244: The Science of Revenge with James Kimmel, Jr.

Welcome back to The Couples Therapist Couch! This podcast is about the practice of Couples Therapy. Each week, Shane Birkel interviews an expert in the field of Couples Therapy to explore all about the world of relationships and how to be an amazing therapist.

 In this episode, Shane talks with James Kimmel, Jr. about The Science of Revenge. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots, and watch it on YouTube – follow and leave a 5-star review.

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The Couples Therapist Couch 244: The Science of Revenge with James Kimmel, Jr.

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 In this episode, Shane talks with James Kimmel, Jr. about The Science of Revenge. James Kimmel, Jr., JD is a violence researcher, psychiatry lecturer, and author who explores the science of revenge, addiction, forgiveness, and violence. He’s the author of 3 books on revenge and forgiveness, the latest being The Science of Revenge. Hear why we naturally want to seek revenge, what goes on in our brain when we seek revenge, why revenge addiction is like drug addiction, how to move your clients away from violence, and how to help them understand how they can truly be healed. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

• What happens inside your brain when you experience humiliation?
• What factors contribute to making us act on the desire for revenge?
• Is suing someone revenge?
• What happens in your brain when you forgive?
• Why do personal relationships spur more desire to retaliate than with strangers?

To learn more about James Kimmel, Jr., The Science of Revenge, and the Miracle Court App, visit:

JamesKimmelJr.com

The Science of Revenge

MiracleCourt.com

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:

 

Show Notes

• 244: The Science of Revenge with James Kimmel, Jr.
• This episode is brought to you by Alma. Visit HelloAlma.com/ATPP to learn more
• [1:07] Welcome to The Couples Therapist Couch
• [2:12] Welcome, James, to the show! 
• [3:52] What is revenge and how is it tied to forgiveness?
• [5:10] Why do we desire revenge?
• [11:48] What's the difference between revenge and self-defense?
• [15:50] Does brain chemistry determine whether it's revenge or not?
• [17:36] How does the addiction aspect work with someone actually gets revenge?
• [23:39] What is the availability of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) to manage our instinct to retaliate?
• [25:34] Is suing someone revenge?
• [30:50] This episode is brought to you by Alma. Visit HelloAlma.com/ATPP to learn more
• [31:57] Why do personal relationships spur more desire to retaliate than with strangers?
• [35:42] How do we move people away from violence?
• [41:43] The science of forgiveness -- what happens in your brain when you forgive?
• [46:11] People attack from the victim position
• [49:12] The Nonjustice System
• [53:52] "We just need one more violence and then we can move on..." 
• [55:27] How can mindfulness and gratitude help with forgiveness?
• [57:19] Learn more about James' Book, The Science of Revenge, and the Miracle Court App
• [59:00] This episode is brought to you by Alma. Visit HelloAlma.com/ATPP to learn more

 

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This podcast is about the practice of Couples Therapy. Many of the episodes are interviews with leaders in the field of Relationships. The show is meant to help Therapists and Coaches learn how to help people to deepen their connection, but in the process it explores what is most needed for each of us to love, heal, and grow. Each week, Shane Birkel interviews an expert in the field of Couples Therapy to explore all about the world of relationships and how to be an amazing therapist.

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Transcript

Note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

00:00
Forgiveness actually takes the pain away, unlike revenge seeking, which just tries to cover it up with a dose of dopamine.

00:12
Welcome to The Couples Therapist Couch, the podcast for couples therapists, marriage counselors, and relationship coaches to explore the practice of couples therapy. And now, your host, Shane Birkel.

00:28
Hey everybody. Welcome back to The Couples Therapist Couch. This is Shane Birkel, and this is the podcast that's all about the practice of couples therapy. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, and the goal of this podcast is to help you learn how to more effectively work with couples and possibly even learn how to have a better relationship. The episode this week is brought to you by Alma. They make it easy to get credentialed with major insurance plans at enhanced reimbursement rates.

00:57
Alma handles all of the paperwork and guarantees payment within two weeks. Visit HelloAlma.com/ATPP or click on the link in the show notes to learn more. everyone, welcome back to The Couples Therapist Couch. This is Shane Birkel and today I'm speaking with James Kimmel, Jr., lawyer, Yale psychiatry lecturer and author of the new book, The Science of Revenge. Hey James, welcome to the show.

01:23
Hey, Shane, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here and to have some time with you and your audience of therapists. I'm really interested in therapy, always have been. And if there's a way that I can help, actually, that would be outstanding. So I'm looking forward to it. That's awesome. Yeah. And I think that the, like how you call it the science of revenge, because I think it's really interesting to understand.

01:51
how the brain works. I have a feeling, I think this is such an interesting topic and I have a feeling there's parts of all of us that go into this sort of revenge mindset at times. And I can't wait to talk to you more about that, but why don't you tell everyone a little bit more about yourself. Yeah, happy to do that. So as you mentioned, I'm a lawyer foremost by training and I've been a litigator for much of my career, but also about

02:20
10 years ago, I joined the Yale School of Medicine as a lecturer in psychiatry to study revenge and forgiveness and violence and the role that revenge and forgiveness play in violence. So I've been doing that for about 10 years there. I guess another thing to know about me is that and particularly pertinent to this podcast is that I've been married to my wife for 37 years.

