June 18, 2025 • 51 mins
We’ve all felt that fire—the urge to get even, to make someone feel the pain they caused us. But at what point does that fire start burning us? This week, Kelly sits down with Yale Psychiatry lecturer, lawyer, and author James Kimmel, Jr. to explore the gripping science behind revenge—and why it behaves more like an addiction than a rational choice.
In his new book The Science of Revenge, James reveals how holding a grudge activates the same neural pathways as drug cravings and how many of us get stuck in revenge loops without even realizing it. Together, they unpack why revenge is so seductive, what it’s doing to our health and society, and the surprisingly powerful antidotes backed by neuroscience.
In this episode:
- Why revenge feels so good… until it doesn’t
- How ruminating on a grievance wires the brain for addiction
- The real difference between forgiveness and letting someone off the hook
- How mindfulness, gratitude, and self-compassion help break the cycle
- What James believes could be the next major public health shift
This one goes deep—and it just might change how you think about justice, healing, and freedom.
Book: The Science of Revenge
Website: https://www.jameskimmeljr.com/
HOST: Kelly Henderson // @velvetsedge // velvetsedge.com
Follow Velvet's Edge on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/velvetsedge/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Conversations on life, style, beauty, and relationships. It's The Velvet's
Edge Podcast with Kelly Henderson.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Doctor James Kimmel is a Yale psychiatry lecturer, lawyer, and author.
He is here today to talk about his new book,
The Science of Revenge, which reveals how revenge operates like
an addiction in the brain and how we can break
free from its grip. Hi, Doctor kim Well, thank you
so much for being here.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Kelly, thanks for having me on your show. Really really
appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
I was telling you before the podcast, I'm so excited
to talk about this topic and just your book in general.
I think is coming out at the perfect time in
our culture because we really can see how people are
operating from such an angry, vengeful place all over the place,
like social media, it's everywhere. I feel like I open
up my Instagram and I'm seeing exactly what you are
(00:54):
talking about constantly. Are you finding that, oh.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
In every way, shape and form. It seems like it's
a national and individual, community, family, workplace, everywhere problem that
is just reaching, you know, boiling levels.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
So it's unfortunate that my you know that my book.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Has come out at this time, but great in the
sense that maybe it can help a lot of people.
It's good to have a problem to solve, and we
finally have some really solid mechanisms for helping tamp this down.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Let's get into that because I love to give the
listeners tangible tools, and so we will get to all
of that as you guys keep listening. But you, I know,
how to deeply personal experience with revenge that really kind
of shaped your life path. And then you did become
a lawyer, which is almost like living out revenge in
a legal way.
Speaker 5 (01:47):
Or productive way.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
So can you tell us a little bit about that story.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Not sure about the productive part we get into that, Okay,
get we can get.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Very much into that.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
But yeah, so this starts with you know, I was
raised on a farm in central Pennsylvania that my folks
moved me and my brother too when I was about
twelve years old. You know, I wasn't born there then.
My great grandfather's farm, and he and my dad actually
were insurance agents.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Not farmers.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Even though we had you know, we had a small
herd of black angus cattle and some pigs and chickens
and things like that, so we had a functional farm,
but it wasn't a farm that we made our living from.
And when I moved there, you know, this was a
great place to be a boy, and I really wanted
to befriend the kids around my farm, who many of
(02:37):
them were living on, working big dairy farms with you know,
hundreds of milk cows, and you know, they their folks
made the living from the land, and so they were
real authentic farm kids, and I just wanted to be one.
And soon after I hit the ground there, I kind
of thought I'd love to be a farmer for the
rest of my life. I mean, that was my aspiration.
(02:59):
So I reached out to these guys, but they weren't
having it. They viewed me and us as outsiders, and
and I could understand why, I mean we were. We
were different in that in that sense, maybe socioeconomically, maybe
just because we you know, hadn't hadn't I hadn't grown
up there as a baby from that moment forward, And
so they shunned me for a while. And when I
(03:22):
wouldn't be deterred, I like joined former Future Farmers of America,
and you know, I built my own hay wagon and
I went to farm shows and just had the best time,
but when they're shunning wouldn't deter me. They started bullying me.
And you know, it started with you know, just a
lot of mean words and things like that, and as
(03:42):
we got older, it progressed into forms of violence. You know,
light stuff at first, just you know, shoves and pushes
and things like that, and then it went on to
kicking and punching in the hallways once in a while
and things like that. This was in the early eighties,
and so you know, there were no anti bullying programs
in my school, and you just kind of were supposed.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
To deal with it. Well.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
One night, my family and I, you know, we were
asleep is very late at night, and we were awakened
to the sound of a gunshot. This was a I
was probably about sixteen or seventeen years old now. We
rushed to the windows to see what was going on,
and I saw a pickup truck speeding away, and it
was a truck owned by one of the guys that
had been harassing me.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
We looked around the house to see if.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
There were any bullet holes or anything like any damage,
and there wasn't and we went back to bed. Eventually,
the next morning, one of my jobs before going to
school was to take care of those cows and pigs
and a hunting dog that we kept, a really sweet
beagle named Paula. And when I went to her pen,
I found her lying dead with a bullet hole in
(04:52):
her head in a pool of blood.
Speaker 5 (04:53):
Good. That had to be very traumatic.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
It was.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
It is even I've probably peded that story a lot
here recently, and it doesn't get easier with any of
the retellings of it. And it was hard to see.
It was hard to kind of imagine that they would
have been driven to this point, and it was also
hard to, you know, picture that you know, I was
in some way responsible for her death because they were
(05:20):
obviously trying to target me through my dog.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
So it was it was tough. My folks were upset.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
They called the police, you know, they came, took a report,
but you know, this was the early eighties. State police
cover big areas in rural country, so they you know,
they felt bad and said, if it gets worse, let
us know. It's on record, but there's nothing that they
could do. So about two weeks later, I found myself
alone late at night. My folks had gone out somewhere
(05:49):
and I heard a vehicle come to a stop in
front of our house. We lived on a one lane
country road, and you know, as I was getting up
to check what was going on, there was a flash
and an explosion, and this same pickup truck took off
out of the smoke and left behind our mangled mailbox,
(06:10):
so they'd blown up the mailbox as well. So clearly,
you know, my strategy of kind of putting up with
things wasn't helping. It didn't seem you know, with the
with that explosion went all of what was left of
my self control. I mean, I was absolutely enraged, and
I wanted to make these guys pay, and I wanted
(06:30):
to balance the scales for what they had been doing
to me for these years now. So you know, we
were hunters. I'd been shooting guns since I was probably
eight years old. We had plenty of guns in the house.
And I grabbed a loaded revolver for my dad's nightstand,
jumped in my mom's car, and you know, I took
off after them through the debt of the night, driving
(06:51):
as fast as I could, and you know, shouting and
screaming and rage, you know, as I'm flying down the road,
and I eventually cornered them on one of their farms
against a barn, and so, you know, it's it's kind
of the scene as their pickup truck is kind of
pointed into a barn and I'm behind them with my
(07:11):
brake beams on, and I'm seeing you know, three or
four heads in the rear window, and they slowly climbed
out of the truck and they're squinting back through my
headlights trying to figure out who had just come flying
down their road after them. What was clear to me
at that moment was that they were unarmed. They had nothing,
(07:32):
you know, no weapons in their hands, and they would
have no way of knowing that I had a gun
or necessarily who I was. And it was my opportunity,
you know, to balance the scales, as I said. And
so I started to get out of the car with
the gun and you know, opened the door and put
my leg through. But then I had a kind of
an instantaneous flash of insight just for a moment, and
(07:57):
you know, it became clear to me that, you know,
if I went through with this, you know, I wouldn't
be just killing them, I'd be killing whoever I was
before that moment, and I'd be an all new person
on the other side of this event, and I'd have
to you know, know myself as a as a murderer.
If I survived the whole thing, or you know, didn't
get incarcerated for the rest of my life, who knows,
(08:19):
lots of potential bad things could happen. And that was
just enough for me to go, this is the price
of getting this revenge that I want so badly. Here
is just way more than I was willing to pay.
Right But you know, we know from too many news
reports that a lot of other people often guys go
through that zone and pull the trigger right way too often.
(08:44):
But in my case, very luckily, thank god, I you know,
saw that I pulled myself back in the car, I
put the gun down, I drove home that night, and
you know that changed my life, that.
Speaker 5 (08:55):
Event, I can imagine.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
So when you drove my next question would be because
you obviously had some insight enough to look at your
future and make a smart decision for that. And also
I would assume the feelings didn't necessarily go away. So
was that when you started to kind of realize or
I'm sure this was a later insight, But did the
(09:19):
revenge become a part of your life that you were
living with then and then carry over into what you're
describing now as an addiction.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Yeah. Well, a couple of things I knew was that
I still wanted to make those guys pay. I just
didn't want to do it that way. That was pretty
clear to me. There was no moment of forgiveness there
at that time. I have since come to do that,
but not at that time, right, And you know, when
I went home, I kind of hoped that maybe this
(09:50):
torment and this bullying would stop, and in fact it did.
And you know, I don't have a direct explanation from
those guys as to why did. I can speculate, you know,
they might have thought it was my mom's car, or
should I say, they might have recognized that it was
my mother's car, and maybe they thought she was in it,
and maybe they thought, oh boy, we've gone too far
(10:12):
here and we better shut it down. You know, that
could have happened. There's any number of things that could
have gone through their head. They may have just felt
like I did, that things had gone, like I said,
really far, and you know the next step might result
in somebody getting seriously hurt and they decided to pull back.
(10:32):
I'm not really sure. Like I said, it's all speculation, right,
But for me going forward, the other big thing that
happened when I got back is, you know, my kind
of quest to become a farmer right And as I said,
that was my goal that ended that night. I was
it was very clear to me. I was like, this
(10:54):
is not going to happen for me. I'm not going
to fit in here, and I'm gonna have to redirect
my energies. And I did, and I turned them. You know,
it was pretty late in my high school career that
I turned towards academics in a serious way. I hadn't
been a very good student up to that point, but
I did like full force and started to get the
(11:17):
hang of it and started to like it. And eventually
I sort of thought, well, what can I do, you know,
with an academic life. And at some point I got
this idea that I, you know, maybe I could become
a lawyer, because lawyers are the people in our society
that have this special license to go ahead and you know,
(11:39):
kind of prescribe, manufacture and distribute revenge to the masses
under the brand name of justice. Now, that's that's a
very I didn't I didn't think of it in those
terms as a seventeen eighteen year old, but I did
have the understanding or instinct that that that type of
profession one that could get me what I wanted, which
(12:02):
was a less costly, more legalized way of retaliating and
in effect what I thought would be defending myself then
you know, going about it in form of street justice
and vigilantism and chasing people around with guns.
