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James Kimmel, Jr. is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. He’s a really groundbreaking scholar of revenge and forgiveness, and he’s known in part for identifying compulsive revenge seeking as an addiction. His book, which is called The Science of Revenge, is fascinating and very relevant.
James’s personal story with revenge begins in his childhood, when he was bullied pretty mercilessly. As James shares in his book, he came very close to committing a mass shooting in retaliation, but thankfully he did not.
As an adult, James became a lawyer—which is when he really realized that he had a revenge addiction, which he explains more about in the top of our conversation today.
As you’ll see throughout our conversation, there’s a spectrum when it comes to revenge but we pretty much all experience revenge desires in our lives. And how we deal with them, or not, affects us individually…it affects our closest relationships and partnerships…and it most certainly affects our broader culture.
Today, James explains how actually trying to get revenge is pretty much always a lost cause—it simply makes us feel worse. But when we feel wronged, or when a grievance arises—it’s not easy, and it might even be harmful, to try to ignore it. At the same time, forgiveness may feel impossible.
This is why James created a simple process—that you can do in your mind—which he calls the NON-Justice System or Miracle Court. And he’ll take you through this toward the end of our chat today.
MORE FROM JAMES KIMMEL JR.
James’ Website
Phil Stutz and The Maze: “Welcome to the Maze”
Cognitive Dissonance with Carol Tavris: “The Self-Justification Trap”
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
I loved your book. My favorite books and the books that I also try to write are revealing things that are so obvious and yet were hidden. And I feel that
JAMES:
Way about feeling that that’s a cool thing.
ELISE:
And I felt that way as I read your book. I was like, oh my God, yes, obviously, and yet previously unstated.
JAMES:
Yeah, hard to imagine. It’s right here on the tip of all of our noses, I always think, but we see right over the top of it into things that mislead us. So yeah, it is a cool experience as humans to suddenly see something that has been there all along, but it’s been concealed probably by ourselves more than anything else. So yeah,
ELISE:
I think that’s a good place to start, really, which is, and you tell your own story a bit at the beginning about the path that your life might’ve taken, but when do you think was the moment where you realized actually revenge addiction, this need for vengeance follows the same, I think it follows the same pathological pathways as any other. Do you have any other addictions in your family that you were Venn diagramming it to or when was this major? Aha.
JAMES:
When the major aha occurred was much later in my life than my teen years when I was bullied and had this very, very close encounter with committing a mass shooting. It was actually in the middle of my legal career, and by that point I had been struggling a ton with these ups and downs throughout my legal career of small litigation wins being these highs and the winds are making other people, the people on the other side of the case miserable in order to try and have our will with them. My client and I would see that in my clients too. We were all getting very excited with these small wins and then having these lows that come after it. And that was infecting my personal life a lot as well and making me a pretty miserable and awful person as an avenger about everything in my life.
And at that point, I had this moment where I was all alone and essentially suicidal at this point because I couldn’t get away from it. I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. And it was at that point that I thought, this looks like addiction. And I don’t have myself any other addictions. Some family members, close family members have had alcohol addictions or alcoholics or had been alcoholics. So I had some picture of what that looked like, but not a full picture. But it was that experience of what was going on with me and what was going on in the world around me where people were shooting and attacking each other and abusing each other. And we see this in the news. I’m not seeing this walking down the street every day, but I’m seeing this in the news. And it became very empty to me to think about all of this horrific behavior and the damage it’s doing as just the doings of some evil force outside of humanity that we’ve been blaming it on for 5,000 years or longer. And I thought there has to be some connection between all of this. And I began to think that people who are doing this are out of control in the sense, in the sense that we think of people with addictions ourselves or others are out of control. We’ve been in effect possessed by a force. And it used to be belief that other addictions were in effect possessions, right? You’re possessed, you’re immoral, you are evil person.
ELISE:
Alcohol is called spirits. Yeah,
JAMES:
Right, right. Exactly. Yeah, that’s a great insight that we call alcohol spirits because they seem to right, you drink them and you seem to be taken over by spirits. That’s a really excellent insight. And so science has a while back figured out that it’s not immorality, it’s a lot of brain science that’s causing this to happen. And it’s not a dark force outside of yourself. It’s a set of biological structures and chemicals inside your own head that’s leading this type of behavior and this compulsion and this addiction that it can just destroy your life, even though you know it’s happening, you can’t stop doing it. I thought that looks like violence to me. And that’s when I became obsessed with this question and decided to move beyond my legal practice and ultimately become a revenge and violence researcher at Yale to study this. Because at the time that I was seeing this was just about at the exact right, very lucky time that some neuroscientists at universities around the world, especially in Europe, had just begun putting people inside of FMRI brain scanners to see what’s going on inside your head when you have a grievance and are given an opportunity to seek revenge.
And they started seeing the exact same reward pathway that’s activated for revenge. It’s this go circuitry that launches us forward, that gives us craving and to go and do something despite the negative consequences of doing it. Those early insights just happened at the right time when I was looking into this, but none of those researchers were looking at it from an addiction angle that wasn’t their purpose. And it would be another 20 years before even a few of them were starting to connect the dot between this circuitry and actual addiction and that revenge seeking could become a compulsive addictive process. And that’s the journey there.
