70: On Revenge with James Kimmel

Host: Brandon Nappi 

Guest: James Kimmel

 Instagram: @theleadersway.podcast 

berkeleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast

Brandon:    Welcome to “Within,” this special episode of the Leader’s Way podcast where we have conversations with artists and scholars and mental health professionals and musicians about how to heal our world. And I’m really excited for this conversation. It’s a conversation about revenge. But even more than that, I think it’s a conversation about who we are as human beings and about our ancient, proto-ancient history about the evolution of us such that we even have this capacity for revenge, what purpose it serves, has served, and how to interrupt it. 

This is also a conversation in addition to an exploration of revenge. It’s a conversation about how to interrupt patterns of vengeance and violence in our world today. So I can’t imagine a more important conversation for us to be having. And at once this is about our own personal wounds and it’s also about the wound of the world because our personal wound quickly becomes the wound that we all hold together collectively as a society. It goes back to that old maxim, “hurt people, hurt people.” And one of my favorite lines from the Franciscan priest and spiritual teacher Richard Rohr is, “A pain that is not transformed is transmitted.” And so in so many ways this conversation with James Kimmel is a conversation about how to begin shifting this evolutionary pattern of dealing with pain because this question of what do you do with your pain is the most important question that we can ask. What do you do with your pain is the most important spiritual question that we can ask. If we want to understand the way the world works right now in terms of cycles of violence being repeated, we have to understand our evolutionary history. And if we want to change it, then we need to be willing to change because the world is changed by people who are willing to change themselves. 

So whether you know this experience of revenge in your own body, this intense feeling that can hijack your rational mind, or whether perhaps you are someone for whom revenge is being directed at, right? You’re the object of someone else’s revenge and maybe you understand quite well why or maybe you don’t even know why someone feels vengeful toward you. This is a conversation for you because it’s a conversation about the deepest parts of our humanity, both acknowledging the pain we can experience, the vengefulness we can sometimes experience, but also the way to respond in a more compassionate, tender hearted, and wholesome way for not only for our own good, but for the good of the world. 

So I’m so, so thankful that my colleague from across campus here at Yale University, James Kimmel, who teaches at the School of Medicine has offered to be with us to talk about his new book, The Science of Revenge. We’ll share a little bit about James Kimmel’s background. He is a violence researcher, a psychiatry professor, and an author who explores the science of revenge, addiction, forgiveness, and violence. He’s an attorney, an author. He’s the assistant clinical professor of psychology here at the Yale School of Medicine. He is the founder and co-director of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies. He’s a breakthrough scholar, expert on revenge and forgiveness. And James first identified this compulsive revenge seeking as an addiction. He’s the first to speak of it this way. And this of course has been his life’s work. He created the non-justice system and the related Miracle court app for healing from grievances and victimization, controlling revenge cravings and revenge addiction. He launched savingcain.org, the very first of its kind website aimed at preventing homicides and mass shootings by speaking directly to prospective killers. And he developed Warning Signs of a Revenge Attack to prevent violence before it happens. He also developed the School Non-Justice System Bullying Prevention Victim Support Program for use with schools and youth. He co-founded the largest peer support mental health agency in Pennsylvania. And he also maintains an active legal practice. So you can see he’s active in so many ways and is just such a gift to the world and a real blessing to our community of learners and scholars and teachers here at Yale.

Welcome to Within, a contemplative segment within the Leader’s Way podcast that explores the convergence of mental health, art, and spirituality through authentic conversations across wisdom traditions about personal and collective transformation. We welcome artists, musicians, spiritual teachers, and healers to reflect on the sacred wisdom needed to heal the world’s deepest wounds. Within examines the inner path to wholeness, not through quick fixes or spiritual bypassing, but through courageous engagement with life’s profound challenges.

James Kimmel, welcome to the Leaders Way podcast. We’re so thankful you’re here. 

James:          Brandon, thanks for having me. 

B:         So you’ve written this incredible book, The Science of Revenge. I’ve just been inhaling it and ruminating on it as moving and as sometimes disturbing and difficult and self-revelatory as this is. It’s like you’ve opened up my brain and you’ve peered into the deepest, darkest corners. So thank you for helping me understand myself and all of humanity. Can you tell us the story of how you got to the point of writing a book on revenge? Part of the gift of our conversations here at the Leader’s Way podcast is to understand the kind of narrative arc of someone’s life. How did you get from, I don’t know, wherever you were a couple decades ago to doing this work and writing this book now? 

