How to Break Free from Revenge Addiction with James Kimmel Jr.

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0:44It is a misconception, and we can see this in these brain scan studies, that the beneficiary of forgiveness is always the victim. It's a hardwired way of self-healing from trauma and pain of the past. The word give in forgiveness is not a gift to the perpetrator who caused your harm. You're giving them nothing. You don't even have to communicate with them to experience these amazing neurological benefits of forgiving a grievance inside your own head. So it is this kind of wonder drug or superpower that we have that's often been neglected in our society.

1:24I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People podcast, and we go all over the world looking for remarkable people to help you be remarkable. And we found another great person. His name is James Kimmel, Jr. He's a lawyer. Don't hold that against him. And a behavioral science researcher. And he proposes a really radical reinterpretation of the role of revenge in our society. He, in a sense, views much of what we call justice-seeking as kind of a dopamine-driven revenge cycle that probably causes more problems than it solves and perpetuates violence and suffering. His latest book is called The Science of Revenge.

2:13It's a very fascinating book. It utilizes his personal experiences, which maybe he'll get into as a youth, plus examples from leaders such as Hitler and Stalin and Mao to shed light on the causes of violence in our society. So welcome to the show, James. Guy, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I just want to tell you that I went to law school for two weeks and then dropped out. So that's my extent of knowledge of the law. Well, then you were wiser than me, I think. Well, your son is entering law school now. So let's see, second generation lawyer, right? Yeah, but my wife is a transactional lawyer, not a litigator.

2:57And my son intends to do the same and stay away from litigation, which I refer to as the professional revenge business. So I'm happy that he's going to steer clear of that aspect of the law. Well, if litigation is professional revenge? What is criminal law? That is also professional revenge seeking. If you're a prosecutor, right, you're seeking revenge on behalf of society. And if you're a civil litigator, you're seeking revenge for money on behalf of your clients. And so, yeah, we're right there with it. And it's legalized revenge that we call justice. That's the brand name that we call The revenge that we seek with doctors and opioids.

3:40If it's bought on the street, it's called heroin. But if we prescribe it, it might be called OxyContin. Same kind of drugs, same addictive properties in both instances, just like justice and revenge seeking. So we have a problem on our hands. So you are literally saying that the desire for revenge and the act of revenge is an addiction, like a medical condition? Yeah, it can be, just like with drugs. So, you know, about 20 % of the people in a population who experiment with drugs or alcohol actually become addicted to them. And we haven't actually studied this question of just how broadly experiences revenge addiction.

4:25But if it follows that pattern, it might be the same thing. And we should be clear when we talk about addiction, we're talking about compulsive behavior. We all experience pleasure from revenge fantasies and imagining revenge gratification. The way we all experience pleasure from opioids. If anybody takes an opioid, they're going to experience some type of euphoric high. And we're going to experience that with revenge seeking. When it becomes addictive is when we can't resist the desire to engage in revenge behavior or take a drug despite knowing the negative consequences. That's when it moves from just a pleasurable experience into something that's more pathological.

5:09And is one of your goals to get the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to recognize this as a medical condition? Yes, absolutely. And we have a lot of evidence now. We have neuroscience evidence, we have behavioral evidence, and we have world history evidence backing up this idea that humanity throughout centuries now and thousands of years has been experiencing revenge addictive moments either in our individual lives or in our corporate lives at population scale. We know that revenge seeking is the primary motivation for almost all forms of human violence, beginning with bullying and youth violence up through intimate partner violence, street and gang violence, extremism, terrorism, genocide, war, all up and down the ladder of severity.

6:05We know that revenge is the primary motivation for that. And then the question becomes is, well, why do we seek revenge at all? And over the last 20 years, neuroscientists have been able to solve that question. And the fact that it is not yet recognized in the DSM, does that pose like real problems or is it just a kind of a formality? Oh, it poses real problems. It's not a surprise that it isn't recognized there yet because the science that is able to show us why we want revenge has only emerged, as I say, the last 20 years. And so this is relatively new science and the DSM isn't about adding new scientific discoveries as quickly as possible.

