October 27, 2025 • 39 mins
Have you ever felt that urge for payback? Revenge is one of the oldest, most universal human instincts. It seems like it promises justice, balance, or even peace. But why does it so often leave us feeling worse, not better?
In this episode, we dive into the psychology of revenge - what drives it, what it costs us, and why our brains find it so hard to let go.
We explore:
• Why revenge feels so intoxicating
• The difference between impulsive and planned revenge
• Who might be more prone to act out revenge
• The negative effects of seeking it out
• Why acting on our need can leave us feeling worse
• The push and pull behind human morality
• Empathy, success and silence as alternatives
If you’ve ever replayed an argument in your head or imagined getting even, this episode is for you.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here.
Back for another episode as we of course talk about
the psychology of our twenties. Today we are going to
be talking about the psychology of revenge. What some of
(00:46):
us might think of as an ugly feeling, but what
is actually one of the most complex, layered human emotions
that we can have. So of my absolute favorite movies
and books are written about this concept. Think like kill
Bill or promising young women or Taken. And I find
(01:07):
our human need for like an eye for an eye
so interesting. It's one of those universal human impulses that
we all get, whether or not we've acted on it,
whether or not we've acknowledged it or not. You know,
if only I could make my ex hurt the way
that they hurt me, If only I could get back
at that friend who betrayed me or that person who
(01:30):
cut me off on the road. Sometimes it almost feels
satisfying to either enact revenge or to daydream about all
the ways we could Is that a good thing? Why
do we feel such like a weird pleasure around hurting
someone who hurt us? Here's the paradox as well. Revenge
(01:51):
promises satisfaction, but more often than not you might not
know this, you probably do, but it actually leaves us
feeling emptier than it might feel good initially. Is it
really worth the cost? And how do you navigate feeling
such a messy bit of feeling that maybe goes up
against your more inherent desire to be a good person.
(02:15):
Why is the drive towards revenge so strong? When should
we act on it? When should we avoid it? These
are all the kind of questions that we're going to
be answering today's episode, as well as looking at some
listener stories of people who have sought revenge and what
the consequences were. There is so much pettiness, so much
(02:36):
drama in this episode, so many good stories, and also
so much psychology. It's almost unbelievable. So without further ado,
let's get into the psychology of revenge. I feel like
the idea of revenge is almost romantic at this point.
(02:57):
It's like this driving force for so many dramatic moments.
Some people would even call them poetic moments. So what
exactly is it about revenge that makes it so powerful
and so hard to resist? To understand revenge, we really
have to start at the origin, feeling at what is
(03:18):
going on before we even decide to get back at someone.
When someone wrongs us, that's the beginning of this process.
Our brain obviously interprets it as a threat not just
to our safety, but also to more high level cognitive values,
so things like social status. It's a threat to social status,
it's a threat to our sense of fairness. It's also
(03:40):
a threat to our identity. Now, when you have a
healthy ego, there is this like invisible protective boundary or
shield around you. It kind of represents like a limit
of what you will and won't tolerate. And when someone
oversteps that boundary, when the shield is penetrated, that's when
something pretty us is triggered. Now, some people's boundary shield
(04:04):
is quite small and close to them, and some people's
is quite wide. Regardless, it is actually completely subjective, but
studies in the field of neuroscience have shown that when
someone crosses that boundary, there is this specific area in
our brain called the dorsal striatom that immediately lights up. Interestingly,
(04:25):
it's also the same area that lights up when we
eat chocolate, when we win money, when we receive praise
from somebody. In other words, the anticipation of revenge after
someone has hurt us, harmed us, betrayed us literally does
feel initially quite pleasurable. This from an evolutionary perspective, makes
a lot of sense. We are wired to respond to injustice.
(04:50):
If we think about early groups of humans, we pretty
much relied on this elusive concept of fairness to survive
being having your resources stolen, having your reputation undermined, having
your partner taken that could and would threaten your survival,
(05:10):
and so revenge served as a signal to others that
this kind of behavior was unacceptable. So in a way
it actually worked to reinforce social rules and to deter
people or others from betrayal or from hurting people. Basically,
it's like the classic idea of punishment, punishing the offender,
(05:33):
teaching them a lesson restoring harmony, and also signaling to
the wider group that this is not okay, but also
that you are not an easy target, and this kind
of reputational enforcement that you are not somebody to be
messed with was really adaptive in smaller communities where reputation
(05:55):
affected access to mates, to protection, to resources, So long
before laws or social contracts, this instinct was really really helpful.
It's actually what psychologist would call altruistic punishment. Basically, yes,
(06:15):
the outcome of revenge might not be necessarily positive for
the other person, but it also has a greater good
in that it used to maintain group cooperation and it
actually used to be good for social harmony, knowing that
there was this balance between giving people respect and knowing
that if you overstepped your boundary you would also receive
(06:36):
some kind of punishment that taught you not.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
To do that.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
So it is a very very old feeling. That's what
we need to understand, especially if you feel a lot
of guilt around wanting to enact revenge against someone. The
question that we kind of get into is why would
it therefore still be useful in modern life. You know,
when we have laws and law enforcement, when we have rules,
(06:59):
when we have a legal system, why do we still
feel the feeling if technically there are other systems that
are meant to, you know, take care of that for us.
The most obvious driver for revenge is this need for justice.
And I know I just mentioned the legal system and
law enforcement system. What if that system is broken. What
(07:20):
if that system doesn't work in your interests? What if
the thing that someone did wasn't necessarily illegal but still
really hurt you deeply, Like what if it was someone
who cheated, or something really petty and small that you
couldn't necessarily sue someone for, but which still really annoyed
you and hurt you. I remember when my ex was
(07:44):
secretly dating someone whilst we were having like discussions of
like do we get back together or not? And we're
having all these talks about like, no, we definitely have
a future together, give me a second chance, and the
whole time he was dating somebody else. And when I
found out, I had never felt that surge of adrenaline
before that like it to be honest like desire to
(08:07):
hurt him, and it honestly like it shocked me, like
it made me see myself differently as an individual. This
is like the classic they must pay kind of motive,
the belief that for fairness to be enacted, retribution is
somewhat required. Revenge also allows us to reassert control if
(08:29):
we've been betrayed, humiliated, or made to feel powerless. Like
fantasizing about payback gives us this sense of agency, even
if we don't do anything about it. There's this idea
of like, yes, this person stepped all over me. Yes,
this person hurt me, but I know I could get
back at them if I wanted to, and therefore I
(08:49):
actually do have some level of control in this situation.
So it kind of serves as this like emotional moral
like psychological recalibration that stops us from being additionally hurt
by this idea that we are powerless to what people
do to us. Many people also believe that revenge actually
(09:10):
helps people get closure. There's this perception that if you
retaliate and make someone feel the way that they made
you feel, that is when you can walk away. That
is when the door is closed. Unsurprisingly, maybe surprisingly, research
shows that revenge actually rarely provides closure. In fact, according
(09:31):
to research published in the Journal of Personality in Social Psychology,
those who enact or engage in revenge actually tend to
ruminate even more about the initial event, and they tend
to actually feel that their negative emotions are kept alive.
