Are You a Grudge Holder or a Revenge Seeker? Here's How It's Hurting You – And How To Get Over It | James Kimmel, Jr.

The psychology and neuroscience of revenge. James Kimmel, Jr. https://www.jameskimmeljr.com/ is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, an expert on revenge, a lawyer, and the founder and co-director of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies. He is the creator of The Nonjustice System, the Miracle Court http://miraclecourt.com/ app, and SavingCain.org http://savingcain.org/ for recovering from grievances and revenge desires and preventing mass violence. His most recent book is The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction—and How to Overcome It. https://www.amazon.com/Science-Revenge-Understanding-Deadliest-Addiction/dp/0593796519 In this episode we talk about: The horrific and violent bullying he endured as a child—which provoked his interest in the subject of revenge The connection between revenge and addiction Our evolutionary programming for revenge Practical strategies for when you feel wronged How to seek justice without revenge An antidote to revenge cravings And much more Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Get ready for another Meditation Party at Omega Institute! This in-person workshop brings together Dan with his friends and meditation teachers, Sebene Selassie, Jeff Warren, and for the first time, Ofosu Jones-Quartey. The event runs October 24th-26th. Sign up and learn more here http://eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party-2025! To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

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• 0:34Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How we doing? Today, we're going to talk about an aspect of the human mind, an aspect of the inner repertoire of our species that has been an incredibly destructive force, both for me and for humans writ large. And that is revenge-seeking or grudge-holding, the desire to get even. We evolved for this, and as you'll hear in this discussion, there are some ways in which this aspect of the human repertoire is adaptive, but, man, it misfires in many, many ways.

• 1:19Dan Harris?

  And all you have to do is look at the broad sweep of human history or the news today or any given day to see how revenge has become what my guest calls an addiction. So that's the bad news, but the good news is that there are ways to work with this very common tendency of the mind. As my guest today says, there are better strategies than revenge-seeking or rumination when you feel wronged. James Kimmel Jr. is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. He's also a lawyer and the founder and co-director of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies. He's the author of three books, including the one we'll focus on today, which is called "The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It."

• 2:00Dan Harris?

  We talk about the horrific and violent bullying that James endured as a child, which provoked his interest in the subject of revenge. It's an extraordinary story. You'll want to hear that. We also... To talk about the neuroscience of revenge, i.e. what happens in your brain when you're seeking revenge, the connection between revenge and addiction, our evolutionary programming in this regard, practical strategies for addressing grievances and revenge desires, how to seek justice without revenge, an antidote for revenge cravings, and much more. Today's episode comes with a custom guided meditation called For When You Want Revenge. It's guided by our Teacher of the Month, Sabine Selassie. This meditation is only for paid subscribers over at danharris.com. Paid subs also get weekly live guided meditation

• 2:45Dan Harris?

  and Q and A sessions every Tuesday at 4:00. So check us out, danharris.com. Join the party. Speaking of parties, and speaking of Sabine Selassie, if you want to meditate with me and her in person, we will be back up at the Omega Institute for another installment of Meditation Party, our annual retreat. That's coming up the weekend of October 24th. There's a link in the show notes. Okay, we'll get started with James Kimmel Jr. right after this.

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• 4:07Dan Harris?

  James Kimmel, welcome to the show. Thank you, Dan, for having me. It's a pleasure. If you're comfortable with it, I'd love to hear a little bit of your backstory, you know, how you got interested in this subject of revenge. I understand it really has its roots in your childhood.

• 4:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, it does. I have kind of a John Wick origin story for my life, for better or worse. When I was about 12 years old, my family moved, my mom and dad moved, our family, I should say, from the suburbs to a farm in central Pennsylvania that had been owned by my great grandfather. And, you know, when I got there as a 12-year-old boy, this was a total awesome wonderland that I really wanted to explore and become part of. And that included, you know, trying to reach out to kids on other farms around us in this big, vast space of mostly dairy farms. Our farm was not a, you know, real working farm in the sense that we didn't make our

• 5:08Speaker 05

  living from the land. We had a small herd of black Angus cattle. We had some pigs and things like that. You know, we didn't have hundreds of Holstein that were being milked twice a day, the way the kids around me did with their family farms. So I reached out to them, trying to befriend them and hang out with them and found that they didn't have any interest in inviting me into their community, their farm community. And I wasn't to be deterred. I really wanted to be part of it. I pretty quickly decided I wanted to grow up to be a farmer, actually. And so I really kept pushing it and trying to win them over and get them to like me. And they weren't having that. And eventually, their shunning turned into bullying. And the bullying started verbally, as it often

• 5:52Speaker 05

  does. And then as we were getting older, like I said, this started when I was about 12, so 13, 14, 15, and even up to 16 and 17, this kept going. And it went from, like I said, verbal into physical assaults and things like that. So it was a pretty grim existence in that sense and disappointing to me. So like I said, it's continued until one night, my family and I, you know, we were all asleep very late at night, and we were awakened to the sound of a gunshot. And we rushed to the windows of our house to look and see what was going on. And I saw a pickup truck outside of the front of our house. A truck that was very familiar to me that had been owned by one of the guys who had been

• 6:36Speaker 05

  kind of abusing me and bullying me all those years. And it took off away from our house down the road. And we looked around the house to see if there was any damage, didn't find any happily. And eventually went back to bed. One of my jobs in the mornings before going to school was to go out and take care of our animals, our cows and pigs. And also this sweet, beautiful beagle, hunting dog named Paula, who had a pen near the barn. And when I went out to feed and water her that morning, I found her lying dead in her pen with a bullet hole in her head in a pool of blood.

• 7:17Dan Harris?

  That is hard to hear. I'm sorry that happened to you.

• 7:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, thanks. Yeah, hard to see, hard to hear, hard to remember even all these years later. It was a lot of distress there. You know, it was a family dog, wasn't only my dog, we were all upset. My folks called the police. The police came, took a report, but they made it clear that there really wasn't much they could do or were willing to do at the time. This was early 1980s. They did say those, you know, there'd be a report and if it got worse, God forbid, you know, there would be this paper trail. And so they kind of exited the scene and we tried to go back to normal.

• 8:03Speaker 05

  About two or three weeks later, I found myself home alone one night, pretty late. My folks were out somewhere. I have a brother, he was gone as well. And I've heard a vehicle pull up to the front of our house. Unusual because we lived on a one-lane country road. As I got up to check it out, see what was happening, there was this same pickup truck and there was also a sudden flash and an explosion. And the pickup truck roared away, leaving behind our mangled mailbox, they had just blown up.

• 8:35Speaker 05

  And with that explosion, kind of that was it for me after all these years of abuse. Now the killing of my dog, detonating mailboxes at our house. And I had had enough and I'd grown up probably from about eight years old to shoot guns. And we had plenty of guns in our house. We were hunters out in the country and my dad kept a loaded revolver, not for hunting, but for safety in his nightstand. And I, I knew it was there and I grabbed it and went off. After these guys, I jumped in my mother's car and I tore off after them through the middle of the night.

• 9:13Dan Harris?

  Did you catch them?