Speaker 5 (12:19):
Right, So it the justice piece.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
I have this in me too, and it always I
think it's so interesting because as I'm listening to your story,
I'm thinking, obviously you would be upset and that was unjust.
What was happening to you wasn't fair. It wasn't like
you asked for it or did something to merit their
actions towards you. So there is this piece when you
have the justice piece within you, that goes, but that's
(12:44):
not fair. So how do we fight this? And then
you go into the law world and that does seem
to me like the legal adult almost way to do it,
because you're doing it through the legal system. And I'm
just curious though, so how because you've now written this
book about revenge as an addiction. What was the moment
(13:07):
in your life after living through that experience and then
a full career as a lawyer that made you go,
wait a second, there's something here that I'm a little
too attached to or get curious about why revenge could
be an addiction.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
So, you know, i'd say for the next twenty years
of my life. You know, I after I became a
lawyer and I practiced law as a litigator. What I
found in doing that is that in every case, you know,
and each each step in every case, and there are
you know, hundreds or thousands of steps and then thousands
(13:47):
of little battles that you can win. And each time
you win one, which is to say, you're putting kind
of pain on your adversary to for, you know, with
the goal of hoping that they'll crumble or you know,
bend to your will or offer up a settlement or
drop a lawsuit.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
Whatever.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
You know, whichever side you're on, and I was, I
was off and on on either side, it didn't matter.
Those little battles would give me kind of a really
great feeling. Wow, a zinger, a high kind of experience.
It didn't last long, but it felt great. There was
a fair amount of pain in getting there, and those
these little highs were short lived, and then you'd want
(14:24):
the next one, right, You'd want it again and again
and again, and that was you know, it was okay
for a while. When I started my career, I was
a prosecutor in the Philadelphia court system, and then I
was a law clerk to a federal trial judge, so
I was I saw the criminal side of it right
in sentencing people as a law clerk and in prosecuting
(14:48):
as a as a as an assistant DA intern. I
was an intern there, and those wins too, felt like
I was doing something good. But to get there, I
they spent a lot of time interviewing, you know, the
victims and preparing them for the testimony that I was
going to put them through in court, and making them
(15:10):
relive their victimization and bringing them to tears over and
over again, and watching their pain because some of them
have been seriously grievously hurt and assaulted. And those things
just seemed really awful and they affected me deeply at
(15:31):
the same time, you know, watching someone be convicted of
a crime and knowing where they were headed in handcuffs,
you know, brought at first this great feeling of ooh, yes,
got this, got this guy, We're doing the right thing here,
But then kind of a feeling of I mean, you know,
I just I'm now part of this system that's grinding
(15:54):
people down. And and yes, they ruined their own lives,
but I'm making sure that their life is ruined. You know,
I'm at the end of that train and I'm sweeping
up the pieces and throwing them into a prison. And
so these were things that just sort of, you know,
I experienced. But as I got better and better at
(16:15):
being a civil litigator and winning more and more cases,
I was watching my own clients and realizing that they
were going through this same process with me. They wanted
all the little wins, they wanted the big win. They
were getting this great enormous pleasure and satisfaction from the
little wins. Sometimes it didn't even matter if we won.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
The big case.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
There was such joy at knowing that we had made
life for the other party and their lawyer worse that day.
Those little moments were like, Wow, that feels so great,
And it would only, like I said, it only last
a short period of time, and then you'd next day,
you'd wake up and try and do it all again,
over and over again. And that started to bleed into
(16:55):
even my personal life. So I became kind of anger
and avenger extraordinary in my home life with my wife
and my kids, with relatives, with neighbors, with people I
met that you got on the wrong side of me
or did something wrong, it would be.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
Like I became.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
I became a legal bully, kind of like the guys
who had been bullying me when I was in high school.
But now I wore a suit and a briefcase that
was kind of about the only and carried a briefcase,
and that was about.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
The only difference.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
And that sort of realization sunk me pretty deep, to
the point that I found myself one night alone in
a spare room kind of contemplating suicide. I couldn't figure
out a way.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
Out of it.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
I tried to cut back. I left law firms, I
went to smaller firms. I formed my own firm, trying
to kind of wean myself off of this, and I
couldn't get myself off of it. No matter what I
did or what I tried, I kept coming back to it.
It was lucrative, It made me feel good. My clients
(18:00):
were wanting me back, They always wanted more of this stuff,
and it began to make me wonder, is this an addiction?
Is just as seeking in the form of revenge, can
that become addictive? And am I hooked on it? Because
I really was beginning to be convinced.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
I was, Okay, well, let's talk about that then, because,
like we said, the book is called The Science of Revenge,
and you say that revenge operates like an addiction in
the brain.
Speaker 5 (18:36):
We talk about addiction a lot on this podcast.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
We've had a multiple twelve step recovery type people on
the podcast or therapist, and so my listeners are very
familiar with addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex, relationships, whatever it is.
I've never heard it discussed in the context of revenge,
but it's all happening in the brains. I'm very curious
if you could break down what is hoppen opening neurologically
(19:02):
when someone's stuck in this cycle of just the grievance.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Sure, yeah, I'd be happy to do that. And so
my third phase of my life, my first phase was,
you know, as a kid to twenty and from twenty
to forty, I was a lawyer. Right from forty to
I'm now sixty sixty one that phase, I left the
law almost entirely. I'm still a lawyer, but I decided
(19:28):
to commit myself to studying this, and I eventually was
able to get invited to become a researcher and a
lecturer at the Yale School of Medicine.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
To study this.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
And the reason that that was able to happen is
about the same time that I was theorizing this idea
that I must I must be addicted, and all of
the people around me seemed addicted, right the other lawyers,
their clients, the whole courts is, I know, just one
after another. Neuroscientists at universities around the world where just
(20:00):
beginning at that same time to put people in brain
scanners fMRI machines and pet scans and study and look
at what's happening inside your brain when you have a
grievance or you feel that you've been victimized and experienced
in an injustice and start to desire to retaliate to
(20:23):
punish the person who wronged you. And so here's how
it works. Here's what happens. It's absolutely fascinating. So grievances
are really defined as a real or an imagined perception
of having been wronged, mistreated, betrayed, disrespected, treated, unjustly victimized
in any way. That's primarily psychological pain there, and those
(20:47):
psychological pains actually register in your brain inside your brain,
in the brain's pain network, which is called the anterior insula.
That's like the primary component of that network. So when
you experience a perception of pain, your anterior insula it activates,
and that's been shown on many, many, many brain studies.
(21:10):
And what that triggers then is this the brain doesn't
like pain, it doesn't want pain, and it wants to
rebalance the pain with pleasure.
Speaker 4 (21:20):
And we've evolved as.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
Humans to derive enormous pleasure from hurting the people who
hurt us, which is to say, getting revenge. And I
could get into, you know, maybe separately if you want,
or later on how we might have evolved to do that,
but for now, just accept the fact that we all
feel the desire for revenge when we've been hurt or
(21:44):
wronged by someone, and that's been observed in studies in
all societies around the world. It's a very universal experience.
It's not just unique to any one individual. We all
sort of feel this desire to want to hurt the
people who hurt us, and so what occurs inside your
brain at that point is to rebalance that pain with
(22:06):
and get a hold of that revenge pleasure. The brain
activates the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction. And you
know your listeners and you might be familiar with this.
So that is the neural circuitry of the nucleus incumbents
and the dorsal stratum. These are the pleasure and reward
areas of the brain, and they activate as you begin
(22:27):
to fantasize about retaliating or punishing the person who wronged you.
And if you go and move on from the fantasy
world inside your head into acting out, you know, punitive
acts in real life, you experience a dopamine rush. Your
brain surges dopamine, and then that dopamine disappears, and that
disappearance gives us that experience that's thought of craving.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
So we begin to crave.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
Revenge or justice in the former avenge, retaliation, punishment, whatever
you want to call it, it's all the same thing.
And so we're looking, we start craving that in the
same way that somebody who has a substance addiction would begin,
you know, craving their drug of choice by seeing a
place where they often take it, or friends who they
take it with, or circumstances or stressors in their lives
(23:15):
that often trigger this desire. So the grievance triggers the
desire and the craving for revenge. The brain responds with
that by giving you that craving, which is motivation to
go and get your drug of choice. And in this case,
the drug of choice is revenge. And the only way
you can gratify your craving is by hurting other people.
(23:37):
You've got to hurt the other person who wronged you
or their proxy. And that's a common misconception that revenge
is only happening when you hurt the person who wronged you.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
It's not.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
You can and it's very common for humans to seek
revenge against all sorts of people that aren't the person
who actually rolled them for any number of reasons, and
we call that revenge by proxy or some people at
displaced revenge. But the common example is, if let's say
you're mistreated at work. You know, your boss gives you
a hard time and you think it's unjust. You can't
(24:09):
retaliate against your boss without losing your job, so you
go home and you pick a fight with your intimate
partner or maybe you you know, quote unquote kick the dog.
That's revenge by proxy. And you wanted revenge against your boss,
it's not safe to get it, so you're going to
get it against somebody who you can get it against,
and he's either going to be either more patient or
can't defend themselves.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
It's almost like just the projection of those emotions onto
other people.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
Kind of, you know. And some psychologists will say that
is displaced revenge seeking. But I'm very reluctant to use
that terminology because I because it assumes then that revenge
has a proper place, and you've just misplaced it on
somebody else. And I think it's pretty clear revenge does
not have a proper place. There's no proper place to
(24:58):
wrong somebody, and particularly somebody who wasn't it had nothing
even to do with your pain. So I don't kind
of I'm not really in favor of that saying yeah, yeah, right,
So I'm sorry. So the last step of this is
so up to this point. As I said, if we all,
if we've evolved to want revenge when we're wrong, then
(25:22):
how could that possibly be something that's bad for us?