6:53The people who create that, the American Psychiatric Association, take their time and want to make sure they're right before they put a diagnosis into the DSM. But I think the time has come now to seriously consider and make that move and that we need it because by seeing revenge seeking as an addictive process, and we can get into how and why and the neuroscience in a moment, but by seeing it that way, this opens up for the first time really in human history, the opportunity to prevent and treat violence using public health methods of prevention and treatment. rather than relying, as we've been for, I don't know, the last 5 ,000 years, solely on the threat of punishment and criminal justice systems, which have been around for a long time, but it seems like this is about as good as they get.

7:43We still have maybe the same 20 % of the people that become addicted to drugs and alcohol, about 20 % of people throughout their lifetimes seem to have contact with the criminal justice system basically being charged. And it's time to see the revenge desire as an addictive process. And when we do, we get to open up our entire addiction prevention and treatment toolkit that we've developed over the last decades and employ that to focus on violence and compulsive revenge seeking in order to add to, not replace, but add to the criminal justice system so that we can really take that next level step in minimizing violence and reducing it.

8:31But obviously, revenge has been around for a long time. Is there any benefit? Does it serve any purpose? The leading theory from an evolutionary perspective on why humans derive pleasure from revenge is that this probably started in the Pleistocene epic, maybe as early as the Ice Age and maybe even earlier than that. But the idea is, and like I said, this is the leading theory, is that as humans began to form societies and live in groups, they needed a way, and this is an adaptive strategy at first, to cause people in societies to agree and comply with a set of social norms. And those might include in caveman days, things like my food is my food and my mate is my mate, and you don't get to come and take those from me.

9:27And if you do, there will be a negative consequence for that. And so in that way, revenge seeking has a deterrent effect, or at least we think it does. And it does seem to have some deterrent effect. And it did when we're trying to deter activities that can frustrate or stop our ability to survive and or procreate. So revenge used purely for those types of adaptive strategies makes sense. Revenge, on the other hand, the way it's often used in modern society is to avenge injuries to our egos, our sense of self-identity, self-respect. There are psychological makeup and the way we want to project and see ourselves in the world.

10:16And when revenge is used In that context, it becomes less adaptive. And more importantly, revenge, although it has this deterrent effect to some degree, it also has the primary motivational effect, as I just mentioned earlier, of motivating almost every form of human violence. It's pretty hard to make a good case that revenge is the best strategy for stopping violence when it is the number one reason why people commit it. That is a real disconnect. And so there probably are better ways of creating deterrence to violence seeking that's motivated by revenge desire. And that's what I argue in the book.

11:00And that's by targeting the desire itself inside the brain, where it forms. And if we focus there, we can achieve this next level violence reduction by deterring violence at that level and not only with the threat of punishment, which that threat of punishment is why we almost in all cases are engaging in violent behavior in the first place, because we experience grievances throughout our lives on an almost daily, hourly basis, small and large. And what we can see neurologically now inside our brains is that when you experience a grievance, which is a real or imagined sense of having been wronged or mistreated or shamed or humiliated.

11:45That pain activates the pain network inside your brain, the anterior insula. The brain doesn't like pain and wants to compensate with a nice dose of pleasure. And the first thing it does is activate the pleasure and reward circuitry that activates for addiction. And we start ruminating on, fantasizing about and potentially engaging in revenge acts. So you may consider this a little bit off the wall, but we kind of have an off the wall podcast. So let's say you go to a WNBA game and you see the star get poked in her eye. Then you see a few plays later, someone else on her team takes down the person who poked your star in the eye.

12:29That was an act of revenge. It was justice. It was grievance. Do you look at that and you say, all right, in the context of the WNBA or athletics, that was justified? You have to do that? Or would you pull Sophie Cunningham aside and say, let me help you deal with your addiction to revenge? Revenge is really prevalent in sport. And sports have a lot of rules and controls to maintain and eliminate most forms of violence. But that form of violence that you just described, let's say a takedown, right, which is in direct violation of the rules that we have. So is it really necessary? If it's retaliation because you just poked my teammate in the eye, that's something that happened in the past.

