Life Uncut - Could You Be A Revenge Addict Without Even Knowing It? Uncut with James Kimmel

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

Why do we want to hurt the people that hurt us?Over the years we have spoken about so many different aspects of relationships but today’s topic is one we have never fully unpacked before and it’s one of the most destructive forces in relationships: revenge.  We don’t always call it that in romantic relationships, but when couples fall into patterns of "getting back at each other", keeping score, or holding long grievances, they’re often trapped in what’s called a “revenge loop;” one that science now shows is addictive and deeply damaging. Today’s guest is James Kimmel. James is a lawyer, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and the author of The Science of Revenge. James has done a huge amount of research into how revenge quietly simmers inside all of us and how revenge triggers the brain’s reward system, much like a drug, and some of us might be revenge addicts without even knowing it.  Today we chat: James wanting to get revenge on the teenage boys who killed his dog The neuroscience of revenge & how it can be addictive Could this ever be used as a ‘defence’ in court? Why we want the people who hurt us to hurt Justice v revenge How Hollywood has relied on revenge plot narratives How women and men experience empathy differently  How forgiveness can rewire our brains You can find more from James Kimmel at his website  You can get a copy of The Science of Revenge You can watch us on Youtube Find us on Instagram Join us on tiktok Or join the Facebook Discussion Group Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because WE LOVE LOVE! XxSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode was recorded on Camaragal land. Hi guys, and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Brittany. And I'm Keisha. And today we have a bit of a different episode. It's one that I'm surprised we haven't spoken about yet, because over the years we have unpacked what I would say almost every, almost every aspect of a relationship. But today we're going to talk about something that can be quite insidious in your relationships,

not just romantic, but with families or with your friendships. That is revenge. Now, we don't always call it revenge in romantic relationships, but if you think about when you get into this cycle of like trying to get back at each other or one up each other, keeping score, having those long grievances, they call that apparently the revenge loop. And that is something that science has actually said is quite addictive. That's why we wanted to unpack it today with a very special guest. Today's guest is James Kimmel. James is a lawyer.

He's an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. And he's also the author of a really great book called The Science of Revenge. James has done a huge amount of research into how revenge quietly simmers inside all of us and how revenge actually triggers the brain's reward system, much like drugs. And some of us actually might be revenge addicts without even knowing it. So today we're going to jump into the neuroscience of revenge, why we want to hurt the people who hurt us, and how forgiveness can rewire our brains. James, welcome to Life Uncut.

Keisha and Britt, thanks so much for having me. Now, James, this seems like a bit of a weird segue, but we do like to get your embarrassing story before we get any of your neuroscience. Do you have something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. you want to knock me down first before I pick my pick myself up. We can talk about my revenge desires later about doing that and see how they're maybe piqued by this. But yes, I do have a revenge story. Mine is a pretty humiliating situation that I had as I was in the middle of law school

here in the States. The way that you get, you know, your best jobs is to kind of get an internship, which is called a summer associate position between your second and your third years of law school. And you want to land the best top firms that you can attract. And I was able to get a really fantastic law firm to be interested in me and take me on for the summer, which was great. So I show up there for the first day, I've got my new lawyer suit on, and I think I'm looking pretty good and trying to be very collegial and pleasant and win people over. And as we're going through this process in the first couple of weeks, they reveal that one of the things the firm likes to do is have softball games with the summer associates, that's the law students, and the

already existing lawyers. I'm all on board for this as everyone else is. So we show up at the softball field and we're pretty much picked for teams. And sometimes I forget, but very early in my life, sometime between birth to age four, I developed this eye problem called amblyopia, which is known as lazy eye, where the two eyes don't rotate and see the same things at the same time, which is critical for depth perception, right? So you need two eyes to be able to judge depth. And I had to have surgery when I was four years old, and then I had to wear an eye patch for years. I looked like a little pirate for a while. So that was pretty weird, but it was successful in bringing my eyes into order, but I've never actually been able to see out of both eyes at

the same time to focus. So I've always had really terrible depth perception and therefore really bad at sports that involved having a ball or other object coming straight at me. So I was playing one of the outfield positions. I was wearing glasses. I still wear glasses. I was wearing glasses at the time. And somebody hit the ball, you know, and it was all me, a very high pop fly, totally easy ball to catch. So, you know, it almost came right where I was standing. I mean, all I had to do was like put the glove up and look up and wait for the ball to come down and, you know, fall into my glove. I mean, it was just, it was perfectly set. But because of my depth perception of problem, I'm holding the glove up and it comes right over the top of the glove,

smashes me right in the face without any warning. You know, it's just like, it's suddenly there and kaboom. I mean, I feel like there was warning. You just didn't see it. I just didn't see it. It just, it just like nicks the top of my glove, comes right across, hits me like right between the eyes, breaks my glasses, cuts my face. So my glasses kind of dented into my face. Now blood coming down my face. My glasses are shattered. It was really painful, as you might imagine. So I had to kind of somehow play this off as the moron out in the field who was trying to get a job with his employer. And it just completely humiliated himself. It was terrible. I did get the job though. I was going to say, okay, good. They felt sorry for you at