02:50
which is hard for me to stretch my brain around because it feels like it was yesterday. And we've never been divorced or separated. And I'm thinking that part of that history is because of my interest in and my research in revenge and forgiveness, which we'll get into. So I think it's it's an important and and valuable part, a valuable thing to know about in relationships.

03:20
And then last, you know, I'm the author of a new book now called the science of revenge, as you said, and the subtitle of that book is understanding the world's deadliest addiction and how to overcome it. We can get into that in a little bit, but what that's referring to is new neuroscience that's suggesting that grievance triggered revenge desires are operating in the same circuitry of the brain as addiction and that

03:48
we can become addicted to revenge seeking for pleasure. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, we'll definitely get into that. But why don't you lay the framework for us, just sort of explaining what you mean by revenge, how it's tied to forgiveness, and set the groundwork for us here. Yeah, happy to do that. So what I mean by revenge is punishing people for things they've done to us.

04:18
mistreatment, injustice, insults, humiliation, betrayal, shame, all those types of significant psychological and physical harms. But it's often psychological that that triggers this. But it's a punishment desire, right? It's this after we experience these these painful wrongs that we call them or injustices or mistreatments.

04:48
victimization and trauma. Trauma is also a big part of this as well. They're all bound up together really. But after we experience that, we often experience very quickly, almost instantaneously, it feels sometimes, a desire to retaliate. That's what I refer to when I'm talking about revenge. And I'm thinking about, is this a desire to create equilibrium?

05:17
sort of in the situation where it's sort of like, because I can imagine like one way to create equilibrium, and I don't know that's the right word, but to is to hurt the other person back, right? And then it feels like, okay, you know, we're back to being on equal ground. Or another way to create that would be if the other person apologizes to me and, you know, gives me a gift and says they're sorry, then I feel like there's some equilibrium because they're making an effort to heal. but

05:47
That's obviously a different energy that's happening in those two circumstances. But why do we seek to get revenge? Like, why does that desire come up in us when someone harms us? It's interesting that you use the term equilibrium because that's actually what the neuroscience is showing. So let me sort of explain what's happening inside your brain when you experience a grievance and what happens after that. So you experience this

06:16
insult or humiliation from someone or other form of victimization or trauma. And that activates inside your brain, the brain's pain network, which is also available for physical pain as well. And that's, it's, in an area called the anterior insula and the brain doesn't like pain, you know, it doesn't want pain. And so we've evolved as humans.

06:43
to the point where we get an enormous jolt of pleasure from retaliating and trying to inflict pain upon the person who wronged us or their proxy. And I mentioned it's or their proxy because we don't always seek retaliation against the person who harmed us. Sometimes they're either not available or it's

07:09
the cost of doing so would be too high. And so we pick someone else who's more readily available, maybe more tolerant, maybe weaker. And we'll use them as the proxy for our revenge seeking. And the classical example is if you've had a bad day at work, your boss was unjust and unkind to you and you come home and you kick the dog. The dog is getting the revenge that you wanted to inflict upon your boss. But

07:38
Had you done so, you'd probably lose your job and that's too high a cost to pay. So you're still getting revenge, but you're just, you know, in effect, displacing it if you want to call it displacement. And it's a term that some researchers use. I don't favor it because it suggests that there's some form of proper placement for revenge when I don't believe there is one. Revenge is almost always a pathological reaction, right? It's it is a

08:07
harmful reaction, not only to the target of the revenge, but to yourself. And it's usually compelled by the strong desire. So let me progress here just a little bit further. So you get this pain that's registering in the pain network, the anterior insula. The brain doesn't like that. And it wants a compensating form of pleasure. And the one that's most readily available through evolution is to try to inflict pain upon the person

08:36
who wronged us. And what studies are showing is that inside our brains, the desire for revenge is activating the addiction, reward and pleasure circuitry of the brain, the nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum. And those are the areas that activate most strongly for substance use disorders, gambling disorder, internet, sex, food, all of the different behavioral addictions as well.

09:07
And to those addictions, can now add revenge addiction to the mix. And so that's activating this powerful craving reward center. And it's giving us a surge of dopamine. And then it's withdrawing that dopamine, which is believed to create this experience of craving. So you get this, ooh, revenge. That would feel so good. And then it goes away because you didn't actually get it yet. And now you're starting to crave it and you're

09:36
beginning to fantasize and plan how you begin to harm the person who harmed you. In other words, how you would plan to revenge. So that entire process is happening sometimes almost in the blink of an eye when we're insulted or demeaned in our relationships. You know, if our partner says an unkind word or has been neglectful, any number of things, we can get into that.

10:05
uh, experience of revenge seeking. And then the last part of this, the third area of the brain that's involved is the prefrontal cortex. And that's the area of the brain that's doing our executive function work. And it's the part of the brain that helps us evaluate the costs and benefits of our decisions and make good decision-making. If that area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex is inhibited or hijacked as we expect it was, we kind of analogize it in

10:35
addiction, it's no longer able to stop or control our revenge craving desire. When that occurs, and that is what we see occurring in most forms of addiction, and it seems to occur as well in revenge seeking, when that occurs, there's no break. So we have this go, go, go circuitry of go and retaliate against the person who wronged you, either verbally, physically, or in some other way.

