James Kimmel, Jr.
Appearances
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Also, they may be deeper in time and relate to other experiences in their life, and they're seeking what we call revenge by proxy, which is to say you can get revenge against someone even if they aren't the person who actually wronged you. multitudes of examples of this in human life and throughout human history in which we will retaliate against someone who's an easier target.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
So, for example, let me give you an instance of a child who is being abused by a parent or some other adult. the child is essentially powerless against that parent or adult and is unable to retaliate so what do they do we see that playing out in bullying in school in which they will in order to get revenge eric the gratification of revenge will pick a weaker child
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
out and and be able to start bullying that child acting out their desire to retaliate and make themselves feel better for what the parent did to them maybe that morning or maybe a week ago you have a very personal relationship to this topic that i'd like you to explain I had a serious victimization experience as a teenager, a bullying experience.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
And that kind of put me on a trail to becoming ultimately a lawyer in the professional revenge business, as I call it, because we're paid to help our clients get revenge for the
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
for the grievances and perceived victimizations that they experience in their lives and we're licensed to do that legally and you know we're licensed to prescribe and manufacture and distribute legalized revenge for people so I went into that business in part to continue this
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
This gratification experience, but it bled over into my personal life and to my family life where I was, you know, just becoming sort of a continual Avenger in a very habitual way and I started to realize when I wanted to cut down because it was making me a pretty awful person and an unhappy person that I wasn't able to or I was only able to for short periods of time and
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
uh... eventually it it pushed me away from the law to sort of save myself and begin to study over the last twenty years the idea of revenge is an addiction just about the time that i started to do that at the yale school of medicine other researchers around the world began to
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
put people in brain scanners and try and figure out what happens inside your brain when you have a grievance or a sense of victimization and then this desire for retaliation emerges in your mind and what's going on there and that's what we've learned so far but the good news is running on a separate track
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
to uh trying to understand what revenge is all about and violence a separate group of researchers were trying to understand what forgiveness is all about and found out some fascinating information which is that forgiveness just imagining what happens when you forget so let me put it this way if you have a grievance and you imagine forgiving it just imagine it you don't tell the other person that you're forgiving it
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
inside your brain that shuts down that pain network that i talked about so it actually takes away the pain instead of covering it up the way revenge does with a little uh... short acting hit of dopamine it then takes away the uh... revenge cravings by deactivating
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction, and then finally it reactivates your prefrontal cortex so that you're able to exert self-control, weigh costs and benefits, and make good decisions. So forgiveness is actually a wonder drug that we didn't even know had all of these powers, and this neuroscience really supports the ancient forgiveness teachings of luminaries like Jesus and the Buddha.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Yeah. And you only have to imagine forgiving. So you can go, I don't want to forgive anybody. I can't believe this guy just did that. Maybe flipped a finger, almost killed you, almost knocked your car off the road. And you might go, I don't want to forgive. I don't. And I get that. And I really do. But if you choose to imagine, just imagine for a few seconds, how would you feel if you forgave it?
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
I haven't met a person yet who just imagined what it would feel like to forgive, who didn't say back to me, oh, how would I feel if I forgave? I'd feel relieved. I would feel like this weight is suddenly off my shoulders. I no longer have to go out, put myself in harm's way and try and harm them back because of what they did to me.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
I can just, in other words, leave the pain of the past where it belongs in the past.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
and i'm one of those people i mean i'm really angry when uh when i get cut off you know i'm shouting jerk and and maybe some other words that i want to say right now and that's not the part that that reaction of pain right because what we're perceiving at that moment is
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
We're perceiving an attack potentially on our bodies because they might have put us in harm's way, but we're also perceiving an attack on our ego, our individuality. We see it as a sign of disrespect, and that is searing pain. I mean, right in your head, it's real pain. You can see that on brain imaging. You can see that area of the brain activating, and your brain needs to do something with that.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
One possibility is revenge, but we're now learning that another possibility that is much more enduring, doesn't come with all of the risks, you can do it as often as you want, forgive, as Jesus said, don't forgive seven times, forgive somebody 70 times seven. And neuroscientists would say, well, That's a great idea, not because it's a pathway to heaven or something.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
It's a great idea because the more often you forgive, the more you are controlling your pain and healing yourself, and the more often you're taking away that revenge craving, and the more often you're activating your decision-making capacity, self-control, and wisdom.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Right. And that's, you know, you're describing there a person who's truly struggling with revenge addiction, right? It's slowly destroying their lives. And so I developed, and we've studied at Yale, a way of helping them and actually also helping people who have shorter term revenge desires, but they can't seem to move beyond them. And that's called the non-justice system or miracle court.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
The miracle court non-justice system process, and there's a free app for this called the miracle court. Anybody can use it. You get to put on trial. Anybody who's ever wronged you for anything in your life, dead or alive, whether you can reach them or not, and the way it works is you play all the roles yourself.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
So you first testify as the victim to yourself, and then you testify as the defendant, the person who wronged you. And you try to put yourself in their shoes and explain what their defense to this would be and what their side of the story was. Then you play the judge and the jury. You get to be the judge, not somebody in a courtroom.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
This is even better than that because you get to decide guilt and innocence and you get to hand down the sentence. And then you imagine becoming the warden and carrying out that sentence and punishing the person. And this enables you to kind of safely gratify your revenge desires without doing it in real life so that you're not harming yourself or anyone else.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
And then in the last and final step, you become the judge of your own life in which you decide whether it was really useful to continue trying to punish this person or whether, and that's when you get to imagine what it would feel like to forgive,