The evolution gave it to us for a reason. And
so when it moves the way that it moves from
let's say, adaptive revenge seeking, which might have begun, you know,
in the Ice age or before when people were living
to get start, just started living together in societies and
(25:43):
needed a way to get everybody to comply with the
same set of rules and stop people from stealing their
food or their mate or whatever. But now here in
modern society it moves to that pathological sort of state
when you can't control it despite the negative consequences. And
that's the classic definition of addiction. Addiction is, you know,
(26:05):
being unable to resist a desire or a behavior despite
the negative consequences. And this is happening with revenge seeking.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
All the time.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Almost always there are you know, negative and sometimes severely
negative consequences to revenge behavior. You're at a minimum, you're
always by definition, you're hurting someone, and that's the definition
of a negative consequence. You're always hurting someone and you're
often hurting yourself. Even though you get this early dopamine rush,
(26:38):
it's very short lived, and you end up feeling usually
worse for going and getting the revenge than you felt beforehand. Yes,
you felt the pain of the grievance, but now you
have the pain of the grievance, and on top of it,
you have enhanced anger, perhaps potentially guilt, potentially anxiety and
fear over now what's going to come back at you
(26:59):
because your active of just just as seeking in the
form of revenge, is another person's active or reception of victimization,
and now they're going to want revenge against you, and
we get these revenge cycles. So this is how revenge
actually is correctly perceived to be an addictive brain biological process.
(27:20):
It travels in the same circuitry, the behaviors are the same.
We're doing it despite the negative consequences. It's very compulsive,
and when we get it, we feel, you know, satisfied
at least for a while, but then we want to
do it again, and some people want to do it
again and again and again, and if you can't control it,
(27:40):
and we see it escalating usually as well, just like
drugs go from you know, maybe cigarettes all the way
up through heroin, you know, eventually, And that's sort of
the way vengeful behavior and violence works. It starts with
non violent forms of behavior and then slowly creeps up
to you know, a simple assault, and then maybe it's
an aggrivated assault, and then maybe you're pulling a gun.
(28:01):
I mean, it could just be anywhere all on that range.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
I'm just so glad that you're talking about something like
this that I think a lot of people listening might
relate to on the day to day, you know. I
think this is a very normal human feeling that we
don't really talk about, which is really interesting. As you
were talking about it, I was thinking, I don't really
discuss this with that many people, but I do find
(28:25):
that our culture has tended to look at addictions or
addicts as less than or messed up, you know, or
they just can't get it together. And the more I've
learned about addiction, the more I see it in every
single one of us. We just have different drugs of choice.
What I'm hearing in this is very much revenge as
(28:47):
a drug of choice, and it sounds exactly the same
as what a drug addict I think would say about
their actual drug of choice. It's the hit, it's the
chasing it. It's the high we look for, that's the
mediate high. But then it eventually goes away. Is you
have to chase another high? Like it's all the same, right.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
It really does seem to be the same. It seems
to be the same behaviorally, you know, when you just
look at someone and how they're behaving, and then I mean,
what you know, the new thing is about this research
is now we can see that the brain looks the same,
so that your brain on you know, your brain on
revenge looks like your brain on drugs. It's kind of
(29:27):
it's doing the same thing in the same circuitry. And
as you said, it may be a different choice, but
we I'm sorry, a different drug of choice. But we
also find you know, there's this idea of vulnerability to
addictions of all sorts. Yes, And you know you often
will find violence traveling with drug addiction, right, I mean
(29:50):
not necessarily all users, but a lot of the dealers. Right,
there's a lot of violence that's involved in it. And
I don't think it's a coincidence that there's a fair
amount of violence that's sort of built into that system,
because you know, people who maybe users and strongly addicted
(30:12):
to a narcotic might also be vulnerable to retaliatory behavior
as well.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Right, and you probably can't logic your way out of it.
Are the more drug that's involved, I would imagine, makes
it harder to kind of talk yourself down emotionally or
you're not just not thinking clearly. So if it's such
an addictive type of energy, how do we know the
difference between like standing up for ourselves and getting stuck
(30:41):
on the revenge loop?
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Yeah, that's an excellent question, and we know it this way.
We know it by thinking about the arrow of time
and what revenge means and what self defense means. Okay,
so revenge and self defense are two very different things.
Revenge seeking is always trying to punish someone for something
(31:04):
that they've done in the past. Okay, it happened in
the past. You can no longer experience it at all
with your senses. It might have been minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years,
or decades ago. Some people carry grievances literally for decades.
I mean, as matter of fact, you know, I think
therapists who you know, start working with people and start
(31:28):
with their childhood, can remember grievances that have happened when
they were very very young, and there they may be,
you know, middle aged and older adults, and they still
remember it, it still hurts, and they might still be
wanting some form of punishment to happen to the person
who roamed them. So our memories are very powerful and
(31:50):
of course, and they can they can really contaminate and
ruin our present and our future. So revenge seeking is
always this punishing people for realms of the past. Self defense,
by contrast, is always present and future looking, and it's
it's involved, and it's a whole different circuitry in the
brain as well, because you're now talking about the fight
(32:12):
and flight instinct. And in that case, right, you're dealing
with a present threat of imminent, you know, potentially serious
harm to yourself or somebody you care about. And so
your def you know, defending yourself either by fleeing or
by you know, using force, if that's all that you
(32:35):
have left to do, uh is an act of self defense.
Speaker 4 (32:39):
And and and.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
The law is built this way, so you know, there's
a defense to even you know, homicide if you were
acting in pure self defense, because the person that you've killed,
was threatening your life and able to you know, carry
out their threat, whereas with revenge there is no defense.
(33:00):
I mean, everybody that's in jail for a violent crime
almost universally was seeking revenge and none of them are
able to invoke. Oh, I was just seeking revenge, so
it must be okay. That's not okay, and it won't
be okay. So there's a very big, bright line between
these two behaviors.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
Does that help out?
Speaker 2 (33:20):
That totally makes sense to me. Whenever we were talking
about threat earlier, you said it could be perceived or real. Yeah,
So like, how often is that happening where people are
perceiving someone's actions as a fault to them and then
(33:45):
going into this revenge loot because of the perceived threat,
And like, why is that happening?
Speaker 5 (33:49):
What's happening in our brain that makes that happen?
Speaker 3 (33:52):
Yeah, So the perception of being wronged is a really
fascinating area of this research that hasn't been significantly explored
yet in terms of its ability to launch the revenge desire,
but we have just almost an infinite number of examples
of it from human history. One that's very recent that
(34:14):
we can all think of is like the you know,
the twenty twenty election. Yeah, so you know, President Trump
perceived that the Democrats had stolen the election and this
was a personal grievance and his followers felt this way
as well. But there's never been any solid evidence that
that happened. And so you get this perception of somebody
(34:37):
doing something really bad and really dirty that's kind of
detached from whether it happened or not, and it just
doesn't matter because in our minds, once we feel that
we're victimized, whether it's true.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
Or not matters not at all. Well.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
Similarly, an extreme example is like Hitler after World War One.
Hitler imagined and actually the whole German people were, you know,
there was a group of politicians and military leaders who
wanted to convince the German people after World War One,
that the reason that Germany agreed to the armistice and
(35:16):
ultimately the Treaty of Versailles, because they they betrayed Germany.
They sold Germany down the river. It was a terrible
act of betrayal and treason, and it is that reason
that Hitler rose to power and ended up launching World
War Two.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
But when we go back and look at the evidence none.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
Of that occurred.
Speaker 4 (35:38):
Jews didn't do anything.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
Politicians, the military leaders, the two highest German military leaders,
agreed to the armistice because they thought it was the
best thing that they could get because they were losing
the war, and so they got some politicians to kind
of sign the documents without them actually doing it, and
they escaped from that type of scrutiny, and that led
(36:02):
to an entire world war. So those are extreme examples,
but in our daily lives, this is happening. You know,
all of the time we think that someone and I'm
sure you can you can think of tons of examples
in your own life in which you know, you think
that somebody said something to you that was intended to hurt,
you know, to insult you or hurt your feelings, and
(36:23):
you're like, wait, what did you just say? Why did
you do that? And then they go, oh, no, no, no, no,
peace man, I didn't mean that at all. But you
you missed, you know, you misread it as a direct attack.
Or you you know, you see somebody that you think
is you know, cut you off in traffic and maybe,
(36:44):
you know, if you had had the time to analyze
the whole thing and question them, they'd be like, I
didn't even see you, man, I'm sorry, I was just
trying to get to my job because I was I
was late. And then you might go, oh, okay, I
I don't feel so bad now because you had a
good reason for doing it. And this is happening all
the time in our families and in our personal lives
(37:06):
and in our workplaces. So we're we're misperceiving it sometimes
not always. We're often perceiving real, real, uh victimization, but
we're also trying to create it. If you're a revenge addict,
you want to create these victimization experiences so you can
get that revenge high again. So you will have fine
(37:27):
people in your life who are kind of always looking
for the reason to feel aggrieved and upset. And and
you know, we know these people, right and and I
think I was one of them for quite a while
as a matter of fact, as part of my you know,
I consider myself a recovering revenge addict. And I think
during those years when I was a lawyer doing that,
I was always looking for an opportunity to find that
(37:51):
something is unfair and then I can now retaliate against.
And we just some people will create those opportunities out
of thin air and misinterpret deliberately an act in order
to perceive it as something that was never intended to be,
in order to sort of trigger this involuntary victimization and
(38:16):
now retaliation response.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
That feels very gratifying.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Yeah, and it's literally like every other addiction. I mean,
the more you're talking about it, it's making so much
sense to me because like an alcoholic. For instance, if
you've ever had an experience with an active alcoholic, often
your behavior is blamed for why they needed to go
get drunk, you know, And it's that same exact thing.
It's the perceived threat or the perceived harm or fault
(38:43):
or whatever to then be able to go act out
and not feel guilty about it or whatever, you know,
because you have the right to do it.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
Yeah, that's a great insight. And I've never had anyone
actually bring it up to me in that way. Is that, Yeah,
you know, an alcohol an alcoholic will kind of aim
the other person you're you know, if you would just
you know, be different and not kind of keep provoking me,
I wouldn't.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
Be drinking all the time.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
And it's not they're using your behavior in order to
create a scenario in which drinking is the perfect response,
or in this case, in my case, you know, it's
revenge seeking is is the response, and it'll make me
feel better if I can just set those dominoes up
and then knock them down, and even though I'm self
(39:29):
creating these victimization experiences.