ELISE:
And we’re going to spend most of our time talking about the cultural implications of this, but I want to go back to those days in the courtroom, and I’m curious in terms of the rutted sort of chasing the dopamine high of getting revenge in the times in between, what’s the emotional soup that you’re in? Is it this discomfort? Is it guilt? Is it dissonance? I just exacted a huge payment now I’m feeling like maybe we went too hard and that was too much and I’m feeling dissonant with who I feel myself to be. What’s the emotional nut of it that you’re trying to soothe? Or for you, was it just a chemical reaction?
JAMES:
Yeah, no, I don’t think, I wouldn’t have been able to describe it as chemical at the time. Of course, I think it sounds like you’re talking about where I or anyone emotionally after a revenge episode where we so revenge seeking, we have to step back just a second and go, why do we want revenge at all? And when someone hurts us, we could want cotton candy or a bag of potato chips because that makes us feel good, but that’s not what we want. What humans want most of all, is the pain of the person who hurt them or a proxy for that person. And that’s how we’ve evolved to make ourselves feel better and that other person’s pain, it’s really difficult and it feels shameful to say, but that’s what makes us feel better. We get highs off of other people’s pain when we feel that we have been wronged or mistreated, victimized, insulted, betrayed these very common emotions and also physical assaults as well, but much of it may be the majority comes from psychological assaults and these psychological assaults, physical assaults, they are true real pain.
They activate the pain circuitry inside your head, the anterior insula and your brain on pain wants that pain to stop you, your brain, all one want this pain to stop. And the instinctive, instantaneous evolved way to get this pain to stop is not actually to stop it, to provide a nice, sweet, tasty dose of pleasure that coats the top of it. And that’s this dopamine hit that we get when we retaliate. And that’s what retaliation is, is that attempt to hurt someone else for something they’ve done in the past. It’s never, we’re not talking about self-defense here. We’re not talking about the present threat of instant or near term future harm where you are fight, flight or freeze type of instinct. Here we’re talking about punishing people for stuff that happened in the past that no longer exists in this world there they’re no longer able to be experienced by your bodily senses or anyone else’s things that happen to you, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, all the way back to your childhood.
And we still, we have these pains and we want pleasure to cover that up and we get this instantaneous pleasure. And afterward going to your question then is so after we’ve gotten what we’ve craved, what’s that feeling like in that space afterward? And the thing about it is a couple of things about it, I guess. One is, so these dopamine surges that happen that motivate us to seek another person’s pain and inflict it on them and enjoy that they’re temporary. So this doesn’t last very long. Kind of like drug highs. They don’t last long and when they go away, they re-expose the pain of the grievance that started this process. So now that you’re feeling this pain again, and it’s kind of shocking and dispiriting because you wanted the pain to go away and stop and you believed that if I could just hurt the other person and make them hurt, my pain will go away.
And that’s a completely false way of thinking. You can’t get your pain to stop by making another person feel pain. But economically, if you think about it, this economic exchange, it’s like we wake up every morning with our treasure of happiness for the day and it’s in our wallet or it’s in our purse or whatever, and we start to wake up in the world and we’re like, Hey, everything’s great. This is good. And then it starts right then we start confronting other people and problems in our lives and it feels like someone else maybe has come and taken a chunk of our treasure of happiness and run away with it. And it makes sense if that were possible to go and chase them down and beat them up and take your happiness back. But happiness isn’t a commodity of finite supply like gold or silver coins that you could take or jewelry and you could bring back. It’s an emotion. And so you go, there you go, give me my happiness back. They can’t. So then you want to hurt them and you hurt them and you go, oh, that felt good. That must’ve been the win here for me. And then I go back and it’s gone again and the pain’s still there. I wasn’t ever able to get my happiness back. The only way you can get your happiness back is to recreate the supply of happiness that’s inside of you, which you control people outside of you don’t control that.
ELISE:
And we’re going to talk about forgiveness and the courtroom in your mind and all of these tools which are so powerful, I think this is all very human, whether you have this addictive tendency towards revenge or not. But in my experience, whenever I’ve been angry and wanted to get mine and get revenge, then what I find is I feel, and maybe I’m experienced enough in life to know exactly what you’re describing. You’re going to just feel worse if you try and make this person pay or that there’s some holding on that’s happening there that’s not serving. But also I recognize in myself, and this goes with, I don’t know if you’ve ever read Carol Tavers and Elliot Aronson’s book, mistakes were Made, but not by me, but your work would be an interesting match. It’s all about dissonance theory and this idea too that someone does something to you, you do something in response, and then you start really building your court case for why they deserved whatever it is that you did.
And so you build monsters to self justify your own actions against them. You start creating these specters in your mind of these atrocious humans who are deserving of all the pain that you have heaped on them or I mean, you obviously see it in divorce courts across the world. So it’s a really interesting psychological factor. And I think what you’re talking about is, I don’t know, was it 20% maybe similar to general rates of addictive behavior, that there’s a certain segment of us who just do not have that stop button who cannot without some of the interventions that you’re going to talk about today, cannot control this impulse and compulsion to seek revenge. Yeah.