least you could have taken the angle of like yeah i might have been a pity hire but you should have said oh look i didn't want to show them up i'm actually very good at baseball so you know you can't go in smashing the lawyers out of the park that's true you poor thing well look james revenge is a it's an unusual place to end up for a specialty i would say but your story is fascinating and the story that you tell of your childhood that sort of sets you up i guess a moment that could have changed your life drastically if you went one direction, but you pulled yourself back, went another direction. I'd love you to tell us about that moment in your childhood that I guess shaped the rest of your life. Yeah, sure. So I was originally raised

in a suburban house until age 12. So just a, you know, a little subdivision type of home with other homes around us and a neighborhood with a bunch of kids. But at age 12, my family moved, my brother and I out to my great grandfather's farm, which my dad had purchased. And so, you know, we were sort of uprooted, relocated to this farm. It was about a 200 acre farm. We had a small herd of black Angus cattle, maybe 10 to 15, some pigs and chickens and things like that. But we, you know, my great grandfather didn't make his living on the land, nor did my dad. They were both insurance agent. So it was kind of a gentleman's farm slash retirement farm for my great-grandfather. Like a bit of a hobby for a while, maybe? Yeah, exactly right. That's a perfect example. Yeah,

it was like a hobby farm for them. But moving out there, I kind of really latched on the idea, I would even love to be a farmer as my career. And that's kind of what I was angling toward. But most important as a 12-year-old was to befriend the kids who lived on neighboring farms. The neighboring farms were, you know, huge farms with hundreds of herd of Holstein dairy cows. And these guys, their fathers and mothers were up at 5 a.m. milking their cows every day and then milking them twice a day. So they were making their living from the land and they viewed me as an outsider completely and didn't want to have anything to do with me. And so they started shunning me and I wasn't about to have that. So I decided I would just come up with more and more ways to win them over, none of which were successful, unfortunately. And they went from shunning to bullying me. James, how bad did the bullying get? Yeah, it got pretty bad, the bullying did. So it started with, you know, verbal abuse, humiliation, shaming me, you know, teasing me, insulting me, that kind of stuff. And then it

moved as we got older, you know, from age 12, now 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17. So it turned physical. And there was a pretty good group of them. And some of them were, you know, pretty big kind of guys. It was just one of me, I am not a huge dude. But that was, you know, it wasn't good. It was, it kind of made life miserable in those moments, but otherwise my life was pretty good until one night, uh, my family and I, we were asleep at night, very late. Uh, and we were awoken suddenly to the sound of a gunshot and, you know, we jumped out of bed, looked out the windows to see what was going on. We lived on this one lane country road, so it wasn't common to have anyone near our home.

And we were surrounded by acres and acres of land. And I looked outside and I saw a pickup truck that had been owned by one of these guys who had been Bullying and harassing me for years And uh, it took off down the road So we we got up went around the house to check and see if there was any damage any bullet holes through windows Didn't see anything thought maybe they were just out spotlighting deer, which is an illegal but not uncommon activity in the country. And we went back to bed. The next morning, when I woke up, one of my jobs before going to school was to take care of our animals, the animals that we had, those beef cows

and pigs. And also among those animals was this sweet little beautiful beagle, a hunting dog named Paula. And when I went to her pen to feed and water her, I found her lying dead in a pool of blood with a bullet hole in her head. I just can't imagine. I can't imagine the type of human I mean, we know they're out there, but the type of human that would do that. But it just seems like from what you said, that's such an excessive jump in the harassment. Like that is a very different field to like, you know, pushing you off the steps of the bus after school or calling you names to then going and shooting your dog. Yeah, it was inconceivable.

And I have no explanation for it. Never gained one at the time. You know why they took it to this level. level i don't remember a specific incident you know that kind of teed them up to get them angrier than they normally were or might have been i don't know if they would have been drinking i you know there's just no way of understanding why they would have done this and so what did that do to you in the moment like what was your because i imagine you'd be scared i mean imagine you'd be distraught and scared but you know you had other overwhelming feelings too yeah yeah so just anger

sadness, grieving for the dog, fury towards them and rage, wanting to get back at them immediately. You know, revenge, which is what we're here to talk about. I absolutely wanted revenge. My parents called the police. Police came, took a report, but didn't do anything to confront them or their families. You know, they said that it would be documented and if things got worse, then they would intervene. But maybe for now, they just didn't feel like it was something that they should jump in on. It was a different time, early 1980s. Maybe if that happened today, the police response would be a little bit more robust. About two or three weeks later, I found myself home alone at night. My folks were out. And I heard a car come to a stop

in front of our house or a vehicle. And again, like I said, one lane country road, pretty unusual. So as I was getting up to see what was going on outside, I saw this same pickup truck again, stopped in front of our house. And then, you know, shortly thereafter, there was a flash and an explosion and the truck roared away again, leaving behind our mailbox, our post box mangled. They had just blown it up, blown it off of its mail post. And that was kind of it for me. At that point, I had tolerated as much as I was willing to tolerate and or as much as

