← 10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Happier with Dan Harris
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.
01:11:53
The psychology and neuroscience of revenge. is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, an expert on revenge, a lawyer, and the founder and co-director of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies. He is the creator of...
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- [00:00]
A
Few things feel better than knowing someone's looking out for you. That is the spirit behind the ATT guarantee. Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they will proactively make it right. That's the AT&T guarantee, because connection should be dependable, especially in the moments that matter most. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.comguarantee for details. @ and T connecting changes everything. This is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody. How we doing? Today we're going to talk about an aspect of the human mind, an aspect of the inner repertoire of our species that has been an incredibly destructive force both for me and for humans writ large. And that is revenge seeking or grudge holding, the desire to get even. We evolved for this. And as you'll hear in this discussion, there are some ways in which this aspect of the human repertoire is adaptive. But man, it misfires in many, many ways. And all you have to do is look at the broad sweep of human history or the news today or any given day to see how revenge has become what my guest calls an addiction. So that's the bad news. But the good news is that there are ways to work with this very common tendency of the mind. As my guest today says, there are better strategies than revenge seeking or rumination when you feel wronged. James Kimmel, Jr. Is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. He's also a lawyer and the founder and co director of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies. He's the author of three books, including the one we'll focus on today, which is called the Science of Revenge, Understanding the world's deadliest addiction and how to overcome it. We talk about the horrific and violent bullying that James endured as a child, which provoked his interest in the subject of revenge. It's an extraordinary story. You'll want to hear that. We also talk about the neuroscience of revenge, I. E. What happens in your brain. You're seeking revenge, the connection between revenge and addiction. Our evolutionary programming in this regard, practical strategies for addressing grievances and revenge desires, how to seek justice without revenge, an antidote for revenge cravings, and much more. Today's episode comes with a custom guided meditation called for when you want revenge. It's guided by our teacher of the month, 7A Selassie. This meditation is only for paid subscribers over@danharris.com paid subs also get weekly live guided meditation and Q and A sessions every Tuesday at 4, so check us out danharris.com Join the party. Speaking of parties and speaking of 7A Selassie, if you want to meditate with me and her in person, we will be back up at the Omega Institute for another installment of Meditation Party, our annual retreat that's coming up the weekend of October 24th. There's a link in the show notes. Okay, we'll get started with James Kimmel Jr. Right after this. 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Use the code happier and@monimalmoney.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off of your first year@monimalmoney.com with the code Happier. You know those moments when someone just takes care of something for you? That's what ATT is doing with the AT and T guarantee. Staying connected matters. That's why AT and T has connectivity you can depend on or they will proactively make it right. That's the AT&T guarantee. Because staying connected isn't optional, it's essential. And AT&T wants you to feel that somebody's got your back. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.comguarantee for details. AT&T connecting changes everything. James Kimmel, welcome to the show.
- [05:56]
B
Thank you, Dan, for having me.
- [05:57]
A
It's a pleasure. If you're comfortable with it, I'd love to hear a little bit of your backstory, you know, how you got interested in this subject of revenge. I understand it really has its roots in your childhood.
- [06:11]
B
Yeah, it does. I have kind of a John Wick origin story for my life, for better or worse. When I was about 12 years old, my family moved as my mom and dad moved our family, I should say, from the suburbs to a farm in central Pennsylvania that had been owned by my great grandfather. And you know, 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. And that included, you know, trying to reach out to kids on other farms around us in this big, vast space of mostly dairy farms. Our farm was not a, you know, real working farm in the sense that we didn't make our living from the land. We had a small herd of Black Angus cattle, we had some pigs and things like that. You know, we didn't have hundreds of Holstein that were being milked twice a day the way the kids around me did with their family farms. So 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, their farm community. And 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. And so I really kept pushing it and trying to win them over and get them to like me, and they weren't having that. And eventually their shunning turned into bullying. And the bullying started verbally, as it often does, and then as we were getting older, like I said, this started when I was about 12, so 13, 14, 15, and even up to 16 and 17, this kept going. And it went from, like I said, verbal into physical assaults and things like that. So it was a pretty grim existence in that sense and disappointing to me. So like I said, it's continued until one night, my family and I, we were all asleep very late at night and we were awakened to the sound of a gunshot. And we, you know, rushed to the windows of our house to look and see what was going on. And I saw a pickup truck outside of the front of our house, A truck that was very familiar to me, that had been owned by one of the guys who had been kind of abusing me and bullying me all those years. And 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. One of my jobs in the mornings before going to school was to go out and take care of our animals, our cows and pigs, and 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.