JAMES:
Right. Yes, that’s right. And you can think of that 20% as equivalent to roughly the number of people in a population who have contact with the criminal justice system because there are folks for whom for the most part are not born evil, they’re not born different, they’re not generally psychopaths or sociopaths. They generally don’t have brain injuries. Those are small percentages of people whose brain structures are actually different. But for the primary group of people who engage in acts of violence that are relatively minor up through and including killing or mass shootings, these are people who have a grievance and a desire for revenge and know or reduced ability to control it. That’s your prefrontal cortex area, the stop area, your brain that’s supposed to stop you from doing things that will visit upon your life, serious negative consequences. And in general, addiction, substance addictions, behavioral addictions, roughly 20% of the people in a population who, for instance, experiment with drugs, alcohol, tobacco, things like that are going to become addicted to them, which is to say that 80% are not addicted.
They may from time to time use those substances, but it doesn’t become a factor that ruins their life or the lives of people around them. And that seems to be about the same number. It hasn’t been fully studied yet of people who experienced revenge addiction. What has been studied is that between 90 and a hundred percent of people in a population, if asked, have you experienced revenge desires recently? We’ll say yes. Yeah, because we all feel wronged almost hour by hour every day, right? There is something that is going to tick you off, right? That’s what feeling wronged means. A grievance, it can be really minor. The toothpaste didn’t just ran out to something far more significant, but to 90% of people will feel this desire to retaliate against someone or something. But only about 20% when asked, and have you acted on those desires will say, yes, I’ve acted on those desires, which kind of maps with the addiction, substance addiction percentages as well.
ELISE:
So some of the really fascinating parts of your book, and there are many fascinating parts, and I think incredibly important, maybe we start with mass shooters because you look at some of the manifestos, and this aligns too with, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in conversation with Nabi Way, but you guys should get together. She at NYU and she studies boys in her latest book, she looks at a lot of manifestos of these mass shooters. And yes, as you explain, we want to look for psychopathy, right? We want to be able to say, these are all sociopaths, or they’re hallucinating or they’re schizophrenic, or there’s some sort of underlying mental disease or they’re antisocial, whatever it is. The reality is that often we can’t find the underlying disease. And you point to there’s evidence all over these manifestos that these are revenge addicts seeking revenge on people and their proxies, which is why so many people get swept up in these horrific crimes. And it’s always hard to talk about these things without when you’re like, well, this is a disease model, but I think we really need to understand what’s happening here. And we clearly don’t, in part, so that I think your point is you can start profiling kids, students for this tendency and potentially intervene or catch some of these actors before it gets to this point.
JAMES:
Yeah, I might say though that it wouldn’t be, I wouldn’t think of the word profiling here in that way. And the reason I say that is that the best thing you can do is start with, so let me say this. So the desire for revenge has been observed among people, humans, as early as the toddler years. You think of snatching an ice cream cone from a toddler’s hand, and you’re going to see some retaliatory behavior from a toddler, right? You’re going to either maybe get a slap back, you might get some mean words coming out, and they might hold a grudge for a period of time until they’re over it. And so this starts at an early age, and this means that kids, young kids, toddlers, and certainly by grade school for sure, for real, are experiencing grievances of all sorts in their lives. And the most significant would probably be being bully victims or witnessing that.
And then all kinds of things that seem trivial in between. But we don’t spend any time teaching or helping support kids really in any methodical way in getting over these grievances and how to manage them that don’t involve the use of this dangerous behavior revenge seeking. And so once you get up to middle school and teen years where you could get school shooter age kids, I think the most valuable thing we can do instead of profiling, because then that just creates an other situation, is intervening on the side of and helping people who feel victimized wherever they are and whoever they are. There’s just an interesting study that came out from some scientists at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit and some other researchers looking at behavioral threat assessment, like how to assess whether somebody who’s exhibiting some concerning behaviors is an actual threat, right? To commit a shooting of some sort.
And one of the things that they concluded there is this pathway to violence. There are, I don’t know, maybe six steps on the pathway that threat assessment professionals look at. Most of them are like things that you can see visibly and they end with accumulating weapons, identifying targets and things like that, which is kind of the easy end of the range. But where that pathway to violence starts is with a grievance. I mean, actually that is the first step on the pathway to violence is having a grievance. And then the next one would be, and not managing or being able to manage the desire for revenge that comes with it. So becoming preoccupied with that grievance and the desire to retaliate. So we can start to do a lot better at that end. And the study concludes that for behavioral threat assessment professionals, it may be more important not to try to identify, I mean, you want to identify threats when you can, but intervening on any grievance is a huge benefit for any community, any family, any individual, a grievance that isn’t getting resolved in a productive way and you’re not able to move past.