I could. And so I was home alone. I had been shooting guns since I was probably eight years old. We had plenty of different kinds of guns in the house, one of which my dad had in a nightstand for personal protection. It was a loaded revolver. And I ran upstairs, I grabbed that gun, ran back downstairs, outside, jumped in my mother's car, and I tore off after these guys through the middle of the night to try and hunt them down. So, you know, so I'm flying down this one lane country road, shouting and screaming in rage. And I eventually did catch up to them. I chased them onto one of their farms and cornered them by a barn. And so, you know, the scene is their pickup truck kind of pointed toward the barn and my car behind their truck with my bright beams on. And I can see three or four heads in the rear window and they start getting out and they're squinting through my bright beams to see who had just chased them down their one lane country road. What was clear to me in that moment was that they weren't armed in the sense that they didn't have any weapons in their hands. They might have had something in the truck, but they didn't have anything in their hands. And the other thing that was clear to me is that they wouldn't have been able to know that I had a gun or necessarily who I was and what my intentions were. So I really had this complete element of surprise and kind of a perfect setup for getting the serious revenge that I really wanted.

So having the upper hand, I opened the door. I grabbed the gun off the passenger seat and I started to get out. it was at that at that moment that I just had this little flash of insight uh for a brief moment and in that I was able to kind of picture the whole set of consequences uh to my life if I went through with this and it would have been so easy to do and it would have felt so good and they and I believe they deserved every everything that I could do to them but I knew that if I survived did in any way. One of the things that would happen to me is my identity would be very different from the guy who showed up at that place. The guy leaving would have to identify himself as a

shooter and a killer. And so that was just enough of an insight that I wanted revenge badly. I wasn't in any way willing to forgive them, but I just didn't want to pay the high price that I'd have to pay to get that form of revenge at that time. And that was enough to cause me to pull my leg back inside the car, put the gun back down on the passenger seat, close the door and drive home. But I had come within seconds of killing three or four guys. James, I think that that story, it really shows us a lot of how revenge can be this quite overwhelming experience. I wonder what is going on inside of our brains that can just make us kind of act in ways that we typically wouldn't. What is it that's going on that causes us to have

this quite a heightened experience, I guess, or something that can just make us act in a way that doesn't feel in line at all with what or who we think we actually are? Yeah. So we only have answers to those really critical questions evolving over the last 20 years. Between, you know, 20 years ago and kind of the beginning of recorded history, nobody has known what's been going on. It's only been discussed in, you know, things like the Greek tragedies and Shakespeare and other novels like The Count of Monte Cristo, and it's discussed in movies, and it's discussed even in the Bible and the Quran and other religious texts. But we don't know why we want to hurt the people who hurt us. We just know that we do, and we know that when we do,

we feel really good when we do it. But now, in the last 20 years, neuroscience has really pulled back the covers. And what we are able to see when a person has a grievance, which is to say they feel victimized or treated unjustly or unfairly in any way, when you've been shamed, humiliated, betrayed, this activates inside your brain, the pain network, the anterior insula. And so your brain, it sees those psychological harms as physical pain and your brain doesn't like pain. And it wants to very quickly counterbalance this pain with pleasure. And we know from evolutionary psychologists that humans evolved this sensation of pleasure when we hurt the people who hurt us as early as the Pleistocene epoch, maybe the Ice Age

type of time, and that we probably evolved to derive this pleasure from hurting the people who hurt us because humans leaving their individual caves and needing to live in societies needed to have ways to do a couple of things. One is cause the other people in our societies to conform to the same set of social norms, right? And then the other is to prevent and deter other people from stealing the things that are necessary for survival and your ability to procreate. So stopping people from either taking your mate or taking the food supply that you depend upon. And so it made sense back in those days to cause people to, or motivate people really, to hurt the people who hurt them as a means of survival and procreation. But today,

here in 2025, all those thousands and thousands of years later, we're often seeking pleasurable revenge for a very different reason. We're doing it for injuries to our egos, to just our psychological identities, which has nothing to do really with your survival and nothing to do with your ability to procreate. It comes down primarily to your psychological state of mind and these psychological injuries that are registered so hard. But what occurs is to get this pleasure that I've just described, your brain activates its pleasure and reward circuitry, the very same circuitry that's activating for drug and alcohol addiction and tobacco addiction and gambling. Those are known as the nucleus accumbens and the dorsal striatum, these two structures in the brain.

One dorsal striatum that controls habit formation and similar addictive compulsive processes. And the nucleus accumbens, which is the pleasure and craving area of the brain, these circuits flood with dopamine very quickly after you've been wronged. And this sensation, this pleasurable sensation of dopamine then suddenly disappears. And it's the absence of the dopamine actually that's believed to create motivation, craving, the desire and the want and the need to go and retaliate against the person who wronged you or their proxy. It turns out that revenge isn't only directed at the exact person who wronged you. Often it's targeted at and inflicted upon people that may have had nothing at all to do with the wrong that you've experienced. You might be doing

that because it's easier to target one person or another, or the person who actually hurt you isn't available or is a much bigger threat to you than someone else. And so you can, we call get back, you know, take it out on the other person who had nothing to do with it. We're taking it out the more proper way of thinking about that is getting revenge by proxy against that person so then if we're experiencing these physiological i mean these physiological changes that we do liken or have scientific proof now that they are like an addiction does that mean you or people maybe in the court system are using this as a way of saying well it's become an addiction like can people actually form new character traits after performing one act of revenge like if that is a