- [09:04]
A
That is hard to hear. I'm sorry that happened to you.
- [09:07]
B
Yeah, thanks. Yeah. Hard to see, hard to hear, hard to remember. Even all these years later. It was a lot of distress there. It was a family dog. Wasn't only my dog. We were all upset. 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. They did say those, you know, there'd be a report and if. If it got worse, God forbid, you know, there'd be this paper trail. And so 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, pretty late. My folks were out somewhere. I have a brother, he was gone as well. And I heard a vehicle pull up to the front of our house. Unusual because we lived on a one lane country road. As I got up to check it out and see what was happening, there was this same pickup truck. And there was also a sudden flash and an explosion. And the pickup truck roared away, leaving behind our mangled mailbox they had just blown up. 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. And I had had enough. And I'd grown up probably from about 8 years old to shoot guns. And we had plenty of guns in our house. We were hunters out in the country. And my dad kept a loaded revolver, not for hunting, but for safety, in his nightstand. And I knew it was there, and I grabbed it and went off after these guys. I jumped in my mother's car and I tore off after Them through the middle of the night.
- [10:59]
A
Did you catch them?
- [11:00]
B
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 and I cornered them by a barn. You know, 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 and I can see three or four heads of the three or four guys that had been, you know, my primary tormentors for all those years. And, you know, they slowly got out of their truck, squinting back through my high beams to try and figure out who had just chased them down. 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, 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, 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 the complete element of surprise. And so I opened the door of my car, I grabbed a gun off the passenger seat and started to get out. And as I was doing that, I had 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'd 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. I'd have to adjust, know myself at a minimum as a potentially a killer. And 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, 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. 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, shut the door and drive home. You know, I'd come within nanoseconds of committing a hugely violent crime and changing my life completely.
- [13:20]
A
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.
- [13:34]
B
Yeah. And that's a really common reaction. You know, I know from a lot of years of neuroscience research. Now a small percentage of people have a very strong empathy center in our minds, 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. 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, it turns out to chilling effect. But that also would be happening in your mind just as much as it was in mine at that moment.
- [14:20]
A
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. What is happening in our brains as we envision revenge? I guess it's the same thing. It's the rumination is creating pain, and the revenge fantasies create pleasure close to that.
- [14:50]
B
So here's what happens when you experience any form of victimization, mistreatment or injustice, and that could be insults, humiliation, disrespect, shame, any form of victimization that really causes you pain. This activates the pain network inside the brain. It actually is a physical pain response. 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. And humans have evolved over thousands of years, many, many thousands of years, back to the Pleistocene epic. It's believed to derive enormous pleasure from inflicting pain upon the people who wrong us or their proxies. And what occurs is after your brain registers this physical pain, it activates the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction, which are the. The dorsal striatum and the nucleus accumbens. 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. Those areas of the brain flood with dopamine, and we get a dopamine high from just thinking about retaliating against the person or people who wronged us or their proxies. 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. 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. And this has been hiding in plain sight really throughout human history. And it's only as 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 wronged and why we're driven to want to hurt other people and commit acts of violence. There's just one last piece of this, and that is your prefrontal cortex, which is your brain's executive function and self control and cost benefit analysis center of the brain. 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. 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. 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, at the last second.
- [18:08]
A
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, but you also said that revenge hurts us. So does it feel good for like a hot second and then it feels bad?