Speaker 5 (39:32):
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
Okay, Well, we've talked about the problems, so I have
to talk about the healing a little bit. We told
the listeners would give them some tangible tools. So what
are some of the science backed strategies that you've come
up with, now that you call yourself even a recovering
revenge addict, that actually help get our brain away from
this vengeful thinking.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
I usually start with the addiction strategies, which your audience
will know well because and I'll just briefly touch on
that I guess before I go on. So if you
think about it, if it's correct, and I believe it
absolutely is, there's enough evidence to show that revenge can
become an addicted, an addiction for people, not all people,
(40:14):
but some people. It becomes a compulsion. Maybe twenty percent,
you know, twenty percent of the people in the world
who try alcohol or drugs become addicted to them, which
means eighty percent don't. Maybe that's and it hasn't been
studied full yet, but maybe around that number of people
become addicted to revenge seeking an eighty percent don't, okay,
But for those twenty percent who are experiencing addiction, if
(40:37):
we think of it as an addictive process, then the
addiction strategies that already exist for prevent addiction, prevention and
treatment are now available to prevent and treat revenge seeking
and violence. Because, you know, public health data and law
enforcement data show that revenge is the primary motive for
(40:57):
almost every form of violence that we are aware of,
everything from intimate partner violence, violence and bullying, all the
way up through you know, police brutality and violent extremism,
terrorism and warfare, I mean, the whole range. So if
that's the case, we can now think of addiction prevention
(41:20):
and treatment strategies as a way of preventing and treating
violence and use that and I believe, very effectively. So
that can include the normal things you're probably aware of,
like cognitive behavioral therapy and counseling and motivational interviewing. Maybe
one day rehabs There are no rehabs for revenge addicts yet,
but maybe there will be someday, and it may include
(41:41):
anti craving drugs. Even the GLP one drugs that seem
to be effective for food cravings might be found to
be effective for revenge desires. I mean, which would be
you know, an astonishing development hasn't been studied yet, but
pretty cool stuff. Then there's the you know, public health
prevention sides, So just educating people about the dangers of
(42:04):
their own revenge desires, that they're natural, you're going to
experience them, and you know, starting this in school health
classes right with kids, and going when you grow up,
there's going to be this temptation that isn't drugs or alcohol,
but it's as were, more dangerous, and it's called revenge seeking,
and you're going to maybe experience this almost every day
of your life because we all experience grievances all the time.
(42:26):
Sigmund Freud believed that we, you know, experience grievances and
want to do a way of the people who insult
us like our by hour every day of our lives.
It's that prevalent, and so teaching people about this in
itself would help a lot of people control it and
seek help if they can't. But now let me switch
(42:48):
to the really cool neuroscience. To me, this is the
most important neuroscience discovery that I learned in all of
my years now in researching this, and that is what
happens inside your brain when you even just imagined forgiving
a grievance. This is extraordinary. So what occurs then is
if you have a grievance and you feel victimized, just
(43:10):
the way we explained, and that pain network inside your brain,
the anterior insula, is activated when you just imagine forgiving Internally,
you don't need to tell the person who wronged you
that you're doing anything. You don't have to tell them
that they're forgiven. You just do this privately with yourself.
And here's what happens. The act of imagining forgiving shuts
(43:30):
down the pain network, So instead of just covering it
up with a temporary hit of dopamine, you're actually getting
by forgiveness the taking away or the stopping of the
pain itself, which is an amazing outcome. The next thing
it does is it also shuts down the pleasure and
reward circuitry of addiction that nucleus, thecumbents en dorsal stratum,
(43:54):
those both are shut down and go silence, so you're
no longer nagged by this endless craving for revenge and
thinking about it and revenge rumination and fantasy. And then
the third thing that forgiveness does is it reactivates your
prefrontal cortex, that's your self control and executive function circuitry,
to help you make good and solid and much more
(44:17):
beneficial cost benefit decisions that are in your own best interest.
And it's in that format that you're able to finally
escape from the traumas and rangs of the past because
you've now shut the pain down, you've shut the revenge
desires down, and you can see that a decision to
let the past be in the past where it's no
(44:39):
longer affecting your present in future is always going to
be your best decision for you if you want to
succeed in your life and have happiness, enjoy again.
Speaker 5 (44:50):
And actually move forward.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
Yes, I think that's the lie about revenge, right, We
think that that is the thing that would get us
out of the situation, when in reality it just keeps
you stuck in it.
Speaker 3 (45:01):
Yeah, that's perfectly put. I mean, it's exactly is what
it does. It just attaches you to it and it
keeps destroying your present and your future when you could
be moving on.
Speaker 5 (45:11):
Yeah, yeah, well I could talk about this all day.
Speaker 2 (45:13):
This is fascinating and love I love how in line
it is with other addictions, because even when you're giving
the neuroscience to why how our brain works. I was
thinking about in twelve step recovery day, one of the
tools is to pray for the person who caused you
harm in one of the steps, and it is the
hardest thing to do. You're supposed to pray for them
and to wish that they get everything that you want.
(45:35):
But exactly what you explained is why that works.
Speaker 5 (45:39):
To let go of.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
The revenge or the revenge seeking or whatever the grievance
feeling is.
Speaker 3 (45:45):
Yeah, that's a nice thing, And I think that the
neuroscience is showing a couple of things. So forgiveness doesn't
benefit the perpetrator. It benefits you as victim, which is
really great. But you don't you don't have to, like
I said, to get all these benefits neurologically, you don't
have to you know, interact with or inform the perpetrator,
(46:08):
and you don't even have to wish them well. You
can start by simply going, I'm forgiving this for me today, right,
and then you can move on. At some point, you
might move on to moving from what's called decisional forgiveness
to a broader form of compassionate forgiveness, in which you're
(46:28):
seeing the other person in a different light and you're
maybe seeing them as a human being again. And that's
wonderful and that is a great goal to hit. But
you don't have to start there, which is a big
ask for a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
I like, you're stuff better with that because adding that
one in it, Yeah, because it's almost I feel like
sometimes it feels dismissive of the feelings that you're really
stuck on. Right then, But if you can think about
it from a way of I'm doing this for me
as an act of self care in a way, I
think that's an easier thing to your brain around first.
Speaker 3 (47:01):
Right, And to help that happen, I want to make
sure I leave your listeners and you with this method.
So one of the things that I've done at Yale
for the over the last fourteen years is research a
method that I developed called the non Justice System or
a miracle court that kind of addresses what we were
just talking about there, okay, and that is this.
Speaker 4 (47:23):
And so there's a free app.
Speaker 3 (47:24):
It's called the Miracle Court app and it's just at
miraclecourt dot com.
Speaker 4 (47:28):
There's no in app purchases.
Speaker 3 (47:30):
Or anything, and it literally is free. But here's what
it enables you to do. And the non justice system
is the written version of that, and it's in my
book They're suing for peace. But here's what it does.
It enables you to put anyone who's ever wronged you
on trial inside a courtner of your mind where you
get to play all of the roles. So in this
(47:53):
role play, you play the victim prosecutor, You played the defendant,
testifying as the defense and it might in your own
imagination about their side of the story. You play judge
and jury, finding guilt or innocence and handing down a
sentence if you want, and it can be anything you want.
You play the warden imposing that sentence that you've handed down,
(48:15):
and then in the last step, you play the judge
of your own life. And in that experience, that last step,
you're in a new courtroom. You imagine this in which
you are asked to first of all, acknowledge that the
wrongs that happened to you are in the past. They're
not happening to you anymore. And that's an important realization.
(48:37):
A lot of people sort of feel like they're in
forever fight in flight mode. They're always being victimized.
Speaker 4 (48:42):
Not true.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
It's a memory, and a memory is a thought formation,
and it only exists in your head. Nobody else is,
and you are the master of what's going on in
your head. So you can start to see, oh, maybe
I could take control of this and not continue to
want to punish the other person and hurt myself in
the process.
Speaker 5 (49:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (49:01):
And the last thing that that last step does is
it invites you to imagine forgiveness. You don't have to
forgive the person, It just asks. It just asks you
close your eyes for a minute and now imagine forgiving
the person who wronged you. How would you feel. And
in almost all cases, whoever's using this non justice system
(49:23):
or the miracle court will say, oh, if I imagine that
I actually forgave them, Wow, I would feel this burden
is off my shoulders. They don't have to punish them anymore.
In other words, they start to feel free instantaneously, and
they start to feel that pain is leaving them that
I said happens with forgiveness, and they start to feel
that those revenge desires are all of a sudden leaving
(49:46):
their entire mind. They're free again, and literally free of
the traumas of the past. So you can experience that
in this process while being heard and while safely releasing
your revenge desires inside this imaginary courtroom where you're no
longer hurting yourself or anybody else, so you safely It's
(50:08):
kind of like method owned for a drug addict.
Speaker 4 (50:09):
Is the way I g right.
Speaker 3 (50:10):
You get the chance to experience revenge in a safe way,
release it, and then move on to a point of healing.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
It's so interesting because I think so much of what
drives so many of us all the time is this
need to feel seen and heard. And so in that
process that you just described, what a great way to
feel seen, even to yourself sometimes you know, to be
acknowledged in that way. And then also to realize how
much you're carrying because of this That is always a
(50:39):
fascinating experience to me, is to realize the harm I'm
doing to myself by continuing to carry things on.
Speaker 5 (50:47):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
Well, this is so fascinating. If you guys want to
know more about this topic in general, the book is
out now. It's called The Science of Revenge. As always,
I will put that in the description of this podcast,
Doctor Kimmel. Where else can people find you if they
want to keep up with your work?
Speaker 3 (51:00):
Sure, I have a website, It's James Kimmel Junior dot com.
James Kimmeljr. Dot Com is probably the best place. I'm
also on Exit James Kimmel Junior dot com as well,
and Blue Sky I think is I think I have
an account now there as well. And then I have
a website at Yale as well, and you can find
(51:22):
James Kimmel Jr.