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
whether it might feel better to actually forgive this whole thing and move on with your life and you have to decide and we all do if you think about it mike every day every moment with every grievance or victimization we have to decide at some point are we going to move on from this or are we going to keep nursing as someone who well and i i think this applies to everyone everyone has entertained thoughts of revenge when they've been wronged and
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
thanks mike it's been a real pleasure and an honor to be on your show today
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Sure. So the recent neuroscience on revenge, which is very fresh and really it hasn't been explored at all by scientists until the last about 20 years. But what we know now is that your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
When you experience a grievance, and a grievance we can think about as a real or imagined perception of having been wronged, mistreated, shamed, humiliated, insulted, any of those experiences of victimization, they all register inside the brain in the pain network. which is known as the anterior insula.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
And when that area of the brain, which is your brain registering significant psychological or physical pain, your brain doesn't like pain and it wants to rebalance itself. So it's got too much pain and it wants to reverse that or balance that. And the way it does it, it turns out, for revenge seeking,
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
is it activates the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction and in that area of the brain it registers revenge which is to say inflicting pain upon another person to make yourself feel better that registers in your brain in that circuitry and it feels extremely pleasurable for you
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Let's take an example of you're driving your car right now or at some other time and somebody cuts you off in traffic, right? So they've disrespected you and your perception is that was wrong, that was a violation of some social norm. And if you're like a lot of people, you're pretty upset by it and you're going to maybe potentially honk your horn, you're going to potentially shout.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
We're perceiving an attack, potentially on our bodies, but we're also perceiving an attack on our ego. We see it as a sign of disrespect. That is searing pain. Right in your head, it's real pain. We can see that on brain imaging.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
If you're a little more aggressive, you might, Flip the finger at that person. If you're a little more aggressive, you might start tailgating them. If you're a little more aggressive than that, you might try and cut them off. And if you're a lot more aggressive, you might pull a gun on that person. So there are these different stages of seeking revenge. So why do people do this?
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Why do we have road rage killings? And why do we have road rage accidents? And why don't we just have a lot of anger on the road from something as simple as being cut off in traffic? And what we know now is that that is your way You being the victimized driver of this guy that cut you off. That is your way of trying to make yourself feel better after the pain of being cut off.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
And that's an important insight for humanity because we've never understood until now what the biological cause of any form of violence is. And now we know the biological cause is almost all forms of violence are violence.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
are the result of revenge seeking so we know that from vast public databases and law enforcement agencies now all generally agree and behavioral studies that almost every form of violence is the result of the perpetrator having felt victimized and now trying to make themselves feel better acting out neural circuitry of pleasure and reward seeking to make themselves feel better
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Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
And the last component is you have a prefrontal cortex in your brain, which is your executive function and control circuitry. And that's there to stop you from doing things that hurt yourself or other people.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
In addiction, that circuitry is generally seen and believed to have been inhibited or hijacked so that you no longer have the clarity of decision making that you might have in a more calmer state.
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Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
So the addiction is if you go after that driver, you swerve in front of them, you put yourself in harm's way, that driver in harm's way, and the other drivers around you in harm's way. and you couldn't control it. It wasn't a rational thought, it was compulsive. Compulsive revenge seeking is the addiction, and we see that throughout society. We see it in intimate partner relationships,
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
husband, wife, or otherwise, spouses, in which there's a continuation of seeking to retaliate over and over again, despite the serious damage it's doing to their relationship, to their family, to their kids.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Well, the first person who said, wow, that guy was a jerk, and then goes back to listening to their radio and driving normally, that person's in full control. He may or she may have fantasized a little bit for a while about all the deliciously cool things they'd like to do to that jerk, but they don't act on it. And they're safe and acting in the normally adaptive way.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
But for many other people, maybe 20% of the population, they're going to escalate that, put themselves in harm's way, put other people in harm's way. And those people are struggling with a revenge addiction, which is, it feels good to retaliate, And just like any other addict who's an addict, you know, of alcohol, other narcotics, they're seeking that pleasure.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up. So the pleasure that you get is very short-lived, just the way it is for drugs and alcohol. It might be minutes to an hour, but as you say, and studies have shown and backed up exactly what you just said, There are negative psychological consequences for Avengers, and they're always there. We always experience them.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
And I try to explain that by imagining a hammer striking a nail. And we often think about, in that case, oh, poor nail, it's just been slugged by this hammer and driven into this board. But we don't think about the hammer. The hammer by physical law, had to experience the impact of that blow at just the same intensity as the nail. And that happens for us as human beings.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
We cannot become the instrument of another person's pain, even a person who we think started it and started the pain cycle first. We can't become the instrument of their pain without experiencing the pain that we're trying to inflict. We always will experience that.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
But we are willing to set it aside for that brief dopamine high that we get by retaliating against someone who we believe has wronged us.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Yes, almost all forms of violence are revenge, intimate partner violence, bullying and youth violence, gang violence, street violence, extremism violence, terrorism, genocide, war, all the way from bottom to top.
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Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Actually, the person who broke into your house is almost guaranteed to have been acting out of some form of perceived victimization. And the perceived victimizations that we imagine or experience in our minds, like I said, sometimes they're real, sometimes they're imagined.