- [18:25]
B
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 believed to be an adaptive strategy that almost all people around the world have. We're born with it. And so the notion that we want revenge is natural and is not itself a pathological process. 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. 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. 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. 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. That includes bullying and youth violence, intimate partner violence, street and gang violence, mass shootings, police brutality, and abuse of force. Studies show all of this, and public health data show it. And all the way up through terrorism, violent extremism, genocide, and warfare. They all have at 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. 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 real or not.
- [20:41]
A
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?
- [20:51]
B
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, believed to be 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 cause 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. What happens now, though, thousands of years later here in 2025, is that we will seek revenge, will 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, an 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 murderous act. And this is happening all the time around the world.
- [22:08]
A
So let me just see if I can restate that. It is adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint to want to mete out some sort of consequence or punishment for transgressions. 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? That's where I'm getting lost a little bit.
- [22:36]
B
No problem. So violence itself is pathological. Violence means you're doing damage to another person's body, and that is considered pathological. 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. So we can think about retaliatory, you know, like a mean tweet that gets bounced back. We could think about social exclusion and social isolation of people that we want to harm. We could think about sabotage and workplace sabotage that people go through, or sabotaging somebody's ability to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend. 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. It's the harms that are beyond that that are uncontrolled. Like all of the forms of violence I had just described before, including, let's just say, street and gang violence or bullying. 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. And there are better strategies for making yourself feel better when you've been wrong than committing an act of violence or trying to hurt someone intentionally for your own gratification.
- [24:09]
A
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?
- [24:26]
B
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. For instance, just take social shunning or cutting off a relationship because you're angry with someone 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. 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. 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. It doesn't escape the infliction of that pain. And that's the same experience that we all have in our lives. 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. 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. That is the inability to resist an urge to ingest something or do something despite the negative consequences of doing it. And that's what's happening with revenge seeking often.
- [25:52]
A
So you said before that revenge actually can feel good, but then it starts to feel bad. It kind of reminds me of what the Buddha said about anger, that it's got a honeyed tip and a poisoned root.
- [26:04]
B
Yeah, great. That's a great quote and very true. And that's what happens, right, with all addictions. They start feeling good, right? We get this instant dopamine hit. You know, we're all also adapted, for instance, to experience euphoria and pleasure from taking opioids. I mean, every human being has this. We know this because if we go to the hospital and we need to have a procedure, well, likely we're going to have an opioid administered to us in order to deaden pain, Knock us out so that somebody can maybe put cuts on our body or worse. So there is a useful aspect to being adapted for euphoria, for opioids. 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.
- [26:59]
A
Okay, so this brings me back to where I was whiffing earlier. Lost the plot on adaptive versus maladaptive. 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 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.
- [27:28]
B
Close, but there's a danger with that one too. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to quibble, but I have to.
- [27:34]
A
I want you to quibble. I want you to quibble. Please. I'm laughing only at myself, not at you.
- [27:39]
B
No problem. Yeah, it's close. 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. There's this version of justice that we think about when we're talking about, let's say, social justice. So it's fairness, equity, even love, Right? 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. 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. 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. We call that justice seeking as well. And when President Bush came out and said we're going to bring the terrorists to justice, 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. And we're going to do it in a big, big way. But, and 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 and 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 that lasted after 9, 11. 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. He was able to convince people to fly into trade towers on the basis that they were getting justice for what they perceived 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.
- [30:05]
A
I don't have much of a quibble with your analysis of post 911 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. 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 have an express. The Tibetans are huge on compassion and, and so am I, but they also have this expression idiot compassion, like you can take it too far. And so I would argue that some sort of action was warranted. Post 911 going to war against Iraq and killing 100,000 people and spending a trillion dollars made very little sense in my view. But something should have been done.
