October 9, 2025 • 54 mins
Why do we want to hurt the people that hurt us?
Over the years we have spoken about so many different aspects of relationships but today’s topic is one we have never fully unpacked before and it’s one of the most destructive forces in relationships: revenge.
We don’t always call it that in romantic relationships, but when couples fall into patterns of "getting back at each other", keeping score, or holding long grievances, they’re often trapped in what’s called a “revenge loop;” one that science now shows is addictive and deeply damaging.
Today’s guest is James Kimmel. James is a lawyer, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and the author of The Science of Revenge. James has done a huge amount of research into how revenge quietly simmers inside all of us and how revenge triggers the brain’s reward system, much like a drug, and some of us might be revenge addicts without even knowing it.
Today we chat:
- James wanting to get revenge on the teenage boys who killed his dog
- The neuroscience of revenge & how it can be addictive
- Could this ever be used as a ‘defence’ in court?
- Why we want the people who hurt us to hurt
- Justice v revenge
- How Hollywood has relied on revenge plot narratives
- How women and men experience empathy differently
- How forgiveness can rewire our brains
You can find more from James Kimmel at his website
You can get a copy of The Science of Revenge
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode was recorded on Cameragle Land. Hi guys, and
welcome back to another episode of Life Unput.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm Brittany and I'm Keisha, and today we have a
bit of a different episode. It's one that I'm surprised
we haven't spoken about yet because over the years we
have unpacked but I would say almost every almost every
aspect of a relationship. But today we're going to talk
about something that can be quite insidious in your relationships,
not just romantic, but with families or with your friendships.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
That is revenge. Now we don't always call it revenge.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
In romantic relationships, but if you think about when you
get into this cycle of like trying to get back
at each other or one up each other, keeping school,
having those long grievances, they call that, apparently the revenge loop,
and that is something that science has actually said is
quite addictive. We wanted to unpack it today with a
very special guest. Today's guest is James Kimmel. James is
(01:04):
a lawyer.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
He's an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale
School of Medicine, and he's also the author of a
really great book called The Science of revenge. James has
done a huge amount of research into how revenge quietly
simmers inside all of us and how revenge actually triggers
the brain's reward system much like drugs, and some of
us actually might be revenge addicts without even knowing it.
(01:26):
So today we're going to jump into the neuroscience of revenge,
why we want to hurt the people who hurt us,
and how forgiveness can rewire our brains. James, Welcome to
life on.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
Cut, Kisha and Britt, thanks so much for having.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Me now, James, this seems like a bit of a
weird segue, but we do like to get your embarrassing
story before we get any of your neuroscience.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Do you have something.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you want to knock me down first,
pick myself up. We can talk about my revenge desires
later about doing that and see how they're maybe by this.
But yes, I do have the revenge story. Mine is
a pretty humiliating situation that I had as I was
in the middle of law school here in the States.
(02:10):
The way that you get, you know, your best jobs
is to kind of get an internship, which is called
a summer associate position between your second and your third
years of law school and you want to land you know,
the best top firms that you can attract. And I
was able to get a really fantastic law firm to
be interested in me and take me on for the summer,
(02:31):
which was great. So, you know, I show up there
for the first day. I've got my you know, my
new lawyer suit on, and I think I'm looking pretty
good and trying to be very collegial and pleasant and
win people over. And as we're going through this process,
in the first couple of weeks, you know, they reveal
that one of the things the firm likes to do
is have softball games with the summer associates, that's the
(02:55):
law students and the already existing lawyers. You know, I'm
all on board for this, as everyone else is. So
we show up at the softball field and you know,
we're pretty much picked for teams and sometimes I forget.
But early, very early in my life, sometime between birth
to age four, I developed this eye problem called amblia opia,
(03:16):
which is known as lazy eye where the two eyes
don't rotate and see the same things at the same time,
which is critical for depth perception. Right, So you need
two eyes to be able to judge depth, and I
had to have surgery when I was four years old,
and then I had to wear an eye patch for years.
I looked like a little pirate for a while. So
(03:37):
it's a little that was pretty weird, but it was
successful in bringing my eyes into order. But I've never
actually been able to see out of both eyes at
the same time, like to focus. So I've always had
really terrible depth perception and therefore really bad at sports
that involved having a ball or other object coming like
(03:58):
straight at me. So I was playing one of the
outfield positions. I was wearing glasses. I still wear glasses.
I was wearing glasses at the time, and somebody hit
the ball, you know, and it was all me a
very high pop fly, totally easy ball to catch, so
you know, it almost came right where I was standing.
(04:21):
I mean, all I had to do was like put
the glove up and look up and wait for the
ball to come down and you know, fall into my glove.
I mean, it was just it was perfectly set, but
because of my depth perception of problem, I'm holding the
glove up and it comes right over the top of
the glove. Smashes me right in the face without any warning.
(04:42):
You know, It's just like it's suddenly there and kaboom.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
I mean I feel like there was warning. You just
didn't see it.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
I just didn't see it. It just it just like nicks.
The top of my glove comes right across, hits me,
like right between the eyes, breaks my glasses, cuts my face,
so my glass is kind of dented into my face. Now,
blood coming down my face, my glasses are shattered. It
was really painful, as you might imagine. So I had
to kind of somehow play this off, as you know,
(05:10):
the moron out in the field who was trying to
get a job with his employer and it just you know,
completely humiliated himself. It's terrible. I did get the job,
though they felt sorry for you.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
At least you could have taken an angle of life.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
I might have been a pity higher.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
You should have said, oh look, I didn't want to
show them up. I'm actually very good at baseball. So
you know you can't go in smashing the lawyers out
of the.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
Park, that's true, you poor thing.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Well look, James, revenge is it's an unusual place to
end up for a specialty I would say, but your
story is fascinating, and the story that you tell of
your childhood that sort of sets you up. I guess
a moment that could have changed your life drastically if
you went one direction, but you pulled yourself backward another direction.
I'd love you to tell us about that moment in
(05:57):
your childhood that I guess shaped the rest of your life.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
Yeah. Sure. So I was originally raised in a suburban
house until age twelve, so just you know, a little
subdivision type of home with other homes around us and
a neighborhood with a bunch of kids. But at age twelve,
my family moved my brother and I out to my
great grandfather's farm, which my dad had purchased, and so,
(06:23):
you know, we were sort of uprooted relocated to this farm.
It was about a two hundred acre farm. We had
a small herd of black angus cattle, maybe ten to fifteen,
some pigs and chickens and things like that. But we
you know, my great grandfather didn't make his living on
the land, door did my dad. They were both insurance agents,
so it was kind of a gentleman's farm slash retirement
(06:48):
farm for my great grandfather like a.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Bit of a hobby for a while, maybe, like.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
Yeah, exactly right, that's a perfect example. It was like
a hobby farm for them. But moving out there, I
kind of really latched on the idea I would even
love to be a farmer as my career, and that's
kind of what I was angling toward. But most important
as a twelve year old was to befriend the kids
who lived on neighboring farms. Of the neighboring farms were,
(07:12):
you know, huge farms with hundreds of herd of Holstein
dairy cows, and these guys, their fathers and mothers were
up at five am milking their cows every day and
then milking them twice a day, so they were making
their living from the land. And they viewed me as
an outsider completely and didn't want to have anything to
(07:33):
do with me, and so they started shunning me. And
I wasn't about to have that, so I decided I
would just come up with more and more ways to
win them over, none of which were successful, unfortunately, and
they went from shunning to bullying me.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
James, how bad did the bullying get.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Yeah, it got pretty bad. The bullying did, so it
started with you know, verbal abuse, humiliation, shaming me, you know,
teasing me, insulting me, that kind of stuff, and then
it moved as we got older, you know, from age
twelve now thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, so it
turned physical. And it was a pretty good group of them,
(08:10):
and some of them were you know, pretty big kind
of guys. It was just one of me. I am
not a huge dude, but that was you know, it
wasn't good. It was. It kind of made life miserable
in those moments, but otherwise my life was pretty good
until one night. My family and I we were asleep
at night, very late, and we were awoken suddenly to
(08:31):
the sound of a gunshot, and you know, we jumped
out of bed, looked out the windows to see what
was going on. We lived on this one lane country road,
so it wasn't common to have anyone near our home.
And we were surrounded by acres and acres of land,
and I looked outside and I saw a pickup truck
that had been owned by one of these guys who
(08:51):
had been bullying and harassing me for years, and it
took off down the road. So we we got out,
went around the house. I can see if there was
any damage, any bullet holes through windows. Didn't see anything.
Thought maybe they were just out spotlighting deer, which is
an illegal but not uncommon activity in the country, And
we went back to bed. The next morning when I
(09:13):
woke up, one of my jobs before going to school
was to take care of our animals, the animals that
we had, those those beef cows and pigs. And also
among those animals was this sweet, little beautiful beagle, a
hunting dog named Paula. And when it went to her
pen to feed in water her I found her lying
dead in a pool of blood, with a bullet hole
(09:35):
in her head.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
I just can't imagine. I can't imagine.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
I can't imagine the type of human. I mean, we
know they're out there, but the type of human that
would do that. But it just seems like from what
you said, that's such an excessive jump in the harassment,
Like that is a very different field to like, you know,
pushing you off the steps of the bus after school,
or calling you names, to then going and shooting your dog.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
Yeah, it was inconceivable, and I have then no ex
planation for it. Never gained one at the time. You know,
why they took it to this level. I don't remember
a specific incident, you know that kind of teed them up,
get them angrier than they normally were or might have been.
(10:17):
I don't know if there had been drinking. You know,
there's just no way of understanding why they would have
done this.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
And so what did that do to you in the moment, Like,
what was your because I imagine you'd be scared. I
mean imagine you'd be distraught and scared, but you know
you had other overwhelming feelings too.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
Yeah. Yeah, so just anger, sadness, grieving for the dog,
fury towards them, and rage, wanting to get back at
them immediately, you know, revenge, which is what we're here
to talk about. I absolutely wanted to revenge. My parents
called the police. Police came, took a report, but didn't
(10:54):
do anything to confront them or their families. You know,
they said that it would be documented and if things
got worse, then they would intervene. But maybe for now,
you know, they just didn't feel like it was something
that they should should jump in on it. It was
a different time, you know, early nineteen eighties. Maybe if
that happened today, the police response would be a little
(11:15):
bit more robust. About two or three weeks later, I
found myself home alone at night. My folks were out,
and I heard a car come to a stop in
front of our house, or a vehicle and again, like
I said, one lane country road, pretty unusual. So as
I was getting up to see what was going on outside,
I saw this same pickup truck again stopped in front
(11:35):
of our house, and then you know, shortly thereafter, there
was a flash and an explosion, and the truck roared
away again, leaving behind our mailbox. Our postbox mangled. They
had just blown it up, blown it off of its
mail post, and that was kind of it for me
at that point. I had tolerated as much as I
was willing to tolerate, and or as much as I could,
(11:58):
and so I was home alone. I had been shooting
guns since I was probably eight years old. We had
plenty of different kinds of guns in the house, one
of which my dad had in a nightstand for you know,
personal protection. It was a loaded revolver, and I ran upstairs,
I grabbed that gun, ran back downstairs outside, jumped in
my mother's car, and I tore off. After these guys
(12:19):
through the middle of the night to try and hunt
them down. You know. So I'm flying down this one
lane country road, shouting and screaming in rage, and I
eventually did catch up to them. I chased them onto
one of their farms and cornered them by a barn.
