Are You a Grudge Holder or a Revenge Seeker? Here’s How It’s Hurting You – And How To Get Over It | James Kimmel, Jr.

Interactive Transcript

spk_0 This is the 10% happier podcast.

spk_0 I'm Dan Harris.

spk_0 Hello everybody, how are we doing?

spk_0 Today we're going to talk about an aspect of the human mind,

spk_0 an aspect of the inner repertoire of our species

spk_0 that has been an incredibly destructive force,

spk_0 both for me and for humans writ large.

spk_0 And that is revenge-seeking or grudge-holding,

spk_0 the desire to get even.

spk_0 We evolved for this, and as you'll hear in this discussion,

spk_0 there are some ways in which this aspect of the human repertoire is adaptive,

spk_0 but man, it misfires in many, many ways,

spk_0 and all you have to do is look at the broad sweep of human history

spk_0 or the news today or any given day to see how revenge has become

spk_0 what my guest calls an addiction.

spk_0 So that's the bad news, but the good news is that there are ways to work

spk_0 with this very common tendency of the mind.

spk_0 As my guest today says, there are better strategies than revenge-seeking

spk_0 or rumination when you feel wronged.

spk_0 James Kimmel Jr. is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.

spk_0 He's also a lawyer and a founder and co-director of the Yale Collaborative

spk_0 for Motive Control Studies.

spk_0 He's the author of three books, including the one we'll focus on today,

spk_0 which is called the Science of Revenge,

spk_0 Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction, and how to overcome it.

spk_0 We talk about the horrific and violent bullying that James endured as a child,

spk_0 which provoked his interest in the subject of revenge.

spk_0 It's an extraordinary story.

spk_0 You'll want to hear that.

spk_0 We also talk about the neuroscience of revenge, i.e. what happens in your brain

spk_0 when you're seeking revenge, the connection between revenge and addiction,

spk_0 our evolutionary programming in this regard, practical strategies

spk_0 for addressing grievances and revenge desires,

spk_0 how to seek justice without revenge, and antidote for revenge cravings, and much more.

spk_0 Today's episode comes with a custom guided meditation called For When You Want Revenge.

spk_0 It's guided by our teacher of the month, Seven A. Celacie.

spk_0 This meditation is only for paid subscribers over at DanHarris.com.

spk_0 Paid subs also get weekly live guided meditation and Q&A sessions every Tuesday at four.

spk_0 So check us out, DanHarris.com, join the party.

spk_0 I'm speaking of parties and speaking of Seven A. Celacie.

spk_0 If you want to meditate with me and her in person, we will be back up at the Omega Institute

spk_0 for another installment of Meditation Party, our annual retreat.

spk_0 That's coming up the weekend of October 24th.

spk_0 There's a link in the show notes.

spk_0 Okay, we'll get started with James Kimmel Jr. right after this.

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spk_0 James Kimmel, welcome to the show.

spk_0 Thank you, Dan, for having me.

spk_0 It's a pleasure.

spk_0 If you're comfortable with it, I'd love to hear a little bit of your backstory on how you got interested in this subject of revenge.

spk_0 I understand it really has its roots in your childhood.

spk_0 Yeah, it does. I have kind of a John Wick origin story for my life for for better or worse when I was about 12 years old.

spk_0 My family moved as my mom and dad moved our family, I should say, from a suburbs to a farm in central Pennsylvania that had been owned by my great grandfather.

spk_0 When I got there as a 12-year-old boy, this was a total awesome wonderland that I really wanted to explore and become part of.

spk_0 That included trying to reach out to kids on other farms around us in this big vast space of mostly dairy farms.

spk_0 Our farm was not a real working farm in the sense that we didn't make our living from the land.

spk_0 We had a small herd of black angus cattle, we had some pigs and things like that.

spk_0 We didn't have hundreds of wholesteen that were being milked twice a day the way the kids around me did with their family farms.

spk_0 I reached out to them trying to befriend them and hang out with them and found that they didn't have any interest in inviting me into their community.

spk_0 I wasn't to be deterred, I really wanted to be part of it. I pretty quickly decided I wanted to grow up to be a farmer actually.

spk_0 I really kept pushing it and trying to win them over and get them to like me and they weren't having that.

spk_0 Eventually they were shunning, turned into bullying.

spk_0 The bullying started verbally as it often does.

spk_0 As we were getting older, I said to start when I was about 12, so 13, 14, 15, and even up to 16 and 17, this kept going.

spk_0 It went from verbal into physical assaults and things like that.

spk_0 It was a pretty grim existence in that sense and disappointing to me.

spk_0 It continued until one night my family and I were all sleep very late at night and we were awakened to the sound of a gunshot.

spk_0 We rushed to the windows of our house to see what was going on and I saw a pickup truck outside of the front of our house.

spk_0 A truck that was very familiar to me that had been owned by one of the guys who had been abusing me and bullying me all those years.

spk_0 It took off away from our house down the road and we looked around the house to see if there was any damage, didn't find any happily and eventually went back to bed.

spk_0 One of my jobs in the morning before going to school was to go out and take care of our animals, our cows and pigs.

spk_0 Also this sweet beautiful beagle hunting dog named Paula who had a pen near the barn and when I went out to feed and water her that morning I found her lying dead in her pen with a bullet hole in her head in a pool of blood.

spk_0 That is hard to hear. I'm sorry that happened to you.

spk_0 Yeah, thanks. Hard to see, hard to hear, hard to remember even all these years later.

spk_0 It was a lot of distress there. It was a family dog, wasn't only my dog. We were all upset.

spk_0 My folks called the police. The police came, took a report but they made it clear that there really wasn't much they could do or were willing to do at the time. This was early 1980s.

spk_0 They did say those, you know, there would be a report and if it got worse, God forbid, you know, there would be this paper trail.

spk_0 They kind of exited the scene and we tried to go back to normal. About two or three weeks later I found myself home alone one night.

spk_0 Pretty late, my folks were out somewhere. I have a brother. He was gone as well.

spk_0 I've heard a vehicle pull up to the front of our house. Unusual because we lived on a one lane country road.

spk_0 As I got up to check it out, see what was happening. There was this same pickup truck and there was also a sudden flash in an explosion and the pickup truck roared away, leaving behind our mangled mailbox. They had just blown up.

spk_0 And with that explosion kind of, that was it for me after all these years of abuse. Now the killing of my dog, detonating mailboxes at our house.

spk_0 I had had enough and I had grown up probably from about eight years old to shoot guns and we had plenty of guns in our house.

spk_0 We were hunters out in the country and my dad kept a loaded revolver not for hunting but for safety in his nightstand.

spk_0 I knew it was there and I grabbed it and went off after these guys. I jumped in my mother's car and I pour off after them through the middle of the night.

spk_0 Did you catch them?