- [31:00]
B
100% agree. But what you're putting your finger on is the distinction between self defense and revenge seeking. So let's talk about that for a second. 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. That's revenge seeking, punishing people for wrongs of the past. That's very distinct from, and it has a completely different set of brain circuitry from self defense which is reacting to protect yourself from 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 fight or flight instinct, which is largely driven by the amygdala, not part of the revenge seeking brain circuitry. When you experience the existence of a real time threat as a purely adaptive strategy, you're going to have to decide whether to fight, freeze or flee. And you're going to have to make that decision pretty quickly. In the case that you just were talking about with Osama Bin Laden, who had many, many, many times before and after 911 said, I'm going to continue to do everything I can to destroy America and kill American lives. It made sense. You're 100% right to go and take out Osama bin Laden, who seemed to be completely incapable of being pacified. And so fight, flight or flee, we fought. 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. So that's the distinction. And 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 realms of the past that only live inside your memory. They're only thought formations inside your head. I mean, once you've been wronged, 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. 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. That's where we need to focus in order to get control of this desire, this addictive, strong compulsion.
- [33:43]
A
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. In the description of the problem. I don't know why this is such a bugaboo 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. It sounds like you're saying, like the desire for self defense, to set boundaries, to mete out what you were calling high justice. Not the way often our quote unquote justice system today operates, where it's, it's just kind of institutionalized revenge in many cases. But high justice, instituting social order and fairness, those were adaptive traits in our evolutionary history where things have gone haywire, really badly haywire. And you can just. Anybody who's a student of history can see it. Anybody who reads the news now can see it as well. Is the revenge, the revenge seeking behavior. Am I close now?
- [34:40]
B
Yeah, I think you're very close now.
- [34:42]
A
Awesome.
- [34:43]
B
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. 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. Right? 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. 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 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. 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 and at the last second were 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. This is happening every day, unfortunately, and very sad experience.
- [36:26]
A
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 insults, the threat of the bullying. 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 call justice. But really it's revenge. That desire has been a massively pernicious force in my life personally. And so I was just wondering, is there a spectrum here?
- [36:58]
B
Yeah, spectrum is a great word for it. And there is. So there's a spectrum of revenge seeking from very nonviolent and not even acted on. It's just, you know, revenge fantasies. And then, you know, 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 has wronged you through violent acts. So there's that spectrum. And there's also a spectrum for people of who might be susceptible. 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. If you ask them in a survey, have you ever thought about revenge or have you thought about revenge even recently? They'll say yes, about 95%. So we all experience this desire for revenge. But of that group of people, only about 20% will report that they've acted on their revenge desires. And that's an interesting number, 20%, because it's also about the same percentage of people who, if you, if they try drugs or alcohol, actually become addicted to them. So 80% of people are not becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol, and 80% of people are not becoming compulsive revenge seekers. But that still leaves 20% on this spectrum that we just discussed between nonviolent and violent. So, you know, the number of people that are committing the violent forms of revenge is substantially reduced. 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. So what we can do by seeing violent revenge seeking as an addiction is we can begin to really think about a true, evidence based and measurable public health approach to reducing, preventing and treating violence.
- [38:55]
A
So for me, as somebody who has a history of addiction to drugs, do you think that would make me more likely to fall in the 20% that would get addicted to revenge, or is there no correlation?
- [39:06]
B
There may be a correlation. There are some theories about the vulnerable brain that apply across addiction. So that if somebody is liable to a drug addiction, they might also be more likely to experience alcoholism or, you know, tobacco use, maybe also gambling. And you also find in populations of addicted people in communities that a lot of times those same populations experience huge levels of violence. And this is a theory without a study right now, what I'm about to say, but it stands to reason, at least to me, that those populations where we think, oh, it's all about her fours and it's about the money, right? It's about the money in drug dealing that's driving the violence, and money is a huge part of it. But the actual desire to hurt other people in almost all of those instances is always following from some form of a grievance. Somebody stepped into my territory, somebody took my money, I'm going to go and get them. Or their gang insulted my gang, we're going to go out with my gang now and we're going to gun them down. 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. So that's our control center. If that's inhibited or hijacked for another addiction, it may also be weakened as well for or against, I should say, these revenge cravings. 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 don't have to struggle with addictions, don't see their life as filled with grievances, a lot of which have been unredressed and haven't experienced lots of suffering and lives that like you know, when you were in the throes of it, where you have a lot of self shame, a lot of self grievances against self. We can even seek revenge against ourselves for letting ourselves down.