13:17You poked my teammate in the eye sometime earlier in the game or maybe in a prior game even. And now you're going to retaliate and inflict pain upon that person who did that. That's punishing them for wrongs of the past. That's to be distinguished, and I distinguish carefully in the book between revenge seeking for past wrongs versus self-defense to prevent present and future threats of harm. If, in your example, the player is now going to have a physical altercation because they have a reason to believe that there's going to be another eye poke that's coming right around the corner, and it's like, nope, not this time.

13:59I'm going to stop you. physically. That's self-defense. That's not revenge seeking. And that would be fight or flight type of behavior rather than revenge seeking. And so it makes sense to do it there. But this idea of self-punishment, the first player who poked the original player in the eye, if they did that out of their own sense of grievance, they used their desire for revenge to do the original eye poke. And now we've got another player who's using their grievance and desire for revenge to take that person down. These are not solid adaptive behaviors. Survival is not at risk. And we have a set of rules and the officials are there to administer those rules.

14:44And you have a coach there that can advocate for the administration of the rules and perhaps pulling that player out of the game. So these are really bad idea behaviors because if the takedown happens, that player who did the takedown, as we all know from being sports spectators, is usually the one that's caught and usually the one that's penalized by the ref. And then has to go forward and living with that either as, wow, I'm a beast and I take other players down, and that may have negative consequences on their career. Usually we see in studies, revenge seeking doesn't actually make us feel good for long.

15:19It's a temporary high, just like drugs. We feel great in the moment and for a short time after. And then we end up feeling worse, angrier. We worry about retaliation back against us. So we're filled with anxiety. So there are a lot of negative consequences to revenge seeking for everybody involved. So you are not saying that there is no such thing as healthy anger or justified grievance or justified indignation. It's about when things spiral out of control. Yeah, for addictive behavior, it's about that compulsion. It's about the, I have this desire to retaliate. And despite knowing that I'm going to suffer negative consequences, or me and other people are going to suffer many negative consequences.

16:04And with revenge seeking, negative consequences are built in. Revenge means inflicting pain on another person because you feel wrong. If you can't control that, then you might be heading into or already involved with a compulsive revenge seeking disorder. And you could and should receive some form of either self-help or professional treatment if it's gotten that far before it begins to take over your life. And we have just innumerable examples throughout human history and modern society of people for whom this revenge seeking has taken over their lives. You can just essentially conclude that every person who's in jail for a violent crime is almost in all instances a revenge addict who could not control their desire to retaliate.

16:56And they're now in prison for that. And then we look at their victims and we look at their victims' families and we look at the families of the people who are in jail. The harms are enormous. The costs to society are just off the charts. And yet we've never looked at scientifically until the last 20 years, what happens inside the brain and why we do this at all. Because I'm going to suggest if somebody pokes you in the eye, you might want to have a bowl of ice cream. We could have been adaptively, right? We could have been adaptively evolved so that when we get an eye pain, we want some ice cream or a nap or we want a hug.

17:38But that's not what we want. We want the pain of the person who hit us in the eye or their proxy. And we want them to know that their new pain is because of what they did to us five minutes ago. Is there a way to remove the sweetness from revenge to, you know, I'd rather have ice cream than this. How do you make revenge less attractive? That's a great question. And there's probably no way to make revenge less sweet because this is a biologically derived, evolved, adaptive experience that we all have when we've been wronged, that revenge will feel temporarily good, just as it is that opioids will always give us this euphoria and it'll always feel good.

18:24But there are ways to control the desire for it and to recover from the addictive compulsive process of revenge seeking. And those include all of the addiction strategies that we know that are effective for drugs and alcohol. Addiction, things like cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, counseling, NA, maybe RA for revenge addicts, anonymous. Ultimately, anti-craving drugs and medications like naltroxone and even GLP-1 anti-craving drugs that have been shown to be effective for food are now being studied for other addictions and may be effective in reducing the cravings, right, for revenge seeking.