spk_0 Yeah. Well, as I was shouting in rage and screaming and driving down the road down this one lane country road, I did eventually catch up to them.

spk_0 I cornered them by a barn. The scene is their pickup truck is kind of pointed at a barn wall and I'm behind their truck in my car with my bright beams on.

spk_0 And I can see three or four heads of the three or four guys that had been my primary formenders for all those years.

spk_0 And they slowly got out of their truck squinting back through my high beams to try and figure out who would just chase them down.

spk_0 It took me a little bit of time to catch up to them. They wouldn't necessarily know it was me. They might have recognized my mother's car, maybe not hard to say.

spk_0 But what was clear to me was that they were unarmed in the sense that they didn't have anything in their hands, no weapons. Maybe they had something in the truck.

spk_0 I don't know, but they couldn't have also known that I had a gun. And that was my opportunity. I mean, I had to complete element of surprise.

spk_0 And so I opened the door of my car. I grabbed a gun off the passenger seat and started to get out.

spk_0 And as I was doing that, I just this flash of insight or inspiration that if I went through with what I wanted to do to those guys that I would, you know, I never be the same again if I survived the entire ordeal that the 17 or 16 year old, whatever age exactly I was at that time who drove down that road would never be the same driving back.

spk_0 I'd have to know myself at a minimum as a potentially killer. I knew that wasn't the guy I was. I knew that wasn't my identity. And it wasn't what I was willing to wear on myself or at least to put it there.

spk_0 Even if it would give me everything I want, all the satisfaction that I was really craving at that point in time of finally doing to them what they had been doing to me.

spk_0 That was just enough to cause me to stop in my tracks and pull my leg back inside the car door and put the gun down on the passenger seat and shut the door and drive home.

spk_0 You know, I come within nanoseconds of committing a hugely violent crime and changing my life completely.

spk_0 It's a harrowing story and I'm surprised and I think this is illustrative. I'm surprised by how much as I listen to it, I want revenge for you.

spk_0 Yeah. And that's a really common reaction. You know, I know from a lot of years of neuroscience research now, the small percentage of people have a very strong empathy center in our minds.

spk_0 And that enables us to feel other people's pain as if it were our own and it even activates the exact same pain circuitry in our brain that was activating for me.

spk_0 And so it makes sense that you would feel that pain and that you would also experience and we've seen in neuroscience studies that the desire to retaliate the desire for revenge, which is activating in the addiction pleasure and reward circuitry.

spk_0 And it turns out to chilling effect, but that also would be happening in your mind just as much as it was in mind at that moment.

spk_0 So let's set aside cases like this one where I and I imagine many of the listeners are empathizing with you and just think about cases where any one of us is wronged.

spk_0 What is happening in our brains as we envision revenge is, I guess it's the same thing. The rumination is creating pain and the revenge fantasies create pleasure.

spk_0 Close to that. So here's what happens. You know, when you experience any form of victimization, mistreatment or injustice and that could be insults, humiliation, disrespect, shame.

spk_0 Any form of victimization that really causes you pain. This activates the pain network inside the brain. It actually is a physical pain response.

spk_0 And that area of the brain is called the anterior insula and your brain doesn't want pain. It doesn't like it. And it wants a compensating dose of pleasure.

spk_0 And humans have evolved over thousands of years, many, many thousands of years back to the place to see an epic, it's believed to derive enormous pleasure from inflicting pain upon the people who wrong us or their proxies.

spk_0 And what occurs is after your brain registers this physical pain, it activates the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction, which are the dorsal stratum and the nucleus acumbens. These two areas of the brain are the very same areas of the brain that activate for people who have drug, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, other behavioral addictions.

spk_0 Those areas of the brain flood with dopamine and we get a dopamine high from just thinking about retaliating against a person or people who wronged us or their proxies.

spk_0 So we're getting this temporary and it's temporary like all other addictions. We get this temporary surge dopamine and this temporary feeling. And then it goes away quickly and it's that disappearance sudden disappearance of dopamine that creates this experience of craving.

spk_0 But with revenge, you know, the craving isn't to inject a needle into your own arm. It's to potentially insert bullets into the bodies of other people. You can only in other words, gratify your craving by inflicting pain upon other people.

spk_0 And this has been hiding in plain sight really throughout human history and it's only is the result of brain imaging studies over the last roughly 20 years that this has finally been revealed. And that's why I've written my book is to bring this out to the public so we know what's going on when we feel wrong and why we're driven to want to hurt other people and commit acts of violence.

spk_0 There's just one last piece of this and that is your prefrontal cortex, which is your brain's executive function and, you know, self control and cost benefit analysis center of the brain.

spk_0 That's your last defense between a revenge fantasy and carrying out in real life and starting to hurt people, which inevitably will hurt yourself.

spk_0 And if that area of your brain, just like with other addictions, it's found that the prefrontal cortex is inhibited or hijacked for people with addiction. And if that's going on for people whose addiction of choice or non choice, the addiction that they're caught up with is revenge addiction.

spk_0 If that area of the brain is inhibited, you would have nothing left that would stop you between what you want to do and what you're doing. Fortunately that night, in my example, my prefrontal cortex was still intact and it stopped me. Thank God it's the last second.

spk_0 I have a million follow ups, but the first one that's coming to mind is you said that we're wired to feel good when we exact revenge.

spk_0 But you also said that revenge hurts us. So does it feel good for like a hot second and then it feels bad?

spk_0 Yes, and more though. So it's going to feel good and it does feel good and it's natural. You know, our desire for revenge is to leave to be an adaptive strategy that almost all people around the world.

spk_0 We're born with it. And so the notion that we want revenge is natural and is not itself a pathological process.

spk_0 It only would become pathological when we are unable to control it despite knowing the negative consequences and the negative consequences of revenge seeking are just legion.

spk_0 So it's not so much that we're going to instantly feel a bounce back pain, but what we're going to experience in our lives are these negative consequences.

spk_0 Among other things are we see in behavioral studies, people who seek revenge actually feel angrier and more anxiety after getting revenge than before doing it.

spk_0 But we also know and this is the critical piece of it that revenge seeking is the primary root motivation of almost all forms of human violence throughout the world.

spk_0 That includes bullying and youth violence, intimate partner violence, street and gang violence, mass shootings, police brutality and abusive force, studies show all of this and public health data show it.

spk_0 And all the way up through terrorism, violent extremism, genocide and warfare, they all have it their root, this process in which someone felt either imagined or actually experienced a grievance that is to say victimization and the sudden overwhelming desire to retaliate in order to get some form of payback as a result of that grievance.

spk_0 And it's important to know, first of all, we imagine grievances all the time, people invent them inside their heads in part to get the gratification and in part because it's uncontrolled and it doesn't matter if it's real for you, it doesn't matter whether a panel of a million judges and there is no such panel would say that's not a real grievance you shouldn't care because if it's real for you and it's starting to generate these revenge desires, then we're in a dangerous situation suddenly right there and it wouldn't matter objectively whether the grievance is not right.