dopamine hit and an addiction and it's rewiring our brain do you see in as a lawyer do you see that people are starting to commit one thing as a normal everyday person they've committed one act of revenge then all of a sudden they get the dopamine hit they start to form an addiction and then their whole personality changes because they're just wanting to keep chasing these revenge dopamine hits. It can happen that way. And I want to be careful to say, I mean, there's having an addiction is never a defense to committing a crime or a tort. And so even if that were the experience, it doesn't let you off the hook. So some people are concerned that by understanding revenge seeking as an addictive process, that maybe this is designed to, or might ultimately create a defense

and it's, it's not going to, and it doesn't, it's not acknowledged. No addiction is a defense. of crime. But in answer to your question there, Britt, is that revenge-seeking desires, revenge desires have been observed as early as in the toddler years. Toddlers seek revenge. If you wrong a toddler, and you can imagine just taking an ice cream cone out of a toddler's hands, you're going to get a pretty nasty response back. You might even get a slap in the face. toddlers and they'll carry grudges, right? They'll carry that for some period of time and they might try and retaliate later until there's a resolution. So we know this even from the toddler years. So it's not about necessarily rewiring your brain. All of us, it turns out, studies show that

95% of people experience revenge desires, but only about 20% act on those. And that's a very interesting and suspicious number because that's about the same number of people who, when they try drugs or alcohol, actually become addicted. 80% of people who tried drugs and alcohol never become addicted to them. And that seems like it might be also the case with revenge seeking. And the addictive process kind of grows in about the same way that drugs and alcohol track, which is to say with drugs and alcohol, you start with the tamer, less addictive substances, the less dangerous ones, right? Tobacco, alcohol, up through cocaine, and then maybe into heroin and fentanyl. There's just this range of horrors. Similarly with revenge seeking, it's about the

same. We start with less dangerous forms of retaliation. Those might be a retaliatory insult or slight or social exclusion, social shunning that is known to really hurt people, but it isn't physical. Maybe sabotaging a relationship that somebody wants or sabotaging your workplace. If you've had a dispute with a coworker or a supervisor and you're just quietly, maybe you're quietly quitting, maybe you're quietly ruining things for other people or blaming them for your own mistakes or vice versa. And then that can move beyond that and up through into simple types of assaults and then more aggravated assaults and then using weapons, death. And we know that revenge is the number one motivator for almost all forms of human

violence. That goes from bullying on playgrounds all the way up through street and gang violence, intimate partner violence, mass shootings, torture, genocide, warfare, violent extremism. All of them are rooted in a perception of being treated unfairly and a desire to hurt that person or their proxy. I think that's really interesting when you start to unpack the narrative that, you know, if you do expand it as big as something like a genocide, do you think that for a group of people to get to that point of violence, do you think that they are all just evil and they all just want to, you know, go out and murder and kill and do these horrendous things? Or does it have to do more with the fact that they perceive they have been wronged and they're trying to seek

revenge for something that has happened to them. I think I would say a lot of people on that Keisha probably are mixing up revenge and justice because as I imagine as you're talking about genocide and there is a mass population it's about seeking justice for what they feel like they've been wronged by and James what's the difference between justice and revenge? Yeah that's a great question Keisha and it I don't know if it's about mixing it up what happens is more that we humans have decided that we can use justice to mean two very opposite things in order to allow and excuse us to do all kinds of horrific acts. And it works like this. So, you know, justice out of one side of our brains and on certain days means things like social justice, equity, fairness, love,

seeing the other as yourself and wanting and acknowledging the right of the other person to have all of the same benefits that we have, right? It's this type of justice that we think of when we think of people like Gandhi or Jesus or the Buddha or Martin Luther King. So social justice. The other form of justice that we use and use the exact same word, it means the exact opposite of everything that I just said. It means punishment, retribution. It justifies cruelty, torture, murder, warfare, all of these things. And we say, I think the Catholic church has a just war doctrine. If war is waged for justice, it's okay. If it's not, it's not. But who decides what justice means in that instance? It's usually the person who is wanting to war says,

I'm merely seeking justice. It's okay for me to do this. It's always retribution. And what they really mean is revenge. I describe in the book, you know, the horrific terrorist attack on 9-11. You know, Osama bin Laden convinced a group of his compatriots that in the name of justice, they should fly airplanes into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon and kill thousands of people because of America's transgressions in the Middle East. And then after that, immediately after that almost, President Bush came on television and said, we're going to bring the terrorists to justice. He did not mean we're going to bring them to fairness, equity, and love. He meant we're going to go out and kill a lot of terrorists because of the terrible crime that

they committed. And so we have these revenge cycles in which both parties are convinced in the justness of their actions in order to excuse their revenge seeking on population level scales even. James, we see a lot more violence being perpetrated by men. From your research, Is there a difference in the way that either biologically or anecdotally different genders experience revenge and maybe even interpret revenge? There is a little bit, but it needs a lot more study. And it is a huge problem and it's a little bit of a mystery because we do know that women and men both experience revenge desires, what appears to be equally and from about the same age. So, you know, we have mean girls, you know, as kids and, you know, a female toddler is going to be as vengeful, if not more, maybe than a male toddler, you don't know, or vice

