Read This If You’re Angry at the People Who Hurt You

How to stop replaying what they did and finally get your peace back.

Nov 23, 2025

When Your Goodness Feels Like a Curse

“How could they’ve done this to me? How could anyone treat someone who cared for them this much… like that?”

Your body asked that question long before your mind did — in the breath you held before entering certain rooms, in the tension behind your ribs, in the heaviness you carried without knowing why.

You’ve felt it: the more you gave, the colder people became. People who did far less (or far worse) were treated with more kindness than you ever received. It leaves you wondering what invisible rule you broke.

Your body still revolts at the memory. The injustice. The performance. The lies. The gaslighting.

You’ve wondered where your people are — the ones who give like you, care like you, protect like you. You weren’t asking for miracles. Just reciprocity.

You’ve even questioned the Universe’s ability to manage things. Why else would your path keep crossing with people who misuse your empathy, turn your love into leverage, and mistake your care for weakness?

You feel angry — and that anger makes sense. Anger is the part of you that knows a line was crossed. It is your body saying, “This was not okay”. Because it was not. Betrayal and abuse are never “just emotional”. They are always physical, because your body is the one that pays the bill for what someone else did. Feeling this much anger doesn’t make you cruel. It makes you honest.

When “Karma” and Psychology Start to Feel Like Gaslighting

Are you tired of people explaining away your suffering?

“Bad karma from past lives”
“People dislike the ones who saw them vulnerable”
“Hurt people hurt people”
“People resist the ones whose presence disrupts their illusions”

Answers that do nothing for how you feel. Answers that leave you even more powerless, and somehow responsible for your own pain.

Most of these explanations skip a step: your rage. Your disgust. The ache of what you lost. They rush you to acceptance without honoring the part of you that should have been protected, but instead had to learn to survive. That part deserves a voice before it is asked to be wise.

You’re exhausted — the over-giver, the one who feels responsible for everyone. Yet the moment someone comes seeking help, your heart opens again. And the cycle continues. Over and over. Until something finally stops you.

It’s the moment you realize that not everyone who reaches for you is drowning. Some people just want a place to lean while they stand on your neck.

The Art of Discernment

This is discernment — where you can finally differentiate between who genuinely needs support and who simply wants access to your energy.

You learn that people aren’t helpless creatures waiting for rescue. They’re adults making choices you’ve been trying to save them from.

And in that realization, you see you were terrified of turning anyone away because you didn’t want to contribute to the cruelty you’ve seen in this world. So you absorbed it instead, overextending yourself to prevent it.

Now you’re tired in a way that sleep can’t fix. And then the truth drops: in refusing to abandon anyone else, you abandoned yourself. In trying to make the world less cruel, you became cruel to yourself.

Then comes the devastating clarity — that the people you protected were comfortable letting you do that.

Your body has been keeping score — reacting not just to the weight you kept carrying that was never yours, but to the fact that you were the one person you forgot to protect.

It hurts. Of course it does.

“How could they’ve done this to me?” The question loops until you understand what it is trying to show you.

No explanation — no karma, no psychology, no philosophy — can justify what your need to be there for everyone has done to a soul built for depth. But that is all you receive.

Meanwhile, you are stuck in a loop of replaying everything that happened, not realizing how much harm you continue to inflict on yourself.

This pattern doesn’t break until you see that the real wound isn’t what people did to you. It’s what you kept doing in response — shrinking, over-giving, abandoning yourself, all just to avoid becoming “cruel”.

The Way Out of the Cycle

Do you know how to get out of this cycle?

It’s seeing the truth so clearly that the cycle can’t run anymore.

But first — we need to talk about anger.

Your anger is not the problem. What you do with it is.

If you try to swallow it, it turns inward as shame, self-blame, and depression. If you turn it outward recklessly, it can perpetuate a toxic cycle by hurting people who didn’t create the wound. But if you let it speak in a safe way, anger becomes what it was always meant to be: clarity. A clean “never again”.

So the first step is letting your anger have somewhere to go.

A Tiny Break From Being the Bigger Person

The Ugly Draft

Write the most unfiltered, petty, “I can’t believe I’m saying this” version of your story. No polishing. No being fair.

Then destroy it:

If it’s on paper, rip it into tiny pieces and give it a dramatic send-off over the recycling.
If it’s digital, rename it something petty like “Ewww, this?”, drag it into the trash, and empty the bin with the same energy you’d use to block a toxic ex.

Your body has done enough archiving. Let the trash folder do some work.