spk_0 So are you saying this is like a bug in the human operating system that is essentially responsible for pretty much everything that plagues us as a species?

spk_0 It's very close to that. Now again, the bug part is not being able to control it despite the negative consequences. So I don't want to say that the desire for revenge itself, like I said, it was an adaptive strategy for this reason, believe to be.

spk_0 That back when humans were kind of coming out of their individual caves and beginning to live in social orders and in societies, they needed at that time a way to pause groups of people to conform to shared social norms and they needed to have a way, a quick way of stopping people from doing things like taking your mate or stealing your food, things that were necessary for survival and procreation.

spk_0 What happens now though, thousands of years later here in 2025, is that we will see revenge, we'll experience powerful revenge cravings for mere wounds to the ego that have nothing to do with your ability to procreate and have nothing to do with your survival, but a slight and offense, a feeling of injustice that does not threaten your existence at all or your ability to procreate is enough to trigger a completely violent and up through murder.

spk_0 And this is happening all the time around the world.

spk_0 So let me just see if I can restate that it is adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint to want to meet out some sort of consequence or punishment for transgressions.

spk_0 What is maladaptive and maybe at the root of all of the violence we're seeing on the news and that I covered for decades is what exactly?

spk_0 That's where I'm getting lost a little bit because-

spk_0 No problem. So violence itself is pathological. Violence means you're doing damage to another person's body and that is considered pathological.

spk_0 But what is most pathological about this is the inability to control your desire for revenge despite the negative consequences, particularly in acts of violence, as opposed to there's a whole range of revenge seeking that humans go through that are not violent at all.

spk_0 So we can think about retaliatory, you know, like a mean tweet that gets bounced back.

spk_0 We could think about social exclusion and social isolation of people that we want to harm.

spk_0 We could think about sabotage and workplace sabotage that people go through or sabotaging somebody's ability to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend.

spk_0 There are lots of ways that humans get back at other humans when they feel wrong that are not violent and do some amount but usually a minimal amount of harm.

spk_0 It's the harms that are beyond that that are uncontrolled like all of the forms of violence I just described before, including let's just say street and gang violence or bullying.

spk_0 Those types of violent experiences are generally pathological because we're seeking pleasure in someone else's pain because we either imagined having been wronged or we were actually wronged and we want to make ourselves feel better.

spk_0 And there are better strategies for making yourself feel better when you've been wrong, then committing an act of violence or trying to hurt someone intentionally for your own gratification.

spk_0 I want to get to those better strategies at some point, but I just want to clarify, I assume you're not saying that things like shunning or mean tweeting or weaponizing the legal system as a form of revenge is appropriate or a healthy behavior.

spk_0 Well, let's say it's a lesser unhealthy behavior than a physical act of violence, but they can all result in severe negative consequences to the person you're wronging and or to yourself.

spk_0 For instance, just take social shunning or cutting off a relationship because you're angry with someone.

spk_0 You're going to experience the loss of that relationship. Think about it this way. You can't become the instrument of another person's pain without experiencing the pain that you're inflicting.

spk_0 Simple example that's kind of visual is, you know, imagine a hammer striking a nail and we think about, oh poor nail, it's just getting pounded by this huge mean hammer that's driving it through this board.

spk_0 But we can also look at it in a more balanced perspective and realize that the hammer has to experience the impact of every one of those blows.

spk_0 It doesn't escape the inflection of that pain and that's the same experience that we all have in our lives.

spk_0 If we try to hurt other people, we're going to experience the pain that we're trying to inflict or some version of that.

spk_0 If we keep doing it and can't control it, despite knowing of those negative consequences, that fits the general definition of what is an addiction.

spk_0 That is the inability to resist and urge to ingest something or do something despite the negative consequences of doing it.

spk_0 And that's what's happening with revenge seeking often.

spk_0 So you said before that revenge actually can feel good, but then it starts to feel bad.

spk_0 It kind of reminds me of what the Buddha said about anger that it's got a honey tip and a poison root.

spk_0 Yeah, great. That's a great quote and very true.

spk_0 And that's what happens right with all addictions. They start feeling good, right?

spk_0 We get this instant dopamine hit.

spk_0 We're all also adapted, for instance, to experience euphoria and pleasure from taking opioids.

spk_0 I mean, every human being has this. We know this because we go to the hospital and we need to have a procedure.

spk_0 Well, likely we're going to have an opioid administered to us in order to dead and pain knock us out so that somebody can maybe put cuts on our body or worse.

spk_0 So there is a useful aspect to being adapted for euphoria for opioids.

spk_0 But we know that if we use opioids for pleasure and can't control our desire to use them and keep taking them when we don't need them for some sort of a medical procedure and they start taking over and ruining our lives, then we have an addiction and it becomes pathological.

spk_0 Okay, so this brings me back to where I was whipping earlier and lost the plot on adaptive versus maladaptive.

spk_0 So maybe I'll take another shot at it. Are you saying that the adaptive evolutionary function of wanting there to be consequences for bad behavior?

spk_0 Maybe the adaptive part of that we could understand as justice or the establishment of a fair social order and the maladaptive would be a desire for revenge.

spk_0 Close, but there's a danger with that one too. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to.

spk_0 No, no, but I have to.

spk_0 I want you to global. I want you to go please. I'm laughing only at myself out of you.

spk_0 No problem. Yeah, it's close.

spk_0 So let's just talk about justice versus revenge for a second because we think that there is a bright line between those two and it helps to fool us into engaging in the most horrific acts that humans are capable of.

spk_0 There's this version of justice that we think about we're talking about. Let's say social justice. So it's fairness, equity, even love, right?

spk_0 The kind of the highest teachings of the most admired humans that have ever walked the planet like Jesus or Gandhi or Martin Luther King.

spk_0 Their forms of justice were not retaliatory. They were trying to see the other person as themselves. That's a form of justice. I'll call it the high form of justice.

spk_0 But then there's this other form of justice, the exact opposite in which we call things like executing someone after they've committed a crime or going to war against a bunch of terrorists who have just knocked down some big buildings in New York City.

spk_0 We call that justice seeking as well. And when you know, President Bush came out and said we're going to bring the terrorists to justice.

spk_0 He didn't mean that we were going to be fair and equitable to terrorists and love them as ourselves. We all knew that what he meant was we're going to go and kill terrorists because of what they've done here.

spk_0 And we're going to do it in a big, big way. But in this is inside the brackets, I can't tell the country we're going to go have a revenge spree because people are going to rise up against that.

spk_0 We don't want to think of ourselves as revenge seekers. But if I can call it justice, I can justify all of the 600,000, 800,000 people that were killed in the Middle East and the trillions of dollars that were spent to chase down a pretty small group of terrorists in the 20 years or 21 year war that lasted after 9.11.

