Revenge, Regret, and the Four Walls
Why getting well usually means letting go of getting even
In my last post I wrote about sitting with my friend Rich as he died, and leaving Ford six months later, almost to the day. That whole season still feels like one of the clearest reminders that life is not a dress rehearsal.
I do not regret leaving Ford. It was the right move at the right time. The grief of leaving that chapter was long and slow. It took years to let go of that identity, but it felt like a clean ending.
I do regret what came next.
People often say they have no regrets. At funerals we play the song My Way and act as if a regret free life is a sign of strength and wisdom. I do not buy that. Honest regret is often the doorway into growth. It is the place where life finally gets our attention.
My regret is simple. I regret going to work for the symphony.
Not because I did not love the music, the musicians, or the supporters. I loved all of that. I loved attending more than three hundred concerts. I loved hearing the orchestra live in that hall. I loved touring Europe with the orchestra, twice, and watching audiences in other countries light up to the same music we played at home. I loved being featured on BBC television to talk about what we were building and why it mattered. I loved speaking to rooms full of executives and donors who were used to stock charts and quarterly results, and watching them light up as they understood how a symphony could be led with the same discipline and care.
On paper it was a perfect move. In reality it was the beginning of a period that nearly broke me.
This is where Edmond Dantès and The Count of Monte Cristo (TV Mini Series 1998) come in. It is this week’s Alignment Movie Process (AMP) session.
Why I am telling this story now?
Part of why I am willing to go this far into my own experience is that I care deeply about healing the great us versus them divide in our country and in the world. In the recent Mr Rogers post we spent time with the idea of self love. You are loved simply because you are here. That is the ground floor.
The problem is that self love alone is not enough if we are still secretly running a scorecard in our heads. If I am determined to get even with the people I see as them, the kindness of Mr Rogers can only go so far. I can quote him. I can admire him. I cannot really live what he taught.
That is why this Monte Cristo session comes next in the arc. Before we can come back to self love and neighbor love in any real way, we have to be willing to loosen our grip on payback. We have to look at the part of us that wants to get even and say, I understand you, and I am not going to let you run my life anymore.
I am sharing my own four walls and my own brush with revenge and identity loss because I do not think we can heal the us vs. them pattern in the abstract. It has to be embodied. It has to be personal. If my story helps even a few people release their own need to get even, then there is more room for the kind of love that Mr Rogers invited us into. That is worth the risk of being this honest.
Edmond at nineteen, me in midlife
In the 1998 French television mini series Le Comte de Monte Cristo with Gérard Depardieu, Edmond Dantès is only nineteen when his life is destroyed. He is falsely accused, thrown into prison, and left to rot for years. He trusts the wrong people, has no idea how much power they have, and never sees the betrayal coming.
When I look back at my own story with the symphony, I see an older version of the same archetype. I was not nineteen. I had corporate experience, success, and a real track record. Yet in some important ways, I was just as naïve as Edmond.
For most of my life I could win people over with genuine kindness, helpfulness, and being a team player. I loved connecting. I liked being the one who could pull different sides together. Deep down I believed that if I showed up that way, people would naturally look out for me in return.
That belief was my blind spot.
I did not fully understand that there are rooms where other agendas are quietly at work. I did not see that someone can appreciate your results and still not have your best interests at heart. I did not know what I did not know. When the turn finally came, it felt like being blindsided in a way my nervous system had never experienced.
I am not going to walk through all the external details here. That is not the point of this post. What matters for this story is what happened inside me after I left.
It felt like being sealed into four walls.
The four walls
If leaving Ford was a long goodbye, the end of my time at the symphony felt very different.
When I try to describe that time, what I see first is not a calendar or a résumé. I see four walls closing in.
Wall one: the silence
The first wall was silence.
There were stories in the air about why I left. Reporters called, and the official pieces simply noted that I was gone. The real damage came from the rumors that rushed in to fill the silence. I heard versions of my story that did not sound like me. Some people believed them. Others wondered. By the time I stepped away I was burned out, not sleeping well, and in no shape to sit down with everyone and talk it through. Phone calls I might have made, conversations I might have had with people who respected me, never happened.
I felt like Edmond in reverse. Instead of being publicly sentenced, it felt like I had been quietly erased.
Wall two: no clear next move
The second wall was vocational.
I did not want to move my family again. I did not want to go work for another orchestra. I had lost faith in the business model and knew I did not have it in me to pour my heart into trying to fix it somewhere else. Consulting did not appeal to me either. I could not imagine going from orchestra to orchestra repeating the same arguments in systems that did not really want to change.
Ford did not bring people back once they left, so there was no going home again. The corporate world looked at my path and I could almost hear the unspoken question. Why would you leave a secure career at Ford for an arts organization?
So I was in my forties with deep executive experience, a long list of accomplishments, and no clear next move that felt honest. It left me in a kind of professional no man’s land.