11:04
And I want to emphasize that most revenge is not violent revenge, but much revenge is, and it's extremely dangerous, and it's the root cause of almost all forms of violence. But when that area of the brain that's supposed to be stopping us from making dumb choices isn't there doing that work, we're no longer able to resist the desire to retaliate. That brings up the entire concept of addiction, because that's really what the

11:33
definition of addiction is, is the inability to resist an urge to engage in a behavior or to ingest a substance. Yeah, that's fascinating. I'm wondering as you're talking, is there a difference or have you looked at the relationship between revenge and sort of protection? Because sometimes if somebody punches me and I feel like I want to punch them back, it's almost just out of protection. It's sort of like

12:02
I feel like maybe there's a different energy to it where if they just leave me alone, then I'm not carrying any desire for revenge. I'm just trying to protect myself. Or even in a relationship where I feel hurt by my partner, I'm just going into a state of protection by my faulty ways that I'm trying to deal with that as opposed to wanting a desire for revenge or something like that.

12:31
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. And that's extremely important. So we want to distinguish between revenge seeking, which is trying to harm somebody for wrongs of the past versus self-defense, which is, you know, our instinct necessary for survival to try and protect ourselves in the face of an imminent threat of, you know, serious harm or violence and

12:59
So in your example there, somebody strikes you, right? And you're in that moment and they're looking like, and obviously they've been capable of, because they just hit you. So it's not at all a stretch to imagine that they could do it again. And so you strike back. You are in a self-defense mode. You're defending yourself from an imminent threat. But if somebody strikes you and five minutes have passed, okay.

13:28
and they're no longer threatening you whatsoever. But you're still planning and fantasizing about and thinking about how you're going to assault them in retaliation. Then that is when we've moved from the present threat to the past and your your action is retaliating out of something that no longer exists. It's only something in your memory. And that's when it becomes a revenge moment. And that's when it's

13:57
more it moves into something that is more pathological, with the exception that, and I want to kind of talk a little bit about evolution for a second. the evolutionary scientists believe that we evolved to their revenge instinct or revenge urge, you know, back in the ice age, as humans were coming together to live in societies, and we needed a way to bring people together and cause them

14:25
to all adhere to and comply with social norms that would allow a society to function as opposed to every person for themselves and might make right and that sort of thing. so revenge has evolved as initially as an adaptive process for humans to live in society and is still adaptive much of the time. you're, let's say you have a child and you're trying to teach the child right from long and

14:54
what's acceptable and non acceptable behavior. And the child violates the rule. And then at some time later, you go, so I'm going to have to do something to help teach you and remind you of this rule. And so there's going to be a little bit of pain that comes with that. It's retaliatory. And you've got to be very measured with it. is revenge. But it also has an adaptive purpose of training your child, right? That's different from

15:23
trying to inflict pain for the purpose of your own gratification because it is highly pleasurable. And that's when it becomes, you know, a more pathological process. You're actually doing it in effect to get the benefits of a drug. And our brains on revenge actually look like our brains on drugs. like if I, my teenager does something and I ground them from their screens for, for 24 hours,

15:52
That's not so you are you saying that like it depends on my brain chemistry about whether we would define that as revenge or not. Like if I'm if I'm coming if I'm just being conscious and I'm trying to be a healthy parent and I'm trying to teach them something then it wouldn't be revenge. Whereas if I'm feel like I want to get back at them because they're being rude like it would be more of the revenge energy that you're talking about. It might not be helpful to think of it in terms of whether it's revenge or not but whether

16:21
it's adaptive or pathological or not. So in other words, if it's an adaptive purpose, which is to teach your teenager, you know, not to do whatever they've done. And that's the reason that you're taking away their treasured cell phone. That's your purpose. And your purpose isn't to gratify your own pleasure, you know, to gratify your desire for revenge. OK, so whether that is

16:50
you know, technically revenge or not, you know, I've defined revenge a little bit more broadly as, know, the intentional infliction of pain because somebody has inflicted pain upon you in the your scenario there. Maybe what your team did wasn't really painful to you and it's purely lesson teaching. And therefore it's not activating the, you know, craving and reward circuitry of addiction. And so therefore it's not at least compulsive revenge seeking.

17:18
Yeah, the kind that's most dangerous and the kind that I see a lot in. mean, the kind that we see in almost all forms of violence, psychological and physical, is the compulsive revenge seeking for pleasure. And that's really what the focus of this neuroscience is. And so what happens if in your research, when somebody seeks revenge and they

17:47
do something hurtful to the other person. How does the addiction work with that? there a sense of satisfaction that they get from doing that? then is that it? They're satisfied with that situation? Or do they tend to want to continue to play out their revenge cycle or something? Yeah. I think you're pointing to a really important distinction there between

18:14
let's say one time rare or occasional acts of revenge versus habitual revenge seeking. And in the one time occasional or rare, you really wouldn't normally be able to associate that with addiction because you're not, know, the compulsion isn't regular. You're not doing, you're not always out of control or often out of control. You're not always seeking this pleasure. You might've done it from time to time.

18:43
And since we're all humans, mean, revenge seeking is found to have been present in all societies around the world from Amazon tribes to developed nations. And it has been observed as early as the toddler years through senior years. So revenge is built in, it's a normal part of behavior and it's not on its own right pathological. It only becomes

19:11
addictive pathological and of deep concern when it becomes compulsive, which is to say you're seeking it to gratify this desire for pleasure and you're not able to control it. And then, you there's a we enter into a distinction within the world of addiction science and addiction medicine of where do we draw the line between what we might think of as addiction and what we might think of as as just, you know, normal behavior. And often it's, you know,

19:41
it's several factors, including that inability to resist the craving, along with some sort of habitualness. So one question to think about there is if somebody is often fantasizing about revenge seeking, but not carrying it out, is that part of that habit? Is that part of their revenge habit where they're thinking about it?