And so, you know, the scene is their pickup truck
kind of pointed toward the barn, and my car behind
(12:42):
their truck with my breake beams on, and I can
see three or four heads in the rear window, and
they start getting out and they're squinting through my bright
beams to see who had just chased them down their
one lane country road. What was clear to me in
that moment was that they weren't armed in the sense
that they didn't have any weapons in their hands. They
(13:03):
might have had something in the truck, but they didn't
have anything in their hands. And the other thing that
was clear to me is that they wouldn't have been
able to know that I had a gun, or necessarily
who I was and what my intentions were. So I
really had this complete element of surprise and kind of
a perfect setup for getting the serious revenge that I
(13:25):
really wanted. So having the upper hand. I opened the door,
I grabbed a gun off the passenger seat, and I
started to get out. It was at that moment that
I just had this little flash of insight for a
brief moment, and in that I was able to kind
of picture the whole set of consequences to my life
(13:47):
if I went through with this, and it would have
been so easy to do and it would have felt
so good they and I believe they deserved everything that
I could do to them. But I knew that if
I survived it in any way, one of the thing
that would happen to me is my identity would be
very different from the guy who showed up at that place.
The guy leaving would have to identify himself as a
(14:09):
shooter and a killer. And so that was just enough
of an insight that I wanted revenge badly. I wasn't
in any way willing to forgive them, but I just
didn't want to pay the high price that I'd have
to pay to get that form of revenge at that time,
and that was enough to cause me to pull my
leg back inside the car, put the gun back down
(14:29):
on the passenger seat, close the door, and drive home.
But I had come within seconds of killing three or
four guys. James.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
I think that that story it really shows us a
lot of how revenge can be this quite overwhelming experience.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
You know. I wonder what is going on inside of
our brains that can just make us kind of act
in ways that we typically wouldn't.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
What is it that's going on.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
That causes us to have this quite a heightened experience,
I guess as something that can just make us a
in a way that doesn't feel in line at all
with what or who we think we actually are.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
Yeah, so we only have answers to those really critical
questions evolving over the last twenty years. Between you know,
twenty years ago and kind of the beginning of recorded history.
Nobody has known what's been going on. It's only been
discussed in you know, things like the Greek tragedies and
Shakespeare and other novels like The Count of Monte Cristo,
(15:26):
and it's discussed in movies, and it's discussed even in
the Bible and the Koran and other religious texts. But
we don't know why we want to hurt the people
who hurt us. We just know that we do, and
we know that when we do we feel really good
(15:46):
when we do it. But now in the last twenty years,
neuroscience has really pulled back the covers and what we
are able to see when a person has a grievance,
which is to say, they feel victimized or treated unjustly
or unfairly in any way. When you've been shamed, humiliated, betrayed,
this activates inside your brain the pain network, the anterior insula,
(16:10):
and so your brain it sees those psychological harms as
physical pain, and your brain doesn't like pain, and it
wants to very quickly counterbalance this pain with pleasure. And
we know from evolutionary psychologists that humans evolved this sensation
of pleasure when we hurt the people who hurt us
(16:33):
as early as the Clisissine epic maybe the ice age
type of time, and that we probably evolved to derive
this pleasure from hurting the people who hurt us because
humans leaving their individual caves and needing to live in
societies needed to have ways to do a couple of things.
One is cause the other people in our societies to
(16:54):
conform to the same set of social norms, right, and
then the other is to prevent and deter other people
from stealing the things that are necessary for survival and
your ability to procreate, so stopping people from either taking
your mate or taking the food supply that you depend upon.
(17:15):
And so it made sense back in those days to
cause people to or motivate people really to hurt the
people who hurt them as a means of survival and procreation.
But today, you know, here in twenty twenty five, all
those thousands and thousands of years later, we're often seeking
(17:36):
pleasurable revenge for a very different reason. We're doing it
for injuries to our egos, to just our psychological identities,
which has nothing to do really with your survival and
nothing to do with your ability to procreate. It comes
down primarily to, you know, your psychological state of mind
in these psychological injuries that are registered so hard. But
(17:59):
what occurs is to get this pleasure that I've just described,
your brain activates its pleasure and reward circuitry, the very
same circuitry that's activating for drug and alcohol addiction and
tobacco addiction and gambling. Those are known as the nucleus
that combans in the dorsal strie atum. These two structures
in the brain, one dorsal stritum that controls habit formation
(18:21):
and similar addictive compulsive processes, and the nucleus accumbans, which
is the pleasure and craving area of the brain. These
circuits flood with dopamine very quickly after you've been wronged,
and this sensation, this pleasurable sensation of dopamine, then suddenly disappears,
and it's the absence of the dopamine actually that's believed
(18:44):
to create motivation, craving, the desire and the want and
the need to go and retaliate against the person who
wronged you or their proxy. It turns out that revenge
isn't only directed at the exact person who wronged you.
Often it's targeted at and inflicted upon people that may
(19:04):
have had nothing at all to do with the wrong
that you've experienced. You might be doing that because it's
easier to target one person or another, or the person
who actually hurt you isn't available or is a much
bigger threat to you than someone else, and so you
can we call get back, you know, take it out
on the other person who had nothing to do with it.
We're taking it out. The more proper way of thinking
(19:25):
about that is getting revenge by proxy against that person.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
So then if we're experiencing these physiological I mean these
physiological changes that we do like and or have scientific
proof now that they are like an addiction, does that
mean you or people maybe in the court system are
using this as a way of saying, well, it's become
an addiction? Like can people actually form new character traits
(19:50):
after performing one act of revenge? Like if that is
a dopamine hit and an addiction and it's rewiring our brain,
do you see in as a lawyer, do you see
that people are starting to commit one thing as a normal,
everyday person, they've committed one active revenge, then all of
a sudden they get a dopamine hit, they start to
form an addiction, and then their whole personality changes because
they're just wanting to keep chasing these revenge dopamine hits.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
It can happen that way, and I want to be
careful to say, I mean there's having an addiction is
never a defense to committing a crime or a tort
And so even if that were they experience, it doesn't
let you off the hook. So some people are concerned
that by understanding revenge seeking as an addictive process that
(20:33):
maybe this is designed to or might ultimately create a defense,
and it's not going to, and it doesn't. It's not acknowledged.
No addiction is a defense to crime. But an answer
to your question there, Britt, is that revenge seeking desires.
Revenge desires have been observed as early as in the
toddler years. Toddlers seek revenge if you wrong a toddler,
(20:55):
and you can imagine just taking an ice cream cone
out of a toddler's hands, you're going to get toddle.
You're gonna get a pretty nasty response back. You might
even get a slap in the face. Toddlers and they
and they'll carry grudges, right, they'll carry that for some
period of time, and they might try and retaliate later
until there's a resolution. So we know this even from
(21:17):
the toddler years, so it's not about necessarily rewiring your
brand all of us. It turns out studies show that
ninety five percent of people experience revenge desires, but only
about twenty percent act on those. And that's a very
interesting and suspicious number because that's about the same number
of people who, when they try drugs or alcohol actually
(21:39):
become addicted. Eighty percent of people who try drugs and
alcohol never become addicted to them, and that seems like
it might be also the case with revenge seeking, and
the addictive process kind of grows in about the same
way that drugs and alcohol track, which is to say,
with you know, drugs and alcohol, you start with the tamer,
(21:59):
lessonive substances, the less dangerous ones, right tobacco, alcohol, up
through cocaine and then maybe into heroin and fentanyl, and
you know, there's just this range of horrors. Similarly, with
revenge seeking, it's about the same We start with less
dangerous forms of retaliation. There might be you know, a
retaliatory insult or slight or social exclusion, a social shunning
(22:23):
that is known to really hurt people, but it isn't physical.
Maybe sabotaging a relationship that somebody wants, or sabotaging your
workplace if you've had a dispute with a coworker or
a supervisor and you're just quietly maybe you're quietly quitting,
Maybe you're quietly ruining things for other people or blaming
them for your own mistakes or vice versa. And then
(22:46):
that can move beyond that and up through into you know,
simple types of assaults and then more aggravated assaults and
then using weapons death. And we know that revenge is
the number one motivator for almost all forms of human
violence that goes from bullying on playgrounds all the way
up through street and gang violence, intimate partner violence, mass shootings, torture, genocide, warfare,
(23:11):
violent extremism. All of them are rooted in a perception
of being treated unfairly and a desire to hurt that
person or their proxy.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
I think that that's really interesting when you start to
unpack the narrative that you know, if you do expand
it as big as something like a genocide, do you
think that for a group of people to get to
that point of violence, do you think that they are
all just evil and they all just want to go
out and murder and kill and do these horrendous things.
Or does it have to do more with the fact
(23:43):
that they perceive they have been wronged and they're trying
to seek revenge for something that has happened to them.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
I think I would say a lot of people on
that Keisha probably are mixing up revenge and justice because,
as I imagine you're talking about genocide and there is
a mass population.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
It's about seeking.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Justice for what they feel like they've been wronged by.
And James, what's the difference between justice and revenge?
Speaker 4 (24:06):
Yeah, it's a great question, Kaisha, and I don't know
if it's about mixing it up. What happens is more
that we humans have decided that we can use justice
to mean two very opposite things in order to allow
and excuse us to do all kinds of horrific acts.
And it works like this, so you know, justice out
of one side of our brains and on certain days
(24:29):
means things like social justice, equity, fairness, love, seeing the
other as yourself, and wanting and acknowledging the right of
the other person to have all of the same benefits
that we have. Right, it's, you know, this type of
justice that we think of when we think of people
like Gandhi or Jesus or the Buddha or Martin Luther King.
(24:52):
So social justice the other form of justice that we
use and use the exact same word. It means the
exact of everything that I just said. It means punishment, retribution,
It justifies cruelty, torture, murder, warfare, all of these things,
and we say, you know, I think the Catholic Church
(25:12):
has a just war doctrine. If war is waged for justice,
it's okay. If it's not, it's not. But who decides
what justice means in that instance? It's usually the person
who is wanting to war says, I'm merely seeking justice.
It's okay for me to do this. It's always retribution.
And what they really mean is revenge. I described in
(25:35):
the book, you know, the horrific terrorist attack on nine
to eleven. You know, Osama bin Laden convinced a group
of his compatriots that in the name of justice, they
should fly airplanes into the World Trades Towers and the
Pentagon and kill thousands of people because of America's transgressions
in the Middle East. And then after that, immediately after that,
(25:56):
almost President Bush came on television and said, we're going
to bring the terrorists to justice. He did not mean
we're going to bring them to fairness, equity, and love.
He meant we're going to go out and kill a
lot of terrorists because of the terrible crime that they committed.
And so we have these revenge cycles in which both
parties are convinced in the justness of their actions in
(26:20):
order to excuse their revenge seeking. On population level scales, even.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
James, we see a lot more violence being perpetrated by men.
From your research, Is there a difference in the way
that either biologically or anecdotally different genders experience revenge and
even maybe even interpret revenge.