Speaker 4 (51:23):
There too.
Speaker 3 (51:24):
But most importantly, the book The Science of Revenge is
the best place to get all of this information in
one place.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
So okay, amazing Again, I will put all of that
in the description of this podcast for you guys. Thank
you so much for being here, Doctor Kimmel.
Speaker 4 (51:37):
You're so welcome. Kelly of great interview, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
Thanks for listening to The Velvet's Edge podcast with Kelly
Henderson where we believe everyone has a little velvet in
a little edge. Subscribe for more conversations on life, style,
beauty and relationships. Search Velvet's Edge wherever you get your podcasts.
Conversations on life, style, beauty, and relationships. It's The Velvet's
Edge Podcast with Kelly Henderson.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Doctor James Kimmel is a Yale psychiatry lecturer, lawyer, and author.
He is here today to talk about his new book,
The Science of Revenge, which reveals how revenge operates like
an addiction in the brain and how we can break
free from its grip. Hi, Doctor kim Well, thank you
so much for being here.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Kelly, thanks for having me on your show. Really really
appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
I was telling you before the podcast, I'm so excited
to talk about this topic and just your book in general.
I think is coming out at the perfect time in
our culture because we really can see how people are
operating from such an angry, vengeful place all over the place,
like social media, it's everywhere. I feel like I open
up my Instagram and I'm seeing exactly what you are
(00:54):
talking about constantly. Are you finding that, oh.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
In every way, shape and form. It seems like it's
a national and individual, community, family, workplace, everywhere problem that
is just reaching, you know, boiling levels.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
So it's unfortunate that my you know that my book.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Has come out at this time, but great in the
sense that maybe it can help a lot of people.
It's good to have a problem to solve, and we
finally have some really solid mechanisms for helping tamp this down.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Let's get into that because I love to give the
listeners tangible tools, and so we will get to all
of that as you guys keep listening. But you, I know,
how to deeply personal experience with revenge that really kind
of shaped your life path. And then you did become
a lawyer, which is almost like living out revenge in
a legal way.
Speaker 5 (01:47):
Or productive way.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
So can you tell us a little bit about that story.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Not sure about the productive part we get into that, Okay,
get we can get.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Very much into that.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
But yeah, so this starts with you know, I was
raised on a farm in central Pennsylvania that my folks
moved me and my brother too when I was about
twelve years old. You know, I wasn't born there then.
My great grandfather's farm, and he and my dad actually
were insurance agents.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Not farmers.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Even though we had you know, we had a small
herd of black angus cattle and some pigs and chickens
and things like that, so we had a functional farm,
but it wasn't a farm that we made our living from.
And when I moved there, you know, this was a
great place to be a boy, and I really wanted
to befriend the kids around my farm, who many of
(02:37):
them were living on, working big dairy farms with you know,
hundreds of milk cows, and you know, they their folks
made the living from the land, and so they were
real authentic farm kids, and I just wanted to be one.
And soon after I hit the ground there, I kind
of thought I'd love to be a farmer for the
rest of my life. I mean, that was my aspiration.
(02:59):
So I reached out to these guys, but they weren't
having it. They viewed me and us as outsiders, and
and I could understand why, I mean we were. We
were different in that in that sense, maybe socioeconomically, maybe
just because we you know, hadn't hadn't I hadn't grown
up there as a baby from that moment forward, And
so they shunned me for a while. And when I
(03:22):
wouldn't be deterred, I like joined former Future Farmers of America,
and you know, I built my own hay wagon and
I went to farm shows and just had the best time,
but when they're shunning wouldn't deter me. They started bullying me.
And you know, it started with you know, just a
lot of mean words and things like that, and as
(03:42):
we got older, it progressed into forms of violence. You know,
light stuff at first, just you know, shoves and pushes
and things like that, and then it went on to
kicking and punching in the hallways once in a while
and things like that. This was in the early eighties,
and so you know, there were no anti bullying programs
in my school, and you just kind of were supposed.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
To deal with it. Well.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
One night, my family and I, you know, we were
asleep is very late at night, and we were awakened
to the sound of a gunshot. This was a I
was probably about sixteen or seventeen years old now. We
rushed to the windows to see what was going on,
and I saw a pickup truck speeding away, and it
was a truck owned by one of the guys that
had been harassing me.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
We looked around the house to see if.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
There were any bullet holes or anything like any damage,
and there wasn't and we went back to bed. Eventually,
the next morning, one of my jobs before going to
school was to take care of those cows and pigs
and a hunting dog that we kept, a really sweet
beagle named Paula. And when I went to her pen,
I found her lying dead with a bullet hole in
(04:52):
her head in a pool of blood.
Speaker 5 (04:53):
Good. That had to be very traumatic.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
It was.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
It is even I've probably peded that story a lot
here recently, and it doesn't get easier with any of
the retellings of it. And it was hard to see.
It was hard to kind of imagine that they would
have been driven to this point, and it was also
hard to, you know, picture that you know, I was
in some way responsible for her death because they were
(05:20):
obviously trying to target me through my dog.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
So it was it was tough. My folks were upset.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
They called the police, you know, they came, took a report,
but you know, this was the early eighties. State police
cover big areas in rural country, so they you know,
they felt bad and said, if it gets worse, let
us know. It's on record, but there's nothing that they
could do. So about two weeks later, I found myself
alone late at night. My folks had gone out somewhere
(05:49):
and I heard a vehicle come to a stop in
front of our house. We lived on a one lane
country road, and you know, as I was getting up
to check what was going on, there was a flash
and an explosion, and this same pickup truck took off
out of the smoke and left behind our mangled mailbox,
(06:10):
so they'd blown up the mailbox as well. So clearly,
you know, my strategy of kind of putting up with
things wasn't helping. It didn't seem you know, with the
with that explosion went all of what was left of
my self control. I mean, I was absolutely enraged, and
I wanted to make these guys pay, and I wanted
(06:30):
to balance the scales for what they had been doing
to me for these years now. So you know, we
were hunters. I'd been shooting guns since I was probably
eight years old. We had plenty of guns in the house.
And I grabbed a loaded revolver for my dad's nightstand,
jumped in my mom's car, and you know, I took
off after them through the debt of the night, driving
(06:51):
as fast as I could, and you know, shouting and
screaming and rage, you know, as I'm flying down the road,
and I eventually cornered them on one of their farms
against a barn, and so, you know, it's it's kind
of the scene as their pickup truck is kind of
pointed into a barn and I'm behind them with my
(07:11):
brake beams on, and I'm seeing you know, three or
four heads in the rear window, and they slowly climbed
out of the truck and they're squinting back through my
headlights trying to figure out who had just come flying
down their road after them. What was clear to me
at that moment was that they were unarmed. They had nothing,
(07:32):
you know, no weapons in their hands, and they would
have no way of knowing that I had a gun
or necessarily who I was. And it was my opportunity,
you know, to balance the scales, as I said. And
so I started to get out of the car with
the gun and you know, opened the door and put
my leg through. But then I had a kind of
an instantaneous flash of insight just for a moment, and
(07:57):
you know, it became clear to me that, you know,
if I went through with this, you know, I wouldn't
be just killing them, I'd be killing whoever I was
before that moment, and I'd be an all new person
on the other side of this event, and I'd have
to you know, know myself as a as a murderer.
If I survived the whole thing, or you know, didn't
get incarcerated for the rest of my life, who knows,
(08:19):
lots of potential bad things could happen. And that was
just enough for me to go, this is the price
of getting this revenge that I want so badly. Here
is just way more than I was willing to pay.
Right But you know, we know from too many news
reports that a lot of other people often guys go
through that zone and pull the trigger right way too often.
(08:44):
But in my case, very luckily, thank god, I you know,
saw that I pulled myself back in the car, I
put the gun down, I drove home that night, and
you know that changed my life, that.
Speaker 5 (08:55):
Event, I can imagine.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
So when you drove my next question would be because
you obviously had some insight enough to look at your
future and make a smart decision for that. And also
I would assume the feelings didn't necessarily go away. So
was that when you started to kind of realize or
I'm sure this was a later insight, But did the
(09:19):
revenge become a part of your life that you were
living with then and then carry over into what you're
describing now as an addiction.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Yeah. Well, a couple of things I knew was that
I still wanted to make those guys pay. I just
didn't want to do it that way. That was pretty
clear to me. There was no moment of forgiveness there
at that time. I have since come to do that,
but not at that time, right, And you know, when
I went home, I kind of hoped that maybe this
(09:50):
torment and this bullying would stop, and in fact it did.
And you know, I don't have a direct explanation from
those guys as to why did. I can speculate, you know,
they might have thought it was my mom's car, or
should I say, they might have recognized that it was
my mother's car, and maybe they thought she was in it,
and maybe they thought, oh boy, we've gone too far
(10:12):
here and we better shut it down. You know, that
could have happened. There's any number of things that could
have gone through their head. They may have just felt
like I did, that things had gone, like I said,
really far, and you know the next step might result
in somebody getting seriously hurt and they decided to pull back.
(10:32):
I'm not really sure. Like I said, it's all speculation, right,
But for me going forward, the other big thing that
happened when I got back is, you know, my kind
of quest to become a farmer right And as I said,
that was my goal that ended that night. I was
it was very clear to me. I was like, this
(10:54):
is not going to happen for me. I'm not going
to fit in here, and I'm gonna have to redirect
my energies. And I did, and I turned them. You know,
it was pretty late in my high school career that
I turned towards academics in a serious way. I hadn't
been a very good student up to that point, but
I did like full force and started to get the
(11:17):
hang of it and started to like it. And eventually
I sort of thought, well, what can I do, you know,
with an academic life. And at some point I got
this idea that I, you know, maybe I could become
a lawyer, because lawyers are the people in our society
that have this special license to go ahead and you know,
(11:39):
kind of prescribe, manufacture and distribute revenge to the masses
under the brand name of justice. Now, that's that's a
very I didn't I didn't think of it in those
terms as a seventeen eighteen year old, but I did
have the understanding or instinct that that that type of
profession one that could get me what I wanted, which
(12:02):
was a less costly, more legalized way of retaliating and
in effect what I thought would be defending myself then
you know, going about it in form of street justice
and vigilantism and chasing people around with guns.
