PODCASTThe Science of Happiness

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Neuroscience reveals revenge can become a powerful habit—and that forgiveness may be one of the most effective ways to break the cycle.

Summary: After years of bullying led him to almost committing an act of violence, James Kimmel Jr., an assistant clinical professor at the Yale School of Medicine, set out to understand why revenge can be so compelling—and how forgiveness can interrupt that cycle, easing emotional pain and strengthening self-control. On this episode of The Science of Happiness, we explore what science can teach us about healing ourselves and creating a less violent world.

How To Do This Practice: 

1. Think of a Grievance: Bring to mind a person or situation that still causes you hurt or resentment.
2. Notice How It Feels: Take a moment to observe any tension, anger, or pain that arises without judging it.
3. Imagine Forgiveness: Without forcing yourself to forgive, simply imagine what it would feel like to let go of the hurt.
4. Notice the Shift: Pay attention to any sense of relief, ease, or softening—even if it's subtle.
5. Return to the Feeling: When the grievance comes back, revisit that imagined sense of forgiveness as a way of caring for yourself.
6. Practice Often: Repeat this exercise whenever resentment resurfaces, allowing forgiveness to become a habit that supports your own healing.

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JAMES KIMMEL JR. is a lawyer, lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, and co-founder and co-director of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies.

Learn more about James Kimmel Jr. here: https://www.jameskimmeljr.com/

Related Science of Happiness episodes:

Why Compassion Requires Vulnerability: https://tinyurl.com/mrxsad33

Nine Steps to Forgiveness: https://tinyurl.com/5xwztnsx

The Science of Letting Go: https://tinyurl.com/ykc2uex4

Related Happiness Break episodes:

A Science-Backed Path to Self-Forgiveness: https://tinyurl.com/2js59anm

A Note to Self on Forgiveness: https://tinyurl.com/ycymxh3h

A Breathing Technique To Help You Relax: https://tinyurl.com/59y4sf5y

This episode was supported by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation as part of a Greater Good Science Center project on "Putting the Science of Forgiveness into Practice."

Message us or leave a comment on Instagram @scienceofhappinesspod. E-mail us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or use the hashtag #happinesspod.

Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap

Transcription:

DACHER KELTNER:  This episode was supported by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation as part of a Greater Good Science Center project on putting the science of forgiveness into practice. 

JAMES KIMMEL: When I was a teenager raised on a farm in Central Pennsylvania, I experienced a fair amount of bullying, and this bullying started verbally, as it often does. But as we grew older and our bodies grew, it became physical, and it went from, you know, pushing and shoving and getting knocked around into things more serious, getting kicked, punched, socked, and menaced constantly. And that was in addition to a lot of, you know, humiliation and shaming and endless types of psychological abuse as well. And the guys that were doing this were actually neighboring farm kids. So I'm about 16 or 17 years old when this all culminates, unfortunately, one night when my folks and I are asleep in bed and we're awakened to the sound of a gunshot. 

(Gunshot SFX) 

JAMES KIMMEL: You know, we jump out of bed and look out the window to see what's going on, and when I looked outside, I could see the pickup truck owned by or driven by one of the guys who had been harassing and tormenting me for all these years, and it took off down the road. And so we, you know, looked around the house to see if there was any damage, any bullet holes in windows and things like that, and fortunately, we didn't see anything, and we went back to bed thinking that all was well. The next morning, one of my jobs before going to school was to feed and water our different animals. We had some pigs and chickens. We also had a sweet beagle hunting dog named Paula. And so as I was heading up to the barn to feed and water her and the other animals, I found her lying dead, unfortunately, in her pen in a pool of blood with a bullet hole in her head. My folks called the police. They showed up, took a report, but made it clear they weren't going to pursue it. And so we tried to go back to normal, and a few weeks later, I found myself home alone kinda late at night, and I heard a vehicle come to a stop in front of our house, and then there was a flash and an explosion this time.

(Explosion SFX)  

JAMES KIMMEL: They had just blown up our mailbox, and the truck took off down the road again, as it did a few weeks earlier. With that explosion, it didn't only detonate the mailbox, it took what was left of my self-control. 

DACHER KELTNER: Welcome to The Science of Happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner. When we've been wronged, many of us feel a deep urge to get even. Revenge can be compelling, satisfying in the moment, and often experienced as righteous, even necessary. But what if that drive for revenge follows patterns we usually associate with addiction? It's a provocative idea. And what if forgiveness is not only a moral or spiritual practice passed down through the ages, but also a neurophysiological process with real effects on the brain and body, shaped by how we hold and move through pain? Joining us to explore these questions is James Kimmel Jr., a lawyer, lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, and co-founder and co-director of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies. He shares what science is revealing about revenge… 

JAMES KIMMEL: So it turns out your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs, and that's not a metaphor

DACHER KELTNER:  ... and forgiveness. 

JAMES KIMMEL: We're not doing anything for the person who harmed us. We're not pardoning what happened to us. We're just taking care of ourselves and healing ourselves from the wrongs of the past. 

DACHER KELTNER: More after this break. 

DACHER KELTNER: Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner. Today, we're talking about revenge, forgiveness, and what neuroscience can teach us about both. Joining us is James Kimmel Jr. He's a lawyer and an assistant clinical professor at the Yale School of Medicine, researching revenge and forgiveness. He's also the author of The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It. Thanks so much for joining us, James. 

JAMES KIMMEL: Thanks for having me. 

DACHER KELTNER: Your kind of mission to get us to rethink the role of revenge and forgiveness in life begins in your childhood. Tell us about that. What happened? 

JAMES KIMMEL: My dad maintained a handgun that he kept loaded in a nightstand for protection. After that truck took off that night, I ran and got that gun, that handgun, jumped in my mother's car, and I went off after those guys, just shouting and screaming in rage, just driving as fast as I could down this one-lane country road in the dark at night. Took me a few minutes to catch up to them, but I eventually cornered them on one of their farms with their truck kind of pinned against a barn, and they slowly get out of the truck, and they turn around, and they're squinting through my high beams. And what I can see at that moment, what's clear to me, is that they were unarmed. They didn't have any weapons in their hands. That's one thing that was clear to me. And the second was they could not have known that I had a gun. And so it was kind of the perfect setup to get the perfect payback that I'd been kind of wanting and fantasizing about now for years after all of this torment. And so I, you know, I grabbed the gun off the passenger seat, and I opened the driver's door, and I started to slide my foot through the door