It is a pain that can metastasize. And so we ought to be thinking about it in that way rather than, and we can have that in health classes, in schools. This is one of the most dangerous addictions you’ll have. We already teach dangerous addictions like drug and alcohol abuse in schools, and we could talk about revenge seeking in just the same way without adding much time to it, but adding a huge amount of benefits so that kids understand their own powerful cravings and their own intense pain that they feel when they’ve been wronged or perceived that they’ve been wronged. And we should mention here, grievances aren’t, they don’t have to have a factual basis, an invented grievance completely manufactured in your head or by someone else who puts it in your head. If that is turned into a pain point and a desire for revenge, it doesn’t matter whether it was false or not so real or imagined grievances are just as dangerous.
And we see that going to now, the mass shooter manifestos, they’re filled with grievance, they’re filled with the desire for revenge, and a lot of their grievances when you’re looking at it from the outside of it, are manufactured. And so there may be a delusional disorder going on with this person where in other words, they’re delusional in the sense that they’re seeing people who are wronging them and attacking them all the way around, and that there’s no other choice but to become an avenger against society itself. And that’s what we tend to see with mass shooters. They’re trying to hurt society itself for their own wrongs to make themselves feel better. And so there is a brain disease there, but it’s not the ones that we typically think about as schizophrenia or even delusional disorders or anything else. It’s revenge addiction, which is a revenge use disorder, just like substance addiction. And we consider that a mental illness that can be intervened on, and we should consider mass shootings as instances of revenge use disorder that can be intervened on. And by doing that, we go from becoming just helpless victims, constantly shocked at these events, to taking it over with public health approaches, the way we’ve been able to do with other addictions.
ELISE:
And I want to talk about these horrible cultural figures like Hitler and the way that you map it. But before we go there, I want to talk about Chris from the KKK because it’s another manifestation, right, of almost group vengeance seeking. And I loved him. And he described to you how it starts, right? With these grievances formed at an early age that made it incredibly easy for him to convert him into the K, k, K. He says instead, there was a loving group eager to embrace me and acknowledge my pain. It was the K, k, K, and they did not approach me with pitchforks and burning crosses, but with a plate of barbecue, ribs, a Bible, and the promise of a brotherhood I missed from my days in the army. And obviously then in these instances, you get the collective pain and desire for revenge from people who feel betrayed, slighted, diminished, bullied, harmed, and then easy targets in the form of immigrants, Jews, black people who are certainly not responsible for the pain that they’re experiencing in their day-to-day, but have been collectively selected as if these people did not exist, I would not feel so victimized.
So you talk a little bit about, because now he’s a really formidable ally in KKK intervention and explaining these underlying dynamics where suddenly someone is wearing a white sheet or not in our culture now. Now they’re just out, everyone’s out. Or you can wear one of those ice masks,
JAMES:
Right? But I’m glad you brought up Chris. He is a really powerful person and a guy who went from violent extremism to becoming a guy who deradicalize people and tries to get them out of those organizations. And his story begins with having been sexually abused as a child by family member and not being able to get over that. And it was the same sex family member as he got older, he began to associate people who are gay or on the L-G-B-T-Q spectrum in any way as automatic threat. So he sees those people as threats and as the type of people who would’ve done that to him. And then he projects that across an entire universe of individuals, and he’s never been able to get over what this family member did to him. And the pain is still there as an adult, and it continues to drive him forward in his revenge seeking.
That happens, and then it sort of replicates. He joins the army after nine 11. He wants to go to the Middle East and avenge America for what happened after the terrorist attacks on nine 11 and gets into some really harrowing, horrific types of behavior against Muslims who he sees as all his enemy and proxy for his own pain in America’s pain. And this goes on and on. And when he comes back, he eventually gets recruited by the KKK and becomes a Nighthawk KKK guy, which is the enforcer within the KKK organization. So that brings it full circle. And it was amazing to watch him is I introduced him to some of my methods of trying to process what happened as a child and forgive what happened. And his experience at the end of that was actually, at first, he was very hostile to it and didn’t want any part of forgiving what this person had done to him, but he eventually came around to kind of feeling like his brain had been rewired by the process and he did let it go.
And that letting go has kind of transformed his life. And that’s what we tend to see at the other end of this journey. If we stop revenge seeking and we start thinking about ways of releasing these pains, and even forgiving, which I now have neuroscience that shows that forgiveness doesn’t effect rewire your brain, it stops that pain. Instead of just covering it up with a dose of dopamine, it ends the pain. That’s a critical insight. And he’s just a beautiful example of seeing that for himself. And it’s an important insight for all of us when we think about extreme is and extremes on any side of any situation, but particularly now in the country with right politics or left politics, and everybody feels aggrieved by the other side, and there’s no insight into the other side whatsoever. There’s no forgiveness whatsoever between one side and the other.
And until that happens, it’s just going to get worse, unfortunately. But we start to see the other person as a demon and motivated by ill will and terrible intent, which is in most if not all cases, not the situation. They’re motivated by this perception of having been wronged by the right or the left. And we have to understand that it’s the same brain. It doesn’t matter whether you think your right or left, your brain is identical to the person on the other side of your situation, and they’re acting out of their own grievances and their own desire for revenge just the way you are. It’s just the same thing.
