The Science of Revenge: Understanding and Overcoming Grievances to Raise More Forgiving Kids

Summary

Raising Good Humans: Episode Summary Title: The Science of Revenge: Understanding and Overcoming Grievances to Raise More Forgiving Kids
Host: Dr. Aliza Pressman
Guest: James Kimmel, Psychiatry Lecturer at Yale School of Medicine and Author of The Science of Revenge
Release Date: June 27, 2025

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Introduction: Exploring the Science of Revenge

In this enlightening episode of Raising Good Humans, Dr. Aliza Pressman delves into the intricate nature of revenge with esteemed guest James Kimmel. The conversation aims to unpack how revenge operates as an addictive system within our brains and explores strategies to help children develop forgiveness, thereby breaking harmful cycles of retaliation.

Understanding Revenge: A Biological and Psychological Perspective

James Kimmel begins by defining revenge as a universal desire to inflict pain on someone who has wronged us, whether the offense is real or perceived. He explains that revenge has evolutionary roots, evolving as a strategy during the Pleistocene Epoch to enforce community norms and shared values.

Notable Quote:
James Kimmel (02:32): “Revenge is punishing people for things that we believe that they've done wrong or that we've imagined that they've done wrong.”

Kimmel emphasizes that in modern society, revenge has become the primary motivation behind various forms of human violence, ranging from sibling rivalry to extreme acts like terrorism and warfare. This pervasive desire to retaliate begins as early as toddlerhood and persists throughout an individual's life.

The Neuroscience Behind Revenge

Delving deeper, Kimmel discusses how grievances—whether psychological or physical—activate the brain's pain network, specifically the anterior insula. This activation mirrors the neurological response to physical pain, triggering a desire to seek compensation through revenge.

Notable Quote:
James Kimmel (06:38): “When you feel betrayal or harm or shame or disrespect, that is real pain in your brain. And your brain doesn't like pain and it wants that to end.”

He compares the brain’s response to revenge with addiction, highlighting that the reward circuitry involved in craving revenge is similar to that activated by addictive substances. This leads to a cycle where the initial surge of dopamine from retaliatory actions is quickly followed by increased anger and anxiety, perpetuating the desire for further revenge.

The Consequences of Revenge

Kimmel outlines the detrimental effects of a revenge-driven mindset. Engaging in revenge not only harms the intended victim but also exacerbates the perpetrator's emotional state, leading to a continuous loop of anger and resentment.

Notable Quote:
James Kimmel (12:39): “When you hurt other people, although we enjoy that initial very short lived dopamine rush like we get with narcotics or gambling, we also, it's followed up very quickly by a letdown.”

This cycle undermines the very purpose of seeking revenge, as it fails to provide lasting satisfaction and instead fosters further negative emotions and potential retaliation.

Teaching Forgiveness: A Neurological Solution

Transitioning to solutions, Kimmel introduces the concept of forgiveness as a countermeasure to the addictive nature of revenge. He explains that practicing forgiveness can deactivate the pain and reward networks in the brain, effectively halting the craving for retaliation.

Notable Quote:
James Kimmel (24:00): “Forgiveness, like I said, at the neurobiological level, it is like a wonder drug. It really... it takes away pain. That's amazing.”

Kimmel shares his development of the "school non-justice system," a method designed to help individuals process grievances internally. This system encourages individuals, especially children, to role-play different perspectives—victim, defendant, judge, and ultimately, themselves as both prosecutor and judge—to facilitate internal forgiveness and emotional healing.

Implementing Forgiveness in Families and Schools

Dr. Pressman highlights the importance of integrating forgiveness practices within the household and educational settings. By fostering a culture of forgiveness, parents can equip their children with the tools to manage grievances healthily, preventing the escalation into chronic resentment or aggressive behaviors.

Notable Quote:
Dr. Aliza Pressman (43:50): “How do we normalize some of these feelings without turning it into a dramatic, potentially harmful way, you know, state of being while still slowly sprinkling in the capacity for more compassionate responses to things.”

Kimmel underscores that teaching children to forgive not only alleviates immediate emotional pain but also sets the foundation for healthier relationships in adulthood. He advises parents to model forgiveness in their interactions and to provide structured methods for children to process and release their grievances.

Conclusion: Cultivating a Forgiving Culture

In wrapping up, Kimmel reflects on the broader societal implications of fostering forgiveness. Drawing parallels with historical events, he illustrates how forgiveness can lead to long-lasting peace and improved relationships between communities.

