teasing me because you want to be my friend. Do you want to be my friend?”

And just like that, she authentically stepped outside the hot potato game and they became friends.

Here’s an idea worth exploring—for all of us:

There’s a tendency for any hurt group to seek to hurt the real or perceived oppressor out of reactivity, rather than from a creative place to do things differently and not pass on the hurt. In other words, I believe we will live in an eye for an eye culture until the stories we consume (inside and outside ourselves) reflect and encourage responses that move us away from being stuck in hurt and revenge and towards dialogue where the problems are not each other but placed alongside us to look at with depersonalized distance.

I’m not intending to minimize that people get hurt. All the time in a variety of small and horrifying ways. And some hurt can be traumatizing and lead to revenge which makes a lot of sense from a good guys vs bad guys lens.

This is what happens in a culture inundated with narratives about the glory or horror of revenge (depending on your vantage point) as opposed to being inundated with narratives about healing, reconciliation, and re-integration of the people or person that others lost trust in.

Why did your brother scratch you?

Why did that woman honk her horn at us?

Why do people steal?

Why are there wars?

War is out of date, obsolete. — Dalai Lama

I’m a big fan of restorative justice, an alternative to punishment that retains accountability AND leans on the people involved to solve the issue rather than an objective outsider (i.e judge). Here’s the simple version:

• Gather all the people who were affected by an act that caused a loss of trust. Even the witnesses and those related to the people involved (i.e. all the stakeholders).

• A mediator speaks to all individually and invites them to participate in a circle.

• All who are willing attend with the mediator leading. Any who choose not to attend are replaced in the circle by a stand-in that is given direction on the role to play (such as the “offender” or even the “offended”).

• The offended speak their experience to the circle. The offender paraphrases back to indicate what they heard. This goes on until the offended feels heard.

• The offender is given a chance to respond, apologize for their impact, and express a bit about the circumstances that led to their behavior. The offended paraphrase back to indicate what they heard. This goes on until the offender feels heard.

• The group might identify and seek to address systemic issues or factors contributing to the offense to prevent future occurrences (i.e. it’s not all about the person taking responsibility alone—the environment/circumstances may have made the offense more likely to happen).

• The circle is complete when the offender has agreed how to make things right. Such as compensating victims for tangible losses from property damage or medical bills. Or engaging in community service as a form of restitution.

• In some cases, the offenders have been forgiven and trusted in such a way that they are brought closer together. “I know you are handy, how about you come by every weekend until you’ve rebuilt our fence yourself?”

In other words, there is a recognition that the human being who offended another is still a human being that has a gift for the community. As long as the community does not attempt to banish the offender like a dragon from a kingdom.

There’s a new story arc emerging that will help us put down the hot potatoes—young and old alike. The one that transforms revenge energy (pushing away) into integrative energy (moving towards). 

Personal-development junkies know this deep down. You can’t banish the parts of yourself you don’t like. You need to give those parts a different job that makes use of their talents.

Do I expect all of us to become saints tomorrow? Do you need to invite all the people you don’t trust over to your house for a slumber party?

No. Baby steps, of course.

But for now, I ask you to consider this: how might you heal this eye for an eye culture in yourself, in your family, in your community with the stories you consume and the stories you tell yourself and others?

My prayer: May we all find the courage to learn how to put down the hot potato. May we find the tools necessary to cultivate this possibility. May we trust that the answers for this new way of being already exist and they are ours to welcome into our awareness. May we acknowledge reality AND tell stories that inspire actions of reconciliation such that our reality one day catches up with those stories and reconciliation becomes the likely response.