• 9:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, as I was, you know, shouting and in rage and screaming and driving down the road, down this one lane country road, I did eventually catch up to them and I cornered them by a barn. You know, the scene is their pickup truck is kind of pointed at a barn wall and I'm behind their truck in my car with my bright beams on. And I can see three or four heads of the three or four guys that had been, you know, my primary tormentors for all those years. And, you know, they slowly got out of their truck, squinting back through my high beams to try and figure out who had just chased them down. It took me a little bit of time to catch up to them. They wouldn't necessarily know it was me. They might've recognized my mother's car, maybe not, hard to say.

• 10:01Speaker 05

  But what was clear to me was that they were unarmed in the sense that they didn't have anything in their hands, no weapons. Maybe they had something in the truck, I don't know. But they couldn't have also known that I had a gun. And that was my opportunity. I mean, I had the complete element of surprise. And so I opened the door of my car, I grabbed the gun off the passenger seat and started to get out. And as I was doing that, I had just this flash of insight or inspiration that if I went through with what I wanted to do to those guys, that I would, you know, I'd never be the same again if I survived the entire ordeal. That the 17 or 16 year old, whatever age exactly I was, at that time, who drove down

• 10:46Speaker 05

  that road would never be the same driving back. I'd have to know myself at a minimum as a. Potentially a killer. And I knew that wasn't the guy I was. I I knew that wasn't my identity and it wasn't what I was willing to wear on myself, or at least to put it there, even if it would give me everything I want, all the satisfaction that I was really craving at that point in time of of finally doing to them what they had been doing to me. That was just enough to cause me to stop in my tracks and pull my leg back inside the car door and put the gun down on the passenger seat, shut the door and drive home. You know, I'd come within nanoseconds of committing a hugely violent crime and changing my life

• 11:31Speaker 05

  completely.

• 11:35Dan Harris?

  It's a harrowing story and I'm surprised, and I think this is illustrative, I'm surprised by how much, as I listen to it, I want revenge for you.

• 11:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. And that's a really common reaction. You know, I know from a lot of years of neuroscience research now, a small percentage of people have a very strong empathy center in our minds. And that enables us to feel other people's pain as if it were our own. And it even activates the exact same pain circuitry in our brain that was activating for me. And so it makes sense that you would feel that pain and that you would also experience, and we've seen in neuroscience studies, that the desire to retaliate, the desire for revenge, which is activating in the addiction, pleasure and reward circuitry, it turns out, to chilling effect. But that also would be happening in your mind, just as much as it was in mine at that moment.

• 12:35Dan Harris?

  So let's set aside cases like this one where I, and I imagine many of the listeners, are empathizing with you, and just think about cases where any one of us

• 12:47Dan Harris?

  Is wronged. What is happening in our brains as we envision revenge is, I guess it's the same thing. It's the rumination is creating pain and the revenge fantasies create pleasure?

• 13:03Speaker 05

  Close to that. So here's what happens. You know, when you experience any form of victimization, mistreatment, or injustice, and that could be insults, humiliation, disrespect, shame, any form of victimization that really causes you pain. This activates the pain network inside the brain. It actually is a physical pain response. And that area of the brain is called the anterior insula. And your brain doesn't want pain. It doesn't like it. And it wants a compensating dose of pleasure. And humans have evolved over thousands of years, many, many thousands of years, back to the Pleistocene epoch, it's believed, to derive enormous

• 13:46Speaker 05

  pleasure from inflicting pain upon the people who wronged us or their proxies. And what occurs is after your brain registers this physical pain, it activates the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction, which are the dorsal striatum and the nucleus accumbens. These two areas of the brain are the very same areas of the brain that activate for people who have drug, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, other behavioral addictions. Those areas of the brain flood with dopamine. And we get a dopamine high from just thinking about retaliating

• 14:27Speaker 05

  against the person or people who wronged us or their proxies. So we're getting this temporary, and it's temporary, like all other addictions. We get this temporary surge dopamine, and this temporary feeling. And then it goes away quickly. And it's that disappearance, sudden disappearance of dopamine that creates this experience of craving. But with revenge, you know, the craving isn't to inject a needle into your own arm. It's to potentially insert bullets into the bodies of other people. You can only, in other words, gratify your craving by inflicting pain upon other people. And this has been hiding in plain sight really throughout human history. And it's only as the result of brain imaging studies over the last roughly 20 years

• 15:11Speaker 05

  that this has finally been revealed. And, and that's why I've written my book is to bring this out to the public. So we know what's going on when we feel wrong and why we're driven to want to hurt other people and commit acts of violence. There's just one last piece of this, and, and that is your prefrontal cortex, which is your brain's executive function and, you know, self-control and cost benefit analysis center of the brain. That's your last defense between a revenge fantasy and carrying out in real life and starting to hurt people, which inevitably will hurt yourself. And if that area of your brain, just like with other addictions, it's found that the prefrontal cortex is inhibited or hijacked for people with addiction.

• 15:56Speaker 05

  And if that's going on for people whose addiction of choice or non-choice, the addiction that they're caught up with is revenge addiction. If that area of the brain is inhibited, you would have nothing left that would stop you between what you want to do and what you're doing. Fortunately, that night, in my example, my prefrontal cortex was still intact and it stopped me, thank God, at the last second.

• 16:22Dan Harris?

  I have a million follow-ups, but the first one that's coming to mind is you said that we're wired to feel good when we exact revenge. But you also said that revenge hurts us. So does it feel good for like a hot second and then it feels bad?

• 16:39Speaker 05

  Yes, and more though. So it's gonna feel good, and it does feel good, and it's natural. You know, our desire for revenge is believed to be an adaptive strategy that almost all people around the world have. We're born with it. And so the notion that we want revenge is natural and is not itself a pathological process. It only would become pathological when we are unable to control it despite knowing the negative consequences. And the negative consequences of revenge-seeking are just legion. So it's not so much that we're going to instantly feel a bounce-back pain, but what we're going to experience in our lives are these negative consequences, among other things are, we see in behavioral

• 17:23Speaker 05

  studies, people who seek revenge actually feel angrier and more anxiety after getting revenge than before doing it. But we also know, and this is the critical piece of it, that revenge-seeking is the primary root motivation of almost all forms of human violence throughout the world. That includes bullying and youth violence, intimate partner violence, street and gang violence, mass shootings, police brutality and abuse of force. Studies show all of this, and public health data show it. And all the way up through terrorism, violent extremism, genocide, and warfare. They all have at their root this process in which

• 18:08Speaker 05

  someone felt, either imagined, or actually experienced a grievance, that is to say victimization, and the sudden overwhelming desire to retaliate in order to get some form of payback as a result of that grievance. And it's important to know, first of all, we imagine grievances all the time. People invent them inside their heads, in part to get the gratification, and in part because it's uncontrolled. And it doesn't matter. If it's real for you, it doesn't matter whether a panel of a million judges, and there is no such panel, would say, "That's not a real grievance. You shouldn't care." Because if it's real for you, and it's starting to generate these revenge desires, then we're in a dangerous situation suddenly

• 18:51Speaker 05

  right there, and it wouldn't matter objectively whether the grievance is real or not.