- [41:09]
A
Coming up, James Kimmel Jr. Talks about some practical strategies for we you feel wronged. An antidote to revenge cravings the courtroom of the mind, which is a fascinating concept and much more. Few things feel better than knowing someone's looking out for you. That is the spirit behind the AT and T guarantee. Staying connected matters. That's why AT and T has connectivity you can depend on or they will proactively make it right. That's the AT&T guarantee because connection should be dependable, especially in the moments that matter most. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.comguarantee for details. @ and T connecting changes everything. The show is sponsored by BetterHelp. October 10th is World Mental Health Day and this year we're saying thank you to therapists. I've had many therapists in my life right now and I totally support the idea of saying thank you to therapists. Therapists have helped me and continue to help me with so much. BetterHelp therapists have helped over 5 million people worldwide. That's millions of stories, millions of journeys, and behind everyone is a therapist who showed up, listened and helped somebody take a step forward. This World Mental Health Day, Better Help is honoring those connections and the therapists who make them possible while showing how easy it is to get guidance from a licensed therapist online with BetterHelp. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps you identify your needs and preferences and their 12 plus years of experience. An industry leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. However, if you're not Happy with your match. You can switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. This World Mental Health Day, we're celebrating the therapists who've helped millions of people take a step forward. If you're ready to find the right therapist for you, BetterHelp can help you start that journey. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com that's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com Happier. 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 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. 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?
- [44:12]
B
Yeah. So the number one best strategy that you ought to be thinking about when you have a grievance, 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 a grievance without telling the person who wronged you that 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, and brain imaging studies 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. 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. The other things that forgiveness does inside your head is it shuts down the pleasure and reward craving circuitry of addiction. So suddenly these intrusive and sometimes endless for people who ruminate 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. So what we've got with forgiveness now, and this is neuroscience based now, it's not just something that comes out of religions. 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 make good decisions that don't result in you hurting people despite the negative consequences to yourself. It's kind of a wonder drug.
- [46:20]
A
So. But how does this work practically? So, Phil, I'll just take myself. I have a couple of people in my life who I have historic beef with. If I wanted to operationalize your advice, would I just imagine myself forgiving them and just see how that feels?
- [46:38]
B
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. 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 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, no, I'm moving on. I've 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. When we think about Jesus teaching, when asked, so how often am I supposed to forgive people? Seven times. And he said, no, not seven times, 70 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 know, 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 are all hardwired to forgive just as much as we are hardwired to want revenge when we've been wronged. We are hardwired to be able to heal ourselves by forgiveness in just the same way. And it gives us all of these benefits.
- [48:39]
A
Ah, so there's the feature in the operating system as opposed to the bug. Yeah, let me repeat that back to you just to make sure I understand it and to make sure the listeners understand it. 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. It doesn't mean I have to lower any boundaries that I've set. 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 and seven times 70. And probably that's an understatement or an undercount or an underestimate. You're just going to have to, over time, try to plant a new habit in your mind and brain. 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.
- [49:46]
B
Yeah. And it's interesting, you know, the idea of faking until you make it. I might change that to say, imagine it until you make it. So we're just using the brain's ability to imagine a decision to forgive. You can imagine that anybody can imagine what it would feel like if I decided to forgive today. How would I feel? I'm not forgiving anything. 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. 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 7 or more, but to operationalize it even further, I created, and we've studied at Yale, a process that's built on the courtroom of the mind that we all have. And I think it's worth 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're the victim, and we can testify what just happened. And now we're the defendant. And I'm gonna imagine what they're gonna 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 from pain to revenge seeking. So that's going on inside our head. Sigmund Freud identified it, you know, 100 years ago. My training was as a lawyer, and I've seen this be carried out, you know, 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 therapists and psychiatrists that people who are trying to recover from trauma need two or three really important things. 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 accountant 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. 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 courtroom 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 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, and 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, the question becomes, as judge of your own life, do you feel better? Did it really give you what you wanted? And what you'll find, and 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 re. Traumatizing, 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 behind you that you can be asked. So now imagine what it would be like if you forgave 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 they want to be sure. I don't want to forgive, 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. 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.
