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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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
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.
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?
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.
I can just, in other words, leave the pain of the past where it belongs in the past.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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
thanks mike it's been a real pleasure and an honor to be on your show today
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