Wall three: the weight at home
The third wall was home.
I had been the sole financial provider for our family. Lura had intentionally set aside her own career to raise our kids and support my work as we moved for Ford. When the symphony ended, our children were nine and eleven. There was no quiet sabbatical. There was a mortgage, groceries, tuition, and the weight of very real uncertainty.
The stress at home was not abstract. It was felt. It showed up in conversations, in sleepless nights, and in the atmosphere of our house. Whatever I was going through, I was not going through it alone. Everyone was on that ride with me, whether they wanted to be or not.
Over the years since, I have had the chance to coach CEOs and senior leaders who have lost their roles or retired earlier than they expected. When we get honest, the pain of that third wall is almost always there. For many men, losing a job can feel like losing a life. Comedian Dave Chappelle put it bluntly:
“You take a man’s job, you’ve taken his life.”
Most of the men I have worked with do not hear that as a punchline. They hear it as biography.
Economic insecurity is not just about numbers on a spreadsheet. It is strongly associated with anxiety, physical pain, and a host of health issues. Losing your role can feel like losing your place in the world.
Wall four: the inner scar
The fourth wall was inside my own nervous system.
By the time I left, I was burned out, sleeping only a few hours a night and feeling fried.
It was not just being tired. It felt like my old life, my identity, and my reputation had all been taken out of my hands at once. My red cape, the one I had proudly hung up each night after work, was gone.
Today we know that trauma does not just live in our memories as stories. Long term trauma and chronic stress are associated with real changes in brain structures involved in memory, emotion, and self regulation. Researchers have seen altered activity and even reduced volume in regions such as the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex in people living with post traumatic stress.
In other words, trauma can behave like a kind of brain scar.
That is what those years felt like for me. A scar I could not see, but could definitely feel.
Those four walls were my own Château d’If. Not stone, but silence, no clear next move, the weight at home, and an inner scar that seemed to color everything.
The madness of getting even
This is where The Count of Monte Cristo started to move from just a story to an energetic map.
Edmond spends years in prison, obsessing over the injustice. When he finally escapes and discovers a vast fortune, he uses that wealth to wage a carefully crafted campaign of revenge. It is brilliant and satisfying on the surface. We cheer for him. We understand why he wants his tormentors to suffer.
Yet as the series unfolds, you can feel something else creeping in. A kind of madness.
Revenge does not give Edmond his life back. It does not restore the years in the cell, the youth he lost, or the love he once had. It keeps him bound to the very people and events that nearly destroyed him. His identity becomes fused with payback.
During the Northern Ireland peace process, Bill Clinton said that if people were going to get well, they might have to accept that they would never really get even. That line has stayed with me. It is exactly what Monte Cristo is about underneath all the sword fights and plot twists.
There is a scene in the film No Country for Old Men that points to the same truth in a quiet Texas way. Sheriff Bell visits his cousin Ellis, who has his own story of being shot and left partially disabled. Ellis listens and finally says:
“All the time you spend trying to get back what has been took from you, more is going out the door. You just have to try to get a tourniquet on it.”
That line really hits home.
Because that is exactly what my life felt like after the symphony. I was trying to get back what had been taken, my reputation, my name, my sense of who I was, while more and more of my energy was quietly bleeding out the side.
When I watch some of our most visible leaders today, I see this archetype in real time. People who are so consumed with settling scores, proving they were wronged, or punishing enemies that they slowly slide into a kind of grasping madness. The more they try to get even, the less at peace they seem in their own skin.
I recognize it because I could feel a quieter version of that impulse in myself.
Losing the red cape
For a long time, my heroic groove was simple. If I worked hard enough, led boldly enough, and helped enough people, I would be recognized and loved. I would be the guy who saved the day. The work with Ford had already fed that story. The symphony was supposed to be the next chapter.
When the red cape is ripped away, that story collapses.
In my conversations with men who have lost careers or retired, there is often an unspoken grief. No one wants to admit how much of their worth was tied to the business card, the title, or the ability to pick up the check. They do not want pity. They do not want to be told to just be grateful. They want someone to see how much it hurts to lose the thing that made them feel like they mattered.
If we are ever going to move toward a healthier partnership between the masculine and the feminine in our culture, we are going to have to talk honestly about the red cape. We are also going to have to find a way to hang it up without losing ourselves.
For me, that is where the Alignment Movie Process came in.
How AMP put a tourniquet on the wound
I have shared elsewhere how AMP was born out of years of intense work with Sue Anne. We watched films, tracked patterns, and created resonance statements that allowed us to act as proxies for others who wanted the benefits without having to do all of the heavy lifting themselves.
In those early years after the symphony, AMP quietly saved me.