- [54:36]
A
This system you devised. Sounds pretty brilliant, honestly. But does it give? You said before, people who've been traumatized, they want to be heard and they want accountability. Does this process provide those. Those. Those needs?
- [54:52]
B
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 Real world, 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 anybody. 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@miraclecourt.com and you can experience an audio version of this entire trial. And 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 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 than they really thought they did at the beginning. 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 manifests as early as the toddler years. 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.
- [57:47]
A
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 you see fit. Mindfulness, especially mindfulness of revenge, triggers cognitive flexibility, which I believe you just kind of referenced in that going through the Miracle Court app, you might see that actually you've got some culpability too. You even talk about drugs like GLP1s, like Manjaro. Can you hold forth on the foregoing?
- [58:15]
B
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. 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 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. Motivational interviewing is another really strong strategy for overcoming or getting into recovery from addiction. And the Miracle Court non justice system is essentially just basically a roleplay 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 naltrexone and even GLP1s. This is more theoretical right now, but we know that GLP1s work on food and appetitive cravings. They're being studied for other addictions, and early evidence shows that they're effective in reducing cravings in drugs and alcohol. 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. Addictions are not a defense to Any criminal act. They've never been recognized that way and they're not going to be and it shouldn't be. If you're a 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 gratification 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 truly rehabilitate someone and get them back into recovery.
- [60:46]
A
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 grudge nursing habit. What kind of tools from cognitive behavioral therapy might be helpful for us in our everyday lives?
- [61:04]
B
Yeah, so I'm, you know, I want to emphasize 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 a healthcare provider generally, it's usually not something you do on your own, but it probably can be from time to time. But it's a way of reframing your own inner language so that you can see things more clearly. Because in a lot of instances, people with anxiety or forms of depression, for instance, we'll stick with anxiety, are fearful of things that maybe they shouldn't be fearful of. And so cognitive behavioral therapy can reframe that. How they do that though, is not something that I feel really qualified to speak to.
- [61:50]
A
Got it. Coming up, James talks about how to seek justice without revenge, political grievances and societal implications, and much more. Few things feel better than knowing someone's looking out for you. That is the spirit behind the AT&T guarantee. Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on or they will proactively make it right. That's the AT&T guarantee. Because connection should be dependable, especially in the moments that matter most. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.comguarantee for details. AT&T connecting changes everything. We've made some new hires on our little team at 10% media recently. I'm thinking specifically about Taylor and Moni. Also Hayden, who's been with us for a while informally and is now a full time member of the team. And I got to tell you, one of the lessons I keep learning as a proprietor of a business is it is so important to find and hire the right people for the job. It makes an extraordinary amount of difference. You've got good people. So if you've just realized that your business needs to hire somebody yesterday, how can you find amazing candidates quickly? Just use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your posts seen on other job sites. Indeed's Sponsored Jobs helps you stand out and hire fast. With Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want to reach faster and it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs Jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non Sponsored Jobs. And that speed aspect is particularly interesting and compelling to me because when we perceive a need on our team, we don't want to wait months before we fill it. We want to be able to fill it quickly. Plus, with Indeed Sponsored Jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long term contracts, and you only pay for results. How fast is Indeed in the minute I've been talking to you. 23 hires were made on Indeed according to Indeed Data Worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit to get your jobs more visibility@inneed.com happier. Just go to indeed.com happier right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's crucial. Let them know Indeed.com happier terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. Okay, so let's just go back to your core piece of advice which has to do with forgiveness. Yes, 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. What kind of work is the word forgiveness doing?
- [65:10]
B
If forgiveness becomes an obstacle for you, you can say, I'm going to make a decision to move past this. 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. 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. That decision is kind of the core essence of what forgiveness means. It doesn't have to mean that you are pardoning the person to their face or that you are restoring the relationship with them or that you are staying in a toxic relationship. 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, this thing that happened in the past, this memory. I'm going to put it in the past and leave it there. 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.