In comparison, people who resist revenge, even resist fantasizing about it,
(09:54):
often recover faster emotionally from the event and from the
person and the act that hurt them. Just something to
keep in mind. The final driver towards revenge is just
plain old impulsivity. It's like this knee jerk reaction to
feeling disarmed by someone else's action. We just have to
(10:16):
lash out. That's a really crucial thing about revenge is
that it often isn't planned. It is so primal and
emotional that it's not strategic. You just want to hurt
the other person, which is why it also tends to
backfire or to not feel as good as we initially
(10:38):
think it will. This might be like the angry text
that you send that you really regret later on when
you know you're meant to be the person who like
rises above things, or like the public call out on
your Instagram stories the heat of the moment reaction you know,
I gosh, I like remember I remember when a group
(10:58):
of my closest friends all went on this overseas trip
together when I was nineteen, and they didn't tell me,
and they kind of asked other people around us not
to tell me either, and I ended up finding out
from someone else. What was my reaction to that? It
was to post this like really cringe Instagram story that
was like when someone shows you who you are, like
(11:20):
believe them, Like it's so awkward to think about right now,
Like that I did that, And obviously I ended up
having a conversation with them, but like that was my
first reaction. I feel so cringe, but in the moment,
like that was the only way, the impulsive way to
restore balance in that situation. So this kind of impulsive
revenge is driven by the limbic system. We speak about
(11:41):
that a lot. It's this emotional center in your brain
that has evolved to keep us alive in dangerous situations
by being extremely reactive. Specifically, the amicdala is the key
actor here. This is the part of your brain responsible
for processing fear, anger, threats, humanly hurt. So when we
(12:02):
do experience those things, the amygdala fires pretty instantly and
it sends signals to our body that you know, we
need to be on high alert, we need to be
doing something, we need to be acting, and when it's
an emotional situation where we can't necessarily fight back or
run away or freeze, we lash out. I guess we
(12:22):
fight back psychologically and emotionally and cognitively by trying in
some way to be in control of the situation, even
if it ends up being kind of ridiculous. This does
not necessarily help us in the modern world. It has
the potential to be very destructive. The tricky thing here
(12:46):
is that impulsive revenge is incredibly fleeting. Once the adrenaline fades,
I promise you, the satisfaction fades as well. What's left
behind is often regret and shame. Studies again, neuroscience studies
have found that impulsive acts of aggression, they do produce
(13:09):
short bursts of reward related activity in our brains, followed
by increases in negative self referential processing. What does that mean?
It's basically that like, oh crap, what have I done? Feeling?
They're like what does this say about me? Feeling? I
(13:30):
thought I was better than this feeling, and that feels awful.
Of course, we also have planned revenge. This is the colder,
more deliberate kind that comes from higher up in the
brain's hierarchy. It involves the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex
(13:52):
and the amigdala are like the same but different. They
are incredibly integral in how our brain operates. But the
prefrontal cortex is all rational, it's long term planning, it's
impulse control. You would think that it would and it
is there to kind of mediate the amigdala. But when
like our instinct for revenge gets shifted into that space, suddenly,
(14:16):
as the injustice lingers and the hot headedness and the
rage goes down, there's like this new colder dimension to
how we're thinking about hurting people. We're incredibly strategic. It's
not chaotic. It's yeah, it's planned. We're thinking it through
sometimes for months on end, and it can feel quite cathartic,
(14:41):
considered soothing. One story I heard from a listener was
about how she got revenge on a boss who had
harassed her by slowly keeping track of receipts and like
basically indications that he was stealing money from the restaurant
that she was working at. So how she did this
and I'm in a paraphrase what she said, but basically
(15:04):
she was always offering to close the tills at the
end of the night and she would count all the money,
and she would count all the credit card transactions or
whatever it was, and keep like doubles of the receipts,
take photos of the receipts, take photos of her count
because she knew that the boss was taking like three
hundred to four hundred dollars off what she had put
in and off her like calculations in claiming to his
(15:27):
boss that like, you know, they've made less for the day.
And one day she was like, I waited for six
months doing this slowly and slowly because you wouldn't do
it every day. And eventually I went to like my
boss's boss and I got him fired.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
See, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
How I feel about that. I kind of love that
for her. Another more I guess sinister story was from
a listener whose partner cheated and she did have evidence.
He didn't know that she knew, but again she stayed
with him for another three months. She was like, I
just went all I felt nothing towards him, but I
like convinced him that I wanted to get married, that
(16:05):
he should like propose to me and we should move
in together and then one weekend he went on like
a boy's trip, and she packed up half the house
left left over that weekend and literally had gotten a
job out of state. Mood states no contact, never spoke
to him again, and I was like, this is Curl,
(16:26):
this is crazy, Like, you know, you built him up
and you like made him feel so in love and
then she just like cut it off and she was like,
that's what he made me feel. And I was like, honestly,
power to you if it made you feel better. I
guess it kind of sounds like he deserves it. But
if you've never felt this way, if you've never been
able to plan this, sometimes it actually does come down
to our personality. For me, like my form of revenge,
(16:51):
revenge has always been very impulsive. But you know, in
the cases where not necessarily these cases, but people where
they go really intense on someone over something petty, there
is actually something probably different about how their brain operates
and about their personality that sociologists and psychologists and neuroscientists
(17:14):
have been trying to figure out. So there's one particular
social psychologist called Ian McKee at the University of Adelaide
who is looking into this. I think still at this
very moment, and according to him, people who are more
vengeful in the planned sense tend to actually score higher
on two traits right wing authoritarianism. Basically, they're very willing
(17:41):
to submit to authority figures, and they're willing to act
aggressively in their name and social dominance orientation. They want
their group to be at the top of the hierarchy.
These individuals are motivated by power, by hierarchy, by the
preservation of status. They don't want to lose face. They
are much more likely to seek out planned revenge. His
(18:04):
research also showed that these personalities tend to be less forgiving,
less benevolent, and more driven by authority and tradition rather
than empathy or understanding. There's also a cultural dimension to
this as well to seeking out revenge. Michelle Gelfand another
(18:28):
psychologist in this area.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Her and her.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Colleagues found that what triggers our need for revenge actually
differs across cultures in the US, in Australia, in the UK,
and other individualistic societies. Revenge is often fueled by anger
and the violation of personal rights, the violation of things
like property rights like this is mine, it belongs to me,
(18:52):
do not take it. You're not allowed it, and if
you try, I'm going to enact revenge on you. But
in collectivist cultures, people aren't so fussed by that stuff.
It's more about and more triggered by violations of duty
and honor and violations against the community. Gelfan also noted
that revenge can actually be more contagious in collectivist cultures
(19:15):
as well, whereby when you harm a member of someone's
in group, so a family member or close friend, that actually,
for those individuals feels more like harm to oneself than
others who are living in individualistic societies. It's not just
my pain like it's our pain. So revenge in these
(19:37):
situations isn't about personal temperament. It's more about cultural and
social belonging and maintaining the fabric of the collectivist society
rather than protecting what's yours. We're going to return to
this idea I mentioned before, which is that on some
level revenge is actually really satisfying. What about the costs?
