On Retribution
Punishing someone might feel amazing in the moment, but so do other drugs
You’ve probably heard parts of this before. The idea that punishment doesn’t truly bring justice—that revenge doesn’t heal the pain inside you. It’s been written about, debated in circles that talk about restorative justice, and slipped into conversations about criminal reform.
The path to healing is longer, harder, and messier than the path to punishment.
But it’s also the only path that leads anywhere worth going.
But knowing it doesn’t make it easier to live. Because when you’ve been hurt—really hurt—nothing seems more right, more necessary, than making someone else hurt too.
I understand that. I get it in a way that’s not theoretical, not something I’ve picked up from a podcast or a book. When you’ve had something taken from you that you can never get back, especially something intimate and core to who you are, the need for someone to suffer is almost instinctive.
It feels like the only way to reclaim what was lost.
But, painfully, I’ve learned that punishment doesn’t do that. It doesn’t bring justice, and it sure as hell doesn’t bring peace.
Punishment is seductive because it feels like control. When someone violates you or crosses a line so deep that it shakes your very sense of safety, punishment seems like the only option to restore balance. When the world suddenly becomes chaotic, threatening, and terrifying, punishment promises you a way to even the score—to regain your footing by making the other person feel what they put you through.
But the reality is, no amount of punishment will ever give you back what was taken. It might dull the sting momentarily; you might feel that surge of power when you watch someone who wronged you suffer the consequences of their actions.
But it fades. It always fades. And you’re left with the same pain you started with—only now it’s compounded by the weight of knowing that inflicting suffering didn’t change anything.
We’re drawn to punishment because we want to believe it will heal us, but it doesn’t. It keeps us tethered to the hurt, replaying the trauma over and over in our heads. And worse, it keeps us from confronting the real work—the work of healing.
Healing Is the Harder Path
The truth is, healing requires something far more difficult than punishment. Healing asks you to face your pain, not bury it under someone else’s suffering. And that’s terrifying. It feels like letting go of punishment is somehow letting the person who hurt you off the hook. It feels like saying their actions don’t matter.
But healing isn’t about them—it’s about you. It’s about refusing to let the harm that was done to you define you any longer. It’s about finding a way to carry your pain without letting it consume you. And punishment doesn’t help with that. It just delays the inevitable work of processing your trauma.
Healing means sitting with that pain, feeling every jagged edge of it, and learning to live with it. It doesn’t mean excusing what happened; it means learning to move forward despite it. That’s the part no one wants to talk about—because it’s hard, and it doesn’t offer the immediate satisfaction that punishment does. But it’s the only path that truly leads to freedom.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that justice is synonymous with retribution. That justice requires making the person who harmed us pay for what they did. We want justice to be swift, to balance the scales, to fix the imbalance. But justice—real justice—isn’t about punishment.
Justice is about healing. It’s about repairing harm and restoring what was broken. And sometimes, that’s not possible. Sometimes, the harm can’t be undone, and the healing has to happen in other ways. It’s about addressing the root causes of violence and trauma, not just punishing the symptoms.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences for harmful actions—there are. But those consequences shouldn’t just be about inflicting more harm. They should be about figuring out how to repair the damage, how to create accountability that actually leads to transformation. Not just for the person who caused the harm, but for the community and for you.
Here’s where things get harder: we’re all complicit in this cycle of harm. Every time we reach for punishment, we’re perpetuating a system that thrives on it. This system is designed to uphold violence and oppression, to punish rather than heal. It’s easy to point fingers at the system “out there” without recognizing how deeply entrenched that same system is within us.
We’re conditioned to believe that punishment will restore order. But every time we choose punishment, we’re reinforcing the very structures that created the harm in the first place. This isn’t just about criminal justice or politics—it’s about how we handle our own pain. We’re part of a culture that teaches us to react to hurt with punishment rather than healing.
Accountability, real accountability, doesn’t come from punishment. It comes from repair. It comes from finding ways to heal the damage that’s been done—not by doubling down on suffering, but by creating spaces for restoration, reconciliation, and reintegration.
Feeling guilty isn’t accountability. Guilt doesn’t change anything—it just keeps you stuck in a loop of self-flagellation. True accountability means taking action to repair the harm that’s been done. It means owning the impact of your actions and doing the work to make things right.
That work doesn’t look like punishment. It looks like healing. It looks like creating opportunities for people to understand the harm they’ve caused, and helping them find ways to make amends—not through suffering, but through repair. Accountability means building systems that help people address their mistakes, not by isolating them or locking them away, but by helping them transform.
And it’s not just about holding others accountable. It’s about holding ourselves accountable. We need to stop looking to punishment as the answer, and start choosing healing—even when it feels impossible.
This isn’t abstract. It’s not something that only applies to courtrooms and prisons. It’s about how we treat each other, how we handle our own pain. It’s about how we respond to harm in our personal lives, in our communities, and within ourselves.
You’ve heard this before, maybe in different forms, maybe from different voices. But now, what will you do with it? Will you keep holding onto punishment, believing it will heal you? Or will you take the harder path, the one that asks you to confront your pain head-on and find a way to heal without inflicting more harm?