20:08
gratifying their need for revenge just by fantasizing about getting it. And then at some momentous point in the future, maybe when they're triggered in just the right way, pow, there's this enormous act of violence. And we can think about, for instance, mass shooters in that way. Mass shooters are almost always people or mass killers are people who are seeking revenge for some form of grievance. Are they addicted is a question that's raised.

20:38
And you might go, well, if they only commit one mass shooting, right, and then they're killed as a result or put in jail for the rest of their lives, can we say that they had a habit? But what you might find, likely find, will find is that they've had perhaps years of smaller, lesser forms of revenge seeking and many, many almost constant fantasies about revenge seeking, which can begin that habituation process.

21:07
So some of this is what I'm talking about is it's all very new, I should say. And there's more work to be done in this area. It's all within the last 20 years that we've even discovered that the brain addiction and reward circuitry is involved with revenge seeking. know, before this time, back to 5000 years, people have thought of revenge seeking and violence is, oh, it's just evil or demented people doing evil or demented things.

21:35
or maybe they're sociopaths, even though a minute percentage of the human population are sociopaths. So what we're learning now is that revenge seeking is common in everywhere and that we're learning that this addictive reward circuitry is part of it and helps to explain what seem like inexplainable acts of violence or in a relationship, just inexplainable acts of cruelty between partners.

22:04
in a relationship in which all of the out of this, you all of a sudden there's this just a mean, know, mean, cruel, astonishing somebody you loved for years. And all of a sudden they're doing this enormous damage to the relationship. And it may be because they are now caught up in a revenge addictive cycle. Yeah. And I get maybe this is like a therapist way of looking at it, but I feel like there's a difference between

22:33
the impulses that I feel and my behavior that I choose to enact. So it's sort of like all of us probably have some wiring toward revenge and that's gonna come up in us depending on our past experiences and who we are and what we've been through. Like might be different levels of that, but we always have a choice about whether we are going to act on that or not. And I imagine too,

23:01
you know, if somebody has been through like certain types of childhood trauma that they might be more prone to have these like revenge seeking feelings or just like addiction around the revenge and things like that. Yeah. And I think there you're pointing to the availability of that prefrontal cortex. So we know that it's built in hardwired and natural to want revenge.

23:30
or want to retaliate and hurt somebody who hurts us, that's built in. So then the question becomes is, what is the availability for a specific person at a specific point in time of their prefrontal cortex wherein, you know, for years, they may have been able to manage that desire perfectly and never, as you say, you know, we have a choice and we have to choose whether to act on this desire or not.

23:59
And that's absolutely true. Part of making that decision is taking place in that prefrontal cortex where you're weighing costs and benefits and all sorts of other factors. If that area of the brain isn't available, let's say, because of prior trauma, for instance, like you said, or it's been weakened as a result of prior trauma, or it's been weakened by anything as simple as exhaustion,

24:26
to and just no longer having the capacity to manage 50 things at once. And all of sudden we just burst out in anger because we weren't able to control it. Or something more significant like overwhelming number of grievances that could be psychological, social, anything from big things like systemic discrimination and things like that all the way down to smaller problems. And then other...

24:55
other weaknesses that we have in our control circuitry. Any of those things can pull down our, you know, last best defense between the desire for revenge and acting on it. And then if that's happening regularly, that's also part of an addictive process. And that's what we know with people who have other addictions is that their prefrontal cortex is not activating correctly. It appears to have been inhibited. So there are

25:25
chemical imbalances or impediments in that circuitry at the same time that there may be increases in the craving circuitry. And that would be a recipe then for carrying out these acts. How would you think about, let's say that somebody steals something from me and then I go to court and I'm seeking fair reimbursement for what was stolen. Is that revenge or is that something else? Like I'm trying to think of like,

25:54
If I'm trying to restore a restoration from a situation like that. Yeah. I mean, you came to the right guy there because I'm a lawyer. So I've done that. So are things similar to that many times with my clients. There is a retaliatory aspect to the law. As matter of fact, a very strong retaliatory aspect. I think of the legal system is that and I'm talking about litigation and the criminal justice system and the civil justice system.

26:23
I think of that as a system for legalized revenge. you can analogize it pretty well to what happens in the medical profession with opioids. So you've got street heroin, which is uncontrolled, we regard as dangerous, and it's against the law. We have legalized opioids in the form of like Oxycontin, which are under the control of a licensed

26:51
professional who can prescribe it and a pharmaceutical company who can manufacture and distribute it. That's the legalized opioid side of the world. In the law, we've got forms of street justice, physical assaults, verbal assaults, and then really bad assaults with weapons against the law to do, but they happen all the time. Then we also have the legalized form of

27:21
revenge in the form of justice seeking, where we have a licensed person, limited control with training, and those are lawyers, or the only people in society that are authorized to get legalized revenge, kind of like the doctor prescribing opioids. And so we have that going on. for lawyers in particular, there's a lot of money that can be made doing this.

27:50
really selling an addictive drug, right? I mean, that's what the neuroscience tends to now show. So people want it, they crave it, and there's a legal way to get it, and they're willing to share a percentage maybe of what they might collect to get that and to hurt the person who hurt them. So there is retaliation, and there is revenge seeking in that process. It's built in legalized revenge.