Notable Quote:
James Kimmel (49:59): “What ends war for any significant period of time is that the two warring sides actually forgive each other.”

He advocates for a nationwide shift towards a more forgiving culture, envisioning initiatives like "Make America Forgiving Again (MAFA)" to promote societal healing and reduce cycles of violence driven by revenge.

Final Thoughts

This episode of Raising Good Humans offers profound insights into the science of revenge and the transformative power of forgiveness. By understanding the neurological underpinnings of retaliation and implementing structured forgiveness practices, parents can guide their children towards healthier emotional landscapes and more compassionate interactions.

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Please note that advertisements and promotional segments have been omitted from this summary to focus solely on the core content of the episode.

Transcript

[A]

The following podcast is a Dear Media production. Welcome to Raising good humans. I'm Dr. Liza Pressman, and today we're talking about what the new science of revenge tells us about raising good humans. So today, James Kimmel, psychiatry lecturer at the Yale School of Medicine and author of the Science of Revenge, is talking to us about what revenge is. It's an addiction. It's a system that leaves us with cravings the same way addictive substances do, and how grievances activate the brain's reward system so that we can teach our kids to reframe and release grievances to help prevent harmful cycles of retaliation. So we're talking about things like sibling rivalry and school bullies all the way to adults who murder. So what I wanted to get out of this conversation is how do we handle the kinds of small grievances that happen constantly in our household, particularly with our children, siblings, et cetera, and among peers? How we can model for forgiveness and teach forgiveness as a way to feel better about ourselves while still honoring the reality of what might have happened, the hurt that was caused, and also figuring out how to keep people safe without this revenge mentality. Because we still need to acknowledge when grievances are something far beyond just. I don't like how that felt, but actually, people are in danger. Can you talk about what revenge even is like? What is the science of revenge?

[B]

Sure, yeah. That's a great place to start. And the way to think about it is revenge is this desire that we all have to inflict pain on someone else because we feel that they have inflicted pain on us or violated some sort of a norm that might be in our family or in our, you know, community or our culture, society, any of those things. So revenge is punishing people for things that we believe that they've done wrong or that we've imagined that they've done wrong.

[A]

I guess. What is the problem with. I mean, I think intuitively we know what the problem with a revenge mindset is, but scientifically, what's the problem?

[B]

Yeah, so a revenge mindset, first of all, we should all know we all have it. It's something that is believed to have evolved as an adaptive strategy from the Pleistocene Epoch, like many thousands of years ago, Ice Age, and maybe earlier. So no real problem occurs with this desire to do this in a context, let's say, back then, when humans were just starting to live in communities and needed to have a way for people in. In the community to kind of all share a set of standards and to be able to teach those standards and enforce them right, including things like, you know, my property is mine and your property is yours kind of thing. Or, you know, in order for us to act as a group, we all have to share the same sets of values. What happens, however, is that we also know now, particularly in modern society, that revenge is the singular root motivation for almost all forms of human violence, which is to say everything from bullying on playgrounds to intimate partner violence, street and gang violence, violent extremism, police brutality, all the way up through terrorism, genocide, and warfare. These are all, in almost all cases, unless somebody is truly, you know, a. Has a different brain structure, like a sociopath. But for most of the rest of us, how do all of us have the capacity to turn violent? Appears to be that it starts with the perception, real or imagined, of having been mistreated, wronged, or victimized. And this instantaneous, almost formation in the mind of a desire to hurt back. And this has been observed as young as in the toddler years. So we're talking about toddlers experience this and then all the way up through the senior year. So this is an experience that humans have to face throughout their lifespans. But we haven't. Scientists until very recently, and I would say within the last two decades, have not really focused on why this happens and how it is that my sudden real or imagined grievance, which is to say my perception of having been mistreated, betrayed, insulted, teased, if you're a kid or an adult for that matter, or otherwise feel like I'm made a victim and I've been treated unjustly, any of those things, start this desire to either hurt the person who did it to us or their proxy. And it's important to think about revenge is not only targeted at the person who did the wrong. Right. But it also can be targeted at a proxy who might be safer for that victim to now retaliate against because they can't really get at the proxy. And you could think of, you know, maybe a child who feels mistreated by a parent and no longer, and of course can't really retaliate against the parent for all kinds of costs and power disparities, but then might go to school and focus on maybe a perceived weaker child and take it out is what we would. You know, the language we use, take it out on them, which becomes this act of bullying that we didn't really understand. But we know that in almost all cases of violence, including from bullying and up, that the perpetrator sees themselves as a victim first. It's this sense of Victimization that motivates the desire to harm other people.