Speaker 4 (26:40):
There is a little bit, but it needs a lot
more study, and it is a huge problem, and it's
a little bit of a mystery because we do know
that women and men both experience revenge desires what appears
to be equally and from about the same age. So
you know, we have mean girls, know as kids, and
(27:01):
you know if a female toddler is going to be
as vengeful, if not more maybe than a male toddler,
you don't know, or vice versa. So in both of
our minds, we you know, we're wired to want to
hurt the people who hurt us. But one study that
shows an important difference, and I talk about in the book,
is one in which while punishing somebody who has acted
(27:26):
unjustly and is now the target of a vengeful act,
when men punish, their empathy centers in their mind. The
ability for a male to empathize with the target, with
the victim of their punishment remains dull, so their empathy
center is dull, whereas for women it's still active. Women
(27:46):
can empathize even with a person who has wronged them.
That ability to do that, then to me, at least
you can extrapolate for that and go that might at
least explain why women draw. Perhaps if they do, and
I think it's I'll just speak anecdotally because I don't
think we've had any study on it, but women do
(28:06):
seem to be willing to cut off and stop the
onslaught their retaliatory actions and aggression sooner than maybe men do,
who who want to continue to carry out for punishment
until its final act and until they've gotten, you know,
perhaps every bit of pleasure that they've been seeking out
(28:26):
of it, because that's what we're all looking for. We're
trying to get this fix to make ourselves feel better
from either the real or imagined sense of victimization that
started the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
But do we know if that's a I mean, I
don't know if you know if that's a nature versus
nurture thing.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
When women have a developed area of their brain for empathy.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Is it something that biologically we are born with or
is it something that we're taught from our mums because
you actually can do You're you're a good little girl,
and you're supposed to care and feel sorry for people
and look after your you know, is it something that
society has just drilled into us and that's why we're
more empathetic.
Speaker 4 (29:01):
That's really a keen and excellent observation. We don't have
the answer to that question. The study that I was
talking about does not discern, you know, when did that
develop in the human lifespan. Does it develop, you know, biologically,
or is it something that's as a result of training.
So it's a great, great question.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Jaji previously spoke about the fact that, you know, revenge
is actually understood by kids as young as Toddler's. We
seem to have this like inherent understanding of wanting to
get something back, wanting to get revenge on someone. In
your book, you described that the revenge plot is something
that we kind of see across almost all of our movies,
almost all of Hollywood, and you even gave the example
(29:43):
in your book of The Lion King. Oh I hated
that film directors and writers, they kind of rely on
this revenge plot narrative.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Why is that.
Speaker 4 (29:51):
It's interesting that you mentioned, Britt that you hated that film.
I also hated that film, and I've always felt very
much in the minority of all people because people love
this movie.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
No, the anxiety, because the whole thing is based around
this revenge and death, and like I'm going to get
back to you, I couldn't deal with the anticipation of
when is it going to happen the whole film.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
I just never sat right with me.
Speaker 4 (30:14):
Yeah, I'm the same way, and what we know from
that film, I mean, let me, let's just make it
even more viscial for a second. If you know the
John Wick films, I mean, I just related at the
beginning of this podcast my own John Wick origin story.
You know, John Wick started with having his beagle killed
and it's kind of a it's a weird, unusual coincidence
(30:35):
that I wasn't aware of because I'd never seen the
John Wick film and wasn't brought to my attention until
I was on the on the Daily Show with Trevor
Noah and Ronnie Chang was interviewing me, and he was
like screaming at me going, this is John went, this is this
John Wick, and I'm going, John Wick, exactly what is that?
So you know, I outed myself as not being particularly
(30:55):
on the public pulse of what the popular movies were
at the time. But you know, in all seriousness, these
revenge plots are incredibly gratifying move You know, movie goes
are paying for television watchers. Whatever you're paying your ticket
money is going often to an industry that you're asking
(31:17):
to victimize you as a member of the audience, to
set up in your mind this terrible sense of injustice
by being empathetic. Because we're all empathetic with the lead
character of any story, so we empathize with their pain,
and so the lead character is usually seriously injured and
treated unfairly, and we instantly begin near the beginning of
(31:39):
a movie to start to crave retaliation on their behalf,
as they do in the story. And then we have
to kind of wait as the movie builds and builds
and builds, and we all know it's coming and we
all expect it, and it better be a big payoff
because we've paid to sit there and watch this. Finally,
by the end, the hero, the protagonist is going to
(32:01):
get some form of serious revenge against the person who
wronged them, who is the villain. And this is in
all superhero movies, as you say, because it's a reliable
plot for selling tickets. And then we get this huge payoff,
this pleasurable revenge sequence in the Lion King, you know
Scar who is the villain is you know, he sails
(32:23):
off a cliff, he's burned alive and torn to shreds
by hyenas, And yes, and yet this is being sold
to children. And my concern in the book that I
express is, you know, this is often for kids might
be their first serious dose of revenge as a drug
(32:44):
and victimization, because you know, you're so bound with little beautiful,
sweet cute Simba, and he loses his father in such
a cruel and horrific way, and so we're all, you know,
instantly wounded at that moment, and then we're getting this
revenge load at the end, and no parent in the
audience is going to explain what just happened and why
(33:05):
you're even there, because we haven't known just how dangerous
this is. So we need to pay more attention to how,
you know, filmmakers are playing our brains and what we're
buying because we're all complicit in it.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
It's a bit unrelated, but it makes me just think
about as an adult, you don't realize how actually cooked
kids TV.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Shows were, even I remember Bamby. You remember Bamby's mom
got shot?
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Like what the opening scene? Baby's mom died and there's
like this little fawn like, well, I don't know how
parents thought it was okay watch this stuff. But I
was trying to think when we're coming into this conversation
James about like, Okay, how's revenge shown up in my life?
What have I done in the past is somebody or
an ex or to get back at them? Because I,
you know, obviously that's an important integral part of the conversation.
(33:50):
And I realized I'm so pathetic, like I don't know
what it says about me.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
I have never sought revenge. And the only two things
I could think of.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
One I remember saying, I remember thinking this was like
a mic drop moment. I remember saying I'm going to
get you back. I said, you won't know when, you
won't know what is it next week? Is it next year?
And I was like, but just no, I'm coming and
in my head, I thought, that's enough, because they're going
to be looking I mean, they probably couldn't care less,
they're going to be looking over their shoulder for the
rest of their life.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
They were.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
They probably forgot about me the week later, but I
remember that was as far as it's ever really gone
for me. That and stealing my excess toilet paper. So
if you did a peer, we couldn't wipe his butt.
After I found out he cheated on me, that's the
level of my revenge. And I was like, wow, I'm
actually quite pathetic, But how do how does revenge typically
show up in a relationship to somebody that's maybe slightly
more spiteful than me.
Speaker 4 (34:38):
Well, you know, maybe you've done a little bit more
than you're even aware of, because if you've had arguments
and shouting matches, and you know you've been you know, accusing,
and in any of those moments, if you've been trying
to make you know your partner feel bad in order
to make yourself feel better, that's revenge seeking. It's not
(35:00):
violent revenge seeking. But if you've been belittling, if you've
been shaming, if you've tried to humiliate, then you know,
with either your words or your denial of affection. If
that was your motive, and it's not just about the
doing of it, But if your motive is I want
him to feel and experience pain and it's making me
(35:21):
feel better, that is revenge seeking. And that's that neurocircuitry.
It's normal. I mean, that's the neural circuitry inside your
head is activating to try and heal you. Now, there
are better strategies than that, and societies have done a
horrific job at educating us about them, and I hope
we'll have a chance to talk about those in a moment.
(35:42):
But you may have been doing more than that, but
going beyond that. So these dragged down arguments that are
designed to hurt the other person emotionally, to humiliate them,
to shame them, those are revenge seeking moments in relationships.
That are I would say the most common doing things
that are kind of sabotage, Like you did with the
toilet paper. That's an act of sabotage, right, I mean,
(36:03):
you're you're sabotaging me in the bathroom. But that's what
that's what's going on there.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Y I showed him, it.
Speaker 4 (36:09):
Was yeah, you showed him and he may not have
even known that you've you've done it. You've just been like,
oh man, I can't believe that there's no toilet papers.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
You James on you, but you knew.
Speaker 4 (36:19):
You knew there was going to be that moment, knew
he had.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
To pay on his body.
Speaker 4 (36:23):
You couldn't get rid of through it exactly. So it's
this is very common in families, in relationships, as I
said earlier, in the workplace as well. You know, it's
also happening with friends. It's happening with kids in schools
like it was as a victim of bully. The number
one factor that motivates a bully to become a bully
(36:45):
is their own sense of victimization. Not necessarily, as I
said earlier, by the child that they're bullying, but it
might have been something that happened at home, or it
might have been from some bigger kid, or from a
parent or a caregiver or a teacher, And now they
have this desire for revenge and they can't rightly retalate
against their own parent, so they then decide to take
(37:07):
it out on what they perceive to be a weaker child.
And so bullies feel themselves to be victims. And there's
a lot of bullying in relationships, as I'm sure you know.
I mean, whether it's male versus female, both sides can
feel victimized and become a bully at almost any moment.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
James, is our desire to seek revenge?
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Is it based more off of what has happened to
us or is it the proximity that we have to
the other person, Like, for example, I think that one
of the biggest betrayals any of us could experience is
being cheated on by our partner. Does that motivate us
more to seek revenge or is it more about like
what is done to us?
Speaker 4 (37:49):
I'd say they're equal in the sense that it's your
sense of victimization, your real or imagined perception of being
a victim. And it's important, you know, I want to
emphasize that a lot of times we only imagining that
something has happened to us, or we are kind of
staging a situation so that we can feel victimized, to
(38:13):
give us this opportunity to retaliate against someone and get
that piece of gratification. If we're really kind of getting
off on this retaliatory moment, and so you know, whether
it's a betrayal, or it's somebody affirmatively insulting you or
maybe shoving you or taking your belongings. They're all registering
in the brain in the same way as a sense
(38:35):
of injustice, mistreatment, maltreatment, or victimization, and any of those
experiences can and almost invariably will trigger a desire to
retaliate to make yourself feel better.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
You did just mention, you said, I'm not quoting, but
society hasn't done enough to teach us about revenge, and
I guess maybe how to avert from that and how
to break the cycle?
Speaker 1 (39:00):
How do you break a cycle of, say, a revenge.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Loop like this insidious tit for tat that you end
up not being able to get out of because it's
a I call it the Turkish tea circle.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
I don't know if you've ever been to Turkey.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
If you go to Turkey and you go out for tea,
because everything's tea, they continue to fill up your cups,
but it's only one at a time, and you can
never It's like this tea circle. You can never get
out of it because one person finishes and the other
person's cup has been filled, and so by the time
that person's cup has they're drunk, there's the next person's
teas filed and it's this. You know, it's a bit
of a joke, but it's a Turkish tea circle that
(39:33):
you can never escape from. And I see that as
the same way as this revenge loop. You're always ready
to get back.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
At the other person. What would you say to people?
How are we going to rewire our brains and train
ourselves to get out of this insidious situation.
Speaker 4 (39:47):
The good news is we don't have to do any rewiring.
So the neuroscience not only shows us that we've evolved
to want revenge to make ourselves feel better when we
imagine or have been victim, but we're also hardwired, it
turns out, to forgive. And the forgiveness that we're hardwired
(40:07):
to do isn't the more commonly thought of concept of
forgiveness that you know is maybe part of religions. It
has a direct physical, neuropsychological process to it, and serious
benefits to anyone who decides, even imagines what it might
feel like to forgive gets a hold of these benefits.