28:18
There's also the issue as you raised. somebody let's well, let's say I'm, you know, it's a personal injury case in which somebody's, they've been injured, but they don't have money and they have a lot of medical expenses. Maybe they've lost their job. And so, you know, it's not necessarily that they're going out to try and hurt the person who ran into their car. They're going out to try and make sure that they have enough money to live on.

28:48
It's still revenge seeking and there's still a high cost for those people when you do it because we could think about what happens when you seek revenge of any form against anybody, legalized or otherwise. And there's this concept, I think it's easiest to see if you think if you imagine a hammer striking a nail, you often think about the nail and go, wow, oh, poor nail. It just got whacked by this heavy steel hammer. That must have hurt. But we don't think about the hammer. The hammer hurt just as much.

29:18
from that impact is the nail, but we don't think of it that way. And that's what happens with revenge seeking is that you or your lawyer, and I was involved in this a lot, and I was feeling the pain of everything that I was trying to inflict, all the pain I was trying to inflict on other litigants, I was experiencing myself and so were my clients. We were all going through this together and you can't escape. If you become the instrument of someone else's pain,

29:47
in your relationship or anywhere else in your life. You have to experience that pain. can't be the instrument of it without experiencing it yourself. And so in answer to your question there to wrap that up, I think the right way to think about it is it is revenge seeking. Sometimes we're doing it for perhaps a quote unquote higher good. Sometimes we're doing it to gratify our base desires and instincts. And what's important to know about that is

30:17
What is our true motive? And if it's the base instinct, it may not be. And I don't think it is worth going and pursuing it. If it's for some sort of higher good and you've exhausted every other means of achieving your goals, let's say your financial goals, if you've been injured, then you may have to go through that. But know that you're going to hurt in that process and don't do it to gratify some deep desire to make the other side feel pain, too.

30:46
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31:16
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31:44
As you were talking through that, was thinking of, and well, this is something I wanted to get into, is the more personal relationships, right? Because in my mind, in some ways, well, I can imagine there are unique situations where somebody attacks me and then I want to seek revenge. I have this mindset. But oftentimes it feels like almost less strong if it's a stranger, if it's just somebody.

32:11
who I don't even know in the world, something happens, it's almost like it's not even worth it, I can let it go. But there's something about personal relationships, particularly with a partner or spouse or someone like that, where I think that there is this, and I'm not saying that people act on it all the time, but there's almost this, you're more likely to feel hurt, and so you're more likely to feel the revenge sort of feelings of wanting to

32:42
to make the situation right when you're dealing with people that you really care about. it's interesting to me because this is someone I love and care about more than anyone, but at the same time, we're capable of hurting each other more than anyone because we care so much. Yeah, and I think you hit it right there at the end is that in an intimate relationship, we're at our most vulnerable and the pain can be really the most severe.

33:11
I mean, we can be so easily and rapidly hurt intentionally or otherwise by our partner. And also we have this long relationship where we think that we've come to an agreement on what's okay or not okay, for instance. And they know the things that are going, the types of grievances or wrongs that are gonna really nail us. And when they use one...

33:38
It's astonishing and maddening and deeply, deeply hurtful. And you know that they know that that was the thing, the best thing they could have done to just wham you, right? And so in response, you're going to instantly look through your library of the best things you could do to retaliate and say back. And off we go, right? Both sides are now seeking revenge purely for the pleasure of it.

34:07
Right. I want to hurt you because you hurt me bad. And it's feeling great. And I love when I land the great comeback and you love when you land the great comeback. And and we just go off on it. And and it continues without any form of restraint. Our prefrontal cortex is asleep or it has been knocked, you know, has been has been knocked out. And our cravings are

34:36
just going wild and that's a fight. That's an intimate partner fight and they're happening all the time. And I think that it's really useful and helpful for people to understand, oh, what's going on in your brain and what's going on on mine can begin to become a way where you can shut that down and stop it earlier than you might have otherwise. And then we can move into talking about

35:03
really the most powerful way of stopping it and self-healing through neuroscience. Neuroscience has shown that forgiveness is so much more powerful than we even close to imagine. And it doesn't really have anything to do with religion, although religion has been wonderful in continuing to show humanity forgiveness for 5,000 years when we didn't understand how.

35:29
important it is inside our brains and how we've been hardwired to do it just for this purpose, to stop these revenge cycles and to heal ourselves rapidly after they occur. I don't know, we can go into that when you're ready. No, that's great. That's great. And I don't know how much you stick to the scientific approach versus take sort of a moralistic viewpoint of life. But to me in my mind,

35:58
You know, my goal would be to move people away from violence. You know, how do we how do we help people recognize the revenge sort of thoughts and mindset that come in, sort of slow down with it and try to come back to the prefrontal cortex and make better decisions about, you know, using forgiveness or other things, especially when it's people you really care about. Yeah, right. The way that I think about it is all of the above approach. So

36:27
My first book that I wrote on revenge seeking and forgiveness was back in 2005 and called Suing for Peace. And it took a purely spiritual approach. So I'm a spiritual person and I was having a lot of difficulty in my life with this legalized form of revenge seeking and what it was doing to me and my clients. And that brought me to ultimately to a point midway through my career of deep despair and it's like

36:55
basically suicidal in a spare bedroom, trying to figure out how to move forward. really had thought I had made a serious mistake in terms of becoming a lawyer and doing this kind of work and how self-harmful it was. And had made me a terrible person in my own life and with my family. was just an all the time avenger, revenge seeker with my wife, with my kids.