[A]

And what about psychological harm versus the like, violent harm? Is that part of the science of revenge?

[B]

So we're talking grievances, and I use that word as a broad term for, you know, the perception, real or imagine of victimization or mistreatment or injustice. Psychological harms have been shown in studies to be an even more powerful motivator for a physical act of violence sometimes than a physical act of violence itself. Starting it. So these psychological harms like betrayal, humiliation, shame, disrespect, all of these things that are often we're facing and we know our kids are facing daily, almost probably daily. I mean, Sigmund Freud thought that we're hour by hour and day by day going through life in our minds doing away with the people who insult us, which is a pretty rough thing to think about. So that was an early idea, but it seems to be shown out now in the neuroscience. But what those psychological harms do inside the brain is they, they, they become physically manifest, which is to say they activate the brain's pain network just like physical harm does. And they activate this area called the anterior insula. So when you feel betrayal or harm or shame or disrespect, that is real pain in your brain. And your brain doesn't like pain and it wants that to end. And what we've evolved to do to end it is to seek a compensating, you know, balance restoring or homeostasis restoring, compensating pleasure. And the pleasure that we seek foremost because we don't want, when somebody insults us, we just don't instinctively want ice cream. And I don't know why, because I love ice cream. And I would, you know, we'd all be better off wanting and craving ice cream when we're wrong. But what we really want is for is the person who wronged us to feel pain. And a very special kind of pain, which is to say pain with the knowledge that your pain, you who hurt me, your pain is because of what you've done to me. Yeah.

[A]

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[B]

Sure. So there are a couple of insights that come from this. So, so one of the insights is that from a neuroscience perspective, from a brain, biological perspective, we now know that your brain on revenge, which is to say your brain craving revenge, looks like your brain on drugs. It actually activates the. So let me kind of explain that. So once the brain experiences this often psychological pain in that pain network, the anterior insula and it's starting to desire pleasure to compensate for that pain, it activates the neural circuitry of addiction, which. The. And, and, and really, that's the pleasure and reward circuitry which is activated for many very pleasurable things. It's activated, you know, if we want a piece of cake, it's activated for sex, it's activated for many other things, and it activates strongly for addictive substances or addictive behaviors, let's say, like gambling. So when that activates, we get. You get this initial surge of dopamine that falls away. And that is the, that is the genesis at a biological perspective, from a biological perspective of this sensation of craving. So we get that little bit of hit, it's taken away from us, and we go, oh, we want more of that. And what we want more of is to hurt the person who wronged us in this case. And that can move to an addictive type of behavior. If you take that craving out of your head in the, you know, the mental world and put it in the physical world despite knowing the negative consequences of doing so, that's, that's, you know, that's sort of the definition of addiction is the inability to resist an urge to engage in a behavior or ingest a substance despite knowing the negative consequences of doing that. And with revenge seeking, by definition, revenge seeking has many negative consequences. The first and foremost is it is intended to punish and inflict pain upon. I don't even want to use the word punish right now. It's intended to cause pain in someone else's body and mind. That is, that is the goal. And this craving is so, you know, it's so clever and devious and not that it has a brain of its own, but the thing is, is that in order to gratify it. Think about it for a second. To gratify the craving for revenge. The