We are asked this constantly, usually by people who have already decided and want permission. The honest answer is more complicated than either yes or no, and it depends less on magic than on what happened to you.
The case against
The most familiar objection is the three-fold law — the idea that whatever you send returns to you multiplied. It is worth knowing that this is a modern principle, formulated in the middle of the twentieth century within one tradition. It is not ancient and it is not universal, and most of the world's magical traditions have never held it.
That does not make it worthless. Whatever its provenance, it encodes something practitioners observe: work built on sustained rage tends to cost the person doing it. Holding an intention against someone requires holding them constantly in mind, and people who spend months doing that do not come out of it well. The harm is real whether or not the mechanism is metaphysical.
The second objection is simpler. You may be wrong. You may have an incomplete picture, or be angry at the wrong person, or be reacting to something that will look different in six months. Directed harm is difficult to take back.
The case for
Nearly every magical tradition on earth contains binding, banishing and justice work. The idea that authentic practice is exclusively benevolent is recent and largely commercial.
Traditional practitioners were consulted precisely because the ordinary channels had failed — because the powerful were not accountable, because there was no court that would hear you. Justice work exists because sometimes there is no other recourse, and refusing it entirely means telling people who have been genuinely wronged that they should simply absorb it.
There is also a distinction worth holding onto. Returning what was sent to you is not the same as originating harm. Most traditions treat those as different categories, and so do we.
The distinction that actually matters
Not whether the work is dark, but whether it is proportionate and true.
Justice work returns consequence to someone who caused harm and escaped it. It is bounded — the cost is proportionate to what was done, and it stops there.
Retribution exceeds what was done. It wants them to suffer more than they made you suffer.
Cruelty has no relationship to an injury at all. It simply wants someone hurt.
Most practitioners will do the first, are cautious about the second, and will not do the third. That line is not squeamishness. Work that exceeds its cause has to draw the excess from somewhere, and it draws it from the person who commissioned it.
What nobody tells you about the practical side
Directed work keeps you connected. That is its mechanism — you cannot send something to a person without maintaining a channel to them.
Which means that as long as the working runs, you are tied to the person you most want out of your life. People come to us months later wanting the tie cut, having achieved exactly what they asked for and discovered that they were still living with the person daily inside their own head.
This is the most common regret we see. Not guilt about the working. Exhaustion from having stayed attached to someone for another six months in order to punish them.
Four questions
Would you say it out loud, in your own name, to someone you respect? A useful test. Intentions that cannot survive being spoken plainly are usually worth examining further.
Is it proportionate? Name the harm done and name what you are asking for. If the second is much larger than the first, you have moved from justice into something else.
Are you certain? Not fairly sure. Certain about what happened and who did it.
What do you want to feel in a year? This is the one that changes people's minds. Most people, asked what they want in twelve months, say free of it. Justice work does not usually deliver free. Cutting, banishing and cleansing do.
What we suggest instead, often
When someone comes to us wanting revenge, we frequently suggest banishing first — work that removes a person's influence from your life rather than reaching into theirs.
It is less satisfying. It gives you nothing to picture. But it addresses what most people actually want, which is for the person to stop occupying their life, and it does so without keeping them tethered for months.
That conversation happens in the live chat on this site more often than anywhere else, and it is worth having before you commit to anything. We will tell you honestly whether what you are describing is proportionate — including when we think it is, which people do not always expect.
Some people hear that and still want justice work. That is a legitimate position, and where the cause is real and the request is proportionate, it is work with a long and honorable history behind it. We would simply rather you chose it clearly than by default.
If you have already cast one and regret it
This comes up more than people expect, and it is worth saying that regret here is normal rather than a sign you have ruined something.
Most directed work is not permanent unless it was deliberately made so. A working built on anger tends to weaken as the anger does, because the anger was the fuel. If you cast something yourself in a bad week and no longer want it running, the first step is simply to stop feeding it — stop revisiting it, stop picturing the outcome.
Beyond that, a formal withdrawal helps. Undo physically whatever you did physically: unbind the knot, bury or dispose of what was buried, dismantle what was assembled. Then state plainly, out loud, that you are withdrawing the intent and releasing the person from it. Say their name. The naming is doing the work, exactly as it was in the original casting.
Then cleanse yourself and cut the connection you built. This is the step people forget, and it is the one that matters most — the tie you created to send something is still there after you stop sending, and it is the thing that keeps a person you wanted rid of present in your life.
Where the work was heavier, or where a power was petitioned rather than energy directed, a withdrawal is not something to improvise. Petitions involve a third party, and you do not unilaterally cancel an arrangement someone else agreed to.
Before you decide
This is the one we would most encourage you to talk through rather than decide alone. Open the chat at the bottom of this page and tell us what happened. We will be straight with you about whether what you are asking for is proportionate, and about whether banishing would serve you better than justice work.
Or browse our justice work.