J:           When I was a teenager, I came within short seconds, microseconds even, of committing a horrific act of violence for revenge. And I went from that point in my life into the professional revenge business, which is becoming a lawyer. And I spent 20-plus years as a litigator getting revenge on behalf of my clients for pay. And although often gratifying in the darker sense that gratification holds for us, it almost ruined my life. 

And at that point, I commenced at first a spiritual journey to understand or try to understand and learn what the world’s great religions tell us about revenge and forgiveness and their teachings and what wisdom they might have to share with us. And I found those answers to be unfortunately equivocal. That the world’s religions, you can find scriptures and texts that will support anything you want to do. If you want to become a main avenger in this world, there are texts that support that. And if you want to become a person who forgives, there’s support for that. And at that point, I really was desperate to understand why I had gone on this path and almost committed this act of violence and then become a lawyer. And I thought, I’m going to have to buckle down and turn to science as a potential answer, since I hadn’t received one anywhere else. And I felt as though I had become,

 as it were, addicted to seeking revenge. And there’s no help for that, no 12-step programs for revenge addicts out there and no rehabs either. And through a series of very unlikely events, I ended up here at the Yale School of Medicine, where I was able to research revenge and why we want it, why we want to hurt the people who hurt us so badly that we’re willing to ruin our lives to get this feeling. 

At the end of that journey, I found from–with the support and wisdom and genius of more than 60 neuroscientists around the world– that it turns out that your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs. 

B:         The first or among the first, as I understand it, to talk about revenge as an addiction. And as you lay this out in the book, this is a real lightbulb. In reading how you lay this out, I thought, well, of course this is the case, right? And yet, we’ve not thought about it this way. Can you walk us through the neuroscience and all the brain systems that are firing in that moment of revenge? And you experience this, I mean, we all experience this, but you experience this in a really intense way in your childhood. What was that like for you to see the science for what it is? 

J:           So, you know, you could just picture any incident in your own life. Maybe, you know, you’re driving to work and you’re cut off in traffic by an inconsiderate driver, and you instantly feel this urge to retaliate. So, what happens inside your brain in that moment, it turns out, is that the injustice and the inconsideration and the pain of being cut off, which is an experience of victimization. And those experiences that we have sometimes many times a day, every day of our lives, in some cases it seems. Those pains of victimization, we call those grievances a real or an imagined perception of having been mistreated, shamed, humiliated, betrayed, victimized, treated, unjustly mistreated, all of these things, these psychological hurts primarily. They register inside your brain and activate the brain’s pain network, which is an area of the brain called the anterior insula. And when your brain experiences this pain, it doesn’t like it. It wants the pain to stop. And to stop the pain, if we can’t get it stopped, we want to at least cover it up with some pleasure. And that’s really the default setting, it turns out, with grievances. And to get pleasure, our brain activates the pleasure and reward circuitry, it turns out, of addiction. 

So, this is the area of the brain, the dopamine rich circuitry, but this activates not to cause us to crave narcotics or alcohol or tobacco or gambling or any of these other behaviors or substances, but instead to begin to want to harm the person who wronged us or their proxy. And we do this because it turns out that we humans take enormous pleasure in hurting the people who wrong us or their proxies, as I said. 

B:         I don’t want to believe that this is true, but this is the science, right? 

J:           This is the science. And I think it’s every honest human’s experience. I hate to say this, but it’s true and we need to acknowledge it, because we can’t continue to blame everything on evil forces that are outside of ourselves and a devil that’s lurking behind the bushes. It turns out that we humans derive incredible pleasure from hurting or killing people who we think deserve it. And we become the judge of who deserves it and who does not. And this activates the pleasure and reward circuitry inside our brains. And we get this enormous pleasure, this dopamine rush, which then fades. So that instead of seeking a narcotic, we seek to inflict pain upon other people. Sometimes that pain– and most often it’s nonviolent, right? It can be an insult. It can be the withdrawal of love. It can be the ending of a relationship. It can be social exclusion and sabotage of different parts of other people’s lives, or it can move into the realms of violence, small acts of violence that are not so destructive all the way up through and including, it turns out, revenge is the primary motive for almost all forms of human violence. That’s bullying and youth violence. That’s intimate partner violence. That’s street violence and gang violence. That is mass shootings, police brutality, violent extremism, terrorism, genocide, and war. All of these plagues upon humanity, it turns out, have at their root this grievance experience, real or imagined grievances, followed by this desire to hurt the people who wronged us or their proxies. 