only way to get the big dopamine rush you want is to hurt someone else. So that's a negative consequence at a minimum for that person. But what we know as well is that is a huge negative consequence for the perpetrator of that pain, which is to say a victim suddenly becomes perpetrator, a normal person. On day X, waking up in the morning, beautiful day, I have all my happiness, it's great. And then maybe my mom or my sibling or a teacher or some other kid at school says something unkind and it's like, wham, there's, there's the pain and I want pleasure back. And the only way I can get that pleasure neurologically right now is to inflict pain on them. That's a pretty cruel built in behavioral system that we've only kind of just pulled the curtains back on, you know, very recently. So how can we control it and teach our kids to control it, which is critical. And I like to say if you think about a hammer and a nail, a hammer can't hit a nail without experiencing the impact of the blow. And you cannot become the instrument of another human being's pain without experiencing the pain you're inflicting. And studies have shown that when we hurt other people, although we enjoy that initial very short lived dopamine rush like we get with narcotics or gambling, we also, it's followed up very quickly by a letdown. It's followed up by more anger, not less, it turns out. So you're not getting rid of the anger by retaliating, you're even angrier. You're also typically filled with more anxiety because you've just now become a perpetrator of a very painful event for some other human being. And you become at risk and your anxiety may spread and fear because you're now, by becoming a perpetrator, you know that that person whom you just hurt now has a grudge against you and you may become soon the victim of their now just deserts back towards you. So there are a lot of negative consequences to revenge seeking. And it doesn't act unfortunately as the deterrent that we often really want or we imagine it will be, because it is actually the motivation for the very next round of, of violence or intentionally inflicted human suffering. Even if it's not violent. We can have psychological revenge seeking all over the place. And we do that all day long as well. So I'm sorry, I kind of got, I wanted to set up the groundwork for how do we adjust that? Yeah, and how we can adjust, that is by one seeing it as an addiction. This enables us to start to go, oh, we have a big toolkit, right? Practitioners, teachers, counselors, families. Because addiction is pretty widely spread and we all kind of know about it. Well, there are a lot of things we can do for people who are struggling with compulsive revenge seeking that are like addiction, informed treatment strategies, things like cognitive behavioral therapy, which I'm sure you're super familiar with, motivational interviewing at the professional level. Self help, things that people do to try and control their cravings and addictions are also on the table. So there's a professional panoply. But the most exciting, at least to me part of all of this research, Eliza, is that as hardwired as we are to want revenge, we are also hardwired to forgive. And we have studies now showing what happens inside your mind when you practice just internal forgiveness. Which is to say you don't even need to express that you're forgiving to the person who wronged you or the bully who just attacked you. But by simply imagining forgiveness internally, it shuts down that very pain network, the anterior insula that I was telling you about, that activates for grievances and psychological and physical harms. It also shuts down the craving and reward circuitry, the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction. So those you no longer crave the desire to hurt that person. And then the last thing it does is it reactivates and animates the prefrontal cortex so you can now make better decisions that are in your own self interest. And when you typically after the revenge attack that you may have perpetrated, you probably will conclude that probably wasn't the best idea. And if you could have thought it through before you did it, you probably would have decided otherwise.