(20:01):
If you are sitting there thinking, I'm kind of tossing
up what I do in this situation, someone has hurt me,
I want to act on it. Let's talk about what
you should actually do practically, what should you do after
this short break. Revenge feels amazing, There is no other
(20:22):
way to say it. It activates the brain's reward centers.
It gives us a surge of control, a surge of pleasure.
The hidden cost is, of course, that fades. But also
that the more we plot and rehearse revenge, the more
we anchor our emotional state to the person who has
hurt us. The more invested and intertwined our stories become.
(20:45):
The more we make our peace conditional on something, and
what it's conditional on is their pain. And this is
where this can get a little bit tricky. There's a
really interesting piece of research from Iowa State conducted in
twenty twenty two which basically looked at six hundred participants.
They partnered them up for this experiment and the researchers
(21:06):
asked them to write just a really basic essay, and
they were told that these essays would be reviewed by
their partner. What was actually happening was that every single
person in this study had the same partner. It was
a research assistant, and that research assistant, slash. The research
team gave every single one of these people or at
(21:28):
least half of these people sorry really bad feedback. They
were like, this is really bad, this is poorly written,
this is terrible, you don't have any talent for this,
and they were trying to anger the participants. So all
of the participants were in this condition, all of them
had the bad feedback. But then participants were then split
into three different groups. The rumination group, these participants were
(21:53):
asked to hit a punching bag whilst looking at the
photo idea of their supposed partner, a distraction group, where
they were shown a picture of an athlete whilst being
asked to think about becoming super fit and punching the bag,
and finally a control group, where participants just were asked
to sit quietly for a little while after receiving their results.
(22:15):
What's really interesting is that the participants in the control group,
the ones who were just like sick quietly think about
the situation, They got over it faster. They showed the
lowest levels of anger and aggression compared to the groups
of participants who vented their feelings in some way processing
(22:38):
the pain individually. Counter to what we think encounter to
what our limbic system is going to tell us is
the best option, even the most calculated revenge came at
a psychological cost, and comes at a psychological cost. It
(22:58):
keeps you entangled with the person who hurt you. It
actually prolongs your emotional dependence on them, meaning that they
still have power even in their absence. This idea that
you want to get back at them still allows them
to exist within your mind. Someone described it to me
as like emotional quicksand the harder you struggle to make
(23:21):
someone else feel what you feel, the deeper you sink
into the very pain that you are trying to escape.
This echoes what a lot of emotional regulation theories will
tell us. When we feel anger, we reinforce its neural pathways.
Every time we replay the story, every fantasy that we
have of getting even, our brain strengthens the association between
(23:46):
pain and vengeance as the only solution. Here's also what's
strange about revenge. Sometimes we do get exactly what we
want it. You know, the apology never can. So we
did get even. They felt the sting, the balance in
theory was restored, and yet afterwards you don't actually feel righteous,
(24:11):
You don't actually feel better. Sometimes we actually feel worse
about ourselves. This has nothing to do with the other person.
It has everything to do with us. There is this
idea in psychology of effective forecasting. Essentially, it's our human
tendency to mispredict or falsely predict how future events will
make us feel. In the moment, we think that revenge
(24:34):
is going to make everything feel better, that justice will
be restored, everything's going to feel great. We think it
will cancel out our hurt, but we overestimate the emotional
payoff and we underestimate how terrible we're actually going to feel.
In particular, when we act on our desire for revenge,
it actually changes how we perceive ourselves. In that instance
(24:56):
of payback, you are no longer just the person who
was wronged. In this situation, you also become the person
who has wrong someone else. And that moral dissonance is
really uncomfortable because it blurs the boundary between victim and perpetrator.
It splits us. That's how this is described. It splits
(25:17):
you between the person you were before the pain, the victim,
and the person who you became in response to it.
Not necessarily the villain, but not necessarily the victim either.
This neuroscientist and experimental psychologist Molly Crockett at Princeton. She
has shown that this kind of moral decision making, such
(25:38):
as do I seek revenge or not, feels good because
it activates the reward network. It also activates the empathy network,
especially this area called the ventromedia or prefrontal context that
like almost immediately makes you see someone else's pain and
(26:00):
feel it yourself, even if you don't like them. Like,
every single person has this structure of their brain, whether
it's as active as someone else's or not. But you know,
when you retaliate those empathy circuits, they don't switch off.
They keep processing the other person's pain. And the human
brain really struggles to feel pleasure and pain at the
(26:23):
same time, to feel empathy and pleasure at the same time.
So you have this like really uneasy like juxtaposition of
satisfaction and whether you acknowledge it or not, a sense
of sadness. This is part of why people often describe
revenge as like leaving a bad taste. A bunch of
(26:45):
social psychologists, one in particular, called rosen hadeit. They have
written about the different domains of disgust and how yes
you feel disgusted at like, oh this food is off
ah like this bad. You also feel moral discussed, moral
discussed at, having gone down to someone else's level, feeling
(27:09):
kind of dirty because of it. That's why when people
say things like I just I can't understand how they
could hurt me, can't understand how they could treat me
like this, that's actually a really good thing. Of Course,
you can't understand why they did that to you because
you're not like them at all. That's a really great thing.
(27:31):
Of Course, you can't empathize or try and recreate the
situation that made them hurt you because you're not them.
You're better than them in this situation. Like it feels
weird to say that, but you are. So should we
ever take the low road over the high road? Is
(27:54):
it ever acceptable morally to do unto others what they've
done to us? Human reality has wrestled with this question,
for literal like for thousands of years. So there's not
really anything new I can bring to this conversation other
than just summarize the two kind of arguments. On one hand,
(28:16):
there's that very ancient law of retaliation, you know, it's
famously captured in the Old Testament. Life for life, Eye
for eye tooth for tooth. In its original context, this
wasn't actually meant to encourage revenge. It was actually meant
to discourage cruelty. It didn't say, you know, don't seek revenge.
(28:38):
It was basically trying to say, like, there are boundaries
around vengeance that it needs to be proportional. You can't
kill someone because they stole your cow. You can't you know,
burn their house down because they knocked over your like
carrots Tand I don't know what my analogies are, but
you know what I mean. In its early form, yeah,
(28:58):
revenge was totally normal ads. But justice, in this early sense,
it meant balance, It didn't mean escalation. However, as human
ethics have evolved, so does our understanding of justice. More
than like two millennia later, Martin Luther King Jr. He
reframed that same principle when he said, the old law
of eye for an eye, tooth through a tooth leaves
(29:20):
everyone blind and toothless. Right, And his point was that
vengeance multiplies suffering. It doesn't actually restore harmony, it corrodes it.