It gave me a way to sit with the four walls without trying to blow them up. It helped me name the patterns that were still running me, and slowly unwind them. It allowed me to keep my heart open, to stay connected to the people I loved, and to not disappear into bitterness.
The AMP session built around The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the anchors in that work for me.
Who this Monte Cristo session is for
If you are going through any of the following, this session is for you.
You lost a job, a role, or a reputation and feel like a part of you is still locked in that moment.
You have been betrayed or pushed out and you replay conversations in your head, imagining what you should have said or done.
You feel that a group, a system, or a person took something from you that you can never get back.
You feel a kind of background anger that never fully goes away, even when life looks fine on the surface.
You notice that a lot of your energy is still tied up in proving that you were right and they were wrong.
This Count of Monte Cristo AMP session is not about pretending those things did not happen. It is about giving your nervous system a way to stop bleeding energy into the past so that healing and forgiveness can even become possible.
Why this particular series
People sometimes ask why I use this particular Count of Monte Cristo, the Gérard Depardieu television mini series from the late 1990s, and not the more popular film. The whole series is now easy to find online, even on Youtube, so it is not about rarity. Here it is:
The honest answer is that I did not go hunting for it. It arrived the way most AMP films arrive. It showed up at a very specific moment in my life, and when I watched it, I could feel in my body that this was the story that matched the pattern I was living. I did not choose it with my head. It chose me through timing and resonance.
What we are working with here is not a small pattern. We are asking your system to loosen its grip on betrayal, humiliation, and the instinct to get even. You have to want the healing. When you choose to watch all four episodes from beginning to end, you are already sending yourself a new message.
I am worth this effort.
I am ready to stop giving my life away to what happened back there.
That willingness becomes part of the resonance. The film does its work. The statements do their work. And the simple fact that you showed up for all of it tells a different story to the part of you that still feels locked in the cell.
How to experience this AMP session
For this session I use the 1998 television mini series Le Comte de Monte Cristo with Gérard Depardieu. It is four episodes, and the statements in this AMP session are based on the entire series. To get the full benefit, you really do need to watch all four.
Step one: the Intention Session
If you would like to experience the resonance of this AMP session, begin with this simple Intention Session. It helps align your body, mind, and emotions so you receive the full benefit of the work. You only need to do this once before you watch the film. If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.
Speak these aloud:
I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.
I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.
I am patient with myself as I make my changes.
I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.
I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.
Engage three simple modalities:
Nod your head yes.
Drink some water.
Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.
Then simply watch The Count of Monte Cristo all the way through. Do not force insights. Just notice what stirs. Notice where you feel close and where you want to pull away. Notice who feels like us and who still feels like them.
Step two: Let Go
These Let Go statements are designed to relax the grip of revenge, resentment, and financial fear.
I release my doubts and can now see riches beyond what I can comprehend.
I no longer give any energy to the anger that has stayed with me all these years.
I no longer allow my hatred and desire for revenge to control this life and future ones.
I no longer pass revenge onto my ancestors and let it end with me through love and peace.
It is safe for me to see my hidden issues around money now.
Say them quietly or out loud and notice what your body does. There is no need to push. Even a small softening is a big shift.
Step three: Allow
These Allow statements invite in the qualities that make forgiveness and new life possible.
I remember the incredible gift of being alive.
My value is beyond my comprehension.
I ask for guidance and receive it every time, I am never abandoned.
I have faith despite all.
I forgive all and find peace.
Again, notice what happens as you speak them. You do not have to believe them fully yet. You are simply giving your nervous system a chance to try on a different way of being for a few breaths.
For now, I believe releasing the need to get even is the essential first step. It does not excuse what happened. It does not pretend there was no harm. It simply acknowledges that if I keep chasing payback, I will bleed out my life force while more goes out the door.
Forgiveness work, in my experience, comes next. It deserves its own AMP sessions, which I will talk about in a future post. For now, this Count of Monte Cristo session is about getting the tourniquet on. It is about stopping the emotional bleeding long enough for real healing to begin.
From regret to gratitude
I said at the beginning that I regret going to the symphony. That is true. It took a toll on me, on my family, and on my feelings about that whole chapter of my life that I am still unwinding.
It is also true that the symphony experience gave me the insights and desire to discover the Alignment Movie Process so I could heal and help others. Just because I regret the move does not mean it was not the perfect thing to crack me open for this mission.
Over time, my affection for the players, the music, and what that work represents slowly returned. Today, when I hear a recording of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto from that era, with the compact disc cover I helped design, I feel something very simple.
I feel happy. I feel grateful that I had the chance to contribute to that chapter of orchestral music. I feel grateful that I got well enough inside to hear that recording without bitterness.
My hope is that this AMP session helps you get your own tourniquet on whatever old wound is still bleeding. You may never get even in the way your anger would prefer. You can still get well.
And that, in the end, is the only kind of justice that actually lets us live.