Speaker 5 (12:19):
Right, So it the justice piece.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
I have this in me too, and it always I
think it's so interesting because as I'm listening to your story,
I'm thinking, obviously you would be upset and that was unjust.
What was happening to you wasn't fair. It wasn't like
you asked for it or did something to merit their
actions towards you. So there is this piece when you
have the justice piece within you, that goes, but that's
(12:44):
not fair. So how do we fight this? And then
you go into the law world and that does seem
to me like the legal adult almost way to do it,
because you're doing it through the legal system. And I'm
just curious though, so how because you've now written this
book about revenge as an addiction. What was the moment
(13:07):
in your life after living through that experience and then
a full career as a lawyer that made you go,
wait a second, there's something here that I'm a little
too attached to or get curious about why revenge could
be an addiction.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
So, you know, i'd say for the next twenty years
of my life. You know, I after I became a
lawyer and I practiced law as a litigator. What I
found in doing that is that in every case, you know,
and each each step in every case, and there are
you know, hundreds or thousands of steps and then thousands
(13:47):
of little battles that you can win. And each time
you win one, which is to say, you're putting kind
of pain on your adversary to for, you know, with
the goal of hoping that they'll crumble or you know,
bend to your will or offer up a settlement or
drop a lawsuit.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
Whatever.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
You know, whichever side you're on, and I was, I
was off and on on either side, it didn't matter.
Those little battles would give me kind of a really
great feeling. Wow, a zinger, a high kind of experience.
It didn't last long, but it felt great. There was
a fair amount of pain in getting there, and those
these little highs were short lived, and then you'd want
(14:24):
the next one, right, You'd want it again and again
and again, and that was you know, it was okay
for a while. When I started my career, I was
a prosecutor in the Philadelphia court system, and then I
was a law clerk to a federal trial judge, so
I was I saw the criminal side of it right
in sentencing people as a law clerk and in prosecuting
(14:48):
as a as a as an assistant DA intern. I
was an intern there, and those wins too, felt like
I was doing something good. But to get there, I
they spent a lot of time interviewing, you know, the
victims and preparing them for the testimony that I was
going to put them through in court, and making them
(15:10):
relive their victimization and bringing them to tears over and
over again, and watching their pain because some of them
have been seriously grievously hurt and assaulted. And those things
just seemed really awful and they affected me deeply at
(15:31):
the same time, you know, watching someone be convicted of
a crime and knowing where they were headed in handcuffs,
you know, brought at first this great feeling of ooh, yes,
got this, got this guy, We're doing the right thing here,
But then kind of a feeling of I mean, you know,
I just I'm now part of this system that's grinding
(15:54):
people down. And and yes, they ruined their own lives,
but I'm making sure that their life is ruined. You know,
I'm at the end of that train and I'm sweeping
up the pieces and throwing them into a prison. And
so these were things that just sort of, you know,
I experienced. But as I got better and better at
(16:15):
being a civil litigator and winning more and more cases,
I was watching my own clients and realizing that they
were going through this same process with me. They wanted
all the little wins, they wanted the big win. They
were getting this great enormous pleasure and satisfaction from the
little wins. Sometimes it didn't even matter if we won.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
The big case.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
There was such joy at knowing that we had made
life for the other party and their lawyer worse that day.
Those little moments were like, Wow, that feels so great,
And it would only, like I said, it only last
a short period of time, and then you'd next day,
you'd wake up and try and do it all again,
over and over again. And that started to bleed into
(16:55):
even my personal life. So I became kind of anger
and avenger extraordinary in my home life with my wife
and my kids, with relatives, with neighbors, with people I
met that you got on the wrong side of me
or did something wrong, it would be.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
Like I became.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
I became a legal bully, kind of like the guys
who had been bullying me when I was in high school.
But now I wore a suit and a briefcase that
was kind of about the only and carried a briefcase,
and that was about.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
The only difference.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
And that sort of realization sunk me pretty deep, to
the point that I found myself one night alone in
a spare room kind of contemplating suicide. I couldn't figure
out a way.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
Out of it.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
I tried to cut back. I left law firms, I
went to smaller firms. I formed my own firm, trying
to kind of wean myself off of this, and I
couldn't get myself off of it. No matter what I
did or what I tried, I kept coming back to it.
It was lucrative, It made me feel good. My clients
(18:00):
were wanting me back, They always wanted more of this stuff,
and it began to make me wonder, is this an addiction?
Is just as seeking in the form of revenge, can
that become addictive? And am I hooked on it? Because
I really was beginning to be convinced.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
I was, Okay, well, let's talk about that then, because,
like we said, the book is called The Science of Revenge,
and you say that revenge operates like an addiction in
the brain.
Speaker 5 (18:36):
We talk about addiction a lot on this podcast.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
We've had a multiple twelve step recovery type people on
the podcast or therapist, and so my listeners are very
familiar with addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex, relationships, whatever it is.
I've never heard it discussed in the context of revenge,
but it's all happening in the brains. I'm very curious
if you could break down what is hoppen opening neurologically
(19:02):
when someone's stuck in this cycle of just the grievance.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Sure, yeah, I'd be happy to do that. And so
my third phase of my life, my first phase was,
you know, as a kid to twenty and from twenty
to forty, I was a lawyer. Right from forty to
I'm now sixty sixty one that phase, I left the
law almost entirely. I'm still a lawyer, but I decided
(19:28):
to commit myself to studying this, and I eventually was
able to get invited to become a researcher and a
lecturer at the Yale School of Medicine.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
To study this.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
And the reason that that was able to happen is
about the same time that I was theorizing this idea
that I must I must be addicted, and all of
the people around me seemed addicted, right the other lawyers,
their clients, the whole courts is, I know, just one
after another. Neuroscientists at universities around the world where just
(20:00):
beginning at that same time to put people in brain
scanners fMRI machines and pet scans and study and look
at what's happening inside your brain when you have a
grievance or you feel that you've been victimized and experienced
in an injustice and start to desire to retaliate to
(20:23):
punish the person who wronged you. And so here's how
it works. Here's what happens. It's absolutely fascinating. So grievances
are really defined as a real or an imagined perception
of having been wronged, mistreated, betrayed, disrespected, treated, unjustly victimized
in any way. That's primarily psychological pain there, and those
(20:47):
psychological pains actually register in your brain inside your brain,
in the brain's pain network, which is called the anterior insula.
That's like the primary component of that network. So when
you experience a perception of pain, your anterior insula it activates,
and that's been shown on many, many, many brain studies.
(21:10):
And what that triggers then is this the brain doesn't
like pain, it doesn't want pain, and it wants to
rebalance the pain with pleasure.
Speaker 4 (21:20):
And we've evolved as.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
Humans to derive enormous pleasure from hurting the people who
hurt us, which is to say, getting revenge. And I
could get into, you know, maybe separately if you want,
or later on how we might have evolved to do that,
but for now, just accept the fact that we all
feel the desire for revenge when we've been hurt or
(21:44):
wronged by someone, and that's been observed in studies in
all societies around the world. It's a very universal experience.
It's not just unique to any one individual. We all
sort of feel this desire to want to hurt the
people who hurt us, and so what occurs inside your
brain at that point is to rebalance that pain with
(22:06):
and get a hold of that revenge pleasure. The brain
activates the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction. And you
know your listeners and you might be familiar with this.
So that is the neural circuitry of the nucleus incumbents
and the dorsal stratum. These are the pleasure and reward
areas of the brain, and they activate as you begin
(22:27):
to fantasize about retaliating or punishing the person who wronged you.
And if you go and move on from the fantasy
world inside your head into acting out, you know, punitive
acts in real life, you experience a dopamine rush. Your
brain surges dopamine, and then that dopamine disappears, and that
disappearance gives us that experience that's thought of craving.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
So we begin to crave.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
Revenge or justice in the former avenge, retaliation, punishment, whatever
you want to call it, it's all the same thing.
And so we're looking, we start craving that in the
same way that somebody who has a substance addiction would begin,
you know, craving their drug of choice by seeing a
place where they often take it, or friends who they
take it with, or circumstances or stressors in their lives
(23:15):
that often trigger this desire. So the grievance triggers the
desire and the craving for revenge. The brain responds with
that by giving you that craving, which is motivation to
go and get your drug of choice. And in this case,
the drug of choice is revenge. And the only way
you can gratify your craving is by hurting other people.
(23:37):
You've got to hurt the other person who wronged you
or their proxy. And that's a common misconception that revenge
is only happening when you hurt the person who wronged you.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
It's not.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
You can and it's very common for humans to seek
revenge against all sorts of people that aren't the person
who actually rolled them for any number of reasons, and
we call that revenge by proxy or some people at
displaced revenge. But the common example is, if let's say
you're mistreated at work. You know, your boss gives you
a hard time and you think it's unjust. You can't
(24:09):
retaliate against your boss without losing your job, so you
go home and you pick a fight with your intimate
partner or maybe you you know, quote unquote kick the dog.
That's revenge by proxy. And you wanted revenge against your boss,
it's not safe to get it, so you're going to
get it against somebody who you can get it against,
and he's either going to be either more patient or
can't defend themselves.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
It's almost like just the projection of those emotions onto
other people.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
Kind of, you know. And some psychologists will say that
is displaced revenge seeking. But I'm very reluctant to use
that terminology because I because it assumes then that revenge
has a proper place, and you've just misplaced it on
somebody else. And I think it's pretty clear revenge does
not have a proper place. There's no proper place to
(24:58):
wrong somebody, and particularly somebody who wasn't it had nothing
even to do with your pain. So I don't kind
of I'm not really in favor of that saying yeah, yeah, right,
So I'm sorry. So the last step of this is
so up to this point. As I said, if we all,
if we've evolved to want revenge when we're wrong, then
(25:22):
how could that possibly be something that's bad for us?