So what's changed in how we think about doing onto others? Well,
modern psychology really suggests that revenge just exists because there
is a tension between two competing moral systems. We are
(29:44):
taught that we need to seek justice. I feel like
that words come up a lot. We're also taught to
care about other people. Care says we should forgive. Justice
says they should go what they deserve. That is also
why revenge feels so kind of delicious at times, because
that moral friction is interesting and doesn't have a right answer,
(30:06):
so it's fascinating. We go back and forth and back
and forth. We don't really know which one we should
do because both feel equally important. Some philosophers, for example,
a manual can't have argued that justice does actually require
retribution and to maintain a moral society we need to
(30:27):
do that. But counter to this, like a lot more
humanist traditions do say that it doesn't produce good, Like,
the highest moral act isn't to mirror someone else's behavior,
it is to rise above it. Researchers who specifically study
empathy and moral reasoning, they describe this as moral elevation.
(30:51):
You will feel better when you witness, or encourage or
perform forgiveness. So if you are you know something just
terrible has happened to you, and you want to get revenge,
and you want to get revenge because you think it
will make you feel better. You might not like to
hear it, but you will experience more reward from not
(31:13):
necessarily forgiving somebody, but trying to maybe understand why they
did it, trying to maybe not justify it, but just
trying to make peace with it without them being involved
at all. Forgiveness actually gives us, neurologically a deeper sense
(31:36):
and kind of reward and sense of dignity and sense
of empowerment. Doesn't mean that forgiveness is easy, doesn't mean
that it's even possible. Sometimes choosing not to retaliate isn't
about moral superiority. It's just about refusing to hand over
more of your peace and power to a person who
already took more of it than they deserve. So maybe
(31:59):
the real question we're getting to here is whether revenge
is acceptable, but whether it is useful? Is it useful
for you? If we think about more productive options, radical
empathy is like one that's probably going to come up
a lot. Radical empathy is like the unconditional empathy and
(32:21):
forgiveness that we have for other people's actions. Doesn't mean
permitting them, doesn't mean letting them do it again, doesn't
mean forgetting. It's just a piece that we restore within
ourselves that you know, we're not We're going to release
the pain that we feel about this. We're going to
have empathy for them. It's about actually really acknowledging like
how someone else may have been hurt into their hurt,
(32:42):
may have been harmed into harming, may have been driven
to cruelty through ignorance or fear, And it is, without
a doubt, I think personally, a much more freeing approach.
We have seen it again with neurope, like with with
studies and with neuroimaging, like people who have this radical
(33:04):
empathy approach are actually happier, Isn't that like the best
revenge isn't success and happiness and peace the best revenge
of all? Probably, So maybe it's uncomfortable to get that
that might be the way to go about it. I
think that this approach personally is one that it is
one that I've adopted in the last year, and it
(33:24):
has made me just feel a little bit less mad
about the world. You know, I got into such a
rut this year thinking about the world as just like
full of terrible people who rule our lives and do
terrible things that we just have to watch and observe,
and that people are cruel and everybody is mad and
angry all the time. It wasn't a nice place to be.
But I started doing this exercise where when I felt
(33:46):
this way, I had to think about someone who I
was angered by or mad at, that I was going
to forgive and I was going to think positive things
about someone in my life in that day, in this
month that I really wanted to like be angry towards
who I could just in that moment symbolically forgive and
wish well. And that wasn't for them, even though of
(34:09):
course in some ways it was. It was for me.
People doing bad, hurtful things will have us believe that
there is no good in the world, But how can
that be true if we demonstrate good and if we
choose the love. So it actually does, I think, change
how you just view the balance of good and evil
in a way that's always going to mean that, I
(34:31):
don't know, it's always going to mean that you have
a more positive outlook. Obviously, not everyone deserves empathy, but
this again is not about these people. This is about you.
This is about you being able to be free of
whatever pain this person has called you caused you. In
one possible way, I think it's this like weird experience
(34:53):
that you have, which is that when you stop needing
someone else to suffer in order to feel okay, like
you actually really start to move on, which is again
annoying and it's frustrating. I love like this idea again
of like success is the best revenge, or like karma
will take care of it for you. I truly believe that.
(35:13):
And the interesting thing is that, like obviously I love
the science and I love the psychology, I don't have
any scientific research or scientific backing to prove that like
karma will take care of it for me. But anecdotally,
I just feel like everything kind of evens out eventually,
and it just stops you from having to labor over
(35:36):
how you're going to get them back. It just stops
you from giving them more of your energy. Like they've
already done something bad to you that's bad enough. Don't
let them then, like take all these precious moments that
you could be spending giving love to others or doing
other things obviously easier said than done, if like everything
(35:57):
we talked about today is easier said than done, But
I do think that it's the more peaceful approach, and
I do think that like having had like real grudges
like about people in the past and at times like
not being able to let it go for many, many years,
the best thing that I've done is to just like
(36:17):
seriously and vigorously and aggressively focus on myself and to
just put everything into being successful, everything into being a
good person, so that like on the off chance they
come to check in on me, or they start watching
or whatever it is, or you know, they follow me
(36:39):
on Instagram, like I don't know, on the off chance
they try and side back in, like they can just
see that they try their best to like kind of
bring me down, and it like never worked. And the
thing is is that it actually doesn't matter whether they
ever do notice that I'm happy, or do notice that
I'm successful, or do notice that my life is good,
(37:00):
because when I started focusing on that stuff, I just
started stopped caring about them completely, and it was like
incredibly incredibly liberating, and it was just like so much
better than any form of retaliation. I feel like I've
done both, but silence and just like silence, no contact,
(37:21):
completely focusing on my own lane was the most empowering
thing that I could do. So those are my amusings
on revenge. That is the psychology of revenge and why
we seek it, why we want it, whether it's actually worthwhile,
and this like radical empathy success is the best revenge
charmatic kind of response to it. That it's kind of
(37:42):
a form of like acceptance therapy as well. Accepting that
you can't control other people, you can control your response,
Like that's really what's empowering about it. I'm gonna stop
going on and on about this because I feel like
I've drilled it into you by now. But I hope
you enjoyed this episode if you have made it this far,
to leave a little olive emoji down below, to like
(38:03):
symbolize an olive branch, symbolize forgiveness, not necessarily the olive
branch that you need to extend to anybody, but like
just the symbol of what we're asking for for ourselves,
forgiving ourselves, for giving somebody else in our mind, not
through actions, and just being able to move forward without
seeking revenge. I want to thank our research assistant Libby
(38:24):
Cobbert for her contributions to this episode, and I want
to thank you guys for listening. This episode was actually
on YouTube, so it's not something I've talked about a lot,
but yeah, we now do YouTube episodes. If you want
to go and I guess rewatch it probably not, but
if you want to watch other episodes like this one,
you can go to YouTube a that's Psychology of Your Twenties.
(38:47):
You can also subscribe to us on substack if you
would like the transcript of this episode, it's free. I'll
leave a link in the description, and also follow us
on Instagram. If you want to see behind the scenes
or an episod so breakdown, or what we're planning for
the next year, or just want to keep in touch
with the podcast, that's the best place to find us.
