So if ruminating on the offense to the point of obsession is the wrong way to deal with mistreatment, the right way appears to lie in how you frame or process these toxic emotions, experts said.

“Oftentimes it’s not necessarily the emotion itself that’s bad or toxic, but how one copes with it,” said Dr. Erin Engle, clinical director of Psychiatry Specialty Services at Columbia University Medical Center.

“That’s why people come to therapy, especially for something like anger — the problem is not the anger per se, but the expressing of that anger that results in some sort of negative consequence.”

While these inclinations of anger and revenge are understandable, that doesn’t mean they’ll do us any good. In reality, they’re more likely to just make things worse. That feeling of motivation to “get even” can tether you to the past in a way that overshadows any potential positive outcome the motivation might bring, said Dr. Merideth Thompson, associate professor in the Department of Management at Utah State University’s Jon M. Huntsman School of Business.

“It tends to anchor that person in the past,” she said.

Dr. Thompson co-authored “We All Seek Revenge: The Role of Honesty-Humility in Reactions to Incivility,” a research paper that looked at how the traits of being humble or honest correlated with engaging in overt or covert forms of revenge in the workplace. Dr. Thompson determined that if the motivation isn’t sinking effort, time and attention into a toxic relationship, then revenge, per se, may be helpful.

“If somebody tries to take revenge and have a more future-oriented approach,” she said, “that kind of thinking tends to orient the person to the future and can make them stronger, happier and healthier.”

Think of it this way: You could use a feeling of envy to examine whether or not it illuminates what you value and prioritize, or you could spend time dwelling, ruminating and calculating a plan to hurt someone in an attempt to quash the feeling. Which seems more likely to be ineffective?