The Voice Note Confessional

Record a voice note where you say everything you never got to say — unfiltered, uncensored, full volume if you need it. Then delete it. The point is the release, not the archive.

The Tantrum for Grown-Ups

Move your body on purpose: shake out your hands, stomp your feet, go for a hard walk, punch a pillow, scream into your car with the windows up.

Let your nervous system know it is safe to respond now. You’re not “overreacting”. You’re finishing a reaction that got stuck.

The Witness

If it feels safe and available, tell the story to someone you trust or a professional who can hold it without minimizing it, fixing it, or making it about them. Being believed is medicine.

One of the reasons we’re suffering so much as a collective is because we turned this sacred release into something “negative”.

We decided it’s more acceptable to hurt other people because we were hurt than to actually process that we were wronged.

We don’t need more people swallowing their rage until it leaks out sideways.

We need more people who can say, “This was not okay”, let that truth move through their body and then release it.

Releasing anger is about not letting your nervous system be the only place where the truth is stored. The next step we’re heading toward is not a bypass for this one.

Sweet Chili Truth:
Your anger isn’t the problem. Letting it rot inside you is. It’s a truth that needs a safe way out of your body.

A 60-Second Reset for Your Nervous System

Before you scroll:

Put your hand on your chest. Hum out one long exhale. Count your heartbeats for 15 seconds — then do it again.

If the second number drops, that’s your nervous system saying, “I heard you”. That hum and exhale nudge your body out of fight-or-flight and back toward safety.

Do this for about a minute, once or twice a day for a week. You’re teaching your body that it doesn’t have to stay braced for impact every time your mind remembers what happened.

If you remember nothing else from this section, remember this little ritual: hand on chest, one long hum, count your heartbeats twice.

A Thank You That Frees You

Now we can talk about something that might have felt impossible a few paragraphs ago.

Gratitude.

You thank the person who wronged you — not out loud, but in your heart.

I hear you protesting already. This is not “forgive them for your peace” in another outfit. Hear me out.

“Thank you” is not step one. First anger names the harm. Then the part of you that was hurt gets to say, “This mattered”. Only after that can gratitude speak from power instead of denial.

Pause for a few minutes. Think about who you were before you understood what these people were doing — and who you are now.

You’re someone more aware now. Someone who intentionally takes care of themselves. Someone who can support others without burning out. Someone who guards their sacred energy.

Who trained you for this version of yourself? Really sit with that.

The people who wronged you.

So you thank them for making it too painful to stay unaware.

Thank them for the kind of heartbreak that pushed you, finally, towards yourself.

Thank them for exposing the real culprit: the part of you that stayed, over-gave, and called it love while your body carried all the consequences.

Because through that, you realize you were never meant to carry other people’s burdens. You were only ever meant to walk beside them while they carried their own.

Imagine if everyone you helped had treated you kindly and appreciated you. You might never have realized that you, too, deserve your own love and energy.

This is how you can now look at the people who may have spent years trying to break you — with gratitude, not hatred.

And to be clear: this gratitude is not an invitation to go back, reopen the door, or offer them another chance to harm you. This gratitude is about freeing you, not fixing the relationship.

If this still feels impossible right now, that’s okay. Your only job is to know the direction. The heart catches up in its own time.

If something in you finally exhaled, tap ❤️ — it helps this reach the ones who need it just as badly.

The Sikh Lens: One Light, Many Roles, No Separation

Now we zoom out to the level where this was never just about “you and them” in the first place.

In Sikhi, separation isn’t just discouraged — it’s exposed as an illusion. There is only One Light, One Source, wearing different faces. I call it God, Creation, Universe — but the language doesn’t matter. In Sikhi, the divide between Creator and creation is man-made, not divine.

Everything you touch, lose, love, and grieve — including the people who hurt you — is happening inside that One. You are a form of that One. So is the friend who betrayed you. So is the ex who nearly destroyed you.

But don’t confuse “God” with comfort. The Divine doesn’t only build. It also tears down what cannot come with you to the next level.

Fall is the simplest example: everything beautiful drops. From the outside, it looks like loss. But nature isn’t panicking. It’s clearing what can’t stay to make room for what’s next.

Growth is a kind of death. The version of you that couldn’t see the pattern doesn’t make it into the next chapter. And who played the executioner for that old version of you?

The ones who “wronged” you.

Through that role, the One ensured that a part of Itself — playing as you — would not stay small forever. God ending God, so God can grow.

This is the play as Sikhi describes it: one Actor, infinite roles, no true separation. And once you see that, the question slowly shifts from “Why did this happen to me?” to “What part of me was I being encouraged to outgrow?”