37:24
anybody that kind of crossed me. I consider myself a recovering revenge addict. And at that point in time, when I started to think about revenge seeking, this was 20 years ago, as an addiction, there was no real science to support it at all. It was just a hunch that I had that I was behaving in a way that I understood people with addictions and substance use disorders to behave, which is this uncontrolled craving. And I saw this in...

37:53
my opposing the lawyers who opposed me. I saw it in their clients. I saw it in my own clients who were paying me enormous amounts of money just to get this feeling this high every day. that's how it is. It's really, you know, it's a dopamine rush. It's a high. So I really thought something's wrong. And this seems addictive. But you know, you look around, there are no 12 step programs or rehabs for revenge addicts. And there was no science to really support it until right before I

38:22
I was getting ready to publish this book and that in 2004, there was this the very first most important study on this that showed that the dorsal striatum, part of the revenge circuitry or the reward and craving circuitry of the brain activates when we have a grievance and we're planning to retaliate. And I went, oh, wow, there is science now behind this. That's incredible. I was able to slip it into that book back in 2005. But I had spent most of the book.

38:51
talking about the revenge teachings of the world's religions. And all of them is, know, the major religions. And I went through all of them and found that they say both things, you know, or sex within religion say both things. One person or one part of the book or the, whether it's the Bible or the Quran or any of the Hindu spiritual books or any of the others, most of them, other than maybe the Daode Qing and maybe the Dhammapada with Buddhism,

39:21
But most of them kind of say part of some of the people in part of the books say, if somebody wrongs you, it's an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. That's the religious law. You must follow that. Go and do to them what they did to you. That's pure revenge. All right. And then other spiritual leaders within the sex like Jesus would say, no, do not do that. Forgive that person. Forgive them 70 times seven if you have to. But he never you he didn't have the science either to explain.

39:51
how or why he knew this was the way to go. But I, as a Christian myself, strong believer in Jesus's forgiveness teachings, thought there must be some reason why he said that. And we're remembering it 2000 years later after he said it. Maybe there's more to it than just, oh, it's the way to be a good person and get into heaven. I felt like there was something more practical in life about forgiveness and that maybe it was my way out.

40:20
of the suffering that I was experiencing as a lawyer. I guess what I'm saying is I agree with your, strongly agree with your idea and your practice of sort of bringing to bear everything you can, either with a client or with yourself, whether it's spiritual, if that's what resonates for somebody, then think about forgiveness in spiritual terms and use it. If it's not, and you need some other more show me science approaches, which is what I...

40:49
did 10 years after that book and for my new book, The Science of Revenge, then use that. Whatever works for you to understand this enormous, valuable lesson about what I think is the most powerful form of self-healing that we have, but that is greatly unused in our society because our society has kind of decided that forgiving somebody is an act of weakness. It's just setting you up for more harm. It's no good to you.

41:18
It's a Pollyanna-ish idea, or you're just a religious person trying to get into heaven, which I may or may not believe exists, that kind of thing. That's why I decided to myself take an all of the above approach and write a book on the spiritual side of forgiveness and also the scientific side. Yeah, that's great. And I really appreciate you opening up about your personal experiences. One of the things that I think

41:47
that I've encountered in working with couples and couples therapy, as you can imagine, is like, let's say that there's a situation where there's been an affair that happens, this huge betrayal in a relationship, and there's this desire for the partner who had the affair, like, I just want my partner to forgive me and we can move on. I totally agree that forgiveness is a really important thing.

42:15
And obviously, I can't debate the science. But I think that I wouldn't want people to use it in that way to just say, like, hey, you need to forgive me and then we can just be good. It's more for the person who's forgiving, I imagine, when you look at the science than it is for the person being forgiven. Yes. Thank you for saying that. And that's exactly where I was going to head with that is that. what the neuroscience is telling us is that forgiveness benefits the victim.

42:45
not the perpetrator, and the benefits are enormous. Let me just set out what's happening inside your brain when you forgive, since I've already discussed what's happening inside your brain when you have a grievance and you want to seek revenge. So when you forgive someone, so you're the victim of some form of mistreatment, and you decide to forgive either the mistreatment itself or the person who did it or both.

43:10
So the first thing to think about is that's a decision that you make inside your own head. It does not have to be conveyed to the person who wronged you. There's no reason to do that unless you want to. And you would only do that if you're trying to save the relationship that you have with that person. But if you're not, and if it's better for you to move on from that relationship, let's say a betrayal, and you've decided that I'm gonna forgive,

43:38
you know, my spouse or significant other who betrayed me inside, but I'm not going to share that with them. And I'm not going to stay in this relationship because that fundamental breach of trust is just too far for me. And it's not healthy for me to stay in that relationship. That's fine. But let me tell you what happens inside your brain when you do that, which is just wonderful stuff. So the first thing that happens when you forgive is that it silences

44:05
the pain network inside your brain, that anterior insula. So when you decide to forgive, forgiveness actually takes the pain away, unlike revenge seeking, which just tries to cover it up with a dose of dopamine. So forgiveness is actually going to the root of that pain and removing that pain, silencing the pain network. The second thing that it does is it also silences the craving and reward circuitry of addiction and revenge seeking.

