James Kimmel, Jr.
speaker
56 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 20 Jan
James Kimmel, Jr.’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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