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.

29:13It made sense. You're 100 % right to go and take out Osama bin Laden, who seem to be completely incapable of being pacified. And so fight, flight, 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 a revenge-based sort of binge that went on for years and years and years. So that's the distinction. And in my book, I'm very in making that distinction. I'm never talking about self-defense and accepting a present threat. I'm only talking about bringing up these realms of the past that only live inside your memory.

29:57They'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 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. Again, this is something I want to talk about.

30:32The productive aspect of this conversation is something I want to get to, but let me just stay 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 just kind of institutionalized revenge in many cases. but high justice, instituting social order and fairness, those were adaptive traits in our evolutionary history where things have gone haywire, really badly haywire.

31:16Anybody who's a student of history can see it. Anybody who reads the news now can see it as well. Is the revenge-seeking behavior. Am I close now? Yeah, I think you're very close now. Awesome. And it is subtle. There is a subtle aspect to this, Dan, that you're putting your finger on. 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?

31:55It's only inside of those people that we think are evil people, which just coincidentally always happen to be the people who disagree with us and do things that we don't like. And we call that evil. That's not a useful construct, and there's really no evidence for it. What there is evidence for now is that all people are capable of 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 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 and at the last second were uncontrolled.

32:57And 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 every day, unfortunately. It's a very sad experience. 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 dungeon or self-righteousness call justice, but really it's revenge.

33:37That desire has been a massively pernicious force in my life personally. And so I'm just wondering, is there a spectrum here? Yeah. Spectrum is a great word for it. And there is, so there's a spectrum of revenge seeking from very nonviolent 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 wronged you up 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.

34:23If you ask them in a survey, have you ever thought about revenge, or have you thought about revenge even recently, 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 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.

35:05So, you know, the number of people that are committing the violent forms of revenge is substantially reduced. 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, as we can begin to really think about a true evidence-based and measurable public health approach to reducing, preventing, and treating violence. 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?

35:53There 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 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 turf wars and it's about the money, right?

36:32It's about the money in drug dealing that's driving the violence. 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 going to go and get them, or their gang insulted my gang. We're going to go out with my gang now and we're going to 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.

37:08If that's, you know, inhibited or hijacked for another addiction, it may also be weakened as well for or against, I should say, these revenge cravings. 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 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.

37:49We can even seek revenge against ourselves for letting ourselves down.

37:56Coming 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.

38:17Okay, 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 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? 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 going to forgive them, you just imagine what you would feel like if you did forgive it.

39:28Inside 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 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.

40:05All 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 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 realms 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.

40:59It's kind of a wonder drug. 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? 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 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.

41:35You 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 past this. That quick little decision suddenly gives you this relief of pain and this relief from the revenge desires.

42:14And 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. We think about Jesus's 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. But neurologically, it looks like it means make this decision to heal yourself and do it as often as necessary until you are healed.

42:58You 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. So there's the feature in the operating system as opposed to the bug. Yeah. 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.

43:41Every 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. 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.

44:20And 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. Yeah. And it's interesting, the idea of faking until 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 that. 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.

44:59You 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 begins to happen merely from imagining it. Now, I don't want to make it easier than it is because it does take effort and 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.

45:37So 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 the victim and we can testify what just happened. And now we're the defendant and I'm going to imagine what they're going to say in their defense. 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. This is the whole thing from pain to revenge seeking. So that's going on inside our heads.

46:09Sigmund Freud identified it 100 years ago. My training was as a lawyer, and I've seen this be carried out 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. 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.

46:50It 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. 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.

47:25And 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 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, the question becomes, as judge of your own life, do you feel better?

48:06Did 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 it and they want to be sure.

48:45I don't want to forgive. I just, 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 only path to get to heaven. And maybe it's heaven on earth, but it's this heaven of getting away from the pains and traumas of your past. 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 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.

49:46It'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 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.

50:28So 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 a victim, that is just like you're in a courtroom. And then when you're testifying as the defendant, it's also just like you're in a courtroom.

51:04So you get this experience inside your imagination that feels very authentic to being heard. And then when you move on to holding to account, 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 more culpability than they really thought they did at the beginning.

51:47So 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.

52:29In 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? 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.

53:26And 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. 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.

54:03And 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 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 for people who commit crimes that they shouldn't be held responsible for the crimes that they commit.

54:54That'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 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. You talked about cognitive behavioral therapy.

55:30For 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? Yeah. So 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 a healthcare provider generally, it's usually not something you do on your own, but 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.

56:12Because in a lot of instances, people with anxiety or forms of depression, birds that 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. Got it. Coming up, James talks about how to seek justice without revenge, political grievances and societal implications, and much more.

56:48Okay, so let's just go back to your core piece of advice, which has to do with forgiveness. Yes. 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? 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.

57:32And that is what forgiveness at its minimal and most essential core really is, 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. 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.

58:38How would we apply this to, say, the U.S. political situation? There are many people listening to this show, myself included, who 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 homies 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? Sure. Critical question. Few things there. One is, so revenge addiction that we've been discussing is not a conservative or a liberal problem.

59:18It 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 it's 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. 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.

1:00:10And 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. 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.

1:01:03It 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 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 in 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.

1:01:46How 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. 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.

1:02:26It 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. 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 going to 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 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.

1:03:05But 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 do agree with you. And I think of 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 going to be part of the problem or the solution? And being part of the solution does not mean quietism or resignation or passivity.

1:03:42It 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? 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 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.

1:04:23So 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 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.

1:05:06I 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. Because, you know, if you're in a family with somebody who's an addict, 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.

1:05:52Forgive 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 at least I understand that it has an internal logic and that just makes the blind rage into a more determined, and again, I'll use the cheesy word, loving resistance.

1:06:40Yeah. I mean, remember that forgiving doesn't convert a conservative into a liberal or a liberal into a conservative. It merely stops them from becoming a retaliatory punisher and inflictor of pain upon another group of people. Yes. 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 the source of pain for half of the country.

1:07:29And unfortunately, that's been going on now for too long between both sides. We talked about the Bible a lot today, but reaping what you sow comes to mind. Yeah. Yeah. Final question before I get to my habitual two final questions. Have you ever reached out to the kids or now men who bullied you? I have not. 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 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?

1:08:06And 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 a professional revenge seeker by becoming a lawyer, which is the legalized form of revenge. It's like doctors prescribing opioids. This is what lawyers do is we prescribe legalized revenge 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.

1:08:45I 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. It's an amazing story. I'm sorry I had 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. 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.

1:09:22That'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 I eventually concluded only science would help us free ourselves of this.

1:10:02As for websites, jameskimmeljr.com is my personal website. A 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 my bio, academic bio, is at Yale as well. If you just Google Kimmel Yale, you'll find me there. James, thank you very much. Great work. Great to have you on. Dan, thank you. Thanks so much for the opportunity to be here.

1:10:35Thanks 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, 7A 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.

1:11:10Tomorrow's is with 7A, who will be joined by DJ Kashmir, who's the executive producer of this show. So as I mentioned earlier, Seb and I will be up at the Omega Institute on October 24th. 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 worked so hard on the show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasily. 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.

1:11:43DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.