44:33
you're getting rid of when you forgive, you're silencing these absolutely intrusive, nuisance creating, pain creating, and sometimes dangerous revenge desires. When you forgive, that area of the brain becomes quiet again. And then importantly, the third thing that happens inside your brain is that when you forgive, it activates or reactivates your prefrontal cortex, executive function, self-control circuitry.

45:03
you're getting control back over yourself, your pain, your desires, and you're able with, if you put those three things together, that's what enables you to move on from, right? The grievance and the pain that you felt into kind of a new life instead of continually allowing yourself to ruminate on and allowing the pain of this thing, this betrayal, let's continue talking about that for a second, this betrayal that might've happened.

45:31
months, now or years ago, but you're still carrying it on into your present. It's infecting and ruining your present and your future. Forgiveness is the way to finally cut off that memory. It's not that the memory goes away, but the pain of it is going away by forgiving and the desire to retaliate over it is going away by forgiving and your self-control and executive function circuitry

45:59
is activating and helping you make good decisions going forward. So there's a lot of benefits from forgiveness that are just for us and not for the perpetrator. And in your example, the spouse or significant other who wants to be forgiven, they want to be forgiven and move on with the relationship for their own reasons, right? You're not obligated to offer that to them. But for yourself,

46:26
You would be acting in your own best interest always to at least forgive this thing internally. Otherwise your entire future until you forgive it will just be awful because you'll be always remembering it and always wanting some form of retaliation to make yourself feel better and it'll never work. The retaliation doesn't make you feel better. Yeah, and some of the language that I that I use sometimes what you're talking about to me sounds like helping people move into a sense of

46:56
Empowerment for themselves in their own life, right? Yes a lot of times with revenge And I talk about this with couples. It's like people Attack from the victim position if I feel like I'm being victimized then I feel entitled to attack the other person and so moving into empowerment is to say and so if it is somebody you trust and and you You you love and there's enough safety there

47:25
you know, moving into empowerment is to say, hey, that feels hurtful to me. Here's my boundary. Here, you know, I would like some accountability from you perhaps, something like that. And like coming from an empowered place, not that I'm going to hurt you back, but I'm going to, willing to tell you my authentic truth about how that feels for me and what I need to change in order to make sure that this still feels like a safe relationship.

47:53
Right? And like you said, if it's not, if I can't get there, then it probably means the relationship is over. that's an empowering thing to make a decision like that, of course, if I've tried to communicate my boundaries and it's just not working for me. Yeah, think I can't disagree with a thing you said there. All of that makes sense. Empowerment is a big part of it. It's taking control of your own brain. you know, remember, think about a grievance.

48:21
like a betrayal that's, you it's happened sometime in the past. If it's happened in the past, it's no longer happening this second. You can't experience that with any of your senses. You can't smell, touch, taste, feel it, none of it. And no one outside of you can experience it and knows that you are thinking about it, right? So it's all inside your head. But yet, but it's hurting you, it's harming you deeply, and it continues to do so.

48:51
So how do you free yourself of this pain? Well, the thing to do is go back inside of your head where the pain is and begin from that space to resolve that conflict and that pain. So I developed around the same time back in 2005 and then I've since been studying at Yale for the last 10 years, a process.

49:16
or a system called the non-justice system, which is the opposite of the justice system. If you think of the justice system as a legalized revenge system, the non-justice system is the opposite, is a system in which the goal is to help you abstain from seeking justice in the form of revenge, sort of like non-violence, which is to abstain from seeking violence. And the way it works is this. We create for you inside your mind what I call a courtroom of the mind.

49:45
And inside this courtroom, you get to put on trial the person who wronged you. So let's say the person who betrayed you in your relationship. But when you put them on trial there, you play all of the roles. So we're to go through a complete trial in which you are the victim and prosecutor and you state what happened and you state how that harmed you. And then you're the defendant. So now you're the person who betrayed you, the person who wronged you. And you testify.

50:14
Again, it's all, it's to yourself either with a partner or a therapist, or there's a free app called the Miracle Court app that has an audio version of this, and it's just you and yourself, and you just speak out loud in a private place. But you pretend to be the defendant, and a lot of people, you would think, oh, who wants to imagine being the person who just wronged me or betrayed me? But it's...

50:40
Stunning to me every time I do it, just how hard people work to be that person and the deep insights that they get and sometimes empathy that they received by engaging in that role. Then they get to be the judge and the jury and decide whether the person who wronged them is guilty or innocent and hand down a sentence. What should the punishment be? And then they get to be the warden.

51:05
Which you don't get to be in the real world, right? In the criminal justice system, if somebody is convicted and they're going to go to jail or even in the most extreme example, executed, you're not the warden. You're rarely seeing these things happening or you're rarely part of it. But in the non-justice system, you get to pick any kind of punishment you want. Doesn't have to be something a normal court would give. And you get to hand that down and then imagine what it would be like to put the person who wronged you through that punishment.

51:35
And this brings us back to that idea of the hammer and the nail and the hammer not being able to escape the pain that they're inflicting. Having done that, what is occurring is there's aspects of cognitive behavioral therapy and motivational interviewing and and other processes that kind of are all built into this kind of instinctively into the trial system that humans have been living with for thousands of years. But it allows somebody who's been traumatized or victimized victimized.

52:05
to be heard, which is critical. You want to be heard and be able to tell your story. You don't want to be judged, but you want to be affirmed. And you want to hold the person who wronged you accountable. This gives you that opportunity to do that all the way through potentially punishing them. But in the final step, you're asked to imagine being the judge of yourself. And in that final step where you're kind of in front of the judge's bench, you're sort of putting yourself on trial, but you're the judge of you.