And the last step in this process, because this is activating the addiction circuitry inside your head that could stop you from seeking revenge instead of just leaving it inside your head as a fantasy, which revenge fantasy is super common, is your prefrontal cortex, your decision-making self-control executive function circuitry. And if that’s been inhibited or hijacked in any way, then nothing’s left to stop you from committing these various acts of revenge. 

B:         Wow. I have so many questions I want to ask. I want to start with maybe in your spirit of sort of radical honesty and just naming this as so human and evolutionary, what’s the evolutionary advantage?  Protecting your loved ones, making sure there’s food close by that no one else steals? What’s the upside of this evolutionary development that is revenge? 

J:           Well, there was, it’s theorized to be that there was an upside and that this was, and in some small ways is an adaptive strategy in some circumstances today. But the leading theory from evolutionary psychologists is that back in, you know, the Pleistocene Epoch maybe the Ice Age and earlier, as humans were coming out of their caves to live together in societies, we needed ways to cause those in our groups to cooperate and share the same set of social norms for that society. And we also needed ways to deter people from doing things to hurt others in the society, particularly things that would, you know, interfere with our either our ability to survive from day to day or procreate, right? 

So we want a way to stop people from stealing the food that we need for winter and we want people to stop stealing our mates. And so it would make sense at that time as an adaptive strategy to punish people who do those things that are no longer considered acceptable because there was a time when that was very acceptable. That was how, you know, early humans survived was, you know, in the survival of this fittest mode, you know, the only people who survive are those who can get the food and get the mate. So, you know, fast forward from, you know, the Ice Age to today, most of the grievances that we have that trigger our desires for revenge are not threats to our survival. They are threats to our egos, to our, you know, separated-from-the-divine identities. And these individual identities are very fragile. And when they get hurt, it hurts bad. And we want to punish the people who have done that. And we will go all the way up through including acts of violence to do that.

B:         Yeah, thank you. Thank you for naming that. And what’s striking here is that the threat doesn’t even need to be real, just perceived, right? And the same neurocircuitry is being triggered. Do I understand that correctly? 

J:           Yeah, we can, yes. And we can illustrate that in a lot of ways. If you think about some of the favorite movies that you have, if they’re revenge plot movies, which many, many, many of them are like things like The Lion King or The Avengers, which says it all in the title, what you’re experiencing during those movies like The Lion King, you know, Simba, the protagonist is his father is killed by his uncle Scar at the beginning of the movie. And we, because humans are empathetic in the audience, we experience Simba’s crushing pain and crushing loss. It is so painful inside our brains. And we are wounded deeply by that horrific death of Mufasa, the father. 

And then we, having been wounded sufficiently by the filmmakers, the filmmakers take us on a journey that we hope will lead to the final outcome, which is that the villain in the movie, Scar, will finally be punished and crushed and destroyed. And they deliver that for us. So by the end of the movie, Scar is cast from a cliff by Simba. He lands in a pit filled with hyenas who tear him apart and flames that burn him alive. He’s destroyed, literally destroyed. And our emotion at that moment is yes. Oh, yes. Thank you. And yes, and that needed to happen. And I love that that happened. 

That is the satisfaction that we feel when we’ve been wronged, and the person that we–who wronged us, finally gets what’s coming to them. And we see this in all forms of entertainment. And we see it in our personal lives from grievances very small and minor, like, you know, and by the way, this affects every human being from toddler years forward. So even toddlers, you steal my ice cream, I will want to slap you or I will carry a grudge against you and try and get back at you later all the way through seniors. So, you know, it’s a lifespan experience and a lifespan problem. 

But that’s how we feel. We enjoy it. We feel wonderful in those moments. And that wonderfulness is so powerful that it can lead us into such destructive acts in our personal lives and in wider society. And when it happens at population scale, as it has, and as it does, you know, for example, with Russia and the Ukraine or Israel and Palestine, or with, you know, here in America with, you know, conservatives and liberals being at each other’s throats. It’s all about, you hurt me, you wronged me, I’m going to punish you for that to make myself feel better. 