So very briefly, what happens when you choose to forgive
(40:31):
or even just imagine forgiving is that that anterior insula,
the brain's pain network that I said is activated when
you feel wronged, forgiveness shuts it down. So unlike revenge seeking,
which just gives you this temporary dopamine relief hit, this
temporary high like drugs and alcohol, when forgiveness comes along,
(40:52):
it actually stops the pain. I mean, it's like a
wonder drug in that sense. It can shut down the
pain rather than just covering it up. The second thing
that forgiveness does is it shuts down the pleasure and
reward circuitry of addictions, so it stops these endless revenge
desires and plotting and scheming and revenge rumination that often
can occupy people's lives and ruin your present moment and
(41:15):
your future because you're always trying to punish people or
one person, whatever it is, for wrongs of the past,
and that can just completely torpedo your ability to have relationships,
to be successful in your life, have great relationships with
your kids, have a good job, succeed in life. Is
being a success is very difficult if what you're spending
(41:36):
most of your time doing is thinking about how you
were victimized and how you would love to get back
at that person, So it shuts that area of the
brain down. And the last thing it does is it
either awakens or awakens the prefrontal cortex, which is your
executive function area of your brain, your decision making and
cost benefit analysis area of the brain. And that area
(41:58):
of the brain is critical to stef from moving from
desiring revenge to seeking it and carrying it out that
in ways that would hurt you or other people. And
that is the same area of the brain that's inhibited
or hijacked for other addictions like drug and alcohol addiction.
You know, we all know people who have addictions know
the negative consequences of their addiction are coming, but their
(42:21):
prefrontal cortex can't stop them. It's been hijacked its thought,
and it doesn't stop them from continuing the addiction. Likewise,
with revenge seeking, for maybe about twenty percent of the people,
we know there will be terrible negative consequences if we
engage in these vengeful acts, but we can't control ourselves. Well,
when you forgive, it reactivates your control circuitry, so you're
(42:44):
getting those benefits. And on top of that, I have
a colleague at Luther college named Lauren Toussaint, who has
shown that forgiveness and he and his colleagues have shown
that forgiveness reduces depression, reduces anxiety, reduces PTSD, improved your sleep,
reduces cardiovascular events. It has all of these physiological benefits
(43:05):
as well as the psychological benefits. So it's a true
wonder drug that works wonders. We don't teach it. We
often think it's forgiving is what weak people do, or
it's deciding to become a victim over and over again.
It is not. I'm very careful in the book to
distinguish between self defense and a leaving a toxic relationship,
which you can still do and forgive at the same time.
(43:28):
You can leave that relationship, you can defend yourself to
the hilt if necessary, but you can stop the pain
of the past from infecting your present and your future
by forgiving it or using other addiction strategies. Because now
we know that it's an addictive process, and we have
all of those professional strategies like cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing,
(43:51):
and even anti craving drugs that might work to help
people control their revenge desires.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
But do we know how to forgive?
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Is it something that you just say out loud, and
then once you've like a manifestation, once you've said it
out loud and you write it down, all of a sudden,
your body lets it go. Because I imagine it's far more
complex than that.
Speaker 4 (44:10):
It doesn't have to be, but it feels that way.
And so one of the things that I've done is
created a way of making forgiveness like operationalizing it and
making it into a process that's much more i'd say
gratifying at the front end. And it's called the Non
Justice System or the Miracle Court, and it's available as
a free app. You can visit Miracle Court dot com.
(44:32):
It's a web app, so you don't even download it
to your phone. It just plays on the browser on
your mobile device. But what it allows you to do
is it creates an imaginary trial in which you put
on trial anyone who's ever wronged you, but you play
all of the roles during the trial. So you are
the victim who's testifying what happened to you, so you're
given the opportunity to be heard, and then you played
(44:53):
the defendant, the person who wronged you, and imagining what
they would say, which may develop you made develop some
empathy in that process because you're starting to take their
perspective on what happened and why they did it, and
you might gain some insights that way. But it's not
critical because if you're still filled with revenge, we've got
the rest of the steps. You become the judge and
the jury, so you can find guilt, law or innocence,
(45:16):
and you can hand down a sentence, and that sentence
can be anything you want, even something a normal court
could not do. Then you become the part of the warden,
carrying out the sentence and imposing it. And that's critical
because it gives you the opportunity not only to punish
the person who ruled you safely releasing these revenge desires
(45:37):
like methadone for a revenge addict, but it also causes
you to face the fact that if you become the
instrument of another human being's pain, you can't escape that
pain yourself. And that's no different than a hammer striking
a nail. Think of a hammer hitting the nail and
we go, oh, poor nail just got hit by this
big hammer, But we forget that the hammer had to
experience that impact in the exact same measure that the
(45:59):
nail it. And that's what happens in real life. We
all experience the pain that we inflict. We can't avoid it,
and even including taking the toilet paper from your boyfriend,
you know, even that you're right, right, right right. And
then in the last step that wraps it all up
and enables forgiveness. Once you've released your you know, desires
(46:23):
for revenge and gotten that off of your back, you're
asked to really consider, do you feel better having gotten
everything you wanted. You've got to punish them, you got
to put them on trial, you got all of your
gratification satisfied. Are you better? Usually you're not. You retraumatized
yourself to get there. You felt the pain of the
infliction of that punishment. And so then you're asked, well,
(46:48):
why don't you just stop for a minute now and imagine,
just imagine how you would feel if you forgave. You
don't have to forgive, you don't need to know what
that looks like or how to do it, but just
imagine if you made that decision, how you would feel.
And most people in our studies have shown that there's
this instant sense of feeling this weight lifted off our shoulders.
(47:08):
We feel this relief and joy because we no longer
have to punish the person. A lot of times it's
feeling of compulsion. We have to get back at the
person who wronged us, and you finally get permission to go. Oh,
I could just I could just move forward with my life.
I could leave this in the past where it belongs,
because it doesn't exist in the real world. It's only
in my memories.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, and people, forget time and energy are your most
precious commodities.
Speaker 1 (47:32):
You'll never get those back.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
And it takes you know this saying of It takes
more muscles in your face to frown then smile. It
takes more energy to expending to be unhappy than happy.
It's the same thing with revenge. To hold on to
that anger and the amount of brain space it takes
up for you becomes an obsession to being able to
let something go and move forward and realize that, hey,
(47:53):
I get this one life. Why would I hold onto
this one situation? They're probably not thinking about it, you know,
why am I going to let them consume me? I
say that from experience, Like when I say that I've
done these silly things. There have been moments that have
absolutely consumed me, you know, Like one of my exis
had a double life, was marrying someone at the same
time as me, and he's the one I took the
toilet paper from. But there was a moment where like
I wanted, I wanted, I was so angry, and I thought,
(48:16):
how could you have treated me like this? Like I
wanted to get back in him, But I actually just
never did. I just let it roll off me and thought,
the best thing I can do is never think of
him again, you know.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
And I think there's just a lesson to be learned
in do you want to spend your.
Speaker 2 (48:31):
Precious time and energy that you have all this planet
holding onto something that might have happened ten years ago.
Speaker 4 (48:37):
Yeah, So, scientists, that's fantastic description. Scientists have identified two
types of forgiveness. There's decisional forgiveness and emotional forgiveness. The
decisional is the easier and the one that I think
you took, and the one that any of us can
take much more easily than we think because it doesn't
even require talking to or confronting the person who ROMed us.
(48:57):
We don't have to say we're pardoning them or forgiving them,
and it's all okay. We don't ever have to speak
to them again. We can leave that toxic relationship behind
as you did, but we can decide for ourselves to
engage in this act of self healing by deciding to
leave it in the past and move forward. That's all
that forgiveness really means is the decision to not seek
(49:19):
revenge against that person who wronged us, which is, in
other words, is to say to not try and hurt
them to make ourselves feel better. It's really a kind
of a negative decision versus emotional forgiveness, which is a
type of forgiveness that we use to save a relationship
that has been threatened by some form of aggrievance and victimization.
(49:41):
And in that case, you might decide to try and
repair the relationship and offer forgiveness directly to the person
who wronged you. But it's not necessary to get all
of those benefits that I just described. They're all available
without ever confronting the person who wronged you and saying, hey,
you know peace, we're good now. You never have to do.
Speaker 3 (50:02):
That, James, I'm curious about, like our understandings of this,
we're seemingly understanding what causes people to seek out revenge
more and you know you've even extended that into revenge addiction.
Is there a treatment for it? Like, is there a
drug that someone can take? Is there a behavioral therapy?
Speaker 4 (50:21):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (50:21):
We're not going to go into lobotomies, but is this
people are not ating lobotomies.
Speaker 3 (50:27):
I'm kind of wondering, like, if we're able to understand
what motivates people to do this, and we're able to
kind of scientifically say this is the thing that causes it,
are we able to interrupt that process?
Speaker 4 (50:40):
We can? And that's the that's really maybe the biggest
part of the good news here is not only is forgiveness.
Let's think before I move on from forgiveness, it is
this wonder drug that's free. You're hardwired to do it.
You don't need very much training to do it. There
are organizations that can train you and you can google
for those. Actually two the one is called the Center
(51:03):
for Peace and Forgiveness and the other is the Path
of Forgiveness. So you can get coaching and how to
forgive if you'd like, and if that would be helpful,
and it can be very powerful for people that use it,
But set aside forgiveness. If that's intolerable for you, that's okay,
because there's even more good news. By seeing revenge seeking
and violence as addictive brain biological processes. It brings the
(51:25):
entire addiction prevention and treatment toolkit online and available to
help people prevent and treat revenge addiction and violence. So,
in other words, like I've said a little bit earlier,
cognitive behavioral therapies, motivational interviewing, peer support, twelve step programs,
(51:46):
mental health counseling, all of those can be used now
not only to help someone who's trying to stop using alcohol,
but can be used to help someone who really can't
control their revel and seeking behavior and wants to change
and correct that. So there are those types of treatments
available up to and maybe including this hasn't been studied yet,
(52:09):
but the anti craving medications like GLP ones like munjaro,
zeenpic and all of those, those types of anti craving
medications that work against food cravings are being studied right
now to see if they work against drug and alcohol cravings.
And there's been good preliminary evidence that they do, the
next step would be to go ahead and test them
(52:30):
against revenge desires as well. That hasn't been studied yet,
but I would expect we would see real benefits from
those types of drugs. And if we started to survey
people who are on them, who have said, hey, not
only am I losing weight, but you know, I used
to drink a lot and it used to you know,
I craved it all the time, and now I don't anymore,
they might also, if asked, and we just haven't done
(52:52):
it yet, if asked, you know, have you seen any
effects on you know, your interpersonal relationships and the times
that you feel wound it If you're a grievance collector
somebody who's always feeling injured, they might really be able
to say, you know, actually I don't even experience that
as much as I used to, So it's possible.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
That's really interesting, James, Thank you so much for coming
and talking to us today. It's a fascinating topic and
something that every single person experiences. And maybe, like you
pointed out for me, maybe you don't even realize you're
doing it within your relationship.
Speaker 1 (53:24):
Maybe these really.
Speaker 2 (53:25):
Tiny minute moments we are going to link your book
The Science of Revenge in our show notes for anyone
that wants to go and find out more. But the
final question, did you forgive the boys that killed your dog?
Speaker 4 (53:38):
I have forgiven them. I have exercise decisional forgiveness. I
never saw them again after that. You know, kind of
a weird thing happened after I, you know, half confronted
them there that night with the gun but never flashed it.