ELISE:
And then you think about it, how it becomes loaded with when you then inflict pain on the other side, and then you’re like, they’re going to seek revenge. We see this obviously in our national politics, and so the fear just gets ratcheted up, fear of reprisal, fear of loss of control, and these things just become increasingly heightened as the stakes become higher. I want to leave ample time for forgiveness and the courtroom, but first I want to talk about the role of humiliation. And let’s talk about Hitler and Mao and Stalin because you outline how our biggest mass killers, right?
JAMES:
Yeah.
ELISE:
I mean the Kangas Khan, 40 million Hitler, 42 million, Stalin, 20 million, Mao 40 million, but how they were ultimately motivated by revenge, which only became more extreme. And Hitler, let’s talk about Hitler just because I feel like people don’t necessarily understand that core wound of the Treaty of Versailles and the way that he felt and rallied Germans around this idea that they had been humiliated and then the Jews became an easy scapegoat. This is after World War I. So can you talk about how he got going a little bit in terms of ratcheting up his revenge fantasies and getting a nation of people to jump on board?
JAMES:
Yeah. It actually starts a little earlier than that. This goes to Hitler becoming a young adult and trying to become actually an artist and a painter. It’s always shocking to think that he was a young guy once and all he wanted to do was be a painter, an artist, and he was not very good at it, was shunned by the art schools that he wanted to get into. And this began his sort of grievance experience in life as far as we can see going back through history. And then not long after that rejection, he gets the opportunity to join the German military to fight in World War I. And he almost instantaneously faces severe combat, lots of death all around, he’s wounded multiple times, he becomes friends with other soldiers and really finds that that universe, the universe of warfare for him was this place where he could really become an avenger extraordinaire and experience the heights self-sacrifice and seeing other people sacrifice their lives.
And suddenly the war ends with the armistice, with the allies, and that stops the war briefly. And then the Treaty of Versailles comes along to finish it. And the Treaty of Versailles in that treaty, the allies imposed because the allies won. Germany was defeated and they could say what they wanted. And the allies wanted maximal revenge, imposed severe punishments on Germany, severe reparations, took parts of the land, the industrial sectors, and humiliated and just truly made Germany grovel. And Hitler in particular saw this and felt this extremely and acutely. But the guys that negotiated that piece for Germany were actually the German generals, but they blamed it on German politicians, including and especially Jews, and said they negotiated the deal, and it’s the politicians who stabbed us, the soldiers, the military who had sacrificed so much in the back. And that gave birth to what’s known as the stab in the back myth, which kind of has its analog when the United States with the stop the steal myth, right?
That the election was stolen from Donald Trump in favor of Biden. And so we have these two important parallels there where complete myths with no facts to base them on ripped large groups of people who felt, and rightfully so, if they were true, they would rightfully feel seriously aggrieved. If the election had been stolen from Trump, people would be absolutely within their rights to feel very, very, very angry and want that to stop. But what has occurred and what occurred in Germany is that the idea that it occurred without any facts was enough to get a lot of people very angry. And Hitler saw this as a way of capitalizing on infecting at population scale, other people with his own grievances and getting them charged up enough to become in group population form great Avengers, and to begin to start to retaliate first inside of Germany against each other and then ultimately outward in World War II by attacking nations around Germany.
And so what you see from Hitler isn’t, when you look at it this way, in this light, in the light of the science of revenge, you’re not seeing a dark demon character, which we can’t really put our fingers on in science. We’ve never identified the devil, right? I mean, the devil just doesn’t exist. But we do see people who seem like they’re acting in a demonic way, which he did, and that really fits absolutely perfectly with the idea that he was seeking revenge on a daily basis and using German technology, German wealth, German military to do that also at population scale, at a scale that’s never before been attempted in humanity. And then Stalin was doing it at roughly the same time and Mao in China. So you had three nations around World War ii, all seeing at the same time what mass communication can do in terms of causing people to feel the same grievance at the same time, and all in unison, desiring revenge, punishments, retribution at massive scale, and then giving them the technology and the resources to go and let it loose. And that’s what seems to me in hindsight to be the cause of tragic atrocities like World War ii.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, it’s a fascinating theory that maps and makes a ton of sense, and you offer lot of really interesting, I guess you would call it evidence, but just the amount of the languaging of vengeance. You write Hitler and his followers methodically nurse multiplied and magnified their grievances against the November criminals of 1918 and others. They fantasized and meticulously planned their revenge creating organizations and systematizing processes for pleasurable revenge delivery within Germany. So that’s fascinating, and I think eyeopening and helpful because as you said, we’re looking for these single demonic sources, but the reality is that we can all participate. It’s this unconscious mob action where suddenly you’re betraying your own values and you’re participating in something that’s so outside of who you feel yourself to be because you’ve been psychically caught up in a fervor that feels good. And that’s really hard, I think for the average person to integrate. It’s like, how did I get
JAMES:
Here? All three of those guys, right? All three of those guys, Hitler, Stalin, and Mile all identified, they all saw it and they all saw how effective it was. And that is what enabled them to become as powerful as they did is they keenly were aware that if you can get a group of people to share the same sense of humiliation and betrayal and shame, these are the three grievances. They can convert someone into a homicidal person without a lot of effort when that is provoked and it’s then hammered on and provoked over and over and over again, and the revenge desire is then encouraged, you’re encouraged to gratify it, and it starts in ways that seem to be small, and then they just keep picking up and they keep picking up and they keep picking up. This looks very much like, I mean, what does this sound like?