spk_0 But that was all possible. The expenditure of the money, the expenditure of human blood, American blood, other people's blood, all possible because we were seeking justice. And FYI, that's exactly what Osama bin Laden was seeking.

spk_0 He was able to convince people to fly into trade towers on the basis that they were getting justice for what they perceive to be wrongs committed by the United States. And so we get these circles of justice in the form of revenge seeking that can go on and on and on forever.

spk_0 I don't have much of a quibble with your analysis of post 9.11 history that as a younger man, I spent a lot of time on the front lines of the subsequent wars. So really witnessed what was happening at the tip of the spear for myself and largely agree that we took it way too far. And yet, even the Dalai Lama, I believe, has said that taking out Osama bin Laden made sense.

spk_0 So I just want to make sure you're not. It's interesting. I think about the Jesus argument of turn the other cheek and then the Tibetans also haven't spread the Tibetans are huge on compassion and so my, but they also have this expression idiot compassion, like you can take it too far.

spk_0 And so I would argue that some sort of action was warranted post 9.11 going to war against Iraq and killing 100,000 people and spending a trillion dollars made very little sent in my view, but something should have been done.

spk_0 100% agree, but what you're putting your finger on is is the distinction between self defense and revenge seeking. So let's talk about that for a second.

spk_0 When we think about revenge seeking, we're always talking about avenging the wrongs of the past. We want to punish somebody for something that they have done in the past. It could have been 10 minutes ago, 10 days, months, years, decades ago.

spk_0 That's revenge seeking, punishing people for wrongs of the past. That's very distinct from it. It has a completely different set of brain circuitry from self defense, which is reacting to protect yourself from the existence of the past.

spk_0 The existence of a present threat, or an imminent threat of serious harm or death. And in that case, the part of the brain that works for us there is our, you know, fight or flight instinct, which is largely driven by the amygdala, not part of the revenge seeking brain circuitry.

spk_0 When you experience the existence of a real time threat as a purely adaptive strategy, you're going to have to decide whether to, you know, fight, freeze or flee. And you're going to have to make that decision pretty quickly.

spk_0 In the case that you just were talking about, whether some have been lawden, who had many, many, many times before and after 9-11 said, I'm going to continue to do everything I can to destroy America and kill American lives.

spk_0 It made sense. You're 100% right to go and take out was some have been lawden who seemed to be completely incapable of being pacified. And so fight, flight or flee, we fought.

spk_0 But as you drew that exact perfect distinction, that's very different from then going and killing hundreds of thousands of other people around him or in other countries in just a revenge based sort of binge that went on for years and years and years.

spk_0 So that's the distinction. And I have in my book, I'm very clear in making that distinction. I'm never talking about self defense and accepting a present threat. I'm only talking about bringing up these wrongs of the past that only live inside your memory.

spk_0 There are only thought formations inside your head. I mean, once you've been wrong, if it's in the past and you have no present or future threat that's imminent, that can't be experienced with your senses at all. It can't be experienced out here in the real world.

spk_0 It's only in your head. The pain of it is only in your head and the desire to retaliate and plot and scheme to hurt the person who wronged you or their proxy is also only inside your head.

spk_0 That's where we need to focus in order to get control of this desire, this addictive strong compulsion.

spk_0 Again, this is something I want to talk about. The productive aspect of this conversation is something I want to get to. But let me just stay in the description of the problem.

spk_0 I don't know why this is such a bug a boob for me, but I really do want to understand the difference evolutionarily between what's adaptive and what's maladaptive. So I'll try again.

spk_0 It sounds like you're saying the desire for self-defense to set boundaries to meet out what you were calling high justice, not the way often our quote unquote justice system today operates where it's just institutionalized revenge in many cases.

spk_0 But high justice, instituting social order and fairness, those were adaptive traits in our evolutionary history where things have gone haywire. Really badly haywire, you can just anybody who's a student of history can see it.

spk_0 Anybody who reads the news now can see it as well is the revenge the revenge seeking behavior. Am I close now?

spk_0 Yeah, I think you're very close now. Awesome. And it is subtle. There is a subtle aspect to this, Dan, that you're putting your finger on. And this is a very new way of thinking about human violence throughout history.

spk_0 And rather than throwing up our hands and going, oh, it's evil, right? There's an evil spirit. We don't even know what that is or where it is. We can't find it. We can't put our finger on it. Maybe it's inside of us. Maybe it's only inside of the other guy.

spk_0 It's only inside of those people that we think are evil people, which just coincidentally always happen to be the people who disagree with us and do things that we don't like. And we call that evil.

spk_0 That's not a useful construct. And there's really no evidence for it. What there is evidence for now is that all people are capable of doing engaging in these violent acts.

spk_0 If they have been wounded, seriously hurt, particularly psychological pain. And they have this desire for revenge that goes uncontrolled for any number of reasons. And they actually act on it.

spk_0 You can get, for instance, a father of a family of maybe three kids and a wife who he proposed to married and was deeply in love with and had three beautiful kids and suddenly becomes a murder suicide perpetrator because he felt wrong, all of the sudden, or had a series of wrongs throughout his life that were unresolved.

spk_0 And at the last second, we're uncontrolled and he decides, I'm going to take them all out in order to make myself feel better and make them feel a lot worse for the indignities that have been inflicted on me.

spk_0 This is happening, you know, every day, unfortunately, it's a very sad experience.

spk_0 I don't see myself in that, but I do see myself in what you were describing before about the rumination, the replaying of the injustice, the insult, the threat of the bullying.

spk_0 And I just wonder are some people more susceptible? It feels to me like my desire for what I might in moments of high-dudgeon or self-righteousness called justice, but really it's revenge.

spk_0 That desire has been a massively pernicious force in my life personally.

spk_0 And so I'm just wondering, is there a spectrum here?

spk_0 Yeah, spectrum is a great word for it.

spk_0 And there is, so there's a spectrum of revenge seeking from very non-violent and not even acted on.

spk_0 It's just revenge fantasies and then maybe it's like I said, it could be just purely verbal or it could be quiet ways of undermining another person who you believe is wrong to do.

spk_0 And so there's a spectrum of, through violent acts, so there's that spectrum.

spk_0 And there's also a spectrum for people of who might be susceptible.

spk_0 So we know from a small group of studies, but I think they're important, that about 20% of, well, let me put it this way, about 90% of all people have revenge desires.

spk_0 If you ask them in a survey, if you ever thought about revenge or if you thought about revenge even recently, they'll say yes, about 95%.

spk_0 So we all experience this desire for revenge.

spk_0 But of that group of people, only about 20% will report that they've acted on their revenge desires.

spk_0 And that's an interesting number 20% because it's also about the same percentage of people who, if they try drugs or alcohol, actually become addicted to them.