- [66:33]
A
How would we apply this to, say, the US Political situation? There are many people listening to this show, myself included, who have issues with Donald Trump. And it's not like we can create a total boundary. I mean, we can reduce our news consumption, but homies in our lives in a non negotiable way. And so it's not just a thing we can quarantine into the past. So how do we not get swamped with resentment vis a vis political figures with whom we disagree?
- [67:04]
B
Sure. Critical question, 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. It is a deeply human problem and it crosses all political boundaries. So it's important to see that. 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. 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 is 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. And so they're going out against us full tilt. 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 like a cataclysm. So if we wanted to make America great again, my thought is we ought to make America forgiving again. And that can sound Pollyanna ish, 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. 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 Appomattox 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. And this is also true at international scale. So World War II is another fantastic example in which you've got Japan and Germany and 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, and the United States dropping nuclear bombs. 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 the beneficiaries of decades of peace. So this is not a Pollyanna ish 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.
- [70:31]
A
Yeah. So just to say I largely, largely, very, very strongly agree with you. I'm not a historian, so the one little quibble I'm going to make here, please forgive. If historians are listening, I definitely, I mean, The World War II 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 meted out excessive punishment, or what could be argued as excessive punishment after World War I, which then led to the rise in the Nazis. But 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 and the north let them get away with it. But having said that, I do agree with you and I think of 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. Are we going to be part of the problem or the solution? And being part of the solution does not mean quietism or resignation or passivity. It doesn't mean failing to 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. Would you agree with the little soapbox speech I just gave there?
- [71:53]
B
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 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 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 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 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 Politico right before the Capitol insurrection, you know, identifying Donald Trump and 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 wreck, you know, they can wreck your 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, forgive our way through it.
- [73:48]
A
And one, you know, I think I'm reflecting you correctly. One way to understand forgiveness in this regard 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, it has this oddly, counterintuitively 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.
- [74:36]
B
Yeah. I mean, remember, forgiving doesn't convert a conservative into a liberal or a liberal into a conservative. It merely stops them from becoming a retaliatory punisher and inflictor of pain upon another group of people. 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, 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 the source of pain for half of the country. And unfortunately, that's been going on now for too long between both sides.
- [75:29]
A
We talked about the Bible a lot today, but reaping what you sow comes to mind.
- [75:33]
B
Yeah.
- [75:33]
A
The final question before I get to my habitual two final questions. Have you ever reached out to the kids or now men who bullied you?
- [75:43]
B
I have not. 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 we sort of skipped over. But how did I go from wanting 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 form of revenge. It's like doctors prescribing opioids. This is what lawyers do, is we prescribe legalized revenge using the brand name of Justice. 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.
- [76:55]
A
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.
- [77:06]
B
Sure, yeah. Thank you for that opportunity. So my current book, maybe the most important, is called the Science of 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 themed. 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 concluded only science would help us free ourselves of this. As for websites, jameskimmeljr.com is my personal website. A lot of information there, including a link to the Miracle Court. And that Miracle Court app is also available@miraclecourt.com you can get it there. And then I have a, you know, my bio, academic bio is at Yale as well. If you just Google Kimmel Yale, you'll find me there.
- [78:19]
A
James, thank you very much. Great work. Great to have you on.
- [78:22]
B
Dan, thank you. Thanks so much for the opportunity to be here.
- [78:31]
A
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 youn Want Revenge. And it's guided by our Teacher of the month, 7 a Selassie, only for paid subscribers over on danharris.com paid subscribers also get weekly live guided meditation sessions on video where you can ask questions as well. The next one's coming up tomorrow, Tuesday, October 7th. We do them every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. Tomorrow's is with 7A who will be joined by DJ Cashmere who's the executive producer of this show. As I mentioned earlier, Seb and I will be up at the Omega Institute on October 24 if you want to come meditate with us in person. It's a whole weekend 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 Vasily. Our 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.
- [79:57]
B
Morning.
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