It sounds like addiction. It sounds like a drug dealer coming into a community where there are no drugs and just slowly providing the hits, and eventually a group of people get really hooked on it and they start to tell other people, you got to come and try this stuff. And off it goes into this same type of behavior in which you’re seeking this pleasure in these pleasurable hits. And when you get the let down, that’s going to happen right after you’re going to go back to the dealer for more, and that becomes a cyclical process until it’s finally broken. So in Mao’s case, he did something really unique, which was he got peasants in the villages to engage in revenge seeking experiences, right in their own communities. These struggle sessions in which people from the communist party would come to the villages and say, tell us who you don’t like and what they’ve been doing wrong to you.
Hey, that’s terrible. We should put them on a public trial, and you don’t have to wait for the government to do it. Let’s just go and do it together. And they get entire villages to target a few people and put them on public display, parade them around, beat them sometimes, beat them to death, torture them. And this started happening across the country. And then they would add into it the messaging that Mal wanted, which was communism is enabling you to do this, and this party is the party that can change the way China looks for your benefit. And it was genius, unfortunately,
ELISE:
No. And it’s conversion too, of the scapegoat mechanism, offloading pain and hurt on someone else. Then you get the self-justification going. They deserved it, feeding the fear of reprisal, feeding more violence. It’s easy to understand how this seed gets planted and then takes off like a noxious weed.
JAMES:
And we’re talking about big scale, but this is also at the family level. This is between intimate partners, two people who are dating each other, and one or both of them get trapped in this cycle of You’re insulting me, you’re shaming me, you’re humiliating me. I’ve got to come down on you, in which case you retaliate yourself. And so both sides start retaliating and we end up with these kind of mini conflagrations that can destroy that not only that relationship, but you can really injure other people. You injure your children and you go, how could you possibly go this far? And you go this far just the same way we do with other addictions. The pleasure is there, the pain after the pleasure leaves is huge, and you just go back to it and do it again. It’s this habit Q driven habit formation. That’s part of every type of addiction, and it’s highly prevalent within grievance triggered compulsive revenge seeking.
ELISE:
So let’s talk about ways to stop it. Let’s talk about the science of forgiveness and the courtroom of the mind and anything else that you’re trying to seed into the culture, because we obviously need all the tools we can get here.
JAMES:
Yeah, happy to do that. So I think it’s helpful to see the brain science on both sides to see how effective and how astonishing and wondrous is forgiveness. Because we think of forgiveness as a lot of people do, at least as some sort of a spiritual practice that only spiritual people do. And it’s really a weak thing that you do, and you’re only doing it to become pious or try to get into heaven or something. And neuroscience is now showing us that’s exactly not the case. I mean, this is really different from that. I mean, it can be that for spiritual people, but a pure atheist can get enormous benefits from forgiveness. And I’ll explain how. So with grievance trigger revenge stars, you activate this pain center of the brain, the anterior insula that in turn activates the ghost circuitry of addiction, the dorsal striatum and nucleus ac Cummins, that’s where the cravings pleasure and habit formation occurs.
So that’s the go circuitry telling you to do it. And then you have this prefrontal cortex that’s your stop circuitry, that’s telling you to stop doing things that would hurt you like revenge in most cases. It usually has a backfire effect upon you. And that’s been shown in studies over and over and over again. We all know this from real life revenge seeking is always a bad idea, but we can’t stop wanting to do it anyway. So here’s what happens. When you even imagine, if you just imagine forgiving somebody or an event, you don’t have to forgive, but just pretend that you might choose to forgive. Here’s what you experience inside your brain in terms of brain scans, that pain area of the brain, the anterior insula where the grievance had activated stops activating. In other words, it actually shuts down the pain, which is an enormous wonder drug type of effect that we didn’t even know was there until the last 20 years.
So we now have neuroscience evidence that backs up the teachings of people like Jesus and the Buddha Gandhi and Martin Luther King and all kinds of people that we revere as doing something miraculous with forgiveness, that we all are capable actually of doing. The next thing that forgiveness does is it shuts down that go circuitry. The craving and pleasure and reward circuitry is turned off as well. And then it activates or reactivates your prefrontal cortex so you can make better decisions, cost benefit decisions to avoid doing things with negative consequences. So I sort of say to people, if I told you I just invented a pill that can stop pain, stop you from engaging in dangerous revenge seeking behaviors and make your life better, I’d probably be a trillionaire with a pharmaceutical company. But it turns out that pill, all of that is all right inside your head.