B:         Yeah, I was just coming out of the the garden center. I’m a gardener. So I spend a lot of time at the garden center and I was coming out of the garden center and there was a bumper sticker. Let me see if I can make this non-political. It was a political bumper sticker for a certain presidential candidate. And it said underneath, “making the other side cry.” Wow. And I thought, whoa, this is exactly what James is talking about. This delight, this glee in the suffering of others. And I thought, whoa. And part of me in the moment wanted to be above all of it, right? I’m too good for that. That wouldn’t be me. Only my opponent would say something like that. It is heartbreaking to realize that this impulse is in all of us. And when you name the Lion King, you know, I guess my curiosity is, I mean, culture is reflecting what is evolutionary, evolutionarily the case in us. But is it also encouraging this? Like, what’s the role of culture either to perpetuate this, this biology, or perhaps to disrupt it or provide another path other than sort of repeating these cycles of vengeance? What say you on the role of culture to interrupt our biology in this way? 

J:           Well, it depends on the type of culture that you live in, right? So, if you live in a culture as we do, right, in a free market economy where you can make literally tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars by selling media or advertising on social networking platforms, if you can do that reliably and repetitively so without the engine ever stopping and with the money endlessly flowing, because you’ve been able to hook people on revenge and continue to give them what they want. Is that culture? Is that business? Is that a defect in culture? I won’t judge that. I’ll just say though, that a strong part of, you know, American culture is a revenge seeking culture and we’re, you know, good with it. We want it and we’ll even elect people to do it for us. 

And I’m glad that you pointed out that it’s not a conservative or a liberal problem. It’s not a political problem. It’s a human problem. It affects all sides of that. So, liberals are revenge seekers. Conservatives are revenge seekers. It just depends at the particular moment who has the power to get the revenge and gratify their desires. And that, you know, recently in America, that sort of flips back and forth every four or eight years, right? So, that’s how it looks there. 

But, you know, let’s take it away from national scale to individual scale and let’s look inside our own homes and our own families between parents and children, between spouses, between brother and sister. We’re seeing the exact same behaviors. You hurt me, you insulted me, I’m going to insult and hurt you back. If you keep doing it, I’m going to do more of it. What the culture doesn’t talk about is, is there an alternative? Why are you doing this? What can be done to stop it? 

What’s hopeful to me about all this, Brandon, is that the same neuroscience techniques, brain scans, that have been able to reveal that this is what’s happening inside our minds with revenge, they’ve also revealed that strategies like forgiveness actually have powerful neurobiological benefits, completely apart from spirituality. And these brain scans on forgiveness and other benefits from forgiveness, which are physiological things like reducing blood pressure, depression, improving sleep, and reducing cardiovascular disease, reducing depression, I mean, amazing physiological benefits, as well as the psychological. The neuroscience of forgiveness is truly, truly hopeful in a way that casting all of these bad behaviors as evil is not because if we really insist on believing that only monsters commit shootings and drive cars through crowds and commit murder suicides of their families, or do things like betray each other in their romantic relationships and taunt and tease each other on playgrounds, if we think it’s only the other person, we’re powerless. 

You know, if we think it’s only a unique type of other person, I should say, an evil one, even though you can’t identify what that means. But it’s secure to say that, but it is completely self-defeating in the ability to ever do anything to stop it, other than threaten of punishment back and endless revenge cycles. 

B:         Yeah, thank you for naming Forgiveness, and of course, a podcast brought to you by an Episcopal Seminary. So, you know, we feel really strongly about forgiveness, and this is an interesting kind of insight from an evolutionary perspective. You’re inviting us to consider forgiveness as a way of interrupting this revenge pattern, and it’s, gosh, it’s no surprise that Christian theology is built around forgiveness as a kind of interruption of humanity’s violence against itself, and its estrangement from itself, from one another, and from God. So, so take us there for a moment or two or three around forgiveness. How do you, how do you understand, in terms of, you know, your world and the work you’ve done, how do you understand this word forgiveness? In my 20 years of work with people leading retreats, teaching meditation, this is a real stumbling block for folks. It’s one of the hardest pieces of Jesus’ teaching. It often takes a lifetime to practice. So help us understand and unpack this idea of forgiveness as you understand it. 

J:           Yeah, I’m happy to. So, I have a spiritual understanding that’s similar to what you’re sharing, but I also have a very new and very important neurobiological understanding of what forgiveness is, and I’m so excited to share this information everywhere I can, because it turns out that forgiveness acts inside your brain like a wonder drug or a superpower, and you don’t have to be a spiritual person to get these benefits at all, and you don’t have to be seeking any form of spiritual experience to get them. They’re completely neurobiological, and it works like this. So when you simply even imagine what it might feel like to forgive a person, so imagine it, you’re not forgiving, and even without ever expressing that you’re forgiving the person who wronged you, without communicating any type of act of pardon or reconciliation whatsoever. This is entirely internal to you, so you just make a decision to imagine what it feels like to forgive, and you can, you know, experience it by closing your eyes right now and thinking about a grievance you might have and imagining what it would feel like to just forgive it and let it go. 