• 18:56Dan Harris?

  So are you saying this is like a bug in the human operating system that is essentially responsible for pretty much everything that plagues us as a species?

• 19:06Speaker 05

  It's very close to that. Now, again, the bug part is not being able to control it despite the negative consequences. So I don't want to say that the desire for revenge itself, like I said, it was an adaptive strategy for this reason, believed to be, that back when humans were kind of coming out of their individual caves and beginning to live in social orders and in societies, they needed at that time a way to cause groups of people to conform to shared social norms. And they needed to have a way, a quick way of stopping people from doing things like taking your mate or stealing your food, things that were necessary for survival and procreation. What happens now, though, thousands of years later

• 19:50Speaker 05

  here in 2025, is that we will seek revenge, we'll experience powerful revenge cravings for mere wounds to the ego that have nothing to do with your ability to procreate and have nothing to do with your survival, but a slight, an offense, a feeling of injustice that does not threaten your existence at all or your ability to procreate is enough to trigger a completely violent and up through murderous act. And this is happening all the time around the world.

• 20:23Dan Harris?

  So let me just see if I can restate that. It is adaptive, from an evolutionary standpoint, to want to mete out some sort of consequence or punishment for transgressions. What is maladaptive and maybe at the root of all of the violence we're seeing on the news and that I covered for decades is what exactly? That's where I'm getting lost a little bit.

• 20:50Speaker 05

  No, no problem. So violence itself is pathological. Violence means you're doing damage to another person's body, and that is, that is considered pathological. What is most pathological about this is the inability to control your desire for revenge despite the negative consequences. Particularly in acts of violence, as opposed to, there's a whole range of revenge-seeking that humans go through that are not violent at all. So, we could think about retaliatory, you know, like a mean tweet that gets bounced back. We could think about social exclusion and social isolation of people that we want to harm. We could think about sabotage and workplace sabotage that people go through, or sabotaging

• 21:33Speaker 05

  somebody's ability to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend. There are lots of ways that humans get back at other humans when they feel wrong that are not violent and do some amount, but usually a minimal amount of harm. It's the harms that are beyond that that are uncontrolled, like all of the forms of violence I just described before, including, let's just say, street and gang violence or bullying. Those types of violent experiences are generally pathological because we're seeking pleasure in someone else's pain because we either imagined having been wronged, or we were actually wronged, and we want to make ourselves feel better. And there are better strategies for making yourself feel better when you've been wronged

• 22:17Speaker 05

  than committing an act of violence or trying to hurt someone intentionally for your own gratification.

• 22:23Dan Harris?

  I want to get to those better strategies at some point, but I just want to clarify, I assume you're not saying that things like shunning, or mean tweeting, or weaponizing the legal system as a form of revenge is appropriate or a healthy behavior?

• 22:40Speaker 05

  Well, let's say it's a lesser unhealthy behavior than a physical act of violence, but they can all result in severe negative consequences to the person you're wronging and/or to yourself. For instance, just take social shunning or cutting off a relationship because you're angry with someone. You're going to experience the loss of that relationship. Think about it this way, you can't become the instrument of another person's pain without experiencing the pain that you're inflicting. Simple example that's kind of visual is, you know, imagine a hammer striking a nail. And we think about, oh, poor nail, it's just getting pounded by this huge mean hammer that's driving it through this board.

• 23:22Speaker 05

  But we can also look at it in a more balanced perspective and realize that the hammer has to experience the impact of every one of those blows. It doesn't escape the infliction of that pain. And that's the same experience that we all have in our lives. If we try to hurt other people, we're going to experience the pain that we're trying to inflict or some version of that. If we keep doing it and can't control it, despite knowing of those negative consequences, that fits the general definition of what is an addiction. That is the inability to resist an urge to ingest something or do something despite the negative consequences of doing it. And that's what's happening with revenge seeking often.

• 24:06Dan Harris?

  So you said before that revenge actually can feel good, but then it starts to feel bad. It kind of reminds me of what the Buddha said about anger, that it's, it's got a honeyed tip and a poisoned root.

• 24:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, great. That's a great quote and very true. And that, and that's what happens right with all addictions. They start feeling good, right? We get this instant dopamine hit. You know, we're all also adapted, for instance, to experience euphoria and pleasure from taking opioids. I mean, every human being has this. We know this because we go to the hospital and we need to have a procedure. Likely, we're going to have an opioid administered to us in order to dead in pain, knock us out so that somebody can maybe put cuts on our body or worse. So there is a useful aspect to being adapted for euphoria for opioids. But we know that if we use opioids for pleasure and can't control our desire to use them and

• 25:02Speaker 05

  keep taking them when we don't need them for some sort of a medical procedure, and they start taking over and ruining our lives, then we have an addiction and it becomes pathological.

• 25:13Dan Harris?

  Okay, so this brings me back to where I was whiffing earlier, lost the plot on adaptive versus maladaptive. So maybe I'll take another shot at it. Are you saying that the adaptive evolutionary function of wanting there to be consequences for bad behavior, maybe the adaptive part of that, we could understand as justice, or the establishment of a fair social order, and the maladaptive would be a desire for revenge?

• 25:41Speaker 05

  Close, but there's a danger with that one, too. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to quibble, but I have to.

• 25:48Dan Harris?

  I want you to quibble. I want you to quibble. Please, I'm laughing only at myself, not at you.

• 25:53Speaker 05

  No problem. Yeah, it's close. So let's just talk about justice versus revenge for a second, because we think that there is a bright line between those two. And it helps to fool us into engaging in the most horrific acts that humans are capable of. There's this version of justice that we think about, where we're talking about, let's say, social justice. So it's fairness, equity, even love, right? The kind of the highest teachings of the most admired humans that have ever walked the planet, like Jesus, or Gandhi, or Martin Luther King. Their forms of justice were not retaliatory. They were trying to see the other person as themselves. That's a form of justice. I'll call it the

• 26:34Speaker 05

  high form of justice. But then there's this other form of justice, the exact opposite, in which we call things like executing someone after they've committed a crime, or going to war against a bunch of terrorists who have just knocked down some big buildings in New York City. We call that justice-seeking as well. And when, you know, President Bush came out and said, "We're going to bring the terrorists to justice," he didn't mean that we were going to be fair and equitable to terrorists and love them as ourselves. We all knew that what he meant was, "We're going to go and kill terrorists because of what they've done here, and we're going to do it in a big, big way."

• 27:16Speaker 05

  But, and this is inside the brackets, I can't tell the country, we're gonna go have a revenge spree, because people are gonna rise up against that. And we don't want to think of ourselves as revenge seekers. But if I can call it justice, I can justify all of the 600,000, 800,000 people that were killed in the Middle East, and the trillions of dollars that were spent to chase down a pretty small group of terrorists in the 20 years or 21 year war that lasted after 9/11. That was all possible. The expenditure of the money, the expenditure of human blood, American blood, other people's blood, all possible because we were seeking justice. And FYI, that's exactly what Osama bin Laden

• 28:00Speaker 05

  was seeking. He was able to convince people to fly into trade towers on the basis that they were getting justice for what they perceived to be wrongs committed by the United States. And so we get these circles of justice in the form of revenge-seeking that can go on and on and on forever.