versa. So in both of our minds, we, you know, we're wired to want to hurt the people who hurt us. But one study that shows an important difference, and I talk about in the book, is one in which While punishing somebody who has acted unjustly and is now the target of a vengeful act, when men punish, their empathy centers in their mind, the ability for a male to empathize with the target, with the victim of their punishment, remains dull. So their empathy center is dull. Whereas for women, it's still active. Women can empathize even with a person who has wronged them. That ability to do that then, to me at least, you can extrapolate for that and go, that might at least explain why women draw, perhaps, if they do. And I think it's I'll just speak anecdotally because I don't think we've had any study on it, but women do seem to be willing to cut off and stop the onslaught, their retaliatory actions and aggression sooner than maybe men do who who want to continue to carry out the punishment until its final act and until they've gotten, you know, perhaps every bit of pleasure that they've been seeking out of it, because that's what we're all looking for. We're trying to get this fixed to make ourselves feel better from either the real or imagined

sense of victimization that started the whole thing. But do we know if that's a, I mean, I don't know if you know, if that's a nature versus nurture thing when women have a developed area of their brain for empathy? Is it something that biologically we are born with? Or is it something that we're taught from our moms because you're a good little girl and you're supposed to care and feel sorry for people and look after your, you know, Is it something that society has just drilled into us and that's why we're more empathetic? That's really a keen and excellent observation.

We don't have the answer to that question. The study that I was talking about does not discern, you know, when did that develop in the human lifespan? Does it develop, you know, biologically or is it something that's as a result of training? So it's a great, great question. James, you previously spoke about the fact that, you know, revenge is actually understood by kids as young as toddlers. we seem to have this like inherent understanding of wanting to get something back, wanting to get

revenge on someone. In your book, you described that the revenge plot is something that we kind of see across almost all of our movies, almost all of Hollywood. And you even gave the example in your book of The Lion King. Oh, I hated that film. Directors and writers, they kind of rely on this revenge plot narrative. Why is that? it's interesting that you mentioned uh brit that you hated that film i also hated that film and i have always felt very much in the minority of all people because people love this movie no the anxiety because the whole thing is based around this revenge and death and like i'm gonna get back to you i couldn't deal with the the anticipation of when is it gonna happen the

whole film i just it never sat right with me yeah i'm the same way and what we know from that film I mean, let's just make it even more visceral for a second. If you know the John Wick films, I mean, I just related at the beginning of this podcast my own John Wick origin story. You know, John Wick started with having his beagle killed. And it's a kind of a, it's a weird, unusual coincidence that I wasn't aware of because I'd never seen the John Wick film and wasn't brought to my attention until I was on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

And Ronnie Chang was interviewing me and he was like screaming at me going, this is John wick this is john wick and i'm going like what john wick exactly what is that so you know i outed myself as not being particularly on the public pulse of what the popular movies were at the time but you know in in all seriousness these revenge plots are incredibly gratifying move you know moviegoers are paying for television watchers whatever you're paying your ticket money is going often to a an industry that uh you're asking yeah uh to victimize you as a member of the audience uh to set up in your mind this terrible sense of injustice by being empathetic because we're all empathetic with the lead character of any story so we empathize with their pain and so

the lead character is usually seriously injured and treated unfairly and we instantly begin near the beginning of a movie to start to crave retaliation on their behalf as they do in the story. And then we have to kind of wait as the movie builds and builds and builds. And we not all know it's coming and we all expect it. And it better be a big payoff because we've paid to sit there and watch this. Finally, by the end, the hero, the protagonist is going to get some form of serious revenge against the person who wronged them, who is the villain. And this is in all superhero movies as you say because it's a reliable plot for selling tickets and then we get this huge payoff this pleasurable revenge sequence in the lion king you know scar who is

the villain uh is uh you know he sails off a cliff uh he's burned alive and torn to shreds by hyenas it's actually horrific yes and and yet this is being sold to children and and my concern in the book that I express is, this is often for kids might be their first serious dose of revenge as a drug and victimization because you're so bound with little, beautiful, sweet, cute Simba and he loses his father in such a cruel and horrific way. And so we're all instantly wounded at that moment and then we're getting this revenge load at the end and no parent in the audience is going to explain what just happened and why you're even there because we haven't known just how dangerous this is so we need to pay more attention to how you know filmmakers are playing our brains and

what we're buying because we're all complicit in it it's a bit unrelated but it makes me just think about as an adult you don't realize how actually cooked kids tv shows were even i remember bambi remember bambi's mom got shot like what's the opening scene bambi's mom died and there's like this little thorn. Like, well, I don't know why, how parents thought it was okay to watch this stuff. But I was trying to think when we were coming into this conversation, James, about like, okay, how have I, how's revenge shown up in my life? What have I done in the past to somebody or an ex or to get back at them? Because I, you know, obviously that's an important integral part of the conversation. And I realized I'm so pathetic. Like, I don't know what it says about

me. I have never sought revenge. And the only two things I could think of, one, I remember saying, I remember thinking this was like a mic drop moment. I remember saying, I'm going to get you back. I said, you won't know when, you won't know what. Is it next week? Is it next year? And I was like, but just know I'm coming. And in my head, I thought that's enough because they're going to be looking, I mean, they

probably couldn't care less. They're going to be looking over their shoulder for the rest of their life. They weren't, they probably forgot about me the week later. But I remember that was as far as it's ever really gone for me, that and stealing my ex's toilet paper. So if he did a poo, he couldn't wipe his butt after I found out he cheated on me. That's the level of my revenge. And I was like, wow, I'm actually quite pathetic.