They didn't come back. I'm not sure if they got
a whiff of We've probably gone as far as we
should ourselves, and we better or pull it back together
(54:01):
again or what. I didn't befriend them, and it took
me quite some time to forgive them, but I have
forgiven them now. I don't wish anything bad for them.
It's too bad that it happened, but it's in the past.
There's no point in continuing to try and retaliate for
something that happened in the past when you can't experience
it with your senses ever again and you can't change it.
Speaker 3 (54:21):
James, I so respect that. I don't know if I
would ever be able to get to.
Speaker 1 (54:25):
A place in peace with that. Thank you so much, James.
We appreciate your time today, you're welcome.
Speaker 4 (54:30):
Thank you,
This episode was recorded on Cameragle Land. Hi guys, and
welcome back to another episode of Life Unput.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm Brittany and I'm Keisha, and today we have a
bit of a different episode. It's one that I'm surprised
we haven't spoken about yet because over the years we
have unpacked but I would say almost every almost every
aspect of a relationship. But today we're going to talk
about something that can be quite insidious in your relationships,
not just romantic, but with families or with your friendships.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
That is revenge. Now we don't always call it revenge.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
In romantic relationships, but if you think about when you
get into this cycle of like trying to get back
at each other or one up each other, keeping school,
having those long grievances, they call that, apparently the revenge loop,
and that is something that science has actually said is
quite addictive. We wanted to unpack it today with a
very special guest. Today's guest is James Kimmel. James is
(01:04):
a lawyer.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
He's an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale
School of Medicine, and he's also the author of a
really great book called The Science of revenge. James has
done a huge amount of research into how revenge quietly
simmers inside all of us and how revenge actually triggers
the brain's reward system much like drugs, and some of
us actually might be revenge addicts without even knowing it.
(01:26):
So today we're going to jump into the neuroscience of revenge,
why we want to hurt the people who hurt us,
and how forgiveness can rewire our brains. James, Welcome to
life on.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
Cut, Kisha and Britt, thanks so much for having.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Me now, James, this seems like a bit of a
weird segue, but we do like to get your embarrassing
story before we get any of your neuroscience.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Do you have something.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you want to knock me down first,
pick myself up. We can talk about my revenge desires
later about doing that and see how they're maybe by this.
But yes, I do have the revenge story. Mine is
a pretty humiliating situation that I had as I was
in the middle of law school here in the States.
(02:10):
The way that you get, you know, your best jobs
is to kind of get an internship, which is called
a summer associate position between your second and your third
years of law school and you want to land you know,
the best top firms that you can attract. And I
was able to get a really fantastic law firm to
be interested in me and take me on for the summer,
(02:31):
which was great. So, you know, I show up there
for the first day. I've got my you know, my
new lawyer suit on, and I think I'm looking pretty
good and trying to be very collegial and pleasant and
win people over. And as we're going through this process,
in the first couple of weeks, you know, they reveal
that one of the things the firm likes to do
is have softball games with the summer associates, that's the
(02:55):
law students and the already existing lawyers. You know, I'm
all on board for this, as everyone else is. So
we show up at the softball field and you know,
we're pretty much picked for teams and sometimes I forget.
But early, very early in my life, sometime between birth
to age four, I developed this eye problem called amblia opia,
(03:16):
which is known as lazy eye where the two eyes
don't rotate and see the same things at the same time,
which is critical for depth perception. Right, So you need
two eyes to be able to judge depth, and I
had to have surgery when I was four years old,
and then I had to wear an eye patch for years.
I looked like a little pirate for a while. So
(03:37):
it's a little that was pretty weird, but it was
successful in bringing my eyes into order. But I've never
actually been able to see out of both eyes at
the same time, like to focus. So I've always had
really terrible depth perception and therefore really bad at sports
that involved having a ball or other object coming like
(03:58):
straight at me. So I was playing one of the
outfield positions. I was wearing glasses. I still wear glasses.
I was wearing glasses at the time, and somebody hit
the ball, you know, and it was all me a
very high pop fly, totally easy ball to catch, so
you know, it almost came right where I was standing.
(04:21):
I mean, all I had to do was like put
the glove up and look up and wait for the
ball to come down and you know, fall into my glove.
I mean, it was just it was perfectly set, but
because of my depth perception of problem, I'm holding the
glove up and it comes right over the top of
the glove. Smashes me right in the face without any warning.
(04:42):
You know, It's just like it's suddenly there and kaboom.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
I mean I feel like there was warning. You just
didn't see it.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
I just didn't see it. It just it just like nicks.
The top of my glove comes right across, hits me,
like right between the eyes, breaks my glasses, cuts my face,
so my glass is kind of dented into my face. Now,
blood coming down my face, my glasses are shattered. It
was really painful, as you might imagine. So I had
to kind of somehow play this off, as you know,
(05:10):
the moron out in the field who was trying to
get a job with his employer and it just you know,
completely humiliated himself. It's terrible. I did get the job,
though they felt sorry for you.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
At least you could have taken an angle of life.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
I might have been a pity higher.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
You should have said, oh look, I didn't want to
show them up. I'm actually very good at baseball. So
you know you can't go in smashing the lawyers out
of the.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
Park, that's true, you poor thing.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Well look, James, revenge is it's an unusual place to
end up for a specialty I would say, but your
story is fascinating, and the story that you tell of
your childhood that sort of sets you up. I guess
a moment that could have changed your life drastically if
you went one direction, but you pulled yourself backward another direction.
I'd love you to tell us about that moment in
(05:57):
your childhood that I guess shaped the rest of your life.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
Yeah. Sure. So I was originally raised in a suburban
house until age twelve, so just you know, a little
subdivision type of home with other homes around us and
a neighborhood with a bunch of kids. But at age twelve,
my family moved my brother and I out to my
great grandfather's farm, which my dad had purchased, and so,
(06:23):
you know, we were sort of uprooted relocated to this farm.
It was about a two hundred acre farm. We had
a small herd of black angus cattle, maybe ten to fifteen,
some pigs and chickens and things like that. But we
you know, my great grandfather didn't make his living on
the land, door did my dad. They were both insurance agents,
so it was kind of a gentleman's farm slash retirement
(06:48):
farm for my great grandfather like a.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Bit of a hobby for a while, maybe, like.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
Yeah, exactly right, that's a perfect example. It was like
a hobby farm for them. But moving out there, I
kind of really latched on the idea I would even
love to be a farmer as my career, and that's
kind of what I was angling toward. But most important
as a twelve year old was to befriend the kids
who lived on neighboring farms. Of the neighboring farms were,
(07:12):
you know, huge farms with hundreds of herd of Holstein
dairy cows, and these guys, their fathers and mothers were
up at five am milking their cows every day and
then milking them twice a day, so they were making
their living from the land. And they viewed me as
an outsider completely and didn't want to have anything to
(07:33):
do with me, and so they started shunning me. And
I wasn't about to have that, so I decided I
would just come up with more and more ways to
win them over, none of which were successful, unfortunately, and
they went from shunning to bullying me.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
James, how bad did the bullying get.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Yeah, it got pretty bad. The bullying did, so it
started with you know, verbal abuse, humiliation, shaming me, you know,
teasing me, insulting me, that kind of stuff, and then
it moved as we got older, you know, from age
twelve now thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, so it
turned physical. And it was a pretty good group of them,
(08:10):
and some of them were you know, pretty big kind
of guys. It was just one of me. I am
not a huge dude, but that was you know, it
wasn't good. It was. It kind of made life miserable
in those moments, but otherwise my life was pretty good
until one night. My family and I we were asleep
at night, very late, and we were awoken suddenly to
(08:31):
the sound of a gunshot, and you know, we jumped
out of bed, looked out the windows to see what
was going on. We lived on this one lane country road,
so it wasn't common to have anyone near our home.
And we were surrounded by acres and acres of land,
and I looked outside and I saw a pickup truck
that had been owned by one of these guys who
(08:51):
had been bullying and harassing me for years, and it
took off down the road. So we we got out,
went around the house. I can see if there was
any damage, any bullet holes through windows. Didn't see anything.
Thought maybe they were just out spotlighting deer, which is
an illegal but not uncommon activity in the country, And
we went back to bed. The next morning when I
(09:13):
woke up, one of my jobs before going to school
was to take care of our animals, the animals that
we had, those those beef cows and pigs. And also
among those animals was this sweet, little beautiful beagle, a
hunting dog named Paula. And when it went to her
pen to feed in water her I found her lying
dead in a pool of blood, with a bullet hole
(09:35):
in her head.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
I just can't imagine. I can't imagine.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
I can't imagine the type of human. I mean, we
know they're out there, but the type of human that
would do that. But it just seems like from what
you said, that's such an excessive jump in the harassment,
Like that is a very different field to like, you know,
pushing you off the steps of the bus after school,
or calling you names, to then going and shooting your dog.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
Yeah, it was inconceivable, and I have then no ex
planation for it. Never gained one at the time. You know,
why they took it to this level. I don't remember
a specific incident, you know that kind of teed them up,
get them angrier than they normally were or might have been.
(10:17):
I don't know if there had been drinking. You know,
there's just no way of understanding why they would have
done this.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
And so what did that do to you in the moment, Like,
what was your because I imagine you'd be scared. I
mean imagine you'd be distraught and scared, but you know
you had other overwhelming feelings too.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
Yeah. Yeah, so just anger, sadness, grieving for the dog,
fury towards them, and rage, wanting to get back at
them immediately, you know, revenge, which is what we're here
to talk about. I absolutely wanted to revenge. My parents
called the police. Police came, took a report, but didn't
(10:54):
do anything to confront them or their families. You know,
they said that it would be documented and if things
got worse, then they would intervene. But maybe for now,
you know, they just didn't feel like it was something
that they should should jump in on it. It was
a different time, you know, early nineteen eighties. Maybe if
that happened today, the police response would be a little
(11:15):
bit more robust. About two or three weeks later, I
found myself home alone at night. My folks were out,
and I heard a car come to a stop in
front of our house, or a vehicle and again, like
I said, one lane country road, pretty unusual. So as
I was getting up to see what was going on outside,
I saw this same pickup truck again stopped in front
(11:35):
of our house, and then you know, shortly thereafter, there
was a flash and an explosion, and the truck roared
away again, leaving behind our mailbox. Our postbox mangled. They
had just blown it up, blown it off of its
mail post, and that was kind of it for me
at that point. I had tolerated as much as I
was willing to tolerate, and or as much as I could,
(11:58):
and so I was home alone. I had been shooting
guns since I was probably eight years old. We had
plenty of different kinds of guns in the house, one
of which my dad had in a nightstand for you know,
personal protection. It was a loaded revolver, and I ran upstairs,
I grabbed that gun, ran back downstairs outside, jumped in
my mother's car, and I tore off. After these guys
(12:19):
through the middle of the night to try and hunt
them down. You know. So I'm flying down this one
lane country road, shouting and screaming in rage, and I
eventually did catch up to them. I chased them onto
one of their farms and cornered them by a barn.