• 28:19Dan Harris?

  I don't have much of a quibble with your analysis of post-9/11 history that as a younger man, I spent a lot of time on the front lines of the subsequent wars, so really witnessed what was happening at the tip of the spear for myself, and largely agree that we took it way too far. And yet, even the Dalai Lama, I believe, has said that taking out Osama bin Laden made sense. So, I just wanted to make sure you're not... It's interesting, I think, about the Jesus argument of turn the other cheek, and then the Tibetans also have an expression... The Tibetans are huge on compassion, and so am I, but they also have this expression, idiot compassion, like you can take it too far. And so, I would

• 29:01Dan Harris?

  argue that some sort of action was warranted post-9/11. Going to war against Iraq and killing 100,000 people and spending a trillion dollars made very little sense, in my view, but something should have been done.

• 29:15Speaker 05

  100% agree, but what you're putting your finger on is the distinction between self-defense and revenge-seeking. So, let's talk about that for a second. When we think about revenge-seeking, we're always talking about avenging the wrongs of the past. We want to punish somebody for something that they have done in the past. It could have been 10 minutes ago, 10 days, months, years, decades ago.

• 29:39Speaker 05

  That's revenge-seeking, punishing people for wrongs of the past. That's very distinct from, and it has a completely different set of brain circuitry, from self-defense, which is reacting to protect yourself from the existence of a present threat, or an imminent threat of serious harm or death. And in that case, the part of the brain that works for us there is our, you know, fight-or-flight instinct, which is largely driven by the amygdala, not part of the revenge-seeking brain circuitry. When you experience the existence of a real-time threat as a purely adaptive strategy, you're gonna have to decide whether to, you know, fight, freeze, or flee.

• 30:23Speaker 05

  And you're gonna have to make that decision pretty quickly. In the case that you just were talking about with Osama bin Laden, who had many, many, many times before and after 9/11, said, "I'm gonna continue to do everything I can to destroy America and kill American lives." It made sense, you're 100% right, to go and take out Osama bin Laden, who seemed to be completely incapable of being pacified. And so, fight, fight, or flee, we fought. But as you drew that exact, perfect distinction, that's very different from then going and killing hundreds of thousands of other people around him, or in other countries, in just

• 31:04Speaker 05

  a revenge-based sort of binge that went on for years and years and years. So, that's the distinction. And I, in my book, I'm very clear in making that distinction. I'm never talking about self-defense and accepting a present threat. I'm only talking about bringing up these wrongs of the past that only live inside your memory. They're only thought formations inside your head. I mean, once you've been wronged, if it's in the past and you have no present or future threat that's imminent, that can't be experienced with your senses at all. It can't be experienced out here in the real world. It's only in your head. The pain of it is only in your head. And the desire to retaliate and plot and scheme to hurt the person who wronged you,

• 31:46Speaker 05

  or their proxy, is also only inside your head. That's where we need to focus in order to get control of this desire, this addictive, strong compulsion.

• 31:57Dan Harris?

  Again, this is something I want to talk about. The productive aspect of this conversation is something I want to get to, but let me just stay in the, in the description of the problem. I don't know why this is such a bugaboo for me, but I really do want to understand the difference evolutionarily between what's adaptive and what's maladaptive. So I'll try again. It sounds like you're saying like the desire for self-defense, to set boundaries, to meet out what you were calling high justice, not the way often our quote unquote justice system today operates where it's, it's just kind of institutionalized revenge in many cases. But high justice, instituting social order and fairness, those were adaptive traits

• 32:37Dan Harris?

  in our evolutionary history where things have gone haywire, really badly haywire. You can just, anybody who's a student of history can see it. Anybody who reads the news now can see it as well, is the revenge, the revenge-seeking behavior. Am I close now?

• 32:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think you're very, you're very close now.

• 32:57Dan Harris?

  Awesome.

• 32:57Speaker 05

  And it is subtle. There, there is a subtle aspect to this, Dan, that you're putting your finger on it. And this is a very new way of thinking about human violence throughout history. And rather than throwing up our hands and going, oh, it's evil, right? There's an evil spirit. We don't even know what that is or where it is. We can't find it. We can't put our finger on it. Maybe it's inside of us. Maybe it's only inside of the other guy, right? It's only inside of those people that we think are evil people, which just coincidentally always happen to be, you know, the people who disagree with us and do things that we don't like. And you, we call that evil. That's not a useful construct and there's really no evidence for it.

• 33:37Speaker 05

  What there is evidence for now is that all people are capable of doing, engaging in these violent acts if they have been wounded, seriously hurt, particularly psychological pain, and they have this desire for revenge that goes uncontrolled for any number of reasons, and they actually act on it. You can get, for instance, a father of a family of maybe, you know, three kids and a wife, who he proposed to. Married and was deeply in love with and had three beautiful kids and suddenly becomes a murder-suicide perpetrator because he felt wrong all of the sudden, or had a series of wrongs throughout his life that were unresolved

• 34:22Speaker 05

  and at the last second were uncontrolled and he decides, "I'm going to take them all out in order to make myself feel better and make them feel a lot worse for the indignities that have been inflicted on me." This is happening, you know, every day unfortunately. It's a very sad experience.

• 34:40Dan Harris?

  I don't see myself in that, but I do see myself in what you were describing before about the rumination, the replaying of the injustice, the insults, the threat of the bullying. And I just wonder, are some people more susceptible? It feels to me like my desire for what I might, in moments of high dudgeon or self-righteousness, call justice, but really it's revenge. That desire has been a massively pernicious force in my life personally. And so I was just wondering, is there a spectrum here?

• 35:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. Spectrum's a great word for it. And there is, so there's a spectrum of revenge-seeking from very non-violent and not even acted on. It's just, you know, revenge fantasies. And then, you know, maybe it's, like I said, it could be just purely verbal or it could be quiet ways of undermining another person who you believe is wrongdoed through violent acts. So there's, there's that spectrum. And there's also a spectrum for people of who might be susceptible. So we know from a small group of studies, but I think they're important, that about 20% of, well, let me put it this way. About 90% of all people have revenge desires. If you ask them in a, in a survey, "Have you ever thought about revenge? Or have you thought about revenge even recently?"

• 35:56Speaker 05

  They'll say yes, about 95%. So we all experience this desire for revenge. But of that group of people, only about 20% will report that they've acted on their revenge desires. And that's an interesting number, 20%, because it's also about the same percentage of people who, if you, if they try drugs or alcohol, actually become addicted to them. So 80% of people are not becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol and 80% of people are not becoming Compulsive revenge seekers, but that still leaves 20% on this spectrum that we just discussed between nonviolent and violent. So, you know, the number of people that are committing the violent forms of revenge is substantially reduced.

• 36:39Speaker 05

  And that, in my view, is where we ought to be directing our public health efforts is trying to help support, identify help and support those people so that they don't take those next fateful steps that result in acts of violence. So what we can do by seeing violent revenge-seeking as an addiction is we can begin to really think about a true evidence-based and measurable public health approach to reducing, preventing and treating violence.