(39:08):
But with all that said, with all that done, I'm
going to close the episode by saying thank you again
for listening. Until next time, be safe, be kind, be
gentle to yourself, don't always go after revenge. It might
not be as satisfying as you think. And we will
talk very very soon.
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here.
Back for another episode as we of course talk about
the psychology of our twenties. Today we are going to
be talking about the psychology of revenge. What some of
(00:46):
us might think of as an ugly feeling, but what
is actually one of the most complex, layered human emotions
that we can have. So of my absolute favorite movies
and books are written about this concept. Think like kill
Bill or promising young women or Taken. And I find
(01:07):
our human need for like an eye for an eye
so interesting. It's one of those universal human impulses that
we all get, whether or not we've acted on it,
whether or not we've acknowledged it or not. You know,
if only I could make my ex hurt the way
that they hurt me, If only I could get back
at that friend who betrayed me or that person who
(01:30):
cut me off on the road. Sometimes it almost feels
satisfying to either enact revenge or to daydream about all
the ways we could Is that a good thing? Why
do we feel such like a weird pleasure around hurting
someone who hurt us? Here's the paradox as well. Revenge
(01:51):
promises satisfaction, but more often than not you might not
know this, you probably do, but it actually leaves us
feeling emptier than it might feel good initially. Is it
really worth the cost? And how do you navigate feeling
such a messy bit of feeling that maybe goes up
against your more inherent desire to be a good person.
(02:15):
Why is the drive towards revenge so strong? When should
we act on it? When should we avoid it? These
are all the kind of questions that we're going to
be answering today's episode, as well as looking at some
listener stories of people who have sought revenge and what
the consequences were. There is so much pettiness, so much
(02:36):
drama in this episode, so many good stories, and also
so much psychology. It's almost unbelievable. So without further ado,
let's get into the psychology of revenge. I feel like
the idea of revenge is almost romantic at this point.
(02:57):
It's like this driving force for so many dramatic moments.
Some people would even call them poetic moments. So what
exactly is it about revenge that makes it so powerful
and so hard to resist? To understand revenge, we really
have to start at the origin, feeling at what is
(03:18):
going on before we even decide to get back at someone.
When someone wrongs us, that's the beginning of this process.
Our brain obviously interprets it as a threat not just
to our safety, but also to more high level cognitive values,
so things like social status. It's a threat to social status,
it's a threat to our sense of fairness. It's also
(03:40):
a threat to our identity. Now, when you have a
healthy ego, there is this like invisible protective boundary or
shield around you. It kind of represents like a limit
of what you will and won't tolerate. And when someone
oversteps that boundary, when the shield is penetrated, that's when
something pretty us is triggered. Now, some people's boundary shield
(04:04):
is quite small and close to them, and some people's
is quite wide. Regardless, it is actually completely subjective, but
studies in the field of neuroscience have shown that when
someone crosses that boundary, there is this specific area in
our brain called the dorsal striatom that immediately lights up. Interestingly,
(04:25):
it's also the same area that lights up when we
eat chocolate, when we win money, when we receive praise
from somebody. In other words, the anticipation of revenge after
someone has hurt us, harmed us, betrayed us literally does
feel initially quite pleasurable. This from an evolutionary perspective, makes
a lot of sense. We are wired to respond to injustice.
(04:50):
If we think about early groups of humans, we pretty
much relied on this elusive concept of fairness to survive
being having your resources stolen, having your reputation undermined, having
your partner taken that could and would threaten your survival,
(05:10):
and so revenge served as a signal to others that
this kind of behavior was unacceptable. So in a way
it actually worked to reinforce social rules and to deter
people or others from betrayal or from hurting people. Basically,
it's like the classic idea of punishment, punishing the offender,
(05:33):
teaching them a lesson restoring harmony, and also signaling to
the wider group that this is not okay, but also
that you are not an easy target, and this kind
of reputational enforcement that you are not somebody to be
messed with was really adaptive in smaller communities where reputation
(05:55):
affected access to mates, to protection, to resources, So long
before laws or social contracts, this instinct was really really helpful.
It's actually what psychologist would call altruistic punishment. Basically, yes,
(06:15):
the outcome of revenge might not be necessarily positive for
the other person, but it also has a greater good
in that it used to maintain group cooperation and it
actually used to be good for social harmony, knowing that
there was this balance between giving people respect and knowing
that if you overstepped your boundary you would also receive
(06:36):
some kind of punishment that taught you not.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
To do that.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
So it is a very very old feeling. That's what
we need to understand, especially if you feel a lot
of guilt around wanting to enact revenge against someone. The
question that we kind of get into is why would
it therefore still be useful in modern life. You know,
when we have laws and law enforcement, when we have rules,
(06:59):
when we have a legal system, why do we still
feel the feeling if technically there are other systems that
are meant to, you know, take care of that for us.
The most obvious driver for revenge is this need for justice.
And I know I just mentioned the legal system and
law enforcement system. What if that system is broken. What
(07:20):
if that system doesn't work in your interests? What if
the thing that someone did wasn't necessarily illegal but still
really hurt you deeply, Like what if it was someone
who cheated, or something really petty and small that you
couldn't necessarily sue someone for, but which still really annoyed
you and hurt you. I remember when my ex was
(07:44):
secretly dating someone whilst we were having like discussions of
like do we get back together or not? And we're
having all these talks about like, no, we definitely have
a future together, give me a second chance, and the
whole time he was dating somebody else. And when I
found out, I had never felt that surge of adrenaline
before that like it to be honest like desire to
(08:07):
hurt him, and it honestly like it shocked me, like
it made me see myself differently as an individual. This
is like the classic they must pay kind of motive,
the belief that for fairness to be enacted, retribution is
somewhat required. Revenge also allows us to reassert control if
(08:29):
we've been betrayed, humiliated, or made to feel powerless. Like
fantasizing about payback gives us this sense of agency, even
if we don't do anything about it. There's this idea
of like, yes, this person stepped all over me. Yes,
this person hurt me, but I know I could get
back at them if I wanted to, and therefore I
(08:49):
actually do have some level of control in this situation.
So it kind of serves as this like emotional moral
like psychological recalibration that stops us from being additionally hurt
by this idea that we are powerless to what people
do to us. Many people also believe that revenge actually
(09:10):
helps people get closure. There's this perception that if you
retaliate and make someone feel the way that they made
you feel, that is when you can walk away. That
is when the door is closed. Unsurprisingly, maybe surprisingly, research
shows that revenge actually rarely provides closure. In fact, according
(09:31):
to research published in the Journal of Personality in Social Psychology,
those who enact or engage in revenge actually tend to
ruminate even more about the initial event, and they tend
to actually feel that their negative emotions are kept alive.