And so, you know, the scene is their pickup truck
kind of pointed toward the barn, and my car behind
(12:42):
their truck with my breake beams on, and I can
see three or four heads in the rear window, and
they start getting out and they're squinting through my bright
beams to see who had just chased them down their
one lane country road. What was clear to me in
that moment was that they weren't armed in the sense
that they didn't have any weapons in their hands. They
(13:03):
might have had something in the truck, but they didn't
have anything in their hands. And the other thing that
was clear to me is that they wouldn't have been
able to know that I had a gun, or necessarily
who I was and what my intentions were. So I
really had this complete element of surprise and kind of
a perfect setup for getting the serious revenge that I
(13:25):
really wanted. So having the upper hand. I opened the door,
I grabbed a gun off the passenger seat, and I
started to get out. It was at that moment that
I just had this little flash of insight for a
brief moment, and in that I was able to kind
of picture the whole set of consequences to my life
(13:47):
if I went through with this, and it would have
been so easy to do and it would have felt
so good they and I believe they deserved everything that
I could do to them. But I knew that if
I survived it in any way, one of the thing
that would happen to me is my identity would be
very different from the guy who showed up at that place.
The guy leaving would have to identify himself as a
(14:09):
shooter and a killer. And so that was just enough
of an insight that I wanted revenge badly. I wasn't
in any way willing to forgive them, but I just
didn't want to pay the high price that I'd have
to pay to get that form of revenge at that time,
and that was enough to cause me to pull my
leg back inside the car, put the gun back down
(14:29):
on the passenger seat, close the door, and drive home.
But I had come within seconds of killing three or
four guys. James.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
I think that that story it really shows us a
lot of how revenge can be this quite overwhelming experience.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
You know. I wonder what is going on inside of
our brains that can just make us kind of act
in ways that we typically wouldn't.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
What is it that's going on.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
That causes us to have this quite a heightened experience,
I guess as something that can just make us a
in a way that doesn't feel in line at all
with what or who we think we actually are.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
Yeah, so we only have answers to those really critical
questions evolving over the last twenty years. Between you know,
twenty years ago and kind of the beginning of recorded history.
Nobody has known what's been going on. It's only been
discussed in you know, things like the Greek tragedies and
Shakespeare and other novels like The Count of Monte Cristo,
(15:26):
and it's discussed in movies, and it's discussed even in
the Bible and the Koran and other religious texts. But
we don't know why we want to hurt the people
who hurt us. We just know that we do, and
we know that when we do we feel really good
(15:46):
when we do it. But now in the last twenty years,
neuroscience has really pulled back the covers and what we
are able to see when a person has a grievance,
which is to say, they feel victimized or treated unjustly
or unfairly in any way. When you've been shamed, humiliated, betrayed,
this activates inside your brain the pain network, the anterior insula,
(16:10):
and so your brain it sees those psychological harms as
physical pain, and your brain doesn't like pain, and it
wants to very quickly counterbalance this pain with pleasure. And
we know from evolutionary psychologists that humans evolved this sensation
of pleasure when we hurt the people who hurt us
(16:33):
as early as the Clisissine epic maybe the ice age
type of time, and that we probably evolved to derive
this pleasure from hurting the people who hurt us because
humans leaving their individual caves and needing to live in
societies needed to have ways to do a couple of things.
One is cause the other people in our societies to
(16:54):
conform to the same set of social norms, right, and
then the other is to prevent and deter other people
from stealing the things that are necessary for survival and
your ability to procreate, so stopping people from either taking
your mate or taking the food supply that you depend upon.
(17:15):
And so it made sense back in those days to
cause people to or motivate people really to hurt the
people who hurt them as a means of survival and procreation.
But today, you know, here in twenty twenty five, all
those thousands and thousands of years later, we're often seeking
(17:36):
pleasurable revenge for a very different reason. We're doing it
for injuries to our egos, to just our psychological identities,
which has nothing to do really with your survival and
nothing to do with your ability to procreate. It comes
down primarily to, you know, your psychological state of mind
in these psychological injuries that are registered so hard. But
(17:59):
what occurs is to get this pleasure that I've just described,
your brain activates its pleasure and reward circuitry, the very
same circuitry that's activating for drug and alcohol addiction and
tobacco addiction and gambling. Those are known as the nucleus
that combans in the dorsal strie atum. These two structures
in the brain, one dorsal stritum that controls habit formation
(18:21):
and similar addictive compulsive processes, and the nucleus accumbans, which
is the pleasure and craving area of the brain. These
circuits flood with dopamine very quickly after you've been wronged,
and this sensation, this pleasurable sensation of dopamine, then suddenly disappears,
and it's the absence of the dopamine actually that's believed
(18:44):
to create motivation, craving, the desire and the want and
the need to go and retaliate against the person who
wronged you or their proxy. It turns out that revenge
isn't only directed at the exact person who wronged you.
Often it's targeted at and inflicted upon people that may
(19:04):
have had nothing at all to do with the wrong
that you've experienced. You might be doing that because it's
easier to target one person or another, or the person
who actually hurt you isn't available or is a much
bigger threat to you than someone else, and so you
can we call get back, you know, take it out
on the other person who had nothing to do with it.
We're taking it out. The more proper way of thinking
(19:25):
about that is getting revenge by proxy against that person.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
So then if we're experiencing these physiological I mean these
physiological changes that we do like and or have scientific
proof now that they are like an addiction, does that
mean you or people maybe in the court system are
using this as a way of saying, well, it's become
an addiction? Like can people actually form new character traits
(19:50):
after performing one act of revenge? Like if that is
a dopamine hit and an addiction and it's rewiring our brain,
do you see in as a lawyer, do you see
that people are starting to commit one thing as a normal,
everyday person, they've committed one active revenge, then all of
a sudden they get a dopamine hit, they start to
form an addiction, and then their whole personality changes because
they're just wanting to keep chasing these revenge dopamine hits.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
It can happen that way, and I want to be
careful to say, I mean there's having an addiction is
never a defense to committing a crime or a tort
And so even if that were they experience, it doesn't
let you off the hook. So some people are concerned
that by understanding revenge seeking as an addictive process that
(20:33):
maybe this is designed to or might ultimately create a defense,
and it's not going to, and it doesn't. It's not acknowledged.
No addiction is a defense to crime. But an answer
to your question there, Britt, is that revenge seeking desires.
Revenge desires have been observed as early as in the
toddler years. Toddlers seek revenge if you wrong a toddler,
(20:55):
and you can imagine just taking an ice cream cone
out of a toddler's hands, you're going to get toddle.
You're gonna get a pretty nasty response back. You might
even get a slap in the face. Toddlers and they
and they'll carry grudges, right, they'll carry that for some
period of time, and they might try and retaliate later
until there's a resolution. So we know this even from
(21:17):
the toddler years, so it's not about necessarily rewiring your
brand all of us. It turns out studies show that
ninety five percent of people experience revenge desires, but only
about twenty percent act on those. And that's a very
interesting and suspicious number because that's about the same number
of people who, when they try drugs or alcohol actually
(21:39):
become addicted. Eighty percent of people who try drugs and
alcohol never become addicted to them, and that seems like
it might be also the case with revenge seeking, and
the addictive process kind of grows in about the same
way that drugs and alcohol track, which is to say,
with you know, drugs and alcohol, you start with the tamer,
(21:59):
lessonive substances, the less dangerous ones, right tobacco, alcohol, up
through cocaine and then maybe into heroin and fentanyl, and
you know, there's just this range of horrors. Similarly, with
revenge seeking, it's about the same We start with less
dangerous forms of retaliation. There might be you know, a
retaliatory insult or slight or social exclusion, a social shunning
(22:23):
that is known to really hurt people, but it isn't physical.
Maybe sabotaging a relationship that somebody wants, or sabotaging your
workplace if you've had a dispute with a coworker or
a supervisor and you're just quietly maybe you're quietly quitting,
Maybe you're quietly ruining things for other people or blaming
them for your own mistakes or vice versa. And then
(22:46):
that can move beyond that and up through into you know,
simple types of assaults and then more aggravated assaults and
then using weapons death. And we know that revenge is
the number one motivator for almost all forms of human
violence that goes from bullying on playgrounds all the way
up through street and gang violence, intimate partner violence, mass shootings, torture, genocide, warfare,
(23:11):
violent extremism. All of them are rooted in a perception
of being treated unfairly and a desire to hurt that
person or their proxy.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
I think that that's really interesting when you start to
unpack the narrative that you know, if you do expand
it as big as something like a genocide, do you
think that for a group of people to get to
that point of violence, do you think that they are
all just evil and they all just want to go
out and murder and kill and do these horrendous things.
Or does it have to do more with the fact
(23:43):
that they perceive they have been wronged and they're trying
to seek revenge for something that has happened to them.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
I think I would say a lot of people on
that Keisha probably are mixing up revenge and justice because,
as I imagine you're talking about genocide and there is
a mass population.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
It's about seeking.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Justice for what they feel like they've been wronged by.
And James, what's the difference between justice and revenge?
Speaker 4 (24:06):
Yeah, it's a great question, Kaisha, and I don't know
if it's about mixing it up. What happens is more
that we humans have decided that we can use justice
to mean two very opposite things in order to allow
and excuse us to do all kinds of horrific acts.
And it works like this, so you know, justice out
of one side of our brains and on certain days
(24:29):
means things like social justice, equity, fairness, love, seeing the
other as yourself, and wanting and acknowledging the right of
the other person to have all of the same benefits
that we have. Right, it's, you know, this type of
justice that we think of when we think of people
like Gandhi or Jesus or the Buddha or Martin Luther King.
(24:52):
So social justice the other form of justice that we
use and use the exact same word. It means the
exact of everything that I just said. It means punishment, retribution,
It justifies cruelty, torture, murder, warfare, all of these things,
and we say, you know, I think the Catholic Church
(25:12):
has a just war doctrine. If war is waged for justice,
it's okay. If it's not, it's not. But who decides
what justice means in that instance? It's usually the person
who is wanting to war says, I'm merely seeking justice.
It's okay for me to do this. It's always retribution.
And what they really mean is revenge. I described in
(25:35):
the book, you know, the horrific terrorist attack on nine
to eleven. You know, Osama bin Laden convinced a group
of his compatriots that in the name of justice, they
should fly airplanes into the World Trades Towers and the
Pentagon and kill thousands of people because of America's transgressions
in the Middle East. And then after that, immediately after that,
(25:56):
almost President Bush came on television and said, we're going
to bring the terrorists to justice. He did not mean
we're going to bring them to fairness, equity, and love.
He meant we're going to go out and kill a
lot of terrorists because of the terrible crime that they committed.
And so we have these revenge cycles in which both
parties are convinced in the justness of their actions in
(26:20):
order to excuse their revenge seeking. On population level scales, even.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
James, we see a lot more violence being perpetrated by men.
From your research, Is there a difference in the way
that either biologically or anecdotally different genders experience revenge and
even maybe even interpret revenge.
Speaker 4 (26:40):
There is a little bit, but it needs a lot
more study, and it is a huge problem, and it's
a little bit of a mystery because we do know
that women and men both experience revenge desires what appears
to be equally and from about the same age. So
you know, we have mean girls, know as kids, and
(27:01):
you know if a female toddler is going to be
as vengeful, if not more maybe than a male toddler,
you don't know, or vice versa. So in both of
our minds, we you know, we're wired to want to
hurt the people who hurt us. But one study that
shows an important difference, and I talk about in the book,
is one in which while punishing somebody who has acted
(27:26):
unjustly and is now the target of a vengeful act,
when men punish, their empathy centers in their mind. The
ability for a male to empathize with the target, with
the victim of their punishment remains dull, so their empathy
center is dull, whereas for women it's still active. Women
(27:46):
can empathize even with a person who has wronged them.