The evolution gave it to us for a reason. And
so when it moves the way that it moves from
let's say, adaptive revenge seeking, which might have begun, you know,
in the Ice age or before when people were living
to get start, just started living together in societies and
(25:43):
needed a way to get everybody to comply with the
same set of rules and stop people from stealing their
food or their mate or whatever. But now here in
modern society it moves to that pathological sort of state
when you can't control it despite the negative consequences. And
that's the classic definition of addiction. Addiction is, you know,
(26:05):
being unable to resist a desire or a behavior despite
the negative consequences. And this is happening with revenge seeking.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
All the time.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Almost always there are you know, negative and sometimes severely
negative consequences to revenge behavior. You're at a minimum, you're
always by definition, you're hurting someone, and that's the definition
of a negative consequence. You're always hurting someone and you're
often hurting yourself. Even though you get this early dopamine rush,
(26:38):
it's very short lived, and you end up feeling usually
worse for going and getting the revenge than you felt beforehand. Yes,
you felt the pain of the grievance, but now you
have the pain of the grievance, and on top of it,
you have enhanced anger, perhaps potentially guilt, potentially anxiety and
fear over now what's going to come back at you
(26:59):
because your active of just just as seeking in the
form of revenge, is another person's active or reception of victimization,
and now they're going to want revenge against you, and
we get these revenge cycles. So this is how revenge
actually is correctly perceived to be an addictive brain biological process.
(27:20):
It travels in the same circuitry, the behaviors are the same.
We're doing it despite the negative consequences. It's very compulsive,
and when we get it, we feel, you know, satisfied
at least for a while, but then we want to
do it again, and some people want to do it
again and again and again, and if you can't control it,
(27:40):
and we see it escalating usually as well, just like
drugs go from you know, maybe cigarettes all the way
up through heroin, you know, eventually, And that's sort of
the way vengeful behavior and violence works. It starts with
non violent forms of behavior and then slowly creeps up
to you know, a simple assault, and then maybe it's
an aggrivated assault, and then maybe you're pulling a gun.
(28:01):
I mean, it could just be anywhere all on that range.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
I'm just so glad that you're talking about something like
this that I think a lot of people listening might
relate to on the day to day, you know. I
think this is a very normal human feeling that we
don't really talk about, which is really interesting. As you
were talking about it, I was thinking, I don't really
discuss this with that many people, but I do find
(28:25):
that our culture has tended to look at addictions or
addicts as less than or messed up, you know, or
they just can't get it together. And the more I've
learned about addiction, the more I see it in every
single one of us. We just have different drugs of choice.
What I'm hearing in this is very much revenge as
(28:47):
a drug of choice, and it sounds exactly the same
as what a drug addict I think would say about
their actual drug of choice. It's the hit, it's the
chasing it. It's the high we look for, that's the
mediate high. But then it eventually goes away. Is you
have to chase another high? Like it's all the same, right.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
It really does seem to be the same. It seems
to be the same behaviorally, you know, when you just
look at someone and how they're behaving, and then I mean,
what you know, the new thing is about this research
is now we can see that the brain looks the same,
so that your brain on you know, your brain on
revenge looks like your brain on drugs. It's kind of
(29:27):
it's doing the same thing in the same circuitry. And
as you said, it may be a different choice, but
we I'm sorry, a different drug of choice. But we
also find you know, there's this idea of vulnerability to
addictions of all sorts. Yes, And you know you often
will find violence traveling with drug addiction, right, I mean
(29:50):
not necessarily all users, but a lot of the dealers. Right,
there's a lot of violence that's involved in it. And
I don't think it's a coincidence that there's a fair
amount of violence that's sort of built into that system,
because you know, people who maybe users and strongly addicted
(30:12):
to a narcotic might also be vulnerable to retaliatory behavior
as well.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Right, and you probably can't logic your way out of it.
Are the more drug that's involved, I would imagine, makes
it harder to kind of talk yourself down emotionally or
you're not just not thinking clearly. So if it's such
an addictive type of energy, how do we know the
difference between like standing up for ourselves and getting stuck
(30:41):
on the revenge loop?
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Yeah, that's an excellent question, and we know it this way.
We know it by thinking about the arrow of time
and what revenge means and what self defense means. Okay,
so revenge and self defense are two very different things.
Revenge seeking is always trying to punish someone for something
(31:04):
that they've done in the past. Okay, it happened in
the past. You can no longer experience it at all
with your senses. It might have been minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years,
or decades ago. Some people carry grievances literally for decades.
I mean, as matter of fact, you know, I think
therapists who you know, start working with people and start
(31:28):
with their childhood, can remember grievances that have happened when
they were very very young, and there they may be,
you know, middle aged and older adults, and they still
remember it, it still hurts, and they might still be
wanting some form of punishment to happen to the person
who roamed them. So our memories are very powerful and
(31:50):
of course, and they can they can really contaminate and
ruin our present and our future. So revenge seeking is
always this punishing people for realms of the past. Self defense,
by contrast, is always present and future looking, and it's
it's involved, and it's a whole different circuitry in the
brain as well, because you're now talking about the fight
(32:12):
and flight instinct. And in that case, right, you're dealing
with a present threat of imminent, you know, potentially serious
harm to yourself or somebody you care about. And so
your def you know, defending yourself either by fleeing or
by you know, using force, if that's all that you
(32:35):
have left to do, uh is an act of self defense.
Speaker 4 (32:39):
And and and.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
The law is built this way, so you know, there's
a defense to even you know, homicide if you were
acting in pure self defense, because the person that you've killed,
was threatening your life and able to you know, carry
out their threat, whereas with revenge there is no defense.
(33:00):
I mean, everybody that's in jail for a violent crime
almost universally was seeking revenge and none of them are
able to invoke. Oh, I was just seeking revenge, so
it must be okay. That's not okay, and it won't
be okay. So there's a very big, bright line between
these two behaviors.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
Does that help out?
Speaker 2 (33:20):
That totally makes sense to me. Whenever we were talking
about threat earlier, you said it could be perceived or real. Yeah,
So like, how often is that happening where people are
perceiving someone's actions as a fault to them and then
(33:45):
going into this revenge loot because of the perceived threat,
And like, why is that happening?
Speaker 5 (33:49):
What's happening in our brain that makes that happen?
Speaker 3 (33:52):
Yeah, So the perception of being wronged is a really
fascinating area of this research that hasn't been significantly explored
yet in terms of its ability to launch the revenge desire,
but we have just almost an infinite number of examples
of it from human history. One that's very recent that
(34:14):
we can all think of is like the you know,
the twenty twenty election. Yeah, so you know, President Trump
perceived that the Democrats had stolen the election and this
was a personal grievance and his followers felt this way
as well. But there's never been any solid evidence that
that happened. And so you get this perception of somebody
(34:37):
doing something really bad and really dirty that's kind of
detached from whether it happened or not, and it just
doesn't matter because in our minds, once we feel that
we're victimized, whether it's true.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
Or not matters not at all. Well.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
Similarly, an extreme example is like Hitler after World War One.
Hitler imagined and actually the whole German people were, you know,
there was a group of politicians and military leaders who
wanted to convince the German people after World War One,
that the reason that Germany agreed to the armistice and
(35:16):
ultimately the Treaty of Versailles, because they they betrayed Germany.
They sold Germany down the river. It was a terrible
act of betrayal and treason, and it is that reason
that Hitler rose to power and ended up launching World
War Two.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
But when we go back and look at the evidence none.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
Of that occurred.
Speaker 4 (35:38):
Jews didn't do anything.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
Politicians, the military leaders, the two highest German military leaders,
agreed to the armistice because they thought it was the
best thing that they could get because they were losing
the war, and so they got some politicians to kind
of sign the documents without them actually doing it, and
they escaped from that type of scrutiny, and that led
(36:02):
to an entire world war. So those are extreme examples,
but in our daily lives, this is happening. You know,
all of the time we think that someone and I'm
sure you can you can think of tons of examples
in your own life in which you know, you think
that somebody said something to you that was intended to hurt,
you know, to insult you or hurt your feelings, and
(36:23):
you're like, wait, what did you just say? Why did
you do that? And then they go, oh, no, no, no, no,
peace man, I didn't mean that at all. But you
you missed, you know, you misread it as a direct attack.
Or you you know, you see somebody that you think
is you know, cut you off in traffic and maybe,
(36:44):
you know, if you had had the time to analyze
the whole thing and question them, they'd be like, I
didn't even see you, man, I'm sorry, I was just
trying to get to my job because I was I
was late. And then you might go, oh, okay, I
I don't feel so bad now because you had a
good reason for doing it. And this is happening all
the time in our families and in our personal lives
(37:06):
and in our workplaces. So we're we're misperceiving it sometimes
not always. We're often perceiving real, real, uh victimization, but
we're also trying to create it. If you're a revenge addict,
you want to create these victimization experiences so you can
get that revenge high again. So you will have fine
(37:27):
people in your life who are kind of always looking
for the reason to feel aggrieved and upset. And and
you know, we know these people, right and and I
think I was one of them for quite a while
as a matter of fact, as part of my you know,
I consider myself a recovering revenge addict. And I think
during those years when I was a lawyer doing that,
I was always looking for an opportunity to find that
(37:51):
something is unfair and then I can now retaliate against.
And we just some people will create those opportunities out
of thin air and misinterpret deliberately an act in order
to perceive it as something that was never intended to be,
in order to sort of trigger this involuntary victimization and
(38:16):
now retaliation response.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
That feels very gratifying.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Yeah, and it's literally like every other addiction. I mean,
the more you're talking about it, it's making so much
sense to me because like an alcoholic. For instance, if
you've ever had an experience with an active alcoholic, often
your behavior is blamed for why they needed to go
get drunk, you know, And it's that same exact thing.
It's the perceived threat or the perceived harm or fault
(38:43):
or whatever to then be able to go act out
and not feel guilty about it or whatever, you know,
because you have the right to do it.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
Yeah, that's a great insight. And I've never had anyone
actually bring it up to me in that way. Is that, Yeah,
you know, an alcohol an alcoholic will kind of aim
the other person you're you know, if you would just
you know, be different and not kind of keep provoking me,
I wouldn't.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
Be drinking all the time.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
And it's not they're using your behavior in order to
create a scenario in which drinking is the perfect response,
or in this case, in my case, you know, it's
revenge seeking is is the response, and it'll make me
feel better if I can just set those dominoes up
and then knock them down, and even though I'm self
(39:29):
creating these victimization experiences.