19:10But the great news in this entire story is the neuroscience of forgiveness is really incredible. It's almost seems like it's miraculous. Just as we've been hardwired to want revenge when someone harms us, we also have been hardwired to forgive and reverse the process and actually end the pain and the cravings on the spot. And that's what forgiveness does. And we can see this in brain scans of people who have a grievance and are asked to simply imagine forgiving it. And what that shows us inside the brain scan is that pain network part of the brain that activated for the grievance, the anterior insula, when you simply imagine forgiveness, even without telling the person who wronged you that you're forgiving them, that stops that area of the brain.

19:59It shuts down the pain rather than just giving you a quick dopamine hit. It also shuts down the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction. So you're no longer craving retaliation and revenge. And then the last thing it does is it reactivates your prefrontal cortex. That's your self-control and executive function circuitry so that you're able to make better cost benefit decisions. And you find when you're in that state that in almost all cases, it's better in your own self-interest, just your self-interest to not seek revenge. It's better to forgive if you want the pain of the past to go away and you don't want it to infect and harm your present and your future.

20:39So just to be clear, the person who forgives gets as much value as the person who receives the forgiveness. Is that what you're saying? It's even bigger than that. The person who forgives gets almost all of the benefits. It is a misconception, and we can see this now neurologically for sure in these brain scan studies, that the beneficiary of forgiveness is always the victim. It's a hardwired way of self-healing from trauma and pain of the past. The word give in forgiveness is not a gift to the perpetrator who caused your harm. You're giving them nothing. You don't even have to communicate with them to experience these amazing neurological benefits of forgiving a grievance inside your own head.

21:28So it is this kind of wonder drug or superpower that we have that's often been neglected. Our society, particularly our society and a paternalistic society, wants to think of forgiveness as some form of weakness or something that you're doing to reward the person who just slapped you in the face with an act of kindness. And it's not that at all. It's a gift to yourself to heal yourself from the trauma and pain of the past. And would it be accurate to say that we don't hear about these mass forgivers? We hear about mass murderers. So, you know, is it because bad news sells and you hear about Mao and Stalin and Hitler, but you don't hear about the people who are mass forgivers?

22:17That's exactly the case. And there are mass forgivers everywhere. And I meet them more and more now as a result of the book. I'll find people who say most of their lives, they've had this insight or intuition that forgiving and moving on as fast as possible is the way to become successful in your life. It's the way to heal and move forward and not allow the bad things that happened to you in the past to infect and destroy your present and your future. So there are some people, and I haven't had the chance to study them, who say they don't even think about revenge when they've been wrong. And I tend to view those types of claims with a little bit of skepticism because I know from other studies that revenge seeking has been found in all societies around the world and that it is an evolved strategy.

23:11And so it seems unlikely that people derive no pleasure from revenge seeking, but they may have developed such a sense of control and wisdom that they just don't want any part of that great feeling, that temporary high that only leads to disaster, that they just don't allow themselves to think about it at all when they've been wrong. And that's a very powerful and good strategy. What we have, Guy, now are neuroscience evidence that supports the ancient forgiveness teachings of people like Jesus and the Buddha, who we think of it as a spiritual construct, but it's really not. It can be, and it's fine that it is a spiritual construct, but it really has a neurological basis inside of our brains and inside of science.

23:59And it's great now, just really in the last 10 or so years, to be able to bring this out to the public and show people that it has all of these benefits for the victim, not the perpetrator.

24:20Now, just to be clear, this is a fine point here. It is one thing to say, let's say somebody does something to you. One reaction could be, I'm not going to let it bother me. I'm not going to think about it. It's not going to even enter into my consciousness anymore. That's one attitude. The other attitude is, I understand what they did, but I am actively forgiving, which is a decision which is different than ignoring. So are you saying either or one is better than the other? Researchers have identified kind of two types of forgiveness. There's decisional forgiveness, as you essentially just described, which is I'm going to make a kind of a tactical decision to forgive this wrong for my own benefit, for my own self benefit.