[A]

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[B]

Yeah, the way that I think about it, and we've developed a method that's available for schools, school counselors, and even families to do this is to think about ways. How could you, how can you systematize force with someone, the idea of forgiveness in a way that's very satisfying and very, very real and doesn't feel like you're setting yourself up for victimization and doesn't feel like in any way a weakness, but a strength and the superpower that it is. Because forgiveness, like I said, at the neurobiological level, it is a, it's kind of a wonder drug. I mean, it really. It takes away pain. That's amazing. It shuts down craving. That is amazing. It restores your best thinking. Incredible. All this stuff, and it's for free and you're hardwired to do it. You don't need a doctor's prescription. It's. It's widely available. Right. It's all inside our heads. So what we've done is and is created a what I call the school non justice system. And this is based on an adult version of what's called the non justice system or the free miracle court app, which is available to anybody. And it's truly completely free. There's not even in, in app purchasing for it. But the way it works is this, you know, so I, my, my background in training is I was trained as a lawyer and I was a litigator for 20 years plus before I joined Yale to become a revenge, forgiveness and violence researcher. And in that process, one of the things, first of all, I mean, the justice system in every country pretty much is a legalized revenge system. Lawyers have the, we have the amazing license that no one else has in society to prescribe, manufacture and distribute this powerful drug, revenge to the masses, you know, under the brand name justice, sort of. It's very similar to thinking about doctors and the ability to prescribe, you know, an opioid that's illegal on the street called heroin, but under the brand name oxycontin, it's okay. And we're going to prescribe it and it has consequences and it, and it does for the legal system, for the people who participate in it. It has very negative Consequences in terms of, you know, addicting them and causing further pain. Even though you set out hoping to do something really good, but you often end up with kind of maybe a new set of pains and tragedy on your hands. Well, but there's a good. There's a actual therapeutic quality, though, to the court, to the idea of a trial. And the reason is, and you'll know this as a psychologist, is because people who have been traumatized, which is to say they've experienced some significant pain, one of the things that they need in order to finally get over this psychological harm and move forward with their lives and is they need to be heard. They need to have some way of holding somebody accountable, ideally. And then maybe they need finally a way to actually go. And I'm done now. I'm done with this, and I can move forward. Trials can give the first two of those very, very well sometimes. But they would in particular if we control. We, the victims controlled the trial, and the trial was inside our head where we need it. So I want to be specific. Revenge seeking is always about punishing people for wrongs of the past. It's not about defending yourself from a present threat of immediate or future harm. That's the fight or flight instinct. It's a whole different category of activity. But for revenge seeking for wrongs of the past, that is what gets us into so much trouble and how we become a perpetrator when we were originally a victim. So if you think about it, things that happen in the past, and this is true for kids, is those are actually just memories of something that no longer exists in our world. I mean, it really is gone from the world we all experience, except for in the victim, you have this thought formation of something that might have happened hours, days, months, years, decades ago. Also that only exists inside your head is the desire to retaliate. A craving is only a thought formation inside your head. Since these are both inside your head and you're the master, right, of what's going on in your head. Where we need the. The intervention or the remedy is something inside your head. So the idea this. I started working on this in 2005, so about 20 years now I've been working on it. The idea that we need a wood and stone and glass courtroom with judges who are not ourselves and lawyers who are not ourselves and witnesses who are not ourselves. I mean, it kind of doesn't make sense that we should expect very much healing out of a setup like that. But if I could put the trial inside my own head, because I consider Myself, a recovering revenge addict, as a. As a lawyer. And I was trying to heal myself when there were no remedies around for me. And I went, how do I stop this? Because I was very, very caught up in the entire litigation process, and it was destroying my life methodically. But I couldn't quit because I loved it so much. I was really hooked. And so I thought, what if I create a courtroom inside the mind for people, and especially starting foremost with myself, in which I put on trial the person who. Anybody who wronged me. And I had a big growing list. People who wronged me, my family member, I mean, everybody, my opposing counsel, other clients. That's just everywhere, society. You can become a victim very easily inside your head. And I set this up so that I would play all of the roles so you can play. If you're using this system, you become the victim, prosecutor, and testify as victim. Then you testify as the defendant, and imagine what they would say in response to your charges. And then you become the judge and the jury, and you hand down, you know, decide guilt or innocence and hand down any punishment you want. And then you become the warden, and you imagine carrying out the punishment on the person who wronged you. But in a final step called the final judgment, you become the judge of your own life. And in that step, you. You. You gain this perspective of, wow, I just put somebody on trial, but I didn't really gain anything from that. I feel painful. How could I escape from this pain now and actually move on with my life? I do feel better because I got to hold them accountable and I got to be heard. Those are critical things for healing. And then we introduced just the idea of imagining. Just imagine how you might feel if you forgave. And when I ask that question, and viewers or listeners can just close their eyes right now, and you can imagine any grievance in your life, and there'll be probably a big, long list, and you can pick one. And this is imagine for just 10 seconds, even imagine forgiving it just for 10 seconds, and you will discover this immediate sense of relief, because neurologically, the pain stopped, and neurologically the craving to punish has stopped, and you probably don't want to let go of that. And then forgiveness becomes a practice in which anytime these painful memories of grievances return, you can forgive them right away, and you can, you know, make that methodical. So we've created a kid's version of this. It's called the school non justice system, in which instead of using an adult criminal trial, we use a school disciplinary hearing. So the, you know, a child, you know, in school gets to play, you know, the victim, but and also the the kid who maybe did something wrong to them. But they also get to play, you know, the principal who's deciding kind of the school disciplinary case and handing down a sentence, and maybe the assistant principal who's maybe going to carry it out. But then they also get to play this sort of really wise teacher in this final step, judgment, who's kind of talking to them. But then in that process, you switch roles and you become the wise teacher and you're able to express your own wisdom to yourself. Who you start to see was on on trial all along because you were all on trial all along. We're trying to save ourselves from these, these grievances and this desire to retaliate. And we're asked in both the adult and the child's version, what is the what's your final verdict on you do you choose to set yourself free from the realms of past or do you choose to continue your suffering? Which one? And most people go, well, I think I'd rather set myself free.