• 37:07Dan Harris?

  Hmm. So for me, as somebody who has a history of addiction to drugs, do you think that would make me more likely to fall in the 20% that would get addicted to revenge? Or is there no correlation?

• 37:20Speaker 05

  There may be a correlation. There are some theories about the vulnerable brain that apply across addiction. So if somebody is liable to a drug addiction, they might also be more likely to experience alcoholism or, you know, tobacco use, maybe also gambling. And you also find in populations of addicted people in communities that a lot of times those same populations experience huge levels of violence. And this is a theory without a study right now, what I'm about to say, but it stands to reason, at least to me, that those populations where we think, oh, it's all about perf wars and it's about the money, right? It's about the money and drug dealing that's driving the violence.

• 38:02Speaker 05

  And money is a huge part of it, but the actual desire to hurt other people in almost all of those instances is always following from some form of a grievance. Somebody stepped into my territory, somebody took my money, I'm gonna go and get them or their gang insulted my gang, we're gonna go out with my gang now and we're gonna gun them down. So it seems like There is some vulnerability that could transcend. The other thing that I think other addictions do is what they're doing to the prefrontal cortex. So that's our control center. If that's inhibited or hijacked for another addiction, it may also be weakened as well for or against, I should say, these revenge cravings.

• 38:45Speaker 05

  And so someone who has another addiction and then suddenly experiences a grievance and strong revenge desires may be more susceptible to carrying out that revenge desire versus other people who have, don't have to struggle with addictions, don't see their life as filled with grievances, a lot of which have been unredressed and haven't experienced lots of suffering and lives that, like you know, when you were in the throes of it, where you have a lot of self shame, a lot of self grievances against self. We can even seek revenge against ourselves for letting ourselves down.

• 39:24Dan Harris?

  Coming up, James Kimmel Jr. talks about some practical strategies for when you feel wronged, an antidote to revenge cravings, the courtroom of the mind, which is a fascinating concept, and much more.

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• 40:48Dan Harris?

  Okay, so let's turn to the practical and productive part of this conversation for a second, more than a second. Just to say, I always want to address the largest possible audience, so we can talk about people who might qualify as addicted to revenge, but I would love to talk about the vast majority of humans who play these revenge fantasies out in our brains, just as a matter of, you know, sort of evolutionary programming. So you said something earlier that I want to come back to. There are better strategies when you feel wronged, better strategies than, I assume, rumination and revenge. What are they?

• 41:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the number one best strategy that you ought to be thinking about when you have a grievance, when you feel that you've been wronged, or betrayed, or victimized in any way, is to actually think about forgiveness, but in an all-new way that humanity hasn't thought of until very recently as well, because now we have a whole set of brain science that reveals that when you merely imagine forgiving a grievance without telling the person who wronged you that you're gonna forgive them, you just imagine what you would feel like if you did forgive it. Inside your brain, what this is doing, and brain imaging studies show this, is it actually shuts down the anterior insula, the pain network that I was talking about. So forgiveness actually

• 42:09Speaker 05

  takes away the pain, it stops the pain, whereas revenge-seeking just gives you this short-term dopamine rush that makes you feel better for a little while, and then leaves you kind of feeling worse but wanting more. The other things that forgiveness does inside your head is it shuts down the pleasure and reward craving circuitry of addiction. So suddenly, these intrusive and sometimes endless for people who ruminate on revenge-seeking, all of that is lifted as well when you simply imagine forgiving. So it shuts down that craving-reward circuitry. And the last thing it does is it activates or reactivates your prefrontal cortex, that self-control and decision-making center of your brain, so that you can make good decisions. So what we've got

• 42:53Speaker 05

  with forgiveness now, and this is neuroscience-based now, it's not- Just something that comes out of religion. And I'm a spiritual person. So I mean, forgiveness is an important concept for me spiritually, but scientifically, it shows that a true atheist who forgives is going to get all of the neurological benefits I just described, which is to say, pain will stop for you, the pain of the wrongs of the past will stop, the cravings for revenge will stop, and you will make good decisions that don't result in you hurting people despite the negative consequences to yourself.

• 43:30Speaker 05

  It's kind of a wonder drug.

• 43:32Dan Harris?

  So how does this work practically? So Phil, I'll just take myself. I have a couple of people in my life who I have historic beef with. If I wanted to operationalize your advice, would I just imagine myself forgiving them and just see how that feels?

• 43:50Speaker 05

  Well, let's talk about what forgiving them means, right? Because I think it means different things to different people. So a lot of people think that the word give that's built inside of the word forgive means you're giving something to the perpetrator, the person who just slapped you in the face. And that's not the case at all. You can get these neurological benefits of forgiveness without communicating with them in any way, shape, or form. It turns out that forgiveness benefits you as victim, not the person who wronged you as perpetrator. And you activate it and you operationalize it the way you're hoping there. One way, the quickest way, is to simply imagine how you would feel if you decide to forgive. You're not going to communicate to the other person. You're just imagining how you would feel if you make a decision, I'm moving on, I'm moving

• 44:35Speaker 05

  past this. That quick little decision suddenly gives you this relief of pain and this relief from the revenge desires. And then you can do that multiple times as pain comes back or revenge desires come back. Every time they come back, you can go, no, I'm moving on. I've left that behind. I've forgiven it already. And it will, in very short order, you'll start to feel that the pain of the grievance and the revenge desires aren't coming back as often as they were. When we think about Jesus' teaching when asked, so how often am I supposed to forgive people? Seven times. And he said, no, not seven times, 70 times, seven times. And I think it's been a kind of a mystery as to why he said that and what that meant.

• 45:19Speaker 05

  But neurologically, it looks like it means make this decision to heal yourself and do it as often as necessary until you are healed. You know, you don't need a doctor for it. You don't need a prescription. You don't need to pay any money for it and you can use it as often as you want. And we're, we are all hardwired to forgive, just as much as we are hardwired to want revenge when we've been wronged. We are hardwired to be able to heal ourselves by forgiveness in just the same way. And it gives us all of these benefits.

• 45:51Dan Harris?

  Ah, so there's the feature of the operating system as opposed to the bug.

• 45:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:55Dan Harris?

  Let me repeat that back to you just to make sure I understand it and to make sure the listeners understand it. I think what you're saying is that forgiveness is a practice and it has a fake it until you make it aspect, which is, okay, I'm going to do what's sometimes called opposite action. Every time I have a revenge fantasy, I'm going to try to get into the habit of imagining, okay, what would it be like if I forgave them? That doesn't mean I'm inviting them over for dinner. It doesn't mean I have to communicate with them in any way. It doesn't mean I have to lower any boundaries that I've set. It's just like, what if I didn't carry this toxicity forward anymore? And it's not like it's magic. It's just going to go away from that first time seven times 70.

• 46:38Dan Harris?

  And probably that's an understatement or an undercount or an underestimate. You're just going to have to over time, try to plant a new habit in your mind and brain. And then the magic kicks in at some indeterminate point in the future where one day you might wake up and actually the toxicity is gone.