But how does revenge typically show up in a relationship to somebody that's maybe slightly more spiteful than me? Oh, you know, maybe you've done a little bit more than you're even aware of because if you've had arguments and shouting matches and, you know, you've been, you know, accusing and in any of those moments, if you've been trying to make, you know, your partner feel bad in order to make yourself feel better, that's revenge seeking. It's not violent revenge seeking, but if you've been belittling, if you've been shaming, if you've tried to humiliate, then with either your words or your denial of affection, if that was your

motive, and it's not just about the doing of it, but if your motive is, I want him to feel and experience pain and it's making me feel better, that is revenge seeking. And that's that that neurocircuitry, it's normal. I mean, that's the neural circuitry inside your head is activating to try and heal you. Now there are better strategies than that. And societies have done a horrific job at educating us about them. And I hope we'll have a chance to talk about those in a moment, but you may have been doing more than that, but going beyond that. So these drag down arguments that are designed to hurt the other person emotionally, to humiliate them, to shame them. Those are revenge seeking moments in relationships that are, I would say, the most

common. Doing things that are kind of sabotaging, like you did with the toilet paper. That's an act of sabotage, right? I mean, you're sabotaging them in the bathroom, but that's what's going on there. Yeah, I showed him. Yeah, you showed him. And he may not have even known that you've done it. He'd just been like, oh man, I can't believe that there's no toilet paper. But I knew, James, I knew. But you knew, right? You knew there was going to be that moment. I knew he had poo on his butt that he couldn't get rid of. That's right. Exactly. So this is very common in families, in relationships, as I said earlier, in the workplace as well. It's also happening with friends. It's happening with kids in schools,

like it was as a victim of bullying. The number one factor that motivates a bully to become a bully is their own sense of victimization. Not necessarily, as I said earlier, by the child that they're bullying, but it might've been something that happened at home, or it might've been from some bigger kid or from a parent or a caregiver or a teacher. And now they have this desire for revenge and they can't rightly retaliate against their own parent. So they then decide to take it out on what they perceive to be a weaker child. And so bullies feel themselves to be victims. And there's a lot of bullying in relationships, as I'm sure you know. I mean, whether it's male versus female, both sides can feel victimized and become a bully

at almost any moment. James, is our desire to seek revenge, is it based more off of what has happened to us or is it the proximity that we have to the other person? Like, for example, I think that one of the biggest betrayals any of us could experience is being cheated on by our partner. Does that motivate us more to seek revenge or is it more about like what is done to us? I'd say they're equal in the sense that it's your sense of victimization, your real or imagined perception of being a victim. And it's important, you know, I want to emphasize that a lot of times we are only imagining that something has happened to us

or we're kind of staging a situation so that we can feel victimized to give us this opportunity to retaliate against someone and get that piece of gratification if we're really kind of getting off on this retaliatory moment. And so, you know, whether it's a betrayal or it's somebody affirmatively insulting you or maybe shoving you or taking your belongings, they're all registering in the brain, in the same way as a sense of injustice, mistreatment, maltreatment, or victimization. And any of those experiences can and almost invariably will trigger a desire to retaliate, to make yourself feel better. You did just mention, you said, I'm not quoting, but society hasn't done enough to teach us about revenge. And I guess maybe how to avert from that

and how to break the cycle. How do you break a cycle of, say, a revenge loop, like this insidious tit-for-tat that you end up not being able to get out of because it's a – I call it the Turkish tea circle. I don't know if you've ever been to Turkey. If you go to Turkey and you go out for tea because everything's tea, they continue to fill up your cups but it's only one at a time and you can never – it's like this tea circle.

You can never get out of it because one person finishes and the other person's cup has been filled. And so by the time that person's cup has, they've drunk theirs, the next person's tea is filled. And it's this, you know, it's a bit of a joke, but it's the Turkish tea circle that you can never escape from. And I see that as the same way as this revenge leap. You're always ready to get back at the other person.

What would you say to people? How are we going to rewire our brains and train ourselves to get out of this insidious situation? The good news is we don't have to do any rewiring. So the neuroscience not only shows us that we've evolved to want revenge to make ourselves feel better when we imagine or have been victimized, but we're also hardwired, it turns out, to forgive. And the forgiveness that we're hardwired to do isn't the more commonly thought of concept of forgiveness that, you know, is maybe part of religions. It has a direct physical neuropsychological process to it and serious benefits to anyone who decides, even imagines what it might feel like to forgive, gets a hold of these benefits.

So very briefly, what happens when you choose to forgive or even just imagine forgiving is that that anterior insula, the brain's pain network that I said is activated when you feel wronged, forgiveness shuts it down. So unlike revenge seeking, which just gives you this temporary dopamine relief hit, this temporary high like drugs and alcohol, when forgiveness comes along, it actually stops the pain. I mean, it's like a wonder drug in that sense. It can shut down the pain rather than just covering it up.