spk_0 So 80% of people are not becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol and 80% of people are not becoming compulsive revenge seekers.

spk_0 But that still leaves 20% on this spectrum that we just discussed between nonviolent and violent.

spk_0 So, you know, the number of people that are committing the violent forms of revenge is substantially reduced.

spk_0 And that, in my view, is where we ought to be directing our public health efforts is trying to help support, identify, help and support those people so that they don't take those next fateful steps that result in acts of violence.

spk_0 So what we can do by seeing violent revenge seeking as an addiction, as we can begin to really think about a true evidence-based and measurable public health approach to reducing preventing and treating violence.

spk_0 So for me, as somebody who has a history of addiction to drugs, do you think that would make me more likely to fall into 20% that would get addicted to revenge? Or is there no correlation?

spk_0 There may be a correlation. There are some theories about the vulnerable brain that apply across addiction.

spk_0 So if somebody is liable to a drug addiction, they might also be more likely to experience alcoholism or, you know, tobacco use may be also gambling.

spk_0 And you also find in populations of addicted people and communities that a lot of times those same populations experience huge levels of violence.

spk_0 And this is a theory without a study right now what I'm about to say.

spk_0 But it stands to reason at least to me that those populations where we think, oh, it's all about herfors and it's about the money, right?

spk_0 It's about the money and drug dealing that's driving the violence. And money is a huge part of it.

spk_0 But the actual desire to hurt other people and almost all of those instances is always following from some form of agreement.

spk_0 Somebody stepped into my territory, somebody took my money, I'm going to go and get them or their gang insulted my gang.

spk_0 We're going to go out with my gang now and we're going to gun them down.

spk_0 So it seems like there is some vulnerability that could transcend the other thing that I think other addictions do is what they're doing to the prefrontal cortex.

spk_0 So that's our control center. If that's, you know, inhibited or hijacked for another addiction, it may also be weakened as well for or against, I should say, these revenge cravings.

spk_0 And so someone who has another addiction and then suddenly experiences a grievance and strong revenge desires may be more susceptible to carrying out that revenge desire versus other people who have don't have to struggle with addictions, don't see their life as filled with grievances,

spk_0 a lot of which have been unredressed and haven't experienced lots of suffering and lives that like you know when you are in the throes of it, where you have a lot of self shame, a lot of self grievances against self.

spk_0 We can even seek revenge against ourselves for letting ourselves down.

spk_0 Coming up, James Kimmel Jr talks about some practical strategies for when you feel wronged and antidote to revenge cravings, the courtroom of the mind, which is a fascinating concept and much more.

spk_0 Okay, so let's turn to the practical and productive part of this conversation for a second more than a second, just to say I always want to address the largest possible audience.

spk_0 So we can talk about people who might qualify as addicted to revenge, but I would love to talk about the vast majority of humans who play these revenge fantasies out in our brains just as a matter of you know sort of evolutionary programming.

spk_0 So you said something earlier that I want to come back to, there are better strategies when you feel wronged better strategies than I assume rumination and revenge. What are they?

spk_0 Yeah, so the number one best strategy that you ought to be thinking about when you have agreements when you feel that you've been wronged or betrayed or victimized in any way is to actually think about forgiveness, but in an all new way that humanity hasn't thought of until very recently as well because now we have a whole set of brain science that reveals that when you merely imagine forgiving agreements without telling the person who wronged you that you are not going to be able to do anything wrong.

spk_0 So you're going to forgive them. You just imagine what you would feel like if you did forgive it inside your brain what this is doing in brain imaging study show this is it actually shuts down the anterior insula the pain network that I was talking about so forgiveness actually takes away the pain it stops the pain.

spk_0 Whereas revenge seeking just gives you this short term dopamine rush that makes you feel better for a little while and then leaves you kind of feeling worse but wanting more.

spk_0 The other things that forgiveness does inside your head is it shuts down the pleasure and reward craving circuitry of addiction.

spk_0 So suddenly these intrusive and sometimes endless for people who reminate on revenge seeking all of that is lifted as well when you simply imagine forgiving so it shuts down that craving reward circuitry and the last thing it does is it activates or reactivates your prefrontal cortex that self control and decision making center of your brain so that you can make good decisions.

spk_0 So what we've got with with forgiveness now and this is neuroscience based now it's not just something that comes out of religion and I'm a spiritual person so I mean forgiveness is an important concept for me spiritually but scientifically it shows that a true atheist who forgives is going to get all of the neurological benefits I just described which is to say pain will stop for you the pain of the wrongs of the past will stop the cravings for revenge will stop and you will stop.

spk_0 You will make good decisions that don't result in you hurting people despite the negative consequences to yourself. It's kind of a wonder drug.

spk_0 So how does this work practically so I'll just take myself I have a couple people in my life who I historic beef with if I wanted to operationalize your advice would I just imagine myself forgiving them and just see how that feels.

spk_0 Well let's talk about what forgiving them means right because I think it means different things to different people so a lot of people think that the word give that's built inside of the word forgive means you're giving something to the perpetrator the person who just slapped you in the face and that's not the case at all you can get these neurological benefits of forgiveness without communicating with them in any way shape or form.

spk_0 It turns out that forgiveness benefits you as victim not the person who wronged you as perpetrator and you activate it and you operationalize it the way you're hoping there one way the quickest way is to simply imagine how you would feel if you decide to forgive you're not going to communicate to the other person you're just imagining how you would feel if you make a decision I'm moving on I'm moving past this that quick little decision suddenly gives you this relief of pain and this relief of pain.

spk_0 It's a relief of pain from the revenge desires and then you can do that multiple times as pain comes back or revenge desires come back every time they come back you can go numb I'm moving on I left that behind I've forgiven it already and it will in very short order you'll start to feel that the pain of the grievance and the revenge desires aren't coming back as often as they were.

spk_0 We think about Jesus is teaching when asked so how often am I supposed to forgive people seven times and he said no not seven times seventy times seven times and I think it's been a kind of a mystery as to why he said that and what that meant but neurologically it looks like it means make this decision to heal yourself and do it as often as necessary until you are healed you don't need a doctor for it you don't need a prescription you don't need to pay any money for it and you can use it as often as you want and we're we're not going to do it.

spk_0 We're all hardwired to forgive just as much as we are hardwired to want revenge when we've been wrong we are hardwired to be able to heal ourselves by forgiveness in just the same way and it gives us all of these benefits.

spk_0 So there's the feature in the operating system as opposed to the bug.

spk_0 Yeah, let me repeat that back to you just to make sure I understand it and to make sure the listeners understand it.

spk_0 I think what you're saying is that forgiveness is a practice and it has a fake it until you make it aspect which is okay I'm going to do what's sometimes called opposite action every time I have a revenge fantasy I'm going to try to get into the habit of imagining okay what would it be like if I forgave them that doesn't mean I'm inviting them over for dinner it doesn't mean I have to communicate with them in any way.