Speaker 5 (39:32):
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
Okay, Well, we've talked about the problems, so I have
to talk about the healing a little bit. We told
the listeners would give them some tangible tools. So what
are some of the science backed strategies that you've come
up with, now that you call yourself even a recovering
revenge addict, that actually help get our brain away from
this vengeful thinking.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
I usually start with the addiction strategies, which your audience
will know well because and I'll just briefly touch on
that I guess before I go on. So if you
think about it, if it's correct, and I believe it
absolutely is, there's enough evidence to show that revenge can
become an addicted, an addiction for people, not all people,
(40:14):
but some people. It becomes a compulsion. Maybe twenty percent,
you know, twenty percent of the people in the world
who try alcohol or drugs become addicted to them, which
means eighty percent don't. Maybe that's and it hasn't been
studied full yet, but maybe around that number of people
become addicted to revenge seeking an eighty percent don't, okay,
But for those twenty percent who are experiencing addiction, if
(40:37):
we think of it as an addictive process, then the
addiction strategies that already exist for prevent addiction, prevention and
treatment are now available to prevent and treat revenge seeking
and violence. Because, you know, public health data and law
enforcement data show that revenge is the primary motive for
(40:57):
almost every form of violence that we are aware of,
everything from intimate partner violence, violence and bullying, all the
way up through you know, police brutality and violent extremism,
terrorism and warfare, I mean, the whole range. So if
that's the case, we can now think of addiction prevention
(41:20):
and treatment strategies as a way of preventing and treating
violence and use that and I believe, very effectively. So
that can include the normal things you're probably aware of,
like cognitive behavioral therapy and counseling and motivational interviewing. Maybe
one day rehabs There are no rehabs for revenge addicts yet,
but maybe there will be someday, and it may include
(41:41):
anti craving drugs. Even the GLP one drugs that seem
to be effective for food cravings might be found to
be effective for revenge desires. I mean, which would be
you know, an astonishing development hasn't been studied yet, but
pretty cool stuff. Then there's the you know, public health
prevention sides, So just educating people about the dangers of
(42:04):
their own revenge desires, that they're natural, you're going to
experience them, and you know, starting this in school health
classes right with kids, and going when you grow up,
there's going to be this temptation that isn't drugs or alcohol,
but it's as were, more dangerous, and it's called revenge seeking,
and you're going to maybe experience this almost every day
of your life because we all experience grievances all the time.
(42:26):
Sigmund Freud believed that we, you know, experience grievances and
want to do a way of the people who insult
us like our by hour every day of our lives.
It's that prevalent, and so teaching people about this in
itself would help a lot of people control it and
seek help if they can't. But now let me switch
(42:48):
to the really cool neuroscience. To me, this is the
most important neuroscience discovery that I learned in all of
my years now in researching this, and that is what
happens inside your brain when you even just imagined forgiving
a grievance. This is extraordinary. So what occurs then is
if you have a grievance and you feel victimized, just
(43:10):
the way we explained, and that pain network inside your brain,
the anterior insula, is activated when you just imagine forgiving Internally,
you don't need to tell the person who wronged you
that you're doing anything. You don't have to tell them
that they're forgiven. You just do this privately with yourself.
And here's what happens. The act of imagining forgiving shuts
(43:30):
down the pain network, So instead of just covering it
up with a temporary hit of dopamine, you're actually getting
by forgiveness the taking away or the stopping of the
pain itself, which is an amazing outcome. The next thing
it does is it also shuts down the pleasure and
reward circuitry of addiction that nucleus, thecumbents en dorsal stratum,
(43:54):
those both are shut down and go silence, so you're
no longer nagged by this endless craving for revenge and
thinking about it and revenge rumination and fantasy. And then
the third thing that forgiveness does is it reactivates your
prefrontal cortex, that's your self control and executive function circuitry,
to help you make good and solid and much more
(44:17):
beneficial cost benefit decisions that are in your own best interest.
And it's in that format that you're able to finally
escape from the traumas and rangs of the past because
you've now shut the pain down, you've shut the revenge
desires down, and you can see that a decision to
let the past be in the past where it's no
(44:39):
longer affecting your present in future is always going to
be your best decision for you if you want to
succeed in your life and have happiness, enjoy again.
Speaker 5 (44:50):
And actually move forward.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
Yes, I think that's the lie about revenge, right, We
think that that is the thing that would get us
out of the situation, when in reality it just keeps
you stuck in it.
Speaker 3 (45:01):
Yeah, that's perfectly put. I mean, it's exactly is what
it does. It just attaches you to it and it
keeps destroying your present and your future when you could
be moving on.
Speaker 5 (45:11):
Yeah, yeah, well I could talk about this all day.
Speaker 2 (45:13):
This is fascinating and love I love how in line
it is with other addictions, because even when you're giving
the neuroscience to why how our brain works. I was
thinking about in twelve step recovery day, one of the
tools is to pray for the person who caused you
harm in one of the steps, and it is the
hardest thing to do. You're supposed to pray for them
and to wish that they get everything that you want.
(45:35):
But exactly what you explained is why that works.
Speaker 5 (45:39):
To let go of.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
The revenge or the revenge seeking or whatever the grievance
feeling is.
Speaker 3 (45:45):
Yeah, that's a nice thing, And I think that the
neuroscience is showing a couple of things. So forgiveness doesn't
benefit the perpetrator. It benefits you as victim, which is
really great. But you don't you don't have to, like
I said, to get all these benefits neurologically, you don't
have to you know, interact with or inform the perpetrator,
(46:08):
and you don't even have to wish them well. You
can start by simply going, I'm forgiving this for me today, right,
and then you can move on. At some point, you
might move on to moving from what's called decisional forgiveness
to a broader form of compassionate forgiveness, in which you're
(46:28):
seeing the other person in a different light and you're
maybe seeing them as a human being again. And that's
wonderful and that is a great goal to hit. But
you don't have to start there, which is a big
ask for a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
I like, you're stuff better with that because adding that
one in it, Yeah, because it's almost I feel like
sometimes it feels dismissive of the feelings that you're really
stuck on. Right then, But if you can think about
it from a way of I'm doing this for me
as an act of self care in a way, I
think that's an easier thing to your brain around first.
Speaker 3 (47:01):
Right, And to help that happen, I want to make
sure I leave your listeners and you with this method.
So one of the things that I've done at Yale
for the over the last fourteen years is research a
method that I developed called the non Justice System or
a miracle court that kind of addresses what we were
just talking about there, okay, and that is this.
Speaker 4 (47:23):
And so there's a free app.
Speaker 3 (47:24):
It's called the Miracle Court app and it's just at
miraclecourt dot com.
Speaker 4 (47:28):
There's no in app purchases.
Speaker 3 (47:30):
Or anything, and it literally is free. But here's what
it enables you to do. And the non justice system
is the written version of that, and it's in my
book They're suing for peace. But here's what it does.
It enables you to put anyone who's ever wronged you
on trial inside a courtner of your mind where you
get to play all of the roles. So in this
(47:53):
role play, you play the victim prosecutor, You played the defendant,
testifying as the defense and it might in your own
imagination about their side of the story. You play judge
and jury, finding guilt or innocence and handing down a
sentence if you want, and it can be anything you want.
You play the warden imposing that sentence that you've handed down,
(48:15):
and then in the last step, you play the judge
of your own life. And in that experience, that last step,
you're in a new courtroom. You imagine this in which
you are asked to first of all, acknowledge that the
wrongs that happened to you are in the past. They're
not happening to you anymore. And that's an important realization.
(48:37):
A lot of people sort of feel like they're in
forever fight in flight mode. They're always being victimized.
Speaker 4 (48:42):
Not true.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
It's a memory, and a memory is a thought formation,
and it only exists in your head. Nobody else is,
and you are the master of what's going on in
your head. So you can start to see, oh, maybe
I could take control of this and not continue to
want to punish the other person and hurt myself in
the process.
Speaker 5 (49:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (49:01):
And the last thing that that last step does is
it invites you to imagine forgiveness. You don't have to
forgive the person, It just asks. It just asks you
close your eyes for a minute and now imagine forgiving
the person who wronged you. How would you feel. And
in almost all cases, whoever's using this non justice system
(49:23):
or the miracle court will say, oh, if I imagine that
I actually forgave them, Wow, I would feel this burden
is off my shoulders. They don't have to punish them anymore.
In other words, they start to feel free instantaneously, and
they start to feel that pain is leaving them that
I said happens with forgiveness, and they start to feel
that those revenge desires are all of a sudden leaving
(49:46):
their entire mind. They're free again, and literally free of
the traumas of the past. So you can experience that
in this process while being heard and while safely releasing
your revenge desires inside this imaginary courtroom where you're no
longer hurting yourself or anybody else, so you safely It's
(50:08):
kind of like method owned for a drug addict.
Speaker 4 (50:09):
Is the way I g right.
Speaker 3 (50:10):
You get the chance to experience revenge in a safe way,
release it, and then move on to a point of healing.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
It's so interesting because I think so much of what
drives so many of us all the time is this
need to feel seen and heard. And so in that
process that you just described, what a great way to
feel seen, even to yourself sometimes you know, to be
acknowledged in that way. And then also to realize how
much you're carrying because of this That is always a
(50:39):
fascinating experience to me, is to realize the harm I'm
doing to myself by continuing to carry things on.
Speaker 5 (50:47):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
Well, this is so fascinating. If you guys want to
know more about this topic in general, the book is
out now. It's called The Science of Revenge. As always,
I will put that in the description of this podcast,
Doctor Kimmel. Where else can people find you if they
want to keep up with your work?
Speaker 3 (51:00):
Sure, I have a website, It's James Kimmel Junior dot com.
James Kimmeljr. Dot Com is probably the best place. I'm
also on Exit James Kimmel Junior dot com as well,
and Blue Sky I think is I think I have
an account now there as well. And then I have
a website at Yale as well, and you can find
(51:22):
James Kimmel Jr.
Speaker 4 (51:23):
There too.
Speaker 3 (51:24):
But most importantly, the book The Science of Revenge is
the best place to get all of this information in
one place.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
So okay, amazing Again, I will put all of that
in the description of this podcast for you guys. Thank
you so much for being here, Doctor Kimmel.
Speaker 4 (51:37):
You're so welcome. Kelly of great interview, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
Thanks for listening to The Velvet's Edge podcast with Kelly
Henderson where we believe everyone has a little velvet in
a little edge. Subscribe for more conversations on life, style,
beauty and relationships. Search Velvet's Edge wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Kelly Henderson
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