The second thing that forgiveness does is it shuts down the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction. So it stops these endless revenge desires and plotting and scheming and revenge rumination that often can occupy people's lives and ruin your present moment and your future because you're always trying to punish people or one person, whatever it is, for wrongs of the past. And that can just completely torpedo your ability to have relationships, to be successful in your life, have great relationships with your kids, have a good job, succeed in life. Being a success is very difficult if what you're spending most of your time doing is thinking about how you were victimized and how you would love to get back at that person. So it shuts that area of the brain down. And the last thing it does is it either awakens or reawakens the prefrontal cortex, which is your executive function area of your brain, your decision-making and cost-benefit analysis

area of the brain. And that area of the brain is critical to stopping you from moving from desiring revenge to seeking it and carrying it out in ways that would hurt you or other people. And that air is the same area of the brain that's inhibited or hijacked for other addictions like drug and alcohol addiction. You know, we all know people who have addictions know the negative consequences of their addiction are coming, but their prefrontal cortex can't stop them. It's been hijacked, it's thought, and it doesn't stop them from continuing the addiction. Likewise with revenge seeking for maybe about 20% of the people, we know there will be terrible negative consequences if we engage in these vengeful acts, but we can't control ourselves. Well, when you forgive, it reactivates your control circuitry. So you're getting those benefits. And on top of that, I have a colleague at Luther College named Lauren Toussaint, who has

shown that forgiveness and he and his colleagues have shown that forgiveness reduces depression, reduces anxiety, reduces PTSD, improves your sleep, reduces cardiovascular events. It has all of these physiological benefits as well as the psychological benefits. So it's a true wonder drug that works wonders. We don't teach it. We often think it's, you know, forgiving is what weak people do, or it's deciding to become a victim over and over again. It is not. I'm very careful in the book to distinguish between self-defense and a leaving a toxic relationship, which you can still do and forgive at the same time. You can leave that relationship. You can defend yourself to the hilt if necessary, but you can stop the pain of the past from

infecting your present and your future by forgiving it or using other addiction strategies, because now we know that it's an addictive process. And we have all of those professional strategies like cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, and even anti-craving drugs that might work to help people control their revenge desires. But do we know how to forgive? Is it something that you just say out loud and then once you've, like a manifestation, once you've said it out loud and you write it down, all of a sudden your body lets it go?

Because I imagine it's far more complex than that. It doesn't have to be, but it feels that way. And so one of the things that I've done is created a way of making forgiveness, like operationalizing it and making it into a process that's much more, I'd say, gratifying at the front end. And it's called the non-justice system or the miracle court. And it's available as a free app. You can visit miraclecourt.com. It's a web app, so you don't even download it to your phone. It just plays on the browser on your mobile device. But what it allows you to do is it creates an imaginary trial in which you put on trial anyone who's ever wronged you,

But you play all of the roles during the trial. So you are the victim who's testifying what happened to you. So you're given the opportunity to be heard. And then you play the defendant, the person who wronged you and imagining what they would say, which may develop, you may develop some empathy in that process because you're starting to take their perspective on what happened and why they did it. And you might gain some insights that way. But it's not critical because if you're still filled with revenge, we've got the rest of the steps. You become the judge and the jury so you can find guilt or innocence and you can hand down a sentence. And that sentence can be anything you want, even something a normal court could not do. Then you become the part of the warden carrying out the sentence and imposing it. And that's critical because it gives you the opportunity not only to punish the person who wronged you, safely releasing these revenge desires like methadone for a revenge addict, but it also causes you to face the fact that if you become the instrument of another human

being's pain, you can't escape that pain yourself. And that's no different than a hammer striking a nail. Think of a hammer hitting the nail and we go, oh, poor nail just got hit by this big hammer. But we forget that the hammer had to experience that impact in the exact same measure that the nail failed it. And that's what happens in real life. We all experience the pain that we inflict. We can't avoid it. And even including taking the toilet paper from your boyfriend. You know, even your ex. And then in the last step, it wraps it all up and enables forgiveness. Once you've released your, you know, desires for revenge and gotten that off of your back, you're asked to really consider, do you feel better having gotten everything you

wanted? You got to punish them. You got to put them on trial. You got all of your gratification satisfied. Are you better? Usually you're not. You re-traumatized yourself to get there. You felt the pain of the infliction of that punishment. And so then you're asked, well, why don't you just stop for a minute now and imagine, just imagine how you would feel if you forgave. You don't have to forgive. You don't need to know what that looks like or how to do it. But just imagine if you made that decision, how you would feel. And most people in our studies have shown that there's this instant sense of feeling this weight lifted of our shoulders. We feel this relief and joy because we no longer have to punish the person. A lot of times it's

feeling of compulsion. We have to get back at the person who wronged us. And you finally get permission to go, oh, I could just, I could just move forward with my life. I could leave this in the past where it belongs because it doesn't exist in the real world. It's only in my memories. Yeah. And people forget time and energy are your most precious commodities. You'll never get those back. And it takes, you know, this saying of it takes more muscles in your face to frown than smile. It takes more energy to expending, to be unhappy than happy. It's the same thing with revenge to hold on to that anger and the amount of brain space it takes up for you becomes an obsession to being able to let something go and move forward and realize that hey I get this one