Here’s what happens according to brain scans inside your brain. The first thing that occurs is that that decision to imagine forgiving deactivates the pain network. It actually stops the pain of the grievance that started the entire process. The very thing you’re looking for, it turns out, is in the hands of forgiveness, not revenge. Revenge can give you short bursts of dopamine, pleasure, that cover up the pain. Forgiveness, on the other hand, deactivates the pain, number one. Number two, it shuts down the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction and that desire for revenge, which is a nagging–you used the word rumination at the beginning of this podcast, and I was like, “Yes, that’s right,” because that’s what we do with revenge. We’re ruminating about it. We’re thinking about it. We’re obsessing about it. We’re fantasizing about how we can get back at the person who wronged us. Sometimes this can preoccupy almost all of our mental energy, and we’re no longer nearly close to the present moment or the future, and much of our present and future are ransacked by it. 

So forgiveness, though, deactivates that circuitry. Suddenly, the cravings for revenge are gone. So the pain is gone, suddenly. The craving for revenge is gone, suddenly. And third, it activates or reactivates your prefrontal cortex that self-control and decision-making executive function circuitry, so you can make good cost/benefit decisions and evaluate whether any form of retaliation is in your own best interest. Almost invariably, there are very rare instances when it is in your best interest, your own best interest, objectively, to seek revenge and go in and commit acts of retaliation. They almost always make things worse inside of your brain, outside, in the dynamic that you’re experiencing. They’re almost never worth it. 

So forgiveness gives you these three big neurobiological bangs for the buck of true self-healing, and that’s what it turns out. The neuroscience shows us that forgiveness is the way of healing yourself from the wrongs of the past, which is a huge benefit. And you don’t need a prescription. It’s available for free. You don’t have to go to a pharmacy. There aren’t any bad side effects. I mean, it’s just this amazing thing that much of at least our society in Western cultures pretty much everywhere, have overlooked for now many, many centuries because we haven’t understood the benefits. It’s been relegated, and I say relegated not in a pejorative way, but it’s been moved into the realm of spirituality and religion only. And so people for whom– they’re disinterested in that for whatever their reasons go, “Oh, well, I’m not interested in forgiveness. I’m not trying to get to heaven here. I don’t even know that there is a heaven. So why should I bother?” That’s not what forgiveness is about. 

And all of this leads to this conclusion, which is forgiveness is for you as the victim. It’s not a gift to the person who perpetrated the wrong. And that’s another myth that we often have about forgiveness is, “Oh, we’re giving the person who just slapped me in the face a gift?” No, you’re not giving them a gift. You’re giving yourself a gift first. If you want to give them a gift and announce that you’ve forgiven them and you want to try and repair the relationship, that’s wonderful and can lead to even greater experiences of ecstasy and joy and better connection with human beings. But even if you can’t get there, you can at least heal yourself internally. It reminds me of that old adage. Maybe it was Anne Lamont, though I’m not sure that she’s the originator. What– Not forgiving is like, “I’m taking rat poison and expecting the rat to die, right?” Yeah. So now we have the neuroscience to suggest that. 

J:           And it actually is. That’s right. It’s sort of like rat poison. 

B:         Right now, I am rewatching The Sopranos, the old HBO series. I’m a third generation Italian American, so my father, even as a kid, thought it was important to sit down and watch The Godfather and all these mob movies. And inevitably, whether you’re watching The Godfather or The Sopranos, they have their own way of telling this story because they consistently will feed into their revenge biology. And they’re always taking revenge, and they’re getting unhappier, and they’re getting unhappier, and their work gets more complicated. And of course, in The Sopranos, Tony’s got to go to therapy every week to process his life, which is unraveling and getting darker and heavier, and he’s more and more unhappy the more revenge he takes, right? So in some strange way, there are cultural examples of film trying to show us of our own self-destruction. 