25:10And it's a great decision. And that's usually the decision that's the easiest to arrive at because you're still looking at your own self-interest and you're clear in your own mind. You're not giving a gift to the person who wronged you. You're not in any way condoning what they've done. You're not endorsing what they've done. You're still holding on to the idea that what they've done is potentially a very terrible wrong and you're not going to budge on that and nor do you have to, nor are you giving away your right to self-defense if let's say you're in a toxic relationship where you're repeatedly being harmed by someone and you decide I'm going to leave that relationship now in order to protect myself, even though I may forgive everything that happened in the past, but I'm going to stop that behavior from continuing into the future.

25:56So that's kind of decisional forgiveness, and it activates a different set of structures in the brain. That's versus what some researchers have identified as emotional forgiveness, where an additional thing occurs in that point. And what occurs is humans are very, very adept at empathizing with other people. And we have this psychologist think of the ability to imagine what's going on in other people's heads. We call that theory of mind. And humans are good at doing that, imagining what another person might've been thinking about. And through a process of analyzing what happened during the grievance and also imagining what the other person, the perpetrator, might have been thinking or going through themselves.

26:42Some people can come to an emotional forgiveness in which they essentially reevaluate and recreate the entire incident, the entire grievance, the entire trauma in a new light in which we can see it as less of a trauma than we once believed it was. So that's emotional forgiveness and it's not required. Decisional forgiveness gets you 90 % of the way. Emotional forgiveness can put you in a really better place if you can see what happened to you and your own role in it, perhaps, and the reasons why the person wronged you in a new and more either a revised light in which it wasn't as bad as you thought, or maybe it might have been excusable because of X, whatever the X might be.

27:32So there are these two types of forgiveness that researchers talk about. Now, do you have a James Kimmel Jr.? Like, these are the steps to catalyze forgiveness. I do. So I created about 20 years ago. This is drawing on my legal practice. As I said, I was a litigator. And one of the things that I found that was useful in the litigation revenge-seeking process is that a trial, the trials that we all know from television or real life experience or movies, but this idea of there being a tribunal of an impartial judge and jury, that there's this experience in which we testify and explain what happened to us as victims and the defendants given an opportunity to explain their side of the story and testify to that.

28:25And then we have, did it happen or not? We have this opportunity to hold the defendant accountable if that's what is being decided and to punish. Imagine at least punishing the defendant for what they've done wrong. So that's what the judge does. And then we move to the warden phase of these trials, the prison or up into and including an executioner. But we move to a phase in which the defendant is punished, which is our gratification socially and individually of the desire for revenge. In those steps, we have two actually pretty therapeutic things happening. One is we get to be heard. And trauma researchers and experts will say that the psychological pain that we experience from grievances, whether they're physical or only in the brain, in order to relieve that.

29:20People need to be heard. There's a need to have someone hear our pain story and acknowledge, yes, this happened and I'm sorry, and that was terrible for you. And we get it. And the other thing people need, in addition to being heard, is this ability to hold the person who did it accountable. And accountability in this sense doesn't mean, we often think it means revenge itself, but it doesn't need to, nor should it. It should mean we've labeled who did the wrong. We've made an account, like an accountant tracking books. An accountant only decides where the money went, how it went. Accountants don't make a judgments on the worth of that money expenditure or the money coming in.

30:03They just account for what happened. And that accountability is really important in healing from trauma as well. So I created this system called the non-justice system, which goes to that first part, decisional forgiveness, and says, if you can't forgive, and most people find it difficult at first, what you could practice is this idea of non-justice. And non-justice is not injustice, which is unfairness. Non-justice means to abstain from seeking justice in the form of revenge, just as non-violence means to abstain from seeking making violence or perpetrating an act of violence. So the non-justice system uses those four steps of the criminal trial, but allows a person using it to put the courtroom inside their head where it needs to be, because we're always talking about wrongs of the past.