My NPC Theory and Your Soul’s Level-Up

You’ve met them: people whose lives expand on paper — more money, more status, more things — but inside, nothing changes. Their whole strategy is extraction. They take from everyone around them to build things they can’t keep, for a life that never actually touches them.

The closest metaphor I have is NPCs in a game — background characters. They look alive, but their responses are scripted. You already know what they’ll do before they do it. When I say some people play an “NPC role” in your life, I don’t mean they’re less divine — I mean they’re stuck repeating the same script, while the same One Light is pushing you to grow beyond it.

Then there are souls you can’t quite place. They don’t fit the molds. They keep evolving. They make choices that don’t match the script you grew up with. They’re not background. They’re main-character energy, whether they want it or not.

My theory: the people whose only real motive is control and domination are the ones stuck on repeat. They’re not here to grow. They’re here to run the same scene over and over. They will live and die in the same script. Different houses. Different jobs. Same soul lesson, refused. They leave this life with pockets full and hands empty.

And then you have souls like Guru Nanak Dev Ji — who could give everything away and still stand in abundance, because their wealth isn’t sitting in a bank account, it’s sitting in their state of consciousness. Those are the souls using this human life well. Whether they fully free themselves from illusion in this round or return from a higher level next time, they’re not stuck on repeat. They’re moving.

I believe some souls are assigned that NPC role in your life. Not because they’re less than, but because they’re not asked to choose their own growth yet. Their role in your life is not to evolve with you, but to pressure you into evolving.

This is where you used to get stuck: it hurt to watch them wreck their life by hurting you — the one who cared for them so deeply. You could see the life they could have been living, and the future they might have grown into, and you wanted it for them so fiercely that you turned your strength into self-punishment. You mistook your power for a sacred duty to carry those who refused to stand — wading in like an elephant to save them from drowning while they kept biting.

But some souls will repeat the same scene forever. They only ever looked like they were drowning because the Divine was using that performance to loosen the weight of old pain and conditioning from your shoulders — to teach you that your work isn’t to rewrite their script, but to recognize the play and walk yourself off that stage.

They will continue to do what they do: test, pull, provoke, drain. That’s their level. Your level is different. You grow anyway. You grow to the point that even death doesn’t get the final say over you.

What Real Healing Actually Looks Like

And that is the quiet gift inside all of this.

Once you see the pattern, it can’t run your life the same way. The pain doesn’t vanish overnight, but it stops being the one in control. Your body has been holding this story for years. It will take time to catch up with what your mind and soul now know. That’s not failure. That’s biology.

You’ll catch yourself reacting differently. What used to ruin your whole day now registers, but doesn’t own you. And on the days it still stings, it won’t drag you under. The charge is lower. The recovery is faster. The story has changed. The waves still come, but they don’t last.

That is what healing actually looks like — not “nothing hurts”, but “nothing owns me”.

If your body still feels like it’s buzzing or frozen, you can start gently helping it release, without forcing anything:

Name what you’re feeling out loud: “I feel angry,” “I feel tight,” “I feel scared”. Putting words to it can calm your nervous system.
Orient to the room: Look around and name five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear. Remind your body that right now, in this moment, you are here, not there.
Lengthen your exhale: Breathe in for a count of four, out for a count of six or eight, a few times. Longer exhales signal safety to your nervous system.
Shake out your hands, roll your shoulders, stretch your neck: Small movements that tell your body it is safe to complete the stress it never got to finish.
Hum softly or place a hand on your chest and one on your belly: The vibration and contact can be soothing for your system, bringing a sense of safety.

These are not a replacement for therapy or medical care. They are small, real ways of telling your body, “You’re allowed to let this go now”.

If it ever feels too big to hold alone, that’s your cue to bring in a coach or professional. Self-mastery was never meant to be a solo sport. Why do you think Sikhs were given ten human Gurus and an eleventh eternal one?

You were never in danger of becoming cold like them. That was the fear that kept you over-giving. But purity doesn’t turn into cruelty. It turns into clarity.

This is where the cycle ends — not because they changed, but because you finally did.

What is meant for you doesn’t require you to abandon yourself to receive it. What leaves now is what can’t come with the version of you that refuses to self-abandon. What remains, and what arrives next, will have to meet you at the level of your new standard.

Your goodness was never the curse. Forgetting yourself was.

You were never being punished. You were being awakened to who you are — the you that you would want to worship, not abandon.

🌶️ Thank you for reading Sweet Chili Truths.

Your move:
What did this article help you see differently?

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