I have this question, this, I don’t know if it’s an internal struggle that’s being raised by your work, and that is the relationship between revenge and justice. And many of us want to be a part of creating justice in the world. We want to resist systems of injustice. And yet, as you said before, I’m conscious that a lot of folks who are committing themselves to noble causes, they’re seeing real suffering in the world, they’re seeing the way systemic injustice is causing real pain. And I wonder how much of this is indignation, how much of this is a revenge impulse? And what is the difference between revenge and justice? These seem very close categories. 

J:           Oh, yes, they’re all too close. So let me start the one step back from revenge and justice, and let’s talk about the distinction between justice and self-defense, because that’s sort of usually the first hang-up. Well, if I don’t seek revenge, I am essentially condoning what another person has done. And I’m setting myself up to be victimized potentially over and over and over again. So let’s talk about that for a second. 

So inside your brain, the way self-defense works is, it’s controlled by a different set of circuitry, primarily the amygdala. And that’s where you get this instantaneous, instinctive when you are faced with an imminent threat, let’s say of serious bodily harm or death. You have essentially three choices, you know, fight, flight, or freeze. Okay, these are your three general choices. That’s in response to a present/imminent future threat of harm. Revenge seeking is always rearward looking. It has nothing to do with the present and the future. It wants to punish people for things that have already happened and have already moved out of the present moment and into the past, so that they’re no longer in the real world at all. These are only things that are inside of the memories, perhaps, of a small group of people. And the desire for revenge itself is also only inside our heads. So these are just thought formations, if you think about it, if you think really carefully about revenge seeking, you’re, you’re trying to punish someone because you have a thought in your head of a memory of a time when you felt some pain. And that’s now creating seemingly present pain inside your head and a present desire to punish somebody for something that happened in the past and that you’ll never be able to return to. That’s a past that doesn’t exist. The past does not exist for us. And so revenge is punishing people for arms of the past and self-defense is protecting ourselves, enabling us to survive from present and future harm. 

In my book, I’m clear to distinguish between these two. And, you know, forgiveness isn’t about self-defense. And none of the neuroscience suggests that we should not try to defend ourselves and the people we love in the face of imminent threats of harm. So we can take that off the table. That’s not what any of this is about. So now let’s talk about justice and revenge. So justice for many people, right, means fairness, equity, seeing the other as ourselves and acknowledging that they deserve the same rights and opportunities that we have. We might call it social justice when we think of that. And we might think of people like, you know, Gandhi and Jesus and Martin Luther King, or the Buddha, these kind of luminaries who taught us about justice and ways of thinking about it and ways of understanding that we’re more than just ourselves. We’re also the other. It’s a beautiful conception of justice, right? And when we’re thinking about that, we’re kind of moving toward our highest selves, right? We feel like we’re maybe even approaching the divine and we think of the divine in that way, as this entity that sees us all as just one and the same and equally lovable from the beginning of those lives until the end of those lives. Amazing.  

And then when we have a grievance and we’ve been wronged or mistreated, we say, well, I’m going to have to get justice against this person. And they don’t mean fairness, equity, and love. They say justice, but what they really mean is I’m going to have to inflict some punishment and pain on that person. I may need to kill them. I may need to kill their family members. I may need to start a war or commit a genocide. I mean, all in the name of justice, or I may need to commit an act of terror, like the 9-11 terrorist attacks in which Osama bin Laden convinced a group of guys to go get justice against America by flying planes into towers and in which in response, our president came out afterward, President Bush, and said, “We’re going to bring the terrorists to justice.” And he did not mean, and we know he didn’t mean, fairness, equity, and love. What he meant was we’re going to kill terrorists because they deserve it, because they did wrong. And so we call it, why did he call it? I mean, we need to stop and ask, why did George Bush call our American revenge-seeking justice? Because justice means this highest form of self. And if you can call your lowest form of self, which is a revenger, an avenger, the highest form of self, you can justify and give sanction to, sanctify, and bless your most base instincts and desires and activities. And so it’s not a problem of the linguistics, because it’s a problem of people using this same word to mean two opposite things, to land at two different conclusions and two different points in their lives. One blesses, sanctions, and excuses, revenge seeking and violence, torture, and suffering. And one, blesses and sanctions, oneness, fairness, equity, and love itself.

B:         Wow. Thank you for naming that. I mean, it’s a lot to digest, and yet what you’re offering is a glimpse in how to heal our world, both at the macro-level, but also in the micro-level. So, I mean, how would you recommend folks who are intrigued by your book and your teaching to begin to integrate this in the small scale? Because I presume that we need to start small, we need to start in our personal lives before we can affect global peace, which we all want to do. What would your invitations be? Can you give us some tips and practices to make change in our daily lives? 