spk_0 It doesn't mean I have to lower any boundaries that I've said it's just like what if I didn't carry this toxicity forward anymore and it's not like it's magic it's just going to go away from that first time seven times seventy and probably that's an understatement or an under counter an underestimate you're just going to have to over time try to plant a new habit in your mind and brain.

spk_0 And then the magic kicks in at some indeterminate point in the future where one day you might wake up and actually the toxicity is gone.

spk_0 Yeah, and it's interesting you know the idea of fake it until you make it I might change that to say imagine it until you make it.

spk_0 So we're just using the brain's ability to imagine a decision to forgive you can imagine anybody can imagine what it would feel like if I decided to forgive today how would I feel I'm not forgiving anything.

spk_0 I don't want to forgive I'm definitely determined not to forgive but I'm going to imagine how I would feel if I did that kind of takes the pressure off you don't have to actually forgive you can just pretend how you might feel and in brain imaging studies we see that this cascade of events you know the stopping of the pain in the pain network and the reduction in revenge cravings begins to happen merely from imagining it.

spk_0 Now I don't want to make it easier than it is because it does take effort it takes practice as you said and it might take 70 times seven or more but to operationalize it even further I created and we've studied it Yale a process that's built on the courtroom of the mind that we all have.

spk_0 I think we're talking about that for a second so going throughout our lives we sort of all have this courtroom inside our heads where we're endlessly putting on trial the people who wrong us but we're playing all the roles right we are we're the victim and we can testify you know what just happened and now we're the defendant and I'm going to imagine what they're going to say in their defense and then I'm the judge and jury and I'm going to find guilt or innocence and I'm going to hand down a sentence and then I'm the warden and I'm going to administer that sentence you know this is the whole thing.

spk_0 From pain to revenge seeking so that's going on inside our heads.

spk_0 Sigmund Freud identified it you know 100 years ago my training was as a lawyer and I've seen this be carried out as a litigator time and time again and we have this in almost all societies this idea of a tribunal that's going to be the judge of what happened and we know from trauma therapist and psychiatrist that people who are trying to recover from trauma need two or three really good things.

spk_0 One is they need an opportunity to be heard and they need to have their experience validated the second thing that they need is some form of accountability and accountability doesn't mean or shouldn't mean it doesn't have to mean revenge it can just mean identifying the person who caused my pain that is accountability just the way an account and identifies where your money went he doesn't or she doesn't explain why it went there or whether it was a good idea or not they're just accounting for where the money went.

spk_0 And accountability really needs to be thought of in that sense so you have these two things that are important to combine and then in the imagining of revenge seeking so I created this experience based on the court of the mind it's a role play where you get to do everything I just said and you get to put on trial anyone who's ever wronged you and you play all of these roles but in the punishment role you get to actually imagine punishing the person who wronged you in any way you want it could be as.

spk_0 Horrific and sadistic as you want it to be or as gentle as you want it to be but what this does by playing it out in your mind is it's kind of a methadone for a revenge addict type of experience where it releases this powerful revenge craving so that it gets out of your way and you can finally at that last step in that there's a final step called the final judgment where now you're asked to be the judge of your own life and having put somebody on trial found them guilty punish them in the way you wanted.

spk_0 The question becomes as judge of your own life do you feel better did it really give you what you want it and what you'll find in most people find when we've studied it is is that it doesn't the pain comes roaring back very quickly and the agony of the whole thing and the memories of what happened and you find that putting someone on trial is just a retraumatizing horrific experience that you probably shouldn't have wanted in the first place so what could you do instead and it's at that point when all of this is a real thing and I'm not sure if you want to do it.

spk_0 I'm not sure if it's just behind you that you can be asked so now imagine what it would be like if you forgive it and when we ask it at that point in time most people will explain wow I would feel I only have to imagine and I want to be sure I don't want to forgive I just but I am willing to imagine what it would feel like if I did and they'll say wow I feel a lot better I feel this weight suddenly lifted from my shoulder.

spk_0 So there's this true healing experience and like I said we can see that neurologically inside your brain what's going on and it's available for us as this like I said this free wonder drug that we kind of poo poo is some you know only path to get to heaven and maybe it's heaven on earth but it's this it's this heaven of getting away from the pains and traumas of your past.

spk_0 This system you devised out pretty brilliant honestly but does it give you said before people who've been traumatized they want to be heard and they want accountability.

spk_0 Does this process provide those those those needs yeah it does and it does because just what I said very early on all of the remembered pain of your grievance of what happened to you in the past is just a thought formation inside your head it's not out here in the world.

spk_0 You can't experience it with your senses your desire for revenge is also just a set of thought formations inside your head why would we really imagine that we need a stone brick and wood courtroom with people who aren't ourselves acting as judges and acting as lawyers going through this kind of process charade in which we're going to put on trial they're going to put on trial and we're going to sit back and watch this trial happening and somehow imagine that that's going to heal us it almost never heals us.

spk_0 But usually the trials in the criminal and civil justice system only serve to make people feel a lot lot worse and to victimize them over and over and over again so by putting the courtroom inside your head you can experience it turns out our imaginations are so powerful that by simply talking to yourself or to a partner so there's an app for this it's called the miracle court app it's free at miracle court.com and you can experience an audio version of this entire trial.

spk_0 It's my voice leading you through the five steps of this trial and if you did that and you tried it you'd find that it feels incredibly real that when you're testifying as victim that is just like you're in a courtroom and then when you're testifying as the defendant it's also just like you're in a courtroom so you get this experience inside your imagination that feels very authentic to being heard and then when you move on to holding to account you know it might be the first time for a lot of people to ever experience it.

spk_0 So you can experience what it's like to be a judge of another person's life and to be on a jury and so you get that experience of thinking about how would I find in this case some people get so into it and they kind of reform what happened that they might decide the person that wronged them isn't even guilty at all that they've kind of discovered a new way of looking at what happened and suddenly they see that they themselves had more culpability then they really thought they did it.

spk_0 So a lot of fascinating stuff happens in this psychodrama role play that's created based on a normal criminal trial and I also have created a version for kids a school version based on school disciplinary hearings that can be used by schools to help kids get through their own grievances and revenge seeking because what we know is that the desire for revenge manifest is early as the toddler years.

spk_0 So from toddler on up to old age humans are experiencing these cravings and we're giving kids very little instruction on how to manage those cravings we tell them about drugs alcohol and sex but we don't tell them about this perhaps the most dangerous craving of all and how to manage it.

spk_0 In your book you talk about some other ways to manage this dangerous craving I'll list a few of them and maybe you can just pick up on them as as you see fit mindfulness especially mindfulness of revenge triggers.