52:35
You decide and you have to decide, do you want to continue seeking justice against this person or do you want to imagine what it would be like at least just imagine it for a second to forgive that person and move on? And what we find when we ask somebody just imagine forgiving them for a second, you don't have to do it. You don't have to forgive them. Just imagine it for a second. What might that feel like? And I've done this with people, even, you know, severe victims, victims of severe violence, and they all have to.

53:05
They all admit, if I forgave them, I would feel relief. And there's this great weight would come off of their shoulders because they're no longer obligated. We sort of feel like we're obligated to get justice. We're obligated to punish the person who wronged us. That's not so, but we think it's so. And to take that burden off of ourselves and go, oh, I could right now, I have control over my own mind now, and I could decide to move on from this.

53:34
That's such a freeing, liberating experience for people. And that's what forgiveness offers. that's why. so I've explained, you know, there how that's happening inside the brain and what's occurring to create this sense of relief. But unlike the revenge seeking dopamine high, the sense of relief you're getting now is this long lasting, genuine, authentic form of relief in which is, as you said, Shane, you have.

54:01
fully empowered yourself. You have taken back control of your mind and realized that you alone can heal yourself from this pain of the past. Only you can do that. Nobody outside of you can come and heal you. You've got to do that bit of work for yourself. That's amazing. How do we get the political leaders of the world to be required to go through that process? Because I do feel like this, you know, I think you said something at one point, like all violence comes from the

54:30
Revenge, Like, that's correct. And it is like, we just need to kill off these group of people, and then we can have peace in the world. There's this constant sort of like, we just need one more piece of violence, and then we'll arrive at the utopia. And it, you know, it never works, right? That's correct. That's a boy, that's such a beautiful I'm gonna I may, I may need to steal that for me. It's a really good analogy to what's happening is we just need that one more and we'll arrive at this utopia. Or if I can make this one more zinger with my partner, you know,

55:00
I'll feel great and I'll be able to move on. And it just never works that way. And it never will work that way. You've got to do this little bit of decision making for yourself inside your head of forgiveness to get that actual move on form of peace. Yeah, that's great. Well, this has been such a great conversation. I know we're running out of time here. I did want to ask you one more thing. This was from the questions that I got. It was about how mindfulness and gratitude can help you rewire your brain as well.

55:31
Yeah, I mean, they can they can help you in this process of forgiveness. But I think that ultimately, I guess I want to say two things. So what does the neuroscience show in terms of relief and remedies here? It gives us and the science of forgiveness, I would say. So there are two two ways to approach these things. If you have someone, I guess, if you're a therapist, let's say, and you're dealing with someone you can now kind of identify as probably addicted to revenge seeking, you can use

56:00
or you should be able to use, mean, in your own judgment, professional judgment, because it hasn't been studied yet. But you should be able to use all of the tried and available addiction recovery strategies for addiction prevention and treatment. Everything, like I said, you see BT and motivational interviewing, even including, know, anti craving drugs at some point, you know, nalmofen and naltrexone and even potentially

56:28
GLP-1, know, semi-glutide drugs, because they may have this effect of tamping down cravings, may, it hasn't been studied yet, so I'm just putting it out there as a future thing, but they may be effective at reducing these powerful revenge cravings that lead us to intense acts of violence, including warfare between nations. So all of the addiction strategies are available and could work, or,

56:57
The forgiveness strategy that I've just talked about, forgiveness on its own can do all of this work by itself. And it's readily available. It's inexpensive. You don't need a prescription. You can just do it. So those are the two methods, I think, that are open for anyone. That's great. That's great. Yeah. So in conclusion, can you mention the book one more time and anything else that you want?

57:25
you know, people to be able to find if they want to find out more about you. Yeah, sure. Thanks for that opportunity. So the new book is called The Science of Revenge by James Kimmel Jr. The Science of Revenge. My website for which has a lot more information and some resources. There's a quiz there that's helpful and some powerful message about forgiveness is called www.JamesKimmelJr.com. That's K-I-M-M-E-L. So like Jimmy Kimmel.

57:55
We've gone back here. The real that Jimmy Kimmel and me, we've had a little bit of a contact with each other about that at one point. So it's kind of fun. And then the other thing to look for is the Miracle Court app. So that's this the non-justice system that I've been describing with this trial inside the courtroom of the mind. That's called the Miracle Court app. And it's at www.MiracleCourt.com. Anybody can use it. It's free.

58:24
It's a web app, so it's not available on the normal app stores. It's just on a website. It looks like you download it, but you don't really. And it just runs in web form. But it has this audio of the complete trial. It's me leading the listener through the steps of this non-justice system miracle court process. That's great. And I can put the link in the show notes so people can easily find that as well. Outstanding. Thank you. Great. Yeah. Thank you so much, James. I really appreciate it. It great talking to you.

58:54
Same Shane, I really appreciated this. Outstanding. The episode this week is brought to you by Alma. They make it easy to get credentialed with major insurance plans at enhanced reimbursement rates. Alma handles all of the paperwork and guarantees payment within two weeks. Visit HelloAlma.com/ATPP or click on the link in the show notes to learn more. And thank you again, everybody. This is Shane Birkel and this is The Couples Therapist Couch.

59:21
podcast. It's all about the practice of couples therapy. I hope you have a great week and we'll see you next time. Bye everybody.