A lot of people seem to struggle with understanding what they have lost in the first place, they just have a felling that tells them that something is wrong, that something bad happened to them, but they don't necessarily understand what.
And because they don't understand what do they have to recover, they often try to recover the wrong thing. Because of this confusion there are a few traps to fall in.
Even when retaliation is done as a joke like a prank for example, it cam last for very long periods of time and escalate to an absurd proportion. This is why it won't offer you any closure, instead it could aggravate things and make it last for a very long period of time.
However even if you retaliate and the other person is not going to try to get even with you again, it still won't offer you any closure because you are completely missing the point. You are not even close to recover what was stolen from you.
We often remain fixated on the things that we missed in the past and hope that if we get what we didn't get in the past is somehow going to fix us in the present. This would be like if you went through a period of starvation, and attempting to eat in the present the food that you missed in the past.
Not only it is not going to work but you are going to eat to much and get fat, it is actually going to hurt you.
Even if you are going to achieve something that it is going to give you other people approval it won't work, look at all the stars that get rich and famous and are still not over the trauma they experienced as children, they still fall in too addiction, mental illness and sometimes even suicide.
The purpose of abuse is to reduce the amount of option someone have, so if you experience prolonged abuse you become adapted to it, and you will fail to recognize all available options you have in the present.
For example if someone puts a gun to your temple, now instead of all the options you had previously you now have only two: do what the person whit the gun is telling you or die.
This gives you the impression that there is something wrong with you and that in order to escape the abuse or make others like you.
You need to control yourself, and that control makes you self conscious, like attempting to talk over the echo of your own voice, it makes it almost impossible to say anything coherently.
And because you are controlling yourself you are no longer choosing the actions that would create the best scenario in the present.
What was taken for you a long time ago was your autonomy, that is the thing that you need to recover. And when you do it will give you closure.