[A]

And now for a quick break. I'm talking about Wayfair right now because I just bought a bunch of stuff on Wayfair because I was searching for ways to make my outdoor space feel a little bit warmer and more fun for summer. And I got everything from outdoor trays so that I can carry drinks and snacks out to outdoor glasses that won't shatter all over the patio. And whatever your style is, mine right now is some combination of rattan and metal and stripes because I'm feeling beachy. But whatever your style is, Wafer has it. You can do a whole outdoor seating gathering as well. You've got the Adirondack chairs, the club chairs, the lounges, the conversation sets, outdoor sofas. You can end up falling fast asleep while you're socializing. I'm also adding patio cushions because I got really hard chairs and didn't think about that at first. But they have great patio cushions with stripes, which is my mood right now. There is just something for every style and every home. So don't wait. Make your outdoor space your dream oasis today with Wayfair and enjoy it all summer long. Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop a huge outdoor selection that's W A Y F A I R.com Wayfair Every style, every home so you've probably heard of a little thing called Venmo, which I use constantly. But did you know that Venmo can be used for more than just paying your friends back. It's true. And I want to introduce you, if you have not already heard that Venmo has a debit card which lets you spend your Venmo balance in really any way possible. You can Venmo this, that and everything. Seriously, everything. If you shop for it, you can pay for it. So with the Venmo debit card, I can buy this computer, I can buy these headphones, I can rent this studio space. I can buy the coffee sitting next to me. I can make a reservation for a spin class tonight. I'm not going to, but I could. Okay, so you get the gist. Venmo everything with Venmo debit card. Visit Venmo Me Slash Debit to learn more and sign up today. Venmo purchase restrictions apply. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancor Bank N A pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated. Card may be used everywhere where MasterCard is accepted. Okay, this one is a little off brand sounding for me, except I'm an East Coaster and I'm a New Yorker. And so Philadelphia Cream Cheese is the undisputed leader in cream cheese. And I'm not giving up a cream cheese and a good bagel. So I want to introduce you to Philadelphia Cream Cheese. In case you don't know about it, which I'm sure you do, and you just know that it makes everything creamier. And while I am very much a classic bagel and cream cheese gal, but there are also awesome recipes to make all of your food easily just a tiny bit more delicious and creamier. Go to www.krafthines.com Philadelphia recipes they have recipes. Easy, easy, easy. For dips, for veggies or crackers. To snack on a little dollop in your guacamole to make it just a little creamier. A little bit for your pasta Alfredo, you name it. Now, I am not the chef, but it's very easy to just put a little bit of this into anything and just make it taste a little yummier. Philadelphia Cream Cheese is the undisputed leader in cream cheese. I grew up with Philadelphia cream cheese. I'm not giving it up. Philadelphia makes everything creamier. Visit cream cheese.com for recipe inspiration. And to purchase Philadelphia Cream Cheese so you can start adding it to your recipes at home, visit creamcheese.com so how do you distinguish for kids, like the difference between forgiveness and the consequences that enable people to be safer? Because it's not about revenge, it's about figuring out the Best way to, you know, like, let's say there was a, if you're thinking about the legal system, there was someone who was a murderer and you, they murdered somebody you love. And so of course you want revenge. That's a totally reasonable feeling. But the, the revenge, in my view, like if we took it to a total extreme, the revenge is like eye for an eye. Yeah, but is there, where's the space of, well, I'm not going to do eye for an eye because then I have to sit with that harm to me in harming someone else. But I also, that person can't go free because other people would be endangered. Or if you take it down to like a school bully, the revenge version would be bully back or get them in so much trouble they're kicked out or something like that. But then, I mean, with children it's different because of course you can help that child who's doing the bullying that you can figure out the pain that they've been going through, what that might be about, help them learn other ways to cope and stop harming others. But at what point is it like, well, we have to do something not for the purposes of revenge, but just for the purposes of safety.

[B]