• 46:58Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it's interesting, you know, the idea of faking until you, you make it. I might change that to say, imagine it until you make it. So we're just using the brain's ability to imagine a decision to forgive. You can imagine, anybody can imagine what it would feel like if I decided to forgive today. How would I feel? I'm not forgiving anything. I don't want to forgive. I'm definitely determined not to forgive, but I'm going to imagine. How I would feel if I did, that kind of takes the pressure off. You don't have to actually forgive. You can just pretend how you might feel. And in brain imaging studies, we see that this cascade of events, you know, the stopping of the pain in the pain network and the reduction in revenge cravings

• 47:43Speaker 05

  begins to happen merely from imagining it. Now, I don't want to make it easier than it is because it does take effort. It takes practice, as you said, and it might take 70 times seven or more. But to operationalize it even further, I created and we've studied at Yale, a process that's built on the courtroom of the mind that we all have. And I think it's worth talking about that for a second. So going throughout our lives, we sort of all have this courtroom inside our heads where we're endlessly putting on trial the people who wrong us. But we're playing all the roles, right? We're, we are, we're the victim and we can testify, you know, what just happened. And now we're the defendant and I'm going to imagine what they're going to say in their defense.

• 48:26Speaker 05

  And then I'm the judge and jury and I'm going to find guilt or innocence. And I'm going to hand down a sentence. And then I'm the warden and I'm going to administer that sentence. You know, this is the whole thing from pain to revenge seeking. So that's going on inside our heads. Sigmund Freud identified it, you know, a hundred years ago. My training was as a lawyer and I've seen this be carried out, you know, as a litigator time and time again. And we have this in almost all societies, this idea of a tribunal that's going to be the judge of what happened. And we know from trauma therapists and psychiatrists that people who are trying to recover from trauma need two or three really important things.

• 49:05Speaker 05

  One is they need an opportunity to be heard and they need to have their experience validated. The second thing that they need is some form of accountability. And accountability doesn't mean or shouldn't mean, it doesn't have to mean revenge. It can just mean identifying the person who caused my pain. That is accountability, just the way an accountant identifies where your money went. He doesn't, or she doesn't explain why it went there or whether it was a good idea or not. They're just accounting for where the money went. And accountability really needs to be thought of in that sense. So you have these two things that are important to combine. And then in the imagining of revenge seeking. So I created this experience based on the courtroom of the mind.

• 49:49Speaker 05

  It's a role play where you get to do everything I just said. And you get to put on trial anyone who's ever wronged you. And you play all of these roles. But in the punishment role, you get to actually imagine punishing the person who wronged you in any way you want. It could be as horrific and sadistic as you want it to be, or as gentle as you want it to be. But what this does by playing it out in your mind is it's kind of a methadone for a revenge addict type of experience where it releases this powerful revenge craving so that it gets out of your way. And you can finally, at that last step, and that there's a final step called the final judgment, where now you're asked to be the judge of your own life. And having put somebody on trial, found them guilty, punished them in the way you wanted,

• 50:32Speaker 05

  the question becomes, as judge of your own life, do you feel better? Did it really give you what you wanted? And what you'll find, and most people find when we've studied it is, is that it doesn't. The pain comes roaring back very quickly and the agony of the whole thing and the memories of what happened. And you find that putting someone on trial is just a re-traumatizing horrific experience that you probably shouldn't have wanted in the first place. So what could you do instead? And it's at that point, when all of this is behind you, that you can be asked, so now imagine what it would be like if you forgave it. And when we ask it at that point in time, most people will explain, wow, I would feel, I only have to imagine, and they want to be sure, and I don't want to forgive, I just,

• 51:16Speaker 05

  but I am willing to imagine what it would feel like if I did. And they'll say, wow, I feel a lot better. I feel this weight suddenly lifted from my shoulder. So there's this true healing experience. And like I said, we can see that neurologically inside your brain, what's going on. And it's available for us as this, like I said, this free wonder drug that we kind of poo poo as some, you know, only path to get to heaven. And maybe it's heaven on earth, but it's this, it's this heaven of getting away from the pains and traumas of your past.

• 51:48Dan Harris?

  This system you devised sounds pretty brilliant, honestly. But does it give? You said before, people who've been traumatized, they want to be heard and they want accountability. Does this process provide those, those, those needs?

• 52:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, it does. And it does because just what I said very early on. All of the remembered pain of your grievance of what happened to you in the past is just a thought formation inside your head. It's not out here in the real world. You can't experience it with your senses. Your desire for revenge is also just a set of thought formations inside your head. Why would we really imagine that we need a stone, brick and wood courtroom with people who aren't ourselves, acting as judges and acting as lawyers, going through this kind of process charade in which we're going to put on trial, they're going to put on trial and we're going to sit back and watch this trial happening and somehow imagine that that's going to heal us. It almost never heals anybody. Usually

• 52:48Speaker 05

  the trials in the criminal and civil justice system only serve to make people feel a lot, lot worse and to victimize them over and over and over again. So by putting the courtroom inside your head, you can experience, it turns out our imaginations are so powerful that by simply talking to yourself or to a partner. So there's an app for this. It's called the Miracle Court app. It's free at miraclecourt.com. And you can experience an audio version of this entire trial and it's my voice leading you through the five steps of this trial. And if you did that and you tried it, you'd find that it feels incredibly real that when you're testifying as victim, that is just like you're in a courtroom. And then when you're testifying as the defendant,

• 53:32Speaker 05

  it's also just like you're in a courtroom. So you get this experience inside your imagination that feels very authentic to being heard. And then when you move on to holding to account, you know, it might be the first time for a lot of people to ever experience what it's like to be a judge of another person's life and to be on a jury. And so you get that experience of thinking about, how would I find in this case? Some people. Get so into it and they kind of reform what happened that they might decide the person that wronged them isn't even guilty at all, that they've kind of discovered a new way of looking at what happened and suddenly they see that they themselves had

• 54:14Speaker 05

  more culpability than they really thought they did at the beginning. So a lot of fascinating stuff happens in this psychodrama role play that's created based on a normal criminal trial. And I also have created a version for kids, a school version, based on school disciplinary hearings that can be used by schools to help kids get through their own grievances and revenge seeking because what we know is that the desire for revenge manifests as early as the toddler years. So from toddler on up to old age, humans are experiencing these cravings and we're giving kids very little instruction on how to manage those cravings. We tell them about drugs, alcohol and sex, but we don't tell them about this, perhaps the most dangerous craving of all and how to manage it.

• 54:57Dan Harris?

  In your book, you talk about some other ways to manage this dangerous craving. I'll list a few of them and maybe you can just pick up on them as you see fit. Mindfulness, especially mindfulness of revenge triggers, cognitive flexibility, which I believe you just kind of referenced in that going through the Miracle Court app, you might see that actually you've got some culpability too. You even talk about drugs like GLP-1s like Manjaro. Can you hold forth on the foregoing?