J:           Yeah, there’s a lot of hopeful information here, for sure. So one is, let me sort of stay on the science and public health side for a moment. If you begin to see the reality of revenge-seeking, or I would say grievance-activated revenge desires in your own personal life, as a kind of an addictive process. And there’s just abundant examples of seeing that. The new Netflix dark comedy, Beef, articulates this revenge addiction experience so well in people’s individual lives. 

B:         James, when you say addiction, can you define that word for us? Because I think for some of our listeners, I mean, I think we all have a kind of common sense understanding what addiction is, but I think we might be locating that outside of ourselves, right? Certainly I don’t have this addiction. So can you define the term for us? 

J:           And it’s true, not all of us have an addictive experience with addiction. So studies show that almost 100% of people in almost all cultures around the world experience revenge desires. And that’s why it’s believed to be an evolutionarily derived and adaptive strategy. When you’re wronged, you have desire to punish the person who wronged you in some way, shape or form.       So that’s nearly 100% of people. 

However, when that same group of people are asked, and have you acted on those desires, that number shifts down closer to 20%. And that 20% is a really important number for addiction, because that’s about the same percentage of people who experiment with things like alcohol or, you know, narcotics actually become addicted. You know, only 20% do; 80% do not become addicted. So now let’s talk about the definition of addiction. What is that? You know, kind of the commonly understood definition is the inability to resist a desire or behavior, despite knowing of the negative consequences of that desire or behavior.

Okay, so you need to have kind of both, you have to have, in other words, the craving. And then you have to have a compulsion that you can’t—it’s really three things that you can’t resist, you can’t resist it, even though there are abundant negative consequences to you and the people around you, and you can’t stop doing it. So you need to kind of have all of those things. So not everyone is a revenge addict. But we all desire revenge, just as and we do I and derive enormous pleasure from it, just as for instance, 100% of people derive enormous pleasure from opioids and alcohol intoxication, you know, we all experience that. But only a percentage of us, like I say, 20% are unable to control the desire for that and allow it to or are unable to stop it from ruining their lives. 

By seeing it as a as an addictive process, this opens up for humanity, the entire addiction toolkit for prevention and treatment of violence itself. Imagine that public health approaches that can prevent or treat violence, you can get there by first understanding that it’s an addictive process and that we have many, many ways of helping people who have other addictions. And lots of those should and do work for revenge addiction. So we want to start with prevention, right? And if it were possible for me to wave the wand, I would have every school health class for kids include not only drug, alcohol and sex education, but grievance and revenge education. So because–that is the this driving craving that’s as powerful as all the others, but can lead to even greater harm than the others because, you know, revenge addicts use or unlike drug addicts, drug addicts inject, you know, narcotics inside their own arms. Revenge addicts shoot bullets inside of other people’s bodies to get pleasure. It’s quite an extreme difference. 

So we want to teach kids, but we don’t; we want to teach them the day, you know, you’re going to experience grievances all your life, things are going to bother you and upset you. And you’re going to feel harmed and humiliated and wronged and betrayed many times. And you’re going to then feel this incredible, powerful drive to want to hurt the people who wronged you. And here are some ways to manage that. And we can help begin to teach that first by educating children and adults that that’s what happens, instead of continually drilling into their heads that there’s this evil force out there that we have no power over and we just have to be victimized by it. We don’t–the evil is in ourselves. 

The next thing is to think about treatment for people who are written in the 20% struggling with revenge addiction. So things like, you know, counseling, therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, 12-step programs, rehabs, all of that world is available. If we deploy it in order to be used to prevent and treat and eradicate violence, which is my ultimate quest. I mean, that’s really what I’m trying to do, is prevent, treat, cure and eradicate violence. And we can use addiction treatment strategies to do that, including and I think very hopeful, helpfully and hopefully, though, because it hasn’t been studied yet. Anti-craving medications, things like GLP one, you know, munjaro, and ozempic and wegovi types of drugs, and other anti-craving medications that have been shown to reduce cravings for food. And in early studies with things like alcohol and narcotics show that they’re also effective against those cravings. And therefore, we can at least imagine hasn’t been tried yet, like I said, that it would reduce revenge desires. So we have all of that toolkit to our side. 