Right. And that really is the distinction, as I was saying, between punishing for wrongs of the past and preventing a present or future harm. So in the present or future harm situations that you've described, and those are all really important and nothing that I've said is intended in any way to limit the, either the need or the, or the right to prevent future harm like that. But we're in that instance, if we're going to remove, let's say a child who's a bully from a classroom, for instance, we're going to do that because we're, you know, our first and foremost and should be only motive is to prevent future harm by that child to other, other children. Right. We're not doing it because we feel this really great gratification and high of just punishing this kid and ruining his life. Right. And, and most of the time we're not doing that. And we shouldn't also be doing that though, as adults for the same reason. So a murderer needs to be separated from society because, wow, they've already now just express, they've all, they've killed someone. So we have strong evidence that they represent a threat and it's going to take some potentially a significant period of time of evaluating that person and working with them through their revenge desires in these ways and treating it like an addictive process. So I think of it as potentially, you know, preventing and treating violence, using addiction strategies to make sure that this person is finally no longer addicted. Because if you murdered somebody, you probably were in an addicted high craving state. You could not control your craving despite the negative consequences to your victim and to yourself, your family, everybody around. And so we, within that case, we're moving not to punishment as gratification to vindicate society's desire to. For vengeance. We're moving towards punishment as prevention of future harm and treatment. And we can do that at all levels. We can do that in families, we can do that in communities. And it's the only. It's kind of like the only real way to make sense of it. Otherwise you're just addicting a new round of people. And I want to emphasize. So studies show, studies of bullying show that the primary motivation for bullying is revenge. So bullies see themselves as victims first, always. And think about this then. So if what do we do with bully victims other than, you know, kind of go, oh, that's too bad, that must have really sucked for you, and we'll try and do something to the bully, right, in other words. But if we don't help the victim of a round of bullying process that and heal from that and release it there. Studies also show that bully victims are at the highest risk of becoming bullies themselves. And I have my. In my own. I mean, I've actually experienced that myself. I was bullied as a child myself for a long period of time. The bullies actually came as I was a teenager, came, staged an attack on my house, shot and killed my dog, then came back a few weeks later, blew up our mailbox, and I actually went after them with a gun and at the last second turned away thankfully, and did not. And I had them cornered. It was, you know, three or four kids and me, and they were unarmed, and I had the gun. It was a terrible thing. And I talk about this in my book. So I'm, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm okay with, with sharing it. But my point though is, is. And then, you know, what I went on to do, because when I left them, I wasn't forgiving anyone. I wanted revenge badly. I just knew that I didn't want to pay the high price that I would get of gunning somebody down, which is good. That's a great, great thing. However, I went on to a career in the professional revenge business by becoming a lawyer. And I was a prosecutor for a while, and then I was a Civil litigator. And so I became, I recognized over time and this took quite a while to sort of put all this together. But I became the very bully that I was trying to avoid when I was a teenager. I was now a legal bully. The difference was, you know, I was wearing a suit now and carrying a briefcase. And those guys back then, they were farm kids and I lived on a farm and you know, they were wearing, you know, dungarees and shirts and boots. So it happens. It really literally does happen that way. And the research shows that it does.

[A]

I'm so sorry, by the way. Just horrific. How do you grow this, like in this slow moments where your kids are sharing the. The wrongdoing and the grievances that are. The volume is low on them. It's sibling. Like I'm. I go back to siblings. Cause you can think of this at thousands of opportunities where it's like, you stole my shirt or something so minor, but that can turn into a blowup. What are some of the tools that you can use to start playing around with the opportunities to say like, okay, that wasn't cool. I can empathize with you as the adult in your life. That, that really was upsetting. And also like, without undermining that, let's figure out a different path.

[B]

Right. And I think that that starts. I mean, the most effective way because of what we now know about forgiveness is having real brain biological benefits. And it's not only, you know, it's not a spiritual construct by any means. It doesn't need to be. If you're. If forgiveness is a valued spiritual teaching for you, and it is for me personally, but if it's valuable for you, you can hold that. But you should also know that it is really powerful psychologically. And so I believe. And what I'm trying to teach with my non justice system and when I am able to get on shows like yours is that we as a society should begin to be serious about teaching a culture of forgiveness. And that starts with inside your own home. You know, it does. Is your. Does your home have a culture of forgiving the other family members when they do things or when we imagine they've done something wrong? A lot of times grievances are imagined, but there is very. There is an imagined grievance is as equally effective as a real grievance for triggering a desire to retaliate and want to hurt back? So do we have. Do you have in your family a culture of forgiveness in which, you know, that involves. And they can involve what I said about this non justice system or miracle court process in the Miracle Court app, which you can use, you know, I lead you through this trial in an audio context, but inside your family, you can, you can do that so that you can honor and recognize the pain that happened, which we often do as parents. We're like, yeah, that was wrong. She or he shouldn't have done that to you. But then we can go. Tell me about it. I heard you. So now you. They've been heard. I'm going to probably, maybe or maybe I'm not going to hold your sibling accountable for what they've done in some way. At a minimum, I'm going to make, I'm going to tell them to never do that again. But then we got to go, so. But I'm sure you still feel this pain. And we want, you know, here's a way for you to learn about your own brain, because your child will face enormous grievances as soon as they leave your house and go to school and add all of their after school activities. And then as they age out into adulthood, I mean, it's just all about grievance management because we're feeling these things all the time. And you can give a child an enormous gift by helping them experience that release that comes from that forgiveness and teaching them that you are, you know, you're learning how to heal yourself. We, we tell our kids, hey, if you got a cut, you know, clean it, get a band aid on it and maybe some, you know, Neosporin or something. Well, we don't teach at all. Hey, when you have a kind of a cut inside your brain, here's how to heal that pretty quickly. And you'll feel a lot better, a lot faster. And that's not a hard lift for any parent to do, you know, because we're doing it with our physical bodies, we're just not doing it with our mental bodies. And we really should be doing that because the stakes are enormous here for dealing, you know, preventing future rounds of violence and ending up with a child who becomes maybe revenge addicted or a compulsive revenge seeker. And it happens to the best of children. And it's tough when it's already at that state to bring them back down again so you can have that culture so that it doesn't even happen in the first place.