life why would I hold on to this one situation they're probably not thinking about it you know why am I going to let them consume me and I say that from experience like when I say that I've done these silly things there have been moments that have absolutely consumed me you know like one of my exes had a double life was marrying someone at the same time as me and he's the one i took the toilet paper from okay there was a moment where like i wanted i wanted i was so angry and i thought how could you have treated me like this like i i wanted to get back in him but i actually just never did i just let it roll off me and thought the best thing i can do is never think of him again you know and i think there's just a lesson to be learned in do you

want to spend your precious time and energy that you have on this planet holding on to something that might have happened 10 years ago yeah so scientists that's fantastic description scientists have identified two types of forgiveness. There's decisional forgiveness and emotional forgiveness. The decisional is the easier and the one that I think you took and the one that any of us can take much more easily than we think, because it doesn't even require talking to or confronting the person who wronged us. We don't have to say we're pardoning them or forgiving them and it's all okay. We don't ever have to speak to them again. We can leave that toxic relationship behind, as you did. But we can decide for ourselves to engage in this act of self-healing by deciding

to leave it in the past and move forward. That's all that forgiveness really means, is the decision to not seek revenge against that person who wronged us, which is, in other words, is to say, to not try and hurt them to make ourselves feel better. It's really a kind of a negative decision versus emotional forgiveness, which is a type of forgiveness that we use to save a relationship that has been threatened by some form of a grievance and victimization. And in that case, you might decide to try and repair the relationship and offer forgiveness directly to the person who wronged you. But it's not necessary to get all of those benefits that I just described. They're all available without ever confronting the person who wronged you and

saying, hey, you know, peace, we're good now. You never have to do that. James, I'm curious about like our understandings of this. We're seemingly understanding what causes people to seek out revenge more. And, you know, you've even extended that into revenge addiction. Is there a treatment for it? Like, is there a drug that someone can take? Is there a behavioral therapy? I don't know. We're not going to go into lobotomies, but like... Keisha, people are not getting lobotomies. I'm kind of wondering, like, if we're able to understand what motivates people to do this and we're able to kind of scientifically say this is the thing that causes it, are we able to interrupt that process? We can. And that's really maybe the biggest part of the good news here is not only is forgiveness, let's think before I move on from forgiveness, it is this wonder drug that's free. You're hardwired to do it. you don't need very much training to do it. There are organizations that can train you and you can

Google for those. Actually two, the one is called the Center for Peace and Forgiveness and the other is the Path of Forgiveness. So you can get coaching in how to forgive if you'd like and if that would be helpful and it can be very powerful for people that use it. But set aside forgiveness. If that's intolerable for you, that's okay because there's even more good news. By seeing revenge seeking and violence as addictive brain biological processes. It brings the entire addiction prevention and treatment toolkit online and available to help people prevent and treat revenge, addiction, and violence. So in other words, like I've said a little bit earlier, cognitive behavioral therapies, motivational interviewing, peer support, 12-step programs,

mental health counseling, all of those can be used now, not only to help someone who's trying to, you know, stop using alcohol, but can be used to help someone who really can't control their revenge seeking behavior and wants to change and correct that. So there are those types of treatments available up to, and maybe including, this hasn't been studied yet, but the anti-craving medications like GLP-1s, like Moonjaro, Zempik, and all of those, those types of anti-craving medications that work against food cravings are being studied right now to see if they work against drug and alcohol cravings. And there's been good preliminary evidence that they do. The next step would be to go ahead and test them against revenge desires as well. That hasn't been

studied yet, but I would expect we would see real benefits from those types of drugs. And if we started to survey people who are on them who have said, hey, not only am I losing weight, but I used to drink a lot and I craved it all the time and now I don't anymore. They might also, if asked, and we just haven't done it yet, if asked, have you seen any effects on your interpersonal relationships and the times that you feel wounded? If you're a grievance collector, somebody who's always feeling injured, they might really be able to say, actually, I don't even experience that as much as I used to so it's possible that's really interesting James thank you so much for coming and talking to us today it's a fascinating topic and something

that every single person experiences and maybe like you pointed out for me maybe you don't even realize you're doing it within your relationship maybe it is those really tiny minute moments we are going to link your book the science of revenge in our show notes for anyone that wants to go and find out more but the final question did you forgive the boys that killed your dog I have forgiven them. I have exercised decisional forgiveness. I never saw them again after that. You know, kind of a weird thing happened after I, you know, half confronted them there that night with the gun, but never flashed it. They didn't come back. I'm not sure if they got a whiff of we've probably gone as far as we should ourselves and we'd better pull it back together again or what. I didn't befriend them and it took me quite some time to forgive them, but I have forgiven them now. I don't wish anything bad for them. It's, it's too bad that it happened, but it's in the past. There's no point in continuing to try and retaliate for something that happened in the past

when you can't experience it with your senses ever again. And you can't change it. I so respect that. I don't know if I would ever be able to get to a place of peace with that. Thank you so much, James. We appreciate your time today. You're welcome. Thank you. We'll be right back.