It’s free. You don’t need a prescription. You can use it as often as you want. You don’t have to go to a pharmacy to get it. It’s called forgiveness. And you can experience even just that momentary bit of pain relief and release instantly by just imagining a grievance that you have right now. And then imagine what it would feel like to forgive that grievance. And you’ll feel kind of almost instantly this lifting of weight from your shoulders. There’s this release and this relief and this sudden pleasant experience that’s free and doesn’t have this dangerous addictive component to it. So then we go, well, how can we operationalize forgiveness? Because a lot of people feel like forgiveness is very difficult. I’m giving a gift to the person who wronged me. That’s what the give and forgiveness means. It turns out it’s not the give and forgiveness, it’s a gift that you give to yourself.
There are two kinds of forgiveness. One is decisional forgiveness, and the other is emotional forgiveness. And the one I’m talking about right now is called decisional forgiveness. It’s this decision to forgive and anybody can make that decision, and it’s completely internal to themselves. You don’t ever have to tell the person who wronged you that they’ve been forgiven. You don’t have to condone what they’ve done to you. You don’t have to accept what they’ve done to you. You don’t have to stay in a toxic relationship with them. If you make decisional forgiveness, it’s merely a technique of healing yourself. It’s a self-healing process. And so you can operationalize that, like I said, instantly by forgiving. But I’ve developed this other way of doing this called the non justice system. That’s a way of accessing the courtroom of your mind as you’ve been mentioning Elise throughout. And that’s this idea that we all go through our hours, days and lives with a courtroom inside our head where we’re endlessly putting on trial the people that we encounter who wrong us or betray us, humiliate us, shame us.
We play all the roles in this trial. We are the victim of course at first, but then we’re the defendant sort of evaluating their side of the case and whether they have a defense at all or not. And oftentimes we’ll find they do not. And then we’re the judge and jury deciding their guilt or innocence, and usually it’s going to be guilty, and we will decide what their sentence should be. And then we’ll start imagining what that sentence looks like. And as the imaginary warden, we’ll imagine carrying out this sentence of punishment. So we’re doing this trial experience, it’s courtroom experience. It’s built inside of us, inside of our heads every day, but at the end of it, we have to decide and we decide whether we’re going to carry out that punishment in the real world or not. And that’s the transition period. We’re going to decide, wow, I’ve fantasized about getting revenge now I’ve found them guilty.
I’d love to punish them, and I think I should. And then you have to fill in the blank. I should leave that there and go about the rest of my day, or I should go ahead and carry it out in real life. And that’s when we move from fantasy into physical revenge seeking experiences, which can be anything from nonviolent verbal insults to more surreptitious sabotage actions where you sabotage another person. Maybe you sabotage their romantic relationship, maybe you sabotage them at work for something they’ve done to you at work, but you kind of don’t let anyone know that it’s happening. It’s just between you and yourself. Or you might move on to acts of physical retaliation, physical sabotage, or even physical violence. But that courtroom of the mind, we can reconvert and take control of that. It’s like a kangaroo court. So it’s completely biased.
It’s always biased in favor of revenge seeking. So how could we undo that? And the way that I’ve created of doing that is to allow you to experience all those steps that I just articulated, but add a fifth step at the end in which you look back before you decide whether to carry out your revenge in the real life, and you go, did this act of justice seeking in the form of revenge, did it make me feel better? So you become the judge of yourself. And in that last step, you imagine this big great courtroom and there’s somebody way above you who’s judging you. And in that last step, you’re asked to think about did putting them on trial and seeking revenge make me feel better or worse? And usually at the end of it, you’re already feeling like it made me feel better. At first, I felt great, I wanted their pain.
But at the end, you’re coming down from this revenge moment and you’re starting to go, no, actually I had to relive my grievance again. I had to revictimize myself every step of this trial, I’ve put myself on trial, really, I’m the one who is in pain. I had to remember it again and again and again. I had to mount this great case. I had to weigh this person’s guilt. I mean, this idea of living rent-free in your brain, that is exactly what is going on with grievances, is the person who wronged you is completely occupying almost all of your conscious thoughts. So it’s not working. And then you’re asked to think about, well, what would it feel like if you imagined, I would just said forgiving the person after having safely released your revenge desires by fantasizing about them and feeling them, but letting them go, which I describe as kind of a methadone for revenge addict kind of experience.
You can imagine getting the revenge you want, but you keep it inside your head where it’s safe. You evaluate whether it really would’ve helped you or not. It wouldn’t. Anybody that’s looking at that would see that. And then you can then get invited to experience what it might feel like to imagine forgiving. And that’s when you get this cathartic experience of, oh, this is even better than the revenge. This is long-term, and this means I’m not hurting myself anymore and I can move on with my life, which is what we all really want to do. So that process is called the Non Justice System or the Miracle Court, and that’s an app that anybody can experience. It’s an audio driven app. I lead you on the app through the steps of the trial. It’s pretty powerful. It’s pretty fun as well, because you get to be everybody. You get to be a judge, you get to be the lawyers on both sides. You get to be a prison warden administering a punishment. So that’s pretty vivid. But it seems to help a lot of people. We’ve studied it at Yale and found so far Yale, its other universities that it does seem to pretty rapidly reduce revenge desires for people, an increase even feelings of benevolence, which is what we really want is to be healed. And that’s kind of that healing experience after any form of trauma that most trauma victims are looking for.