But the one that you can use today that is the most powerful that your brain was already wired to do is forgiveness. You know, I think you said earlier in the podcast, people have a lot of trouble with getting their head around forgiveness, accepting it or even how to operationalize it. So for example, to address that, I’ve created and we’ve studied at the Yale School of Medicine, this process called the non-justice system, or the miracle court process, that makes forgiveness a heck of a lot easier, faster and more potent for many people. And it takes away these revenge desires. 

And the way it works is that it seems like from the neuroscience that we all have a courtroom inside our heads. And we’re endlessly day after day, hour by hour, Sigmund Freud thought, putting on trial to people who wronged us and then punishing them. And then really, at the end, it’s the question is, should I carry out that punishment in the real world? Or can I just leave it inside my head? So, you know, I’ve sort of retooled it and using, you know, because I’m a lawyer, as I said, I’ve used my experience there to create a trial in which you can put anyone who wronged you on trial inside your head at any time for free. There’s a Miracle Court app that allows you to use this for free anytime you want. But you play all the roles during this trial, you are the victim who is testifying, which from trauma experts will say, oh, that’s giving the victim an opportunity to be heard, which is so critical and self-healing is that victims want to be heard, they want somebody or at least themselves to really acknowledge they were hurt and they were hurt badly. And they’re not making it up. And then you play the defendant, you play the person who wronged you. And in adopting that person’s persona and beginning to testify as to your side of the story, sometimes this creates a sudden and unexpected burst of empathy and a re-understanding of the harm that was caused or the conflict in such a way that for some people, maybe 30% of them kind of go, wow, I might have had a role in this myself in the problem that occurred, I might have been seeing it wrong, I might have I might have been misperceiving the whole thing. 

But for the most, they go on and they become the jury and the judge. So when you become jury and judge, you get the opportunity to hold someone to account. And that doesn’t mean revenge, that just means identifying and labeling that person as the person who is at fault, who caused the harm. And then you get to hand down a sentence. And in the non-justice system, Miracle Court, it can be anything you want, not only something that a real court would impose. And then in the next to the last step, you become the warden administering the punishment. And you imagine actually carrying out your sentence upon the person who wronged you. And some important things that happen. One is it’s kind of like methadone for a revenge addict, you get this safer experience of the high you want, of getting some punishment. But it’s inside your head where you can’t hurt yourself or anyone else. But you also experience in that process the absolute pain and sometimes terror of becoming the instrument of another human being’s pain. You know, I like a hammer cannot escape the impact of hitting a nail, you always think, oh, poor nail just got blasted by that hammer. But we’re omitting that poor hammer just hit that nail and it feels the exact same force coming back against it. And that’s the same with human life, you can’t become an instrument of another person’s pain without experiencing that pain. 

And studies show that revenge seeking usually makes you feel angrier, not less, filled with more anxiety, not less. And we all know, we’re also, we become fearful because we know that our act of revenge-seeking, which feels like justice to us, is the person the targets act of victimization or receipt of victimization and wrong, creating a new round of revenge desires in them. And so we get these cycles.

 Then in the last step of the non-justice system, you’re asked to become the judge of yourself and sitting high above yourself and looking down at yourself, almost like God might, you can begin to ask yourself a few questions. Number one is, did it help to put that person on trial and punish the crud out of them? I don’t feel better. Actually, I kind of feel retraumatized. And that’s correct. Trials retraumatize people over and over and over again. Well, what might it feel like now after you’ve gotten this desire for revenge off your shoulders? What might it feel like if you chose to forgive or at least no longer seek justice in the form of revenge? And at that point, you decide what you want to do. And this is when you experience this instant set of relief. And for most people, they go, Oh, it would be in my own self-interest to forgive. That is the only way I can actually get rid of the pain of the wrongs of the past and heal from them. So that’s one way of operationalizing forgiveness that I think maybe people in the modern world who can’t imagine what Jesus might have meant by turning the other cheek and forgiving, 2000 years ago, this is a way for us to maybe get our hands around that.

B:         The book is The Science of Revenge. James Kimmel, thank you for sending this out into the world. Thank you for your research. And I believe the world is a slightly less violent place because of your work and research and because of your place in it. So thank you so much for all you’re doing.

J:           Thank you, Brandon, for the opportunity to be on your show and share this information with people. I really appreciate it. 

B:         Thank you for listening to Within, the contemplative segment of the Leaders Way podcast. We trust this conversation has provided nourishment for your own growing and healing. Until next time, may you find deep peace and courage in all you do.