In comparison, people who resist revenge, even resist fantasizing about it,
(09:54):
often recover faster emotionally from the event and from the
person and the act that hurt them. Just something to
keep in mind. The final driver towards revenge is just
plain old impulsivity. It's like this knee jerk reaction to
feeling disarmed by someone else's action. We just have to
(10:16):
lash out. That's a really crucial thing about revenge is
that it often isn't planned. It is so primal and
emotional that it's not strategic. You just want to hurt
the other person, which is why it also tends to
backfire or to not feel as good as we initially
(10:38):
think it will. This might be like the angry text
that you send that you really regret later on when
you know you're meant to be the person who like
rises above things, or like the public call out on
your Instagram stories the heat of the moment reaction you know,
I gosh, I like remember I remember when a group
(10:58):
of my closest friends all went on this overseas trip
together when I was nineteen, and they didn't tell me,
and they kind of asked other people around us not
to tell me either, and I ended up finding out
from someone else. What was my reaction to that? It
was to post this like really cringe Instagram story that
was like when someone shows you who you are, like
(11:20):
believe them, Like it's so awkward to think about right now,
Like that I did that, And obviously I ended up
having a conversation with them, but like that was my
first reaction. I feel so cringe, but in the moment,
like that was the only way, the impulsive way to
restore balance in that situation. So this kind of impulsive
revenge is driven by the limbic system. We speak about
(11:41):
that a lot. It's this emotional center in your brain
that has evolved to keep us alive in dangerous situations
by being extremely reactive. Specifically, the amicdala is the key
actor here. This is the part of your brain responsible
for processing fear, anger, threats, humanly hurt. So when we
(12:02):
do experience those things, the amygdala fires pretty instantly and
it sends signals to our body that you know, we
need to be on high alert, we need to be
doing something, we need to be acting, and when it's
an emotional situation where we can't necessarily fight back or
run away or freeze, we lash out. I guess we
(12:22):
fight back psychologically and emotionally and cognitively by trying in
some way to be in control of the situation, even
if it ends up being kind of ridiculous. This does
not necessarily help us in the modern world. It has
the potential to be very destructive. The tricky thing here
(12:46):
is that impulsive revenge is incredibly fleeting. Once the adrenaline fades,
I promise you, the satisfaction fades as well. What's left
behind is often regret and shame. Studies again, neuroscience studies
have found that impulsive acts of aggression, they do produce
(13:09):
short bursts of reward related activity in our brains, followed
by increases in negative self referential processing. What does that mean?
It's basically that like, oh crap, what have I done? Feeling?
They're like what does this say about me? Feeling? I
(13:30):
thought I was better than this feeling, and that feels awful.
Of course, we also have planned revenge. This is the colder,
more deliberate kind that comes from higher up in the
brain's hierarchy. It involves the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex
(13:52):
and the amigdala are like the same but different. They
are incredibly integral in how our brain operates. But the
prefrontal cortex is all rational, it's long term planning, it's
impulse control. You would think that it would and it
is there to kind of mediate the amigdala. But when
like our instinct for revenge gets shifted into that space, suddenly,
(14:16):
as the injustice lingers and the hot headedness and the
rage goes down, there's like this new colder dimension to
how we're thinking about hurting people. We're incredibly strategic. It's
not chaotic. It's yeah, it's planned. We're thinking it through
sometimes for months on end, and it can feel quite cathartic,
(14:41):
considered soothing. One story I heard from a listener was
about how she got revenge on a boss who had
harassed her by slowly keeping track of receipts and like
basically indications that he was stealing money from the restaurant
that she was working at. So how she did this
and I'm in a paraphrase what she said, but basically
(15:04):
she was always offering to close the tills at the
end of the night and she would count all the money,
and she would count all the credit card transactions or
whatever it was, and keep like doubles of the receipts,
take photos of the receipts, take photos of her count
because she knew that the boss was taking like three
hundred to four hundred dollars off what she had put
in and off her like calculations in claiming to his
(15:27):
boss that like, you know, they've made less for the day.
And one day she was like, I waited for six
months doing this slowly and slowly because you wouldn't do
it every day. And eventually I went to like my
boss's boss and I got him fired.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
See, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
How I feel about that. I kind of love that
for her. Another more I guess sinister story was from
a listener whose partner cheated and she did have evidence.
He didn't know that she knew, but again she stayed
with him for another three months. She was like, I
just went all I felt nothing towards him, but I
like convinced him that I wanted to get married, that
(16:05):
he should like propose to me and we should move
in together and then one weekend he went on like
a boy's trip, and she packed up half the house
left left over that weekend and literally had gotten a
job out of state. Mood states no contact, never spoke
to him again, and I was like, this is Curl,
(16:26):
this is crazy, Like, you know, you built him up
and you like made him feel so in love and
then she just like cut it off and she was like,
that's what he made me feel. And I was like, honestly,
power to you if it made you feel better. I
guess it kind of sounds like he deserves it. But
if you've never felt this way, if you've never been
able to plan this, sometimes it actually does come down
to our personality. For me, like my form of revenge,
(16:51):
revenge has always been very impulsive. But you know, in
the cases where not necessarily these cases, but people where
they go really intense on someone over something petty, there
is actually something probably different about how their brain operates
and about their personality that sociologists and psychologists and neuroscientists
(17:14):
have been trying to figure out. So there's one particular
social psychologist called Ian McKee at the University of Adelaide
who is looking into this. I think still at this
very moment, and according to him, people who are more
vengeful in the planned sense tend to actually score higher
on two traits right wing authoritarianism. Basically, they're very willing
(17:41):
to submit to authority figures, and they're willing to act
aggressively in their name and social dominance orientation. They want
their group to be at the top of the hierarchy.
These individuals are motivated by power, by hierarchy, by the
preservation of status. They don't want to lose face. They
are much more likely to seek out planned revenge. His
(18:04):
research also showed that these personalities tend to be less forgiving,
less benevolent, and more driven by authority and tradition rather
than empathy or understanding. There's also a cultural dimension to
this as well to seeking out revenge. Michelle Gelfand another
(18:28):
psychologist in this area.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Her and her.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Colleagues found that what triggers our need for revenge actually
differs across cultures in the US, in Australia, in the UK,
and other individualistic societies. Revenge is often fueled by anger
and the violation of personal rights, the violation of things
like property rights like this is mine, it belongs to me,
(18:52):
do not take it. You're not allowed it, and if
you try, I'm going to enact revenge on you. But
in collectivist cultures, people aren't so fussed by that stuff.
It's more about and more triggered by violations of duty
and honor and violations against the community. Gelfan also noted
that revenge can actually be more contagious in collectivist cultures
(19:15):
as well, whereby when you harm a member of someone's
in group, so a family member or close friend, that actually,
for those individuals feels more like harm to oneself than
others who are living in individualistic societies. It's not just
my pain like it's our pain. So revenge in these
(19:37):
situations isn't about personal temperament. It's more about cultural and
social belonging and maintaining the fabric of the collectivist society
rather than protecting what's yours. We're going to return to
this idea I mentioned before, which is that on some
level revenge is actually really satisfying. What about the costs?