spk_0 Cognitive flexibility which I believe you just kind of referenced in that they going through the the miracle court app you might see that actually you've got some culpability to you even talk about drugs like JLP ones like mongaro can you hold forth on the forgoing.

spk_0 Yeah sure let's think about it this sense if it's true and the evidence is all pointing in this direction that grievance triggered compulsive revenge desires are the root cause of intentionally afflicted human suffering and violence.

spk_0 Therefore seeing revenge and violence as an addiction is the right way to see it then we've opened up our entire toolkit of addiction prevention and treatment strategies that work for other forms of addiction but may now work for violence and that would include things like cognitive behavioral therapy which is easily part of the the miracle court non justice system process I just described you're retraining your brain into how to work through your grievance and your revenge desires.

spk_0 Motivational interviewing is another really strong strategy for overcoming or getting into recovery from addiction and the miracle court non justice system is a essentially just basically a role play script that is asking you or interviewing you by a list of questions that enables you to gain insight through your own answers to these important questions and then anti craving medications like now tracks on and even GLP ones this is one of the most important questions I've ever had.

spk_0 I'm more theoretical right now but we know that GLP ones work on food and repetitive cravings they're being studied for other addictions and early evidence shows that they're effective in reducing cravings in you know drugs and alcohol.

spk_0 If that holds true they may also be effective at reducing revenge desires among the small percentage of people who are the most greatly afflicted and who present the greatest danger to society and the other thing that I emphasize in the book is none of what I've said is to create nor can it create a defense to people who commit crime for people who commit crimes that they shouldn't be held responsible for the crimes that they commit that's not so.

spk_0 Addictions are not a defense to any criminal act they've never been recognized that way and they're not going to be in it shouldn't be your danger to society you need to be removed from society but we don't have to then keep someone incarcerated and remove them for our own.

spk_0 Gradification of hurting them because they've hurt us we should do it more to make sure that society is safe and then begin prevention and treatment using all of these processes and more to see if we can really rehabilitate someone and get them back into recovery.

spk_0 You talked about cognitive behavioral therapy for those of us who aren't you know in that therapy and don't have the time or plans to do it but do want to get better at reducing our grudging nursing habit what kind of tools from cognitive behavioral therapy might be helpful for us in our everyday lives.

spk_0 Yeah so I'm you know I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist so I'm not a treating doctor and cognitive behavioral therapy in general is a strategy in which though you know I healthcare provider generally it's usually not something you do on your own but I it probably can be from time to time but it's a way of reframing your own inner language so that you can see.

spk_0 Things more clearly because in a lot of instances people with anxiety or forms of depression birds will stick with anxiety are fearful of things that maybe they shouldn't be fearful of and so cognitive behavioral therapy can reframe that.

spk_0 How they do that though is not something that I feel really qualified to speak to.

spk_0 Got it.

spk_0 Coming up James talks about how to seek justice without revenge political grievances and societal implications and much more.

spk_0 Okay so let's just go back to your core piece of advice which has to do with forgiveness.

spk_0 Yes.

spk_0 Just technically again when you use the word forgiveness and I'm making this move that you suggest which is kind of counter programming against my revenge fantasies and I'm imagining what it would be like to forgive.

spk_0 What kind of work is the word forgiveness doing.

spk_0 If forgiveness becomes an obstacle for you you can say I'm going to make a decision to move past this.

spk_0 I'm going to make a decision to let this grievance the wrong of the past stay in the past it's no longer going to affect my present or my future and that is what forgiveness at its minimal and most essential core really is is a decision to not seek justice in the form of revenge.

spk_0 The word that I use and I coined this term in my first book called suing for peace is non justice which is to say not seeking justice in the form of revenge.

spk_0 That decision is kind of the core essence of what forgiveness means.

spk_0 It doesn't have to mean that you are partying the person to their face or that you are restoring the relationship with them or that you are staying in a toxic relationship.

spk_0 It doesn't require any of this it requires though a decision inside your head of I'm no longer going to seek revenge against you and I'm no longer going to allow this suffering to occur.

spk_0 This thing that happened in the past this memory I'm going to put it in the past and leave it there.

spk_0 I'm not going to keep on bringing it back out in order to stimulate more and more revenge desires and more and more pain for myself.

spk_0 How would we apply this to say the US political situation there are many people listening to this show myself included who you know have issues with Donald Trump and it's not like we can create a total boundary.

spk_0 I mean we can reduce our news consumption but home these in our lives in a non-negotiable way and so it's not just a thing we can quarantine into the past.

spk_0 So how do we not get swamped with resentment these of the political figures with whom we disagree?

spk_0 Sure. A critical question. A few things there. One is so revenge addiction that we've been discussing is not a conservative or a liberal problem it is a human problem.

spk_0 It is a deeply human problem and it crosses all political boundaries so it's important to see that.

spk_0 The reason it's important to see that is because the other the people who are opposite you if you're a liberal the conservatives conservative people over the last 20 years have experienced in their minds whether it's real or not does not matter as I said it's real for them and that's all that matters.

spk_0 They have experienced grievances that they feel have been not redressed and that they have not been able to forgive and likewise now perhaps you know as the administration has turned liberals see enormous amounts of grievance coming as Trump has kind of created a set of avengers within his administration like a superhero movie who are just doing everything they can to avenge the wrongs of their past.

spk_0 And so they're going out against us full till and that is just spurring now another set of victimization experiences for liberals who are going to want to retaliate again against Trump and this will continue on and on forever until either one of two things happen there's an act of forgiveness or there's an act of serious revenge seeking that unleashes you know like a cataclysm.

spk_0 So if we wanted to make America great again my thought is we ought to make America forgiving again and that can sound poly anish but here's why it's not throughout American history and world history at every turn anytime there's been a serious conflict and I'm talking about war level conflict like let's say the civil war in the United States.

spk_0 A military victory does not end the war it ends some hostilities but the only thing that holds the peace is forgiveness the only thing that held the peace after apomattox was that the people in the north and the south decided collectively over a series of years that they were going to forgive what happened rather than avenge it.

spk_0 And this is also true at international scale so world war two is another fantastic example in which you've got Japan and Germany in the United States deadlocked in a death match for multiple years with Germany committing genocides and murdering tens of millions of people Japan doing the same thing in the United States dropping nuclear bombs.

spk_0 How is it possible that we are all at peace and have been at peace for 70 plus years with these two former adversaries it's not because of the military conquest which stopped the hostilities it's because the three countries and the people in them decided to forgive each other the Marshall plan came out instead of a plan to destroy Germany which was Stalin's plan and Truman rejected that at the last second thankfully and we've been in the United States.

spk_0 And the beneficiaries of decades of peace so this is not a polyanna is concept by any means and it works at your individual level it works in your family it works at your workplace it works in schools forgiveness is the only way that humans can ultimately live together despite their their disagreements and their wounds and their injuries of the past.