ELISE:
And don’t you have another app or site? Is that called Saving Cane?
JAMES:
So Saving cane.org is a website that I built that floats on the internet the way that suicide prevention websites float on the internet, hoping to somebody who might be on the internet who’s thinking of taking their own lives, might look at some of the information on that and reconsider, well, s cain.org is that kind of same website, but for people who are planning particularly mass shootings. So we know that mass shooters are on the internet a lot, and the hope is, and I’ve had a few who’ve actually contacted me, people who are planning on committing a mass shooting who got onto my website, saw these resources like the non justice system, miracle Court that I just described, and other resources that are there and have reconsidered and decided not to go through it thankfully. So I think that there are direct ways right there to help prevent mass shootings.
And so that website’s been available and a link to that app is on that website. So that’s there. And then the last thing that I’m doing, or most recent, I should say it’s probably never going to be the last, the most recent thing I’m doing is forming revenge anonymous groups worldwide. So carrying forward this idea of revenge addiction is the root cause of human violence and intentionally inflicted human suffering and focusing on the addiction side is creating 12 step groups just like AA and a. We have the same Revenge Anonymous has the same type of 12 steps with the same language that’s familiar for people who have experienced that. And I’m just starting to stand those up right now as we speak and getting some groups formed online and then eventually in the physical space to help people. Because what’s happened is since my book was published the end of May and over the last four or five months, I’ve just gotten a ton of emails from people who go, oh my gosh, you’re describing me or someone I know, and where can I get more help and support? And I think that for a lot of people, 12 step programs have really been shown to work in terms of controlling addictive behaviors. And so I think we’ll find the same experience for revenge addiction. So Revenge Anonymous is going to be coming available soon.
ELISE:
What a beautiful idea. And thank you for your work. It’s really important. And I think any of these things, we are all exist on this spectrum. And just even listening, thinking about the trials that I run in my own life and also how exhausting it is right over time to sort of continually really takes, it takes up so much energy. It takes so much energy. It’s such a drag. Alright, well thank you. Hopefully we’ll meet again and this feels like a really important cornerstone in understanding who we are and what is happening to us.
JAMES:
Yeah, thank you so much for the opportunity to be on your show and sharing this with your more information for me at www.jameskimmeljr.com. You can learn about the revenge anonymous groups that I was just talking about there. There’s a quiz actually there you can take to check out your true relationship with revenge desires and it might give you a startling picture or not depending on where you are on the spectrum you just mentioned of revenge seeking because some people are pretty high avengers and some people I know, some people, my wife’s one is rarely if ever cares at all about getting revenge, and I’m like, who are you? I don’t know how that could be. I identify myself as a recovering revenge addict for sure. So it’s amazing.
ELISE:
I will include links to all of this in the show notes
And as obviously the science of revenge too, which I thought was totally fascinating. So thank you for all you’re doing and I will see you out there. I think that this is a really important piece of work, particularly in the way that it is the interstitial tissue of so many other mechanisms that we can observe in our culture. And I think it really helps for those of us who are wondering what is happening and who really just don’t understand what’s at play and how people can go so far. And we think about the leaders of the United States, for example, and you can see sort of revenge addiction in full display. We didn’t really sort of briefly talked about Trump, but he obviously is nursing his revenge fantasies all day every day, and we’re watching this play out. One of the things that I didn’t get a chance to talk to James about, but which is fascinating insight that he offers is our obsession with the word justice.
And he writes, dictionaries and theora tell us, justice means equity and fairness with synonyms like egalitarianism, honor, uprightness, decency, integrity, righteousness, morality, virtue, propriety, trustworthiness, and incorruptibility. There’s the virtuous Dr. Jekyll side of justice, the one we think of when we advocate for social justice and revere luminaries like MLK Jr. Gandhi, Jesus Buddha, Lazu, but justice has a much darker side, a Mr. Hyde. This meaning of justice is the polite politically correct term we use when we really mean revenge. As in the refrain after the September terrorist attacks on America, justice will be done. That is the American definition of justice. It’s revenge. And he asked the question, which I think is really valid, which is why do we say justice when we really mean revenge? And he answers that because when it’s called justice, all manner of torture and atrocities are instantly sanitized and sanctified.
So it’s something that I think is really important for all of us to think about. He writes, justice has cast a dark spell on America. We have become a revenge addicted nation. Justice in the form of revenge was the basis of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol. Justice in the form of revenge is a unifier and sanctifier of racism, antisemitism, misogyny, Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, group and gang conflict, and all other causes that convert grievances into repression and violence. Justice is the go word that has unleashed murder, war, genocide, and terror throughout human history. The other thing that I just wanted to mention that this reminds me of, and this is in previous podcast episodes, is Phil Stutz’s concept of the Maze. I’ve written about this on Substack as well, but that’s another really useful tool when you find yourself sort of in an obsessive cycle about a situation where you want, let’s just say it justice, but really where you want revenge, where you want someone to get theirs and you want to get paid back, et cetera.
That’s another really useful metaphor. I’ll include links to everything that James Kimmel mentioned, as well as other relevant podcasts and Substack newsletters. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. So how, thank you.