• 55:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure. Let's think about it this sense. If it's true and the evidence is all pointing in this direction that grievance triggered compulsive revenge desires are the root cause of intentionally afflicted human suffering and violence, therefore seeing revenge and violence as an addiction is the right way to see it, then we've opened up our entire toolkit of addiction prevention and treatment strategies that work for other forms of addiction, but may now work for violence. And that would include things like cognitive behavioral therapy, which is easily part of the Miracle Court non-justice system process I just described. You're retraining your brain into how to work through your grievance and your revenge desires.

• 56:10Speaker 05

  Motivational interviewing is another really strong strategy for overcoming or getting into recovery from addiction. And the miracle court non-justice system is essentially just basically a role play script that is asking you or interviewing you by a list of questions that enables you to gain insight through your own answers to these important questions. And then anti-craving medications like naltrexone and even GLP-1s, this is more theoretical right now, but we know that GLP-1s work on food and appetitive cravings. They're being studied for other addictions and early evidence shows that they're effective in reducing cravings

• 56:53Speaker 05

  in drugs and alcohol. If that holds true, they may also be effective at reducing revenge desires among the small percentage of people who are the most greatly afflicted and who present the greatest danger to society. And the other thing that I emphasize in the book is, none of what I've said is to create, nor can it create, a defense to people who commit crimes, for people who commit crimes, that they shouldn't be held responsible for the crimes that they commit. That's not so. Addictions are not a defense to any criminal act. They've never been recognized that way, and they're not going to be, and it shouldn't be. If you're a danger to society, you need to be removed from society. But we don't have to then keep

• 57:38Speaker 05

  someone incarcerated and remove them for our own gratification of hurting them because they've hurt us. We should do it more to make sure that society is safe and then begin prevention and treatment using all of these processes and more to see if we can truly rehabilitate someone and get them back into recovery.

• 57:58Dan Harris?

  You talked about cognitive behavioral therapy. For those of us who aren't in that therapy and don't have the time or plans to do it, but do want to get better at reducing our grudge nursing habit, what kind of tools from cognitive behavioral therapy might be helpful for us in our everyday lives?

• 58:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I'm, you know, I want to emphasize I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist. So I'm not a treating doctor and cognitive behavioral therapy in general is a strategy in which though, you know, a healthcare provider generally, it's usually not something you do on your own, but I, it probably can be from time to time. But it's a way of reframing your own inner language so that you can see things more clearly. Because in a lot of instances, people with anxiety or forms of depression, or it will stick with anxiety, are fearful of things that maybe they shouldn't be fearful of. And so cognitive behavioral therapy can reframe that. How they do that, though, is not something that I feel really qualified to speak to.

• 59:01Dan Harris?

  Got it.

• 59:05Dan Harris?

  Coming up, James talks about how to seek justice without revenge, political grievances and societal implications, and much more.

• 59:17Speaker 08

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• 59:46Dan Harris?

  Okay, so let's just go back to your core piece of advice, which has to do with forgiveness.

• 59:50Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 59:51Dan Harris?

  Just technically, again, when you use the word forgiveness, and I'm making this move that you suggest, which is kind of counter-programming against my revenge fantasies, and I'm imagining what it would be like to forgive, what kind of work is the word forgiveness doing?

• 1:00:12Speaker 05

  If forgiveness becomes an obstacle for you, you can say, "I'm going to make a decision to move past this. I'm going to make a decision to let this grievance, the wrong of the past, stay in the past. It's no longer going to affect my present or my future." And that is what forgiveness, at its minimal and most essential core, really is. It is a decision to not seek justice in the form of revenge. The word that I use, and I coined this term in my first book, called "Suing for Peace," is non-justice, which is to say, not seeking justice in the form of revenge. That decision is kind of the core essence of what forgiveness means.

• 1:00:55Speaker 05

  It doesn't have to mean that you are pardoning the person to their face, or that you're restoring the relationship with them, or that you are staying in a toxic relationship. It doesn't require any of this. It requires, though, a decision inside your head of, "I'm no longer going to seek revenge against you, and I'm no longer going to allow this suffering to occur." This thing that happened in the past, this memory, I'm going to put it in the past and leave it there. I'm not going to keep on bringing it back out in order to stimulate more and more revenge desires and more and more pain for myself.

• 1:01:36Dan Harris?

  How would we apply this to, say, the US political situation? There are many people listening to this show, myself included, who, you know, have issues with Donald Trump. And it's not like we can create a total boundary. I mean, we can reduce our news consumption, but a homie's in our lives in a non-negotiable way. And so it's not just a thing we can quarantine into the past. So how do we not get swamped with resentment vis a vis political figures with whom we disagree?

• 1:02:06Speaker 05

  Sure. Critical question. A few things there. One is, so revenge addiction that we've been discussing is not a conservative or a liberal problem. It is a human problem. It is a deeply human problem, and it crosses all political boundaries. So it's important to see that. The reason it's important to see that is because the other, the people who are opposite you, if you're a liberal, the conservatives, conservative people over the last 20 years, have experienced, in their minds, whether it's real or not, does not matter, as I said. It's real for them and that's all that matters. Have experienced grievances that they feel have been not redressed and that they have not been able to forgive.

• 1:02:49Speaker 05

  And likewise now, perhaps, you know, as the administration has turned, liberals see enormous amounts of grievance coming as Trump has kind of created a set of Avengers within his administration, like a superhero movie, who are just doing everything they can to avenge the wrongs of their past. And so they're going out against us full tilt. And that is just spurring now another set of victimization experiences for liberals who are going to want to retaliate again against Trump. And this will continue on and on forever until either one of two things happen. There's an act of forgiveness or there's an act of serious revenge-seeking that unleashes, you know, like a cataclysm.

• 1:03:34Speaker 05

  So if we wanted to make America great again, my thought is we ought to make America forgiving again. And that can sound Pollyanna-ish, but here's why it's not. Throughout American history and world history, at every turn, anytime there's been a serious conflict, and I'm talking about war-level conflict, like, let's say, the Civil War in the United States. A military victory does not end the war. It ends some hostilities. But the only thing that holds the peace is forgiveness. The only thing that held the peace after Appomattox was that the people in the North and the South decided collectively, over a series of years,

• 1:04:16Speaker 05

  that they were going to forgive what happened rather than avenge it. And this is also true at international scale. So World War II is another fantastic example in which you've got Japan and Germany and the United States deadlocked in a death match for multiple years, with Germany committing genocides and murdering tens of millions of people, Japan doing the same thing, and the United States dropping nuclear bombs. How is it possible that we are all at peace and have been at peace for 70-plus years with these two former adversaries? It's not because of the military conquest which stopped the hostilities, it's because the three countries and the people in them decided to forgive each other.

• 1:05:01Speaker 05

  The Marshall Plan came out instead of a plan to destroy Germany, which was Stalin's plan. And Truman rejected that at the last second, thankfully, and we've been the beneficiaries of decades of peace. So this is not a Pollyanna-ish concept by any means, and it works at your individual level, it works in your family, it works at your workplace, it works in schools. Forgiveness is the only way that humans can ultimately live together despite their disagreements and their wounds and their injuries of the past.

• 1:05:33Dan Harris?