[A]

And it's interesting because the sibling relationship is so predictive of peer relationships, which are so predictive of adult relationships. So I think it makes so much sense as we think about the first place that our kids are learning about these things inside the household. And then I imagine we also can use our own experiences and grievances to model out loud how we're doing this ourselves.

[B]

Yeah. And not only modeling, but in. So from a parent perspective, you're having mom or dad, you're having grievances all, you know, many, many times a day with your. With your spouse or significant other. So how are we. What are we doing with those to help heal ourselves from these grievances? Are we avengers? Are we like the family, you know, the family of avengers where we're, you know, every wrong needs to, you know, deserves a knockdown? Or are we kind of. Do we have a culture of forgiveness where we are modeling it through our own actions? Right. I mean, through our own grievances and our own revenge desires and are those well controlled? And we, by doing that, we can really teach our kids how. How to live a good life. Right. And how to heal from the wrongs of past.

[A]

Well, since it seems like we're in such a. A culture war right now, this is such an important topic, and I know so many parents are craving, like, not only understanding how we got here, but how do we come out of this and sort of change the course of our collective culture? And our household culture seems to be a really beautiful place to start. So this is a really cool. This is a really cool book. I really appreciate it. It was so not a topic that I had been able to put my. Like, it wasn't something that I was like, oh, we really need to understand this. But now that I understand that revenge is actually this, like, thinking of this as an addictive substance or addictive experience, it makes so much sense to see, like, how we keep getting more and more and enmeshed in societal grievances and personal grievances, and having any way out of it to just stop this cycle is going to benefit everyone. But certainly families who come from a history of this kind of interaction like, to be able to break those cycles when you didn't even have a name for it before is so beneficial.

[B]

Right. We can now label it and then we can get our hands around it and begin maybe to work with it. I mean, my ultimate goal with regard to the broader culture, you know, is, I guess, two things. One is what I've said about forgiveness here is not in any way Pollyanna. Ish. So after all of America's wars, for instance, you know, we. We often. We. We think of wars as being often settled with a military solution, right. There was an act of conquer. There was a Surrender or something like that. And that does stop hostilities in the moment. That's not really, though. What ends war. What ends war for any significant period of time is that the two warring sides actually forgive each other. And the most enormous, powerful example of that was after World War II. After World War II, America and the Allies did an extraordinary, miraculous thing over the objections of Stalin and Russia in particular, who wanted to punish and throttle Germany, just destroy it. And the Allies said, we're not going to repay. That exact mentality is what started World War II. Because it's the way World War I ended, with this onerous set of treaty conditions on Germany that led to Hitler's rise. But, you know, Truman and the German Prime Minister Attlee, it was after Churchill agreed that. That we weren't going to repeat those mistakes and we were going to help re. I mean, amazingly help rebuild Germany and we. And forgive them. And Germany has been for now 70, 80 years, one of America's strongest allies, and we're at complete peace with them. That didn't happen. The peace that. That length of peace wasn't the result of the military conquest. It was the result of the peoples of both nations using forgiveness, which we. Like I said, we're all hard. We're as hardwired to do forgiving as we are to do revenge seeking. We can choose which one to emphasize. So, you know, I believe in today's America. We need to make America more forgiving again, you know, mafa. If I could choose the acronym, it would be Make America Forgiving Again. Mafa.

[A]

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