(20:01):
If you are sitting there thinking, I'm kind of tossing
up what I do in this situation, someone has hurt me,
I want to act on it. Let's talk about what
you should actually do practically, what should you do after
this short break. Revenge feels amazing, There is no other
(20:22):
way to say it. It activates the brain's reward centers.
It gives us a surge of control, a surge of pleasure.
The hidden cost is, of course, that fades. But also
that the more we plot and rehearse revenge, the more
we anchor our emotional state to the person who has
hurt us. The more invested and intertwined our stories become.
(20:45):
The more we make our peace conditional on something, and
what it's conditional on is their pain. And this is
where this can get a little bit tricky. There's a
really interesting piece of research from Iowa State conducted in
twenty twenty two which basically looked at six hundred participants.
They partnered them up for this experiment and the researchers
(21:06):
asked them to write just a really basic essay, and
they were told that these essays would be reviewed by
their partner. What was actually happening was that every single
person in this study had the same partner. It was
a research assistant, and that research assistant, slash. The research
team gave every single one of these people or at
(21:28):
least half of these people sorry really bad feedback. They
were like, this is really bad, this is poorly written,
this is terrible, you don't have any talent for this,
and they were trying to anger the participants. So all
of the participants were in this condition, all of them
had the bad feedback. But then participants were then split
into three different groups. The rumination group, these participants were
(21:53):
asked to hit a punching bag whilst looking at the
photo idea of their supposed partner, a distraction group, where
they were shown a picture of an athlete whilst being
asked to think about becoming super fit and punching the bag,
and finally a control group, where participants just were asked
to sit quietly for a little while after receiving their results.
(22:15):
What's really interesting is that the participants in the control group,
the ones who were just like sick quietly think about
the situation, They got over it faster. They showed the
lowest levels of anger and aggression compared to the groups
of participants who vented their feelings in some way processing
(22:38):
the pain individually. Counter to what we think encounter to
what our limbic system is going to tell us is
the best option, even the most calculated revenge came at
a psychological cost, and comes at a psychological cost. It
(22:58):
keeps you entangled with the person who hurt you. It
actually prolongs your emotional dependence on them, meaning that they
still have power even in their absence. This idea that
you want to get back at them still allows them
to exist within your mind. Someone described it to me
as like emotional quicksand the harder you struggle to make
(23:21):
someone else feel what you feel, the deeper you sink
into the very pain that you are trying to escape.
This echoes what a lot of emotional regulation theories will
tell us. When we feel anger, we reinforce its neural pathways.
Every time we replay the story, every fantasy that we
have of getting even, our brain strengthens the association between
(23:46):
pain and vengeance as the only solution. Here's also what's
strange about revenge. Sometimes we do get exactly what we
want it. You know, the apology never can. So we
did get even. They felt the sting, the balance in
theory was restored, and yet afterwards you don't actually feel righteous,
(24:11):
You don't actually feel better. Sometimes we actually feel worse
about ourselves. This has nothing to do with the other person.
It has everything to do with us. There is this
idea in psychology of effective forecasting. Essentially, it's our human
tendency to mispredict or falsely predict how future events will
make us feel. In the moment, we think that revenge
(24:34):
is going to make everything feel better, that justice will
be restored, everything's going to feel great. We think it
will cancel out our hurt, but we overestimate the emotional
payoff and we underestimate how terrible we're actually going to feel.
In particular, when we act on our desire for revenge,
it actually changes how we perceive ourselves. In that instance
(24:56):
of payback, you are no longer just the person who
was wronged. In this situation, you also become the person
who has wrong someone else. And that moral dissonance is
really uncomfortable because it blurs the boundary between victim and perpetrator.
It splits us. That's how this is described. It splits
(25:17):
you between the person you were before the pain, the victim,
and the person who you became in response to it.
Not necessarily the villain, but not necessarily the victim either.
This neuroscientist and experimental psychologist Molly Crockett at Princeton. She
has shown that this kind of moral decision making, such
(25:38):
as do I seek revenge or not, feels good because
it activates the reward network. It also activates the empathy network,
especially this area called the ventromedia or prefrontal context that
like almost immediately makes you see someone else's pain and
(26:00):
feel it yourself, even if you don't like them. Like,
every single person has this structure of their brain, whether
it's as active as someone else's or not. But you know,
when you retaliate those empathy circuits, they don't switch off.
They keep processing the other person's pain. And the human
brain really struggles to feel pleasure and pain at the
(26:23):
same time, to feel empathy and pleasure at the same time.
So you have this like really uneasy like juxtaposition of
satisfaction and whether you acknowledge it or not, a sense
of sadness. This is part of why people often describe
revenge as like leaving a bad taste. A bunch of
(26:45):
social psychologists, one in particular, called rosen hadeit. They have
written about the different domains of disgust and how yes
you feel disgusted at like, oh this food is off
ah like this bad. You also feel moral discussed, moral
discussed at, having gone down to someone else's level, feeling
(27:09):
kind of dirty because of it. That's why when people
say things like I just I can't understand how they
could hurt me, can't understand how they could treat me
like this, that's actually a really good thing. Of Course,
you can't understand why they did that to you because
you're not like them at all. That's a really great thing.
(27:31):
Of Course, you can't empathize or try and recreate the
situation that made them hurt you because you're not them.
You're better than them in this situation. Like it feels
weird to say that, but you are. So should we
ever take the low road over the high road? Is
(27:54):
it ever acceptable morally to do unto others what they've
done to us? Human reality has wrestled with this question,
for literal like for thousands of years. So there's not
really anything new I can bring to this conversation other
than just summarize the two kind of arguments. On one hand,
(28:16):
there's that very ancient law of retaliation, you know, it's
famously captured in the Old Testament. Life for life, Eye
for eye tooth for tooth. In its original context, this
wasn't actually meant to encourage revenge. It was actually meant
to discourage cruelty. It didn't say, you know, don't seek revenge.
(28:38):
It was basically trying to say, like, there are boundaries
around vengeance that it needs to be proportional. You can't
kill someone because they stole your cow. You can't you know,
burn their house down because they knocked over your like
carrots Tand I don't know what my analogies are, but
you know what I mean. In its early form, yeah,
(28:58):
revenge was totally normal ads. But justice, in this early sense,
it meant balance, It didn't mean escalation. However, as human
ethics have evolved, so does our understanding of justice. More
than like two millennia later, Martin Luther King Jr. He
reframed that same principle when he said, the old law
of eye for an eye, tooth through a tooth leaves
(29:20):
everyone blind and toothless. Right, And his point was that
vengeance multiplies suffering. It doesn't actually restore harmony, it corrodes it.