spk_0 Yeah so just to say largely largely very very strongly agree with you I'm not historians so the one little quibble I'm going to make here please forgive if the historians are listening I definitely I mean the world war two example definitely lands for me the Marshall plan is a is a very interesting case study in forgiveness and restoration probably learned the hard way after we needed out excessive punishment or what could be argued as excessive punishment after world war one which then led to the rise in the Nazis but I'm not sure if you're going to be able to see the end of the world war two.

spk_0 I think after the civil war what happened a lot of what happened was less forgiveness but more that the south figured out a way to carry out slavery by other means in the north let them get away with it but having said that I do agree with you and I you know I think of you know controversial moves like Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon which was unpopular at the time but history has viewed kindly we have a decision to make each one of us at every moment especially in these polarized times we're going to be

spk_0 part of the problem or the solution and being part of the solution does not mean quietism or resignation or passivity doesn't mean failing set boundaries failing to speak up but you can do all of that from a place of compassion altruism dare I say love rather than revenge seeking and that is the choice we have

spk_0 would you agree with the little soap box beach I just gave there yeah I would definitely agree with that and what we need to be aware of is that the pain that we feel that's being inflicted if you're a liberal person by you know the conservative administration is a lot of it is revenge seeking and the conservatives felt that during the Biden administration they were victimized by a lot of revenge seeking there so

spk_0 so how did that happen why would we keep doing this we're doing it because we feel victimized and we want to retaliate as soon as we get that opportunity and it seems as though unfortunately that

spk_0 American elections are now about which group can get power so that we can get into office and begin hurting the other half of the country that is not a recipe for

spk_0 peace or prosperity in this nation people need to start forgiving the grievances that they feel and moving on from them and as you said that doesn't mean staying in a toxic relationship it doesn't mean trying to oppose the election of a very vengeful man as president I wrote a piece in

spk_0 Politico right before the capital insurrection you know identifying Donald Trump in my concerns about him his inability to control his revenge desires and that America had made a decision at that time to take away the keys to the country because you know if you have a if you're in a family with somebody who's an addict they can record you know they can

spk_0 record family can do a lot of damage and you've got to do things to make your family safe first America tried it made it safe and somehow we made a decision to put him back in office again and now we're going to bear the consequences of that but we still have to forgive our way through it if we have a hope of getting the country back together again

spk_0 forgive our way through it and one you know I think I'm reflecting you correctly one way to understand forgiveness in this regards specifically is a kind of cognitive empathy where you understand you don't have to agree with it but just to understand make the effort to understand the way people with whom you disagree see the world I find that for example when I consume conservative media which I do very regularly

spk_0 it has this oddly counter intuitively calming effect I don't agree with what they're saying much of the time but I at least I understand that it has an internal logic and that just makes the blind rage into a more determined and again I'll use the cheesy word loving resistance.

spk_0 Yeah I mean remember forgiving doesn't convert a conservative into a liberal or liberal into a conservative it merely stops them from becoming a retaliatory punisher and inflictor of pain upon another group of penis that is that's kind of the thing that I'm talking about here is that decision to stop the retaliation on all sides as swiftly as possible and in every way possible

spk_0 no matter how distasteful it feels we don't have to become the punishers if you're a liberal person you don't have to become the punisher of conservatives you can still hold your views and try and sell them to the American people as the better way without becoming you know the source of pain for half of the country

spk_0 and unfortunately that's been going on now for too long between both sides.

spk_0 We were talked about the Bible a lot today but reaping what you sow comes to mind yeah final question before I get to my habitual two final questions have you ever reached out to the kids are now the men who bullied you.

spk_0 I have not you know I moved away from that area and I even forget most of their names but I didn't even do it at the time like I said when I drove away that night I wasn't forgiving anyone and you know we sort of skipped over but how did I go from wanting to be a free way to do it.

spk_0 I wanted to be a farmer to becoming a lawyer to becoming a researcher at Yale and that journey was kind of based on this where I wanted revenge I just realized I didn't want to pay such a high price for it and I realized that I could become I could become a professional revenge seeker by becoming a lawyer which is the legalized former revenge it's like you know doctors prescribing opioids this is what lawyers do is we prescribe you know legalized revenge and then in the brand using the brand name of justice.

spk_0 So it affected my life and I became a revenge seeker for the next 20 years professionally and that eventually permeated every aspect of my life I was a revenge seeker at home with my wife and kids I was a revenge seeker in the community I couldn't get away from it I really did feel addicted and it was that sense of feeling addicted hopeless and helpless that led me away from the law and into becoming a violence researcher at Yale.

spk_0 It's an amazing story I'm sorry I had to live it but we're benefiting from it final question can you just remind everybody of the names of your books and of your app your website please just plug it all sure yeah thank you for that opportunity so my current book maybe the most important is called the science of revenge understanding the world's deadliest addiction and how to overcome it that's available at any place that books are sold I have two other books that are also revenge and forgiveness that I'm going to do.

spk_0 I think one is a novel called the trial of fallen angels about a young lawyer who finds herself in the afterlife having to defend the souls of murderers at the final judgment while trying to solve the mystery of her own death and then my first book was a spiritual book called suing for peace and that book is about my spiritual journey to try and understand revenge addiction as a spiritual problem rather than as a scientific one and I eventually conclude that I'm going to be a revenge seeker.

spk_0 I think it's a very important thing to do is to include it only science would help us free ourselves of this as for websites James Kimmel Jr. com is my personal website lot of information there including a link to the miracle court and that miracle court app is also available at miracle court.com you can get it there and then I have a you know my bio academic bio is it Yale as well if you just google chemical Yale you'll find me there.

spk_0 James thank you very much great work great to have you on Dan thank you thanks so much for the opportunity to be here.

spk_0 Thanks again to James Kimmel Jr. fascinating to talk to him as mentioned earlier there is a guided meditation that comes with this episode it's specifically designed to help you take everything you just heard and kind of pound it into your neurons in a practical way it's called for when you want revenge and it's guided by our teacher of the month.

spk_0 So last week only for paid subscribers over on Dan Harris dot com paid subscribers also get a weekly live guided meditation sessions on video where you can ask questions as well the next one's coming up tomorrow to the October 7th we do them every Tuesday at four Eastern tomorrow is with seven a who will be joined by DJ cashmere who is the executive producer of this show as I mentioned earlier seven I will be up at the Omega Institute on October 24th if you want to come meditate with us in person.

spk_0 So we're going to be a long thing we call it meditation party there's a link in the show notes. Finally thank you very much to everybody who works so hard on the show our producers are Tara Anderson Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasilie are recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at pod people Lauren Smith is our managing producer Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer DJ cashmere is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

spk_0 you

Are You a Grudge Holder or a Revenge Seeker? Here’s How It’s Hurting You – And How To Get Over It | James Kimmel, Jr.

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