  Yeah, so just to say, I largely, largely, very, very strongly agree with you. I'm not a historian, so the one little quibble I'm gonna make here, please forgive if historians are listening. I definitely, I mean, the World War II example definitely lands for me, the Marshall Plan is a, is a very interesting case study in forgiveness and Restoration probably learned the hard way after we meted out excessive punishment, or what could be argued as excessive punishment after World War I, which then led to the rise of the Nazis. But I think after the Civil War, what happened, a lot of what happened was less forgiveness, but more that the South figured out a way to carry out slavery by other means and the North let them get away with it. But having said that, I, I do agree with you, and I, you know, I think of, you know,

• 1:06:18Dan Harris?

  controversial moves like Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon, which was unpopular at the time, but history has viewed kindly. We have a decision to make, each one of us, at every moment, especially in these polarized times. Are we gonna be part of the problem or the solution? And being part of the solution does not mean quietism, or resignation, or passivity, it doesn't mean failing to set boundaries, failing to speak up, but you can do all of that from a place of compassion, altruism, dare I say, love, rather than revenge-seeking, and that is the choice we have. Would you agree with the little soapbox speech I just gave there?

• 1:06:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. And what we need to be aware of is that the pain that we feel that's being inflicted, if you're a liberal person, by, you know, the conservative administration is, a lot of it is revenge seeking. And the conservatives felt that during the Biden administration, they were victimized by a lot of revenge seeking there. So how did that happen? Why would we keep doing this? We're doing it because we feel victimized and we want to retaliate as soon as we get that opportunity. And it seems as though unfortunately that American elections are now about which group can get power so that we can get into office

• 1:07:39Speaker 05

  and begin hurting the other half of the country. That is not a recipe for peace or prosperity in this nation. People need to start forgiving the grievances that they feel and moving on from them. And as you said, that doesn't mean staying in a toxic relationship. It doesn't mean trying to oppose the election of a very vengeful man as president. I wrote a piece in Politico right before the Capitol insurrection, you know, identifying Donald Trump and my concerns about him, his inability to control his revenge desires, and that America had made a decision at that time to take away the keys to the country.

• 1:08:22Speaker 05

  Because, you know, if you have a, if you're in a family with somebody who's an addict, they can wreck, you know, they can wreck your family, can do a lot of damage, and you've got to do things to make your family safe first. America tried it, made it safe, and somehow we made a decision to put him back in office again. And now we're going to bear the consequences of that. But we still have to forgive our way through it if we have a hope of getting the country back together again.

• 1:08:50Dan Harris?

  Or give our way through it. And one, you know, I think I'm reflecting you correctly. One way to understand forgiveness in this regard specifically is a kind of cognitive empathy, where you understand, you don't have to agree with it, but just to understand, make the effort to understand the way people with whom you disagree see the world. I find that, for example, when I consume conservative media, which I do very regularly, it has this oddly counterintuitively calming effect. I don't agree with what they're saying much of the time, but I, at least I understand that it has an internal logic.

• 1:09:29Dan Harris?

  And that just makes the blind rage into a more determined, and again, I'll use the cheesy word, loving resistance.

• 1:09:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, remember forgiving doesn't convert a conservative into a liberal or a liberal into a conservative. It merely stops them from becoming a retaliatory punisher, an inflicter of pain upon another group of people. That is, that's kind of the thing that I'm talking about here, is that decision to stop the retaliation on all sides as swiftly as possible and in every way possible, no matter how distasteful it feels. We don't have to become the punishers. If you're a liberal person, you don't have to become the punisher of conservatives. You can still hold your views and try and sell them to the American people as the better way without becoming,

• 1:10:23Speaker 05

  you know, the, the source of pain for half of the country. And unfortunately, that's been going on now for too long between both sides.

• 1:10:31Dan Harris?

  We were talking about the Bible a lot today, but reaping what you sow comes to mind.

• 1:10:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Dan Harris?

  Final question before I get to my habitual two final questions. Have you ever reached out to the? Kids are now the men who bullied you?

• 1:10:46Speaker 05

  I have not, you know, I moved away from that area and I even forget most of their names. But I didn't even do it at the time. Like I said, when I drove away that night, I wasn't forgiving anyone. And, you know, we sort of skipped over, but how did I go from wanting to be a farmer to becoming a lawyer, to becoming a researcher at Yale? And that journey was kind of based on this, where I wanted revenge. I just realized I didn't want to pay such a high price for it. And I realized that I could become, I could become a professional revenge seeker by becoming a lawyer, which is the legalized form of revenge. It's like, you know, doctors prescribing opioids. This is what lawyers do is we prescribe, you know, legalized revenge and then in the brand,

• 1:11:28Speaker 05

  using the brand name of justice. So it affected my life and I became a revenge seeker for the next 20 years professionally. And that eventually permeated every aspect of my life. I was a revenge seeker at home with my wife and kids. I was a revenge seeker in the community. I couldn't get away from it. I really did feel addicted. And it was that sense of feeling addicted, hopeless and helpless that led me away from the law and into becoming a violence researcher at Yale.

• 1:11:57Dan Harris?

  It's an amazing story. I'm sorry about to live it, but we're benefiting from it. Final question, can you just remind everybody of the names of your books and of your app, your website? Please just plug it all.

• 1:12:09Speaker 05

  Sure. Yeah. Thank you for that opportunity. So my current book, maybe the most important, is called The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It. That's available at any place that books are sold. I have two other books that are also revenge and forgiveness themed. One is a novel called The Trial of Fallen Angels about a young lawyer who finds herself in the afterlife, having to defend the souls of murderers at the final judgment while trying to solve the mystery of her own death. And then my first book was a spiritual book called Suing for Peace. And that book is about my spiritual journey to try and understand revenge addiction as a spiritual problem rather than as a scientific one. And

• 1:12:54Speaker 05

  I eventually concluded only science would help us free ourselves of this. As for websites, jameskimmeljr.com is my personal website. Lot of information there, including a link to the Miracle Court and that Miracle Court app. Is also available at miraclecourt.com. You can get it there. And then I have a, you know, my bio, academic bio is at Yale as well. If you just Google Kimmel Yale, you'll find me there.

• 1:13:22Dan Harris?

  James, thank you very much. Great work. Great to have you on.

• 1:13:25Speaker 05

  Dan, thank you. Thanks so much for the opportunity to be here.

• 1:13:33Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to James Kimmel Jr. Fascinating to talk to him. As mentioned earlier, there is a guided meditation that comes with this episode. It's specifically designed to help you take everything you just heard and kind of pound it into your neurons in a practical way. It's called For When You Want Revenge, and it's guided by our Teacher of the Month, Seb A. Selassie, only for paid subscribers over on danharris.com. Paid subscribers also get weekly live guided meditation sessions on video where you can ask questions as well. The next one's coming up tomorrow, Tuesday, October 7th. We do them every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. Tomorrow's is with Seb A., who will be joined by DJ Cashmere, who's the executive producer of this show. As I mentioned earlier, Seb and I will be up at the Omega Institute on October 24th

• 1:14:18Dan Harris?

  if you want to come meditate with us in person. It's a whole weekend long thing. We call it Meditation Party. There's a link in the show notes. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who works so hard on the show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.