That ability to do that, then to me, at least
you can extrapolate for that and go that might at
least explain why women draw. Perhaps if they do, and
I think it's I'll just speak anecdotally because I don't
think we've had any study on it, but women do
(28:06):
seem to be willing to cut off and stop the
onslaught their retaliatory actions and aggression sooner than maybe men do,
who who want to continue to carry out for punishment
until its final act and until they've gotten, you know,
perhaps every bit of pleasure that they've been seeking out
(28:26):
of it, because that's what we're all looking for. We're
trying to get this fix to make ourselves feel better
from either the real or imagined sense of victimization that
started the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
But do we know if that's a I mean, I
don't know if you know if that's a nature versus
nurture thing.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
When women have a developed area of their brain for empathy.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Is it something that biologically we are born with or
is it something that we're taught from our mums because
you actually can do You're you're a good little girl,
and you're supposed to care and feel sorry for people
and look after your you know, is it something that
society has just drilled into us and that's why we're
more empathetic.
Speaker 4 (29:01):
That's really a keen and excellent observation. We don't have
the answer to that question. The study that I was
talking about does not discern, you know, when did that
develop in the human lifespan. Does it develop, you know, biologically,
or is it something that's as a result of training.
So it's a great, great question.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Jaji previously spoke about the fact that, you know, revenge
is actually understood by kids as young as Toddler's. We
seem to have this like inherent understanding of wanting to
get something back, wanting to get revenge on someone. In
your book, you described that the revenge plot is something
that we kind of see across almost all of our movies,
almost all of Hollywood, and you even gave the example
(29:43):
in your book of The Lion King. Oh I hated
that film directors and writers, they kind of rely on
this revenge plot narrative.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Why is that.
Speaker 4 (29:51):
It's interesting that you mentioned, Britt that you hated that film.
I also hated that film, and I've always felt very
much in the minority of all people because people love
this movie.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
No, the anxiety, because the whole thing is based around
this revenge and death, and like I'm going to get
back to you, I couldn't deal with the anticipation of
when is it going to happen the whole film.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
I just never sat right with me.
Speaker 4 (30:14):
Yeah, I'm the same way, and what we know from
that film, I mean, let me, let's just make it
even more viscial for a second. If you know the
John Wick films, I mean, I just related at the
beginning of this podcast my own John Wick origin story.
You know, John Wick started with having his beagle killed
and it's kind of a it's a weird, unusual coincidence
(30:35):
that I wasn't aware of because I'd never seen the
John Wick film and wasn't brought to my attention until
I was on the on the Daily Show with Trevor
Noah and Ronnie Chang was interviewing me, and he was
like screaming at me going, this is John went, this is this
John Wick, and I'm going, John Wick, exactly what is that?
So you know, I outed myself as not being particularly
(30:55):
on the public pulse of what the popular movies were
at the time. But you know, in all seriousness, these
revenge plots are incredibly gratifying move You know, movie goes
are paying for television watchers. Whatever you're paying your ticket
money is going often to an industry that you're asking
(31:17):
to victimize you as a member of the audience, to
set up in your mind this terrible sense of injustice
by being empathetic. Because we're all empathetic with the lead
character of any story, so we empathize with their pain,
and so the lead character is usually seriously injured and
treated unfairly, and we instantly begin near the beginning of
(31:39):
a movie to start to crave retaliation on their behalf,
as they do in the story. And then we have
to kind of wait as the movie builds and builds
and builds, and we all know it's coming and we
all expect it, and it better be a big payoff
because we've paid to sit there and watch this. Finally,
by the end, the hero, the protagonist is going to
(32:01):
get some form of serious revenge against the person who
wronged them, who is the villain. And this is in
all superhero movies, as you say, because it's a reliable
plot for selling tickets. And then we get this huge payoff,
this pleasurable revenge sequence in the Lion King, you know
Scar who is the villain is you know, he sails
(32:23):
off a cliff, he's burned alive and torn to shreds
by hyenas, And yes, and yet this is being sold
to children. And my concern in the book that I
express is, you know, this is often for kids might
be their first serious dose of revenge as a drug
(32:44):
and victimization, because you know, you're so bound with little beautiful,
sweet cute Simba, and he loses his father in such
a cruel and horrific way, and so we're all, you know,
instantly wounded at that moment, and then we're getting this
revenge load at the end, and no parent in the
audience is going to explain what just happened and why
(33:05):
you're even there, because we haven't known just how dangerous
this is. So we need to pay more attention to how,
you know, filmmakers are playing our brains and what we're
buying because we're all complicit in it.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
It's a bit unrelated, but it makes me just think
about as an adult, you don't realize how actually cooked
kids TV.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Shows were, even I remember Bamby. You remember Bamby's mom
got shot?
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Like what the opening scene? Baby's mom died and there's
like this little fawn like, well, I don't know how
parents thought it was okay watch this stuff. But I
was trying to think when we're coming into this conversation
James about like, Okay, how's revenge shown up in my life?
What have I done in the past is somebody or
an ex or to get back at them? Because I,
you know, obviously that's an important integral part of the conversation.
(33:50):
And I realized I'm so pathetic, like I don't know
what it says about me.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
I have never sought revenge. And the only two things
I could think of.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
One I remember saying, I remember thinking this was like
a mic drop moment. I remember saying I'm going to
get you back. I said, you won't know when, you
won't know what is it next week? Is it next year?
And I was like, but just no, I'm coming and
in my head, I thought, that's enough, because they're going
to be looking I mean, they probably couldn't care less,
they're going to be looking over their shoulder for the
rest of their life.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
They were.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
They probably forgot about me the week later, but I
remember that was as far as it's ever really gone
for me. That and stealing my excess toilet paper. So
if you did a peer, we couldn't wipe his butt.
After I found out he cheated on me, that's the
level of my revenge. And I was like, wow, I'm
actually quite pathetic, But how do how does revenge typically
show up in a relationship to somebody that's maybe slightly
more spiteful than me.
Speaker 4 (34:38):
Well, you know, maybe you've done a little bit more
than you're even aware of, because if you've had arguments
and shouting matches, and you know you've been you know, accusing,
and in any of those moments, if you've been trying
to make you know your partner feel bad in order
to make yourself feel better, that's revenge seeking. It's not
(35:00):
violent revenge seeking. But if you've been belittling, if you've
been shaming, if you've tried to humiliate, then you know,
with either your words or your denial of affection. If
that was your motive, and it's not just about the
doing of it, But if your motive is I want
him to feel and experience pain and it's making me
(35:21):
feel better, that is revenge seeking. And that's that neurocircuitry.
It's normal. I mean, that's the neural circuitry inside your
head is activating to try and heal you. Now, there
are better strategies than that, and societies have done a
horrific job at educating us about them, and I hope
we'll have a chance to talk about those in a moment.
(35:42):
But you may have been doing more than that, but
going beyond that. So these dragged down arguments that are
designed to hurt the other person emotionally, to humiliate them,
to shame them, those are revenge seeking moments in relationships.
That are I would say the most common doing things
that are kind of sabotage, Like you did with the
toilet paper. That's an act of sabotage, right, I mean,
(36:03):
you're you're sabotaging me in the bathroom. But that's what
that's what's going on there.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Y I showed him, it.
Speaker 4 (36:09):
Was yeah, you showed him and he may not have
even known that you've you've done it. You've just been like,
oh man, I can't believe that there's no toilet papers.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
You James on you, but you knew.
Speaker 4 (36:19):
You knew there was going to be that moment, knew
he had.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
To pay on his body.
Speaker 4 (36:23):
You couldn't get rid of through it exactly. So it's
this is very common in families, in relationships, as I
said earlier, in the workplace as well. You know, it's
also happening with friends. It's happening with kids in schools
like it was as a victim of bully. The number
one factor that motivates a bully to become a bully
(36:45):
is their own sense of victimization. Not necessarily, as I
said earlier, by the child that they're bullying, but it
might have been something that happened at home, or it
might have been from some bigger kid, or from a
parent or a caregiver or a teacher, And now they
have this desire for revenge and they can't rightly retalate
against their own parent, so they then decide to take
(37:07):
it out on what they perceive to be a weaker child.
And so bullies feel themselves to be victims. And there's
a lot of bullying in relationships, as I'm sure you know.
I mean, whether it's male versus female, both sides can
feel victimized and become a bully at almost any moment.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
James, is our desire to seek revenge?
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Is it based more off of what has happened to
us or is it the proximity that we have to
the other person, Like, for example, I think that one
of the biggest betrayals any of us could experience is
being cheated on by our partner. Does that motivate us
more to seek revenge or is it more about like
what is done to us?
Speaker 4 (37:49):
I'd say they're equal in the sense that it's your
sense of victimization, your real or imagined perception of being
a victim. And it's important, you know, I want to
emphasize that a lot of times we only imagining that
something has happened to us, or we are kind of
staging a situation so that we can feel victimized, to
(38:13):
give us this opportunity to retaliate against someone and get
that piece of gratification. If we're really kind of getting
off on this retaliatory moment, and so you know, whether
it's a betrayal, or it's somebody affirmatively insulting you or
maybe shoving you or taking your belongings. They're all registering
in the brain in the same way as a sense
(38:35):
of injustice, mistreatment, maltreatment, or victimization, and any of those
experiences can and almost invariably will trigger a desire to
retaliate to make yourself feel better.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
You did just mention, you said, I'm not quoting, but
society hasn't done enough to teach us about revenge, and
I guess maybe how to avert from that and how
to break the cycle?
Speaker 1 (39:00):
How do you break a cycle of, say, a revenge.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Loop like this insidious tit for tat that you end
up not being able to get out of because it's
a I call it the Turkish tea circle.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
I don't know if you've ever been to Turkey.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
If you go to Turkey and you go out for tea,
because everything's tea, they continue to fill up your cups,
but it's only one at a time, and you can
never It's like this tea circle. You can never get
out of it because one person finishes and the other
person's cup has been filled, and so by the time
that person's cup has they're drunk, there's the next person's
teas filed and it's this. You know, it's a bit
of a joke, but it's a Turkish tea circle that
(39:33):
you can never escape from. And I see that as
the same way as this revenge loop. You're always ready
to get back.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
At the other person. What would you say to people?
How are we going to rewire our brains and train
ourselves to get out of this insidious situation.
Speaker 4 (39:47):
The good news is we don't have to do any rewiring.
So the neuroscience not only shows us that we've evolved
to want revenge to make ourselves feel better when we
imagine or have been victim, but we're also hardwired, it
turns out, to forgive. And the forgiveness that we're hardwired
(40:07):
to do isn't the more commonly thought of concept of
forgiveness that you know is maybe part of religions. It
has a direct physical, neuropsychological process to it, and serious
benefits to anyone who decides, even imagines what it might
feel like to forgive gets a hold of these benefits.
So very briefly, what happens when you choose to forgive
(40:31):
or even just imagine forgiving is that that anterior insula,
the brain's pain network that I said is activated when
you feel wronged, forgiveness shuts it down. So unlike revenge seeking,
which just gives you this temporary dopamine relief hit, this
temporary high like drugs and alcohol, when forgiveness comes along,
(40:52):
it actually stops the pain. I mean, it's like a
wonder drug in that sense. It can shut down the
pain rather than just covering it up. The second thing
that forgiveness does is it shuts down the pleasure and
reward circuitry of addictions, so it stops these endless revenge
desires and plotting and scheming and revenge rumination that often
can occupy people's lives and ruin your present moment and
(41:15):
your future because you're always trying to punish people or
one person, whatever it is, for wrongs of the past,
and that can just completely torpedo your ability to have relationships,
to be successful in your life, have great relationships with
your kids, have a good job, succeed in life. Is
being a success is very difficult if what you're spending
(41:36):
most of your time doing is thinking about how you
were victimized and how you would love to get back
at that person, So it shuts that area of the
brain down. And the last thing it does is it
either awakens or awakens the prefrontal cortex, which is your
executive function area of your brain, your decision making and
cost benefit analysis area of the brain. And that area
(41:58):
of the brain is critical to stef from moving from
desiring revenge to seeking it and carrying it out that
in ways that would hurt you or other people. And
that is the same area of the brain that's inhibited
or hijacked for other addictions like drug and alcohol addiction.