So what's changed in how we think about doing onto others? Well,
modern psychology really suggests that revenge just exists because there
is a tension between two competing moral systems. We are
(29:44):
taught that we need to seek justice. I feel like
that words come up a lot. We're also taught to
care about other people. Care says we should forgive. Justice
says they should go what they deserve. That is also
why revenge feels so kind of delicious at times, because
that moral friction is interesting and doesn't have a right answer,
(30:06):
so it's fascinating. We go back and forth and back
and forth. We don't really know which one we should
do because both feel equally important. Some philosophers, for example,
a manual can't have argued that justice does actually require
retribution and to maintain a moral society we need to
(30:27):
do that. But counter to this, like a lot more
humanist traditions do say that it doesn't produce good, Like,
the highest moral act isn't to mirror someone else's behavior,
it is to rise above it. Researchers who specifically study
empathy and moral reasoning, they describe this as moral elevation.
(30:51):
You will feel better when you witness, or encourage or
perform forgiveness. So if you are you know something just
terrible has happened to you, and you want to get revenge,
and you want to get revenge because you think it
will make you feel better. You might not like to
hear it, but you will experience more reward from not
(31:13):
necessarily forgiving somebody, but trying to maybe understand why they
did it, trying to maybe not justify it, but just
trying to make peace with it without them being involved
at all. Forgiveness actually gives us, neurologically a deeper sense
(31:36):
and kind of reward and sense of dignity and sense
of empowerment. Doesn't mean that forgiveness is easy, doesn't mean
that it's even possible. Sometimes choosing not to retaliate isn't
about moral superiority. It's just about refusing to hand over
more of your peace and power to a person who
already took more of it than they deserve. So maybe
(31:59):
the real question we're getting to here is whether revenge
is acceptable, but whether it is useful? Is it useful
for you? If we think about more productive options, radical
empathy is like one that's probably going to come up
a lot. Radical empathy is like the unconditional empathy and
(32:21):
forgiveness that we have for other people's actions. Doesn't mean
permitting them, doesn't mean letting them do it again, doesn't
mean forgetting. It's just a piece that we restore within
ourselves that you know, we're not We're going to release
the pain that we feel about this. We're going to
have empathy for them. It's about actually really acknowledging like
how someone else may have been hurt into their hurt,
(32:42):
may have been harmed into harming, may have been driven
to cruelty through ignorance or fear, And it is, without
a doubt, I think personally, a much more freeing approach.
We have seen it again with neurope, like with with
studies and with neuroimaging, like people who have this radical
(33:04):
empathy approach are actually happier, Isn't that like the best
revenge isn't success and happiness and peace the best revenge
of all? Probably, So maybe it's uncomfortable to get that
that might be the way to go about it. I
think that this approach personally is one that it is
one that I've adopted in the last year, and it
(33:24):
has made me just feel a little bit less mad
about the world. You know, I got into such a
rut this year thinking about the world as just like
full of terrible people who rule our lives and do
terrible things that we just have to watch and observe,
and that people are cruel and everybody is mad and
angry all the time. It wasn't a nice place to be.
But I started doing this exercise where when I felt
(33:46):
this way, I had to think about someone who I
was angered by or mad at, that I was going
to forgive and I was going to think positive things
about someone in my life in that day, in this
month that I really wanted to like be angry towards
who I could just in that moment symbolically forgive and
wish well. And that wasn't for them, even though of
(34:09):
course in some ways it was. It was for me.
People doing bad, hurtful things will have us believe that
there is no good in the world, But how can
that be true if we demonstrate good and if we
choose the love. So it actually does, I think, change
how you just view the balance of good and evil
in a way that's always going to mean that, I
(34:31):
don't know, it's always going to mean that you have
a more positive outlook. Obviously, not everyone deserves empathy, but
this again is not about these people. This is about you.
This is about you being able to be free of
whatever pain this person has called you caused you. In
one possible way, I think it's this like weird experience
(34:53):
that you have, which is that when you stop needing
someone else to suffer in order to feel okay, like
you actually really start to move on, which is again
annoying and it's frustrating. I love like this idea again
of like success is the best revenge, or like karma
will take care of it for you. I truly believe that.
(35:13):
And the interesting thing is that, like obviously I love
the science and I love the psychology, I don't have
any scientific research or scientific backing to prove that like
karma will take care of it for me. But anecdotally,
I just feel like everything kind of evens out eventually,
and it just stops you from having to labor over
(35:36):
how you're going to get them back. It just stops
you from giving them more of your energy. Like they've
already done something bad to you that's bad enough. Don't
let them then, like take all these precious moments that
you could be spending giving love to others or doing
other things obviously easier said than done, if like everything
(35:57):
we talked about today is easier said than done, But
I do think that it's the more peaceful approach, and
I do think that like having had like real grudges
like about people in the past and at times like
not being able to let it go for many, many years,
the best thing that I've done is to just like
(36:17):
seriously and vigorously and aggressively focus on myself and to
just put everything into being successful, everything into being a
good person, so that like on the off chance they
come to check in on me, or they start watching
or whatever it is, or you know, they follow me
(36:39):
on Instagram, like I don't know, on the off chance
they try and side back in, like they can just
see that they try their best to like kind of
bring me down, and it like never worked. And the
thing is is that it actually doesn't matter whether they
ever do notice that I'm happy, or do notice that
I'm successful, or do notice that my life is good,
(37:00):
because when I started focusing on that stuff, I just
started stopped caring about them completely, and it was like
incredibly incredibly liberating, and it was just like so much
better than any form of retaliation. I feel like I've
done both, but silence and just like silence, no contact,
(37:21):
completely focusing on my own lane was the most empowering
thing that I could do. So those are my amusings
on revenge. That is the psychology of revenge and why
we seek it, why we want it, whether it's actually worthwhile,
and this like radical empathy success is the best revenge
charmatic kind of response to it. That it's kind of
(37:42):
a form of like acceptance therapy as well. Accepting that
you can't control other people, you can control your response,
Like that's really what's empowering about it. I'm gonna stop
going on and on about this because I feel like
I've drilled it into you by now. But I hope
you enjoyed this episode if you have made it this far,
to leave a little olive emoji down below, to like
(38:03):
symbolize an olive branch, symbolize forgiveness, not necessarily the olive
branch that you need to extend to anybody, but like
just the symbol of what we're asking for for ourselves,
forgiving ourselves, for giving somebody else in our mind, not
through actions, and just being able to move forward without
seeking revenge. I want to thank our research assistant Libby
(38:24):
Cobbert for her contributions to this episode, and I want
to thank you guys for listening. This episode was actually
on YouTube, so it's not something I've talked about a lot,
but yeah, we now do YouTube episodes. If you want
to go and I guess rewatch it probably not, but
if you want to watch other episodes like this one,
you can go to YouTube a that's Psychology of Your Twenties.
(38:47):
You can also subscribe to us on substack if you
would like the transcript of this episode, it's free. I'll
leave a link in the description, and also follow us
on Instagram. If you want to see behind the scenes
or an episod so breakdown, or what we're planning for
the next year, or just want to keep in touch
with the podcast, that's the best place to find us.
(39:08):
But with all that said, with all that done, I'm
going to close the episode by saying thank you again
for listening. Until next time, be safe, be kind, be
gentle to yourself, don't always go after revenge. It might
not be as satisfying as you think. And we will
talk very very soon.
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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