You know, we all know people who have addictions know
the negative consequences of their addiction are coming, but their
(42:21):
prefrontal cortex can't stop them. It's been hijacked its thought,
and it doesn't stop them from continuing the addiction. Likewise,
with revenge seeking, for maybe about twenty percent of the people,
we know there will be terrible negative consequences if we
engage in these vengeful acts, but we can't control ourselves. Well,
when you forgive, it reactivates your control circuitry, so you're
(42:44):
getting those benefits. And on top of that, I have
a colleague at Luther college named Lauren Toussaint, who has
shown that forgiveness and he and his colleagues have shown
that forgiveness reduces depression, reduces anxiety, reduces PTSD, improved your sleep,
reduces cardiovascular events. It has all of these physiological benefits
(43:05):
as well as the psychological benefits. So it's a true
wonder drug that works wonders. We don't teach it. We
often think it's forgiving is what weak people do, or
it's deciding to become a victim over and over again.
It is not. I'm very careful in the book to
distinguish between self defense and a leaving a toxic relationship,
which you can still do and forgive at the same time.
(43:28):
You can leave that relationship, you can defend yourself to
the hilt if necessary, but you can stop the pain
of the past from infecting your present and your future
by forgiving it or using other addiction strategies. Because now
we know that it's an addictive process, and we have
all of those professional strategies like cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing,
(43:51):
and even anti craving drugs that might work to help
people control their revenge desires.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
But do we know how to forgive?
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Is it something that you just say out loud, and
then once you've like a manifestation, once you've said it
out loud and you write it down, all of a sudden,
your body lets it go. Because I imagine it's far more
complex than that.
Speaker 4 (44:10):
It doesn't have to be, but it feels that way.
And so one of the things that I've done is
created a way of making forgiveness like operationalizing it and
making it into a process that's much more i'd say
gratifying at the front end. And it's called the Non
Justice System or the Miracle Court, and it's available as
a free app. You can visit Miracle Court dot com.
(44:32):
It's a web app, so you don't even download it
to your phone. It just plays on the browser on
your mobile device. But what it allows you to do
is it creates an imaginary trial in which you put
on trial anyone who's ever wronged you, but you play
all of the roles during the trial. So you are
the victim who's testifying what happened to you, so you're
given the opportunity to be heard, and then you played
(44:53):
the defendant, the person who wronged you, and imagining what
they would say, which may develop you made develop some
empathy in that process because you're starting to take their
perspective on what happened and why they did it, and
you might gain some insights that way. But it's not
critical because if you're still filled with revenge, we've got
the rest of the steps. You become the judge and
the jury, so you can find guilt, law or innocence,
(45:16):
and you can hand down a sentence, and that sentence
can be anything you want, even something a normal court
could not do. Then you become the part of the warden,
carrying out the sentence and imposing it. And that's critical
because it gives you the opportunity not only to punish
the person who ruled you safely releasing these revenge desires
(45:37):
like methadone for a revenge addict, but it also causes
you to face the fact that if you become the
instrument of another human being's pain, you can't escape that
pain yourself. And that's no different than a hammer striking
a nail. Think of a hammer hitting the nail and
we go, oh, poor nail just got hit by this
big hammer, But we forget that the hammer had to
experience that impact in the exact same measure that the
(45:59):
nail it. And that's what happens in real life. We
all experience the pain that we inflict. We can't avoid it,
and even including taking the toilet paper from your boyfriend,
you know, even that you're right, right, right right. And
then in the last step that wraps it all up
and enables forgiveness. Once you've released your you know, desires
(46:23):
for revenge and gotten that off of your back, you're
asked to really consider, do you feel better having gotten
everything you wanted. You've got to punish them, you got
to put them on trial, you got all of your
gratification satisfied. Are you better? Usually you're not. You retraumatized
yourself to get there. You felt the pain of the
infliction of that punishment. And so then you're asked, well,
(46:48):
why don't you just stop for a minute now and imagine,
just imagine how you would feel if you forgave. You
don't have to forgive, you don't need to know what
that looks like or how to do it, but just
imagine if you made that decision, how you would feel.
And most people in our studies have shown that there's
this instant sense of feeling this weight lifted off our shoulders.
(47:08):
We feel this relief and joy because we no longer
have to punish the person. A lot of times it's
feeling of compulsion. We have to get back at the
person who wronged us, and you finally get permission to go. Oh,
I could just I could just move forward with my life.
I could leave this in the past where it belongs,
because it doesn't exist in the real world. It's only
in my memories.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, and people, forget time and energy are your most
precious commodities.
Speaker 1 (47:32):
You'll never get those back.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
And it takes you know this saying of It takes
more muscles in your face to frown then smile. It
takes more energy to expending to be unhappy than happy.
It's the same thing with revenge. To hold on to
that anger and the amount of brain space it takes
up for you becomes an obsession to being able to
let something go and move forward and realize that, hey,
(47:53):
I get this one life. Why would I hold onto
this one situation? They're probably not thinking about it, you know,
why am I going to let them consume me? I
say that from experience, Like when I say that I've
done these silly things. There have been moments that have
absolutely consumed me, you know, Like one of my exis
had a double life, was marrying someone at the same
time as me, and he's the one I took the
toilet paper from. But there was a moment where like
I wanted, I wanted, I was so angry, and I thought,
(48:16):
how could you have treated me like this? Like I
wanted to get back in him, But I actually just
never did. I just let it roll off me and thought,
the best thing I can do is never think of
him again, you know.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
And I think there's just a lesson to be learned
in do you want to spend your.
Speaker 2 (48:31):
Precious time and energy that you have all this planet
holding onto something that might have happened ten years ago.
Speaker 4 (48:37):
Yeah, So, scientists, that's fantastic description. Scientists have identified two
types of forgiveness. There's decisional forgiveness and emotional forgiveness. The
decisional is the easier and the one that I think
you took, and the one that any of us can
take much more easily than we think because it doesn't
even require talking to or confronting the person who ROMed us.
(48:57):
We don't have to say we're pardoning them or forgiving them,
and it's all okay. We don't ever have to speak
to them again. We can leave that toxic relationship behind
as you did, but we can decide for ourselves to
engage in this act of self healing by deciding to
leave it in the past and move forward. That's all
that forgiveness really means is the decision to not seek
(49:19):
revenge against that person who wronged us, which is, in
other words, is to say to not try and hurt
them to make ourselves feel better. It's really a kind
of a negative decision versus emotional forgiveness, which is a
type of forgiveness that we use to save a relationship
that has been threatened by some form of aggrievance and victimization.
(49:41):
And in that case, you might decide to try and
repair the relationship and offer forgiveness directly to the person
who wronged you. But it's not necessary to get all
of those benefits that I just described. They're all available
without ever confronting the person who wronged you and saying, hey,
you know peace, we're good now. You never have to do.
Speaker 3 (50:02):
That, James, I'm curious about, like our understandings of this,
we're seemingly understanding what causes people to seek out revenge
more and you know you've even extended that into revenge addiction.
Is there a treatment for it? Like, is there a
drug that someone can take? Is there a behavioral therapy?
Speaker 4 (50:21):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (50:21):
We're not going to go into lobotomies, but is this
people are not ating lobotomies.
Speaker 3 (50:27):
I'm kind of wondering, like, if we're able to understand
what motivates people to do this, and we're able to
kind of scientifically say this is the thing that causes it,
are we able to interrupt that process?
Speaker 4 (50:40):
We can? And that's the that's really maybe the biggest
part of the good news here is not only is forgiveness.
Let's think before I move on from forgiveness, it is
this wonder drug that's free. You're hardwired to do it.
You don't need very much training to do it. There
are organizations that can train you and you can google
for those. Actually two the one is called the Center
(51:03):
for Peace and Forgiveness and the other is the Path
of Forgiveness. So you can get coaching and how to
forgive if you'd like, and if that would be helpful,
and it can be very powerful for people that use it,
But set aside forgiveness. If that's intolerable for you, that's okay,
because there's even more good news. By seeing revenge seeking
and violence as addictive brain biological processes. It brings the
(51:25):
entire addiction prevention and treatment toolkit online and available to
help people prevent and treat revenge addiction and violence. So,
in other words, like I've said a little bit earlier,
cognitive behavioral therapies, motivational interviewing, peer support, twelve step programs,
(51:46):
mental health counseling, all of those can be used now
not only to help someone who's trying to stop using alcohol,
but can be used to help someone who really can't
control their revel and seeking behavior and wants to change
and correct that. So there are those types of treatments
available up to and maybe including this hasn't been studied yet,
(52:09):
but the anti craving medications like GLP ones like munjaro,
zeenpic and all of those, those types of anti craving
medications that work against food cravings are being studied right
now to see if they work against drug and alcohol cravings.
And there's been good preliminary evidence that they do, the
next step would be to go ahead and test them
(52:30):
against revenge desires as well. That hasn't been studied yet,
but I would expect we would see real benefits from
those types of drugs. And if we started to survey
people who are on them, who have said, hey, not
only am I losing weight, but you know, I used
to drink a lot and it used to you know,
I craved it all the time, and now I don't anymore,
they might also, if asked, and we just haven't done
(52:52):
it yet, if asked, you know, have you seen any
effects on you know, your interpersonal relationships and the times
that you feel wound it If you're a grievance collector
somebody who's always feeling injured, they might really be able
to say, you know, actually I don't even experience that
as much as I used to, So it's possible.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
That's really interesting, James, Thank you so much for coming
and talking to us today. It's a fascinating topic and
something that every single person experiences. And maybe, like you
pointed out for me, maybe you don't even realize you're
doing it within your relationship.
Speaker 1 (53:24):
Maybe these really.
Speaker 2 (53:25):
Tiny minute moments we are going to link your book
The Science of Revenge in our show notes for anyone
that wants to go and find out more. But the
final question, did you forgive the boys that killed your dog?
Speaker 4 (53:38):
I have forgiven them. I have exercise decisional forgiveness. I
never saw them again after that. You know, kind of
a weird thing happened after I, you know, half confronted
them there that night with the gun but never flashed it.
They didn't come back. I'm not sure if they got
a whiff of We've probably gone as far as we
should ourselves, and we better or pull it back together
(54:01):
again or what. I didn't befriend them, and it took
me quite some time to forgive them, but I have
forgiven them now. I don't wish anything bad for them.
It's too bad that it happened, but it's in the past.
There's no point in continuing to try and retaliate for
something that happened in the past when you can't experience
it with your senses ever again and you can't change it.
Speaker 3 (54:21):
James, I so respect that. I don't know if I
would ever be able to get to.
Speaker 1 (54:25):
A place in peace with that. Thank you so much, James.
We appreciate your time today, you're welcome.
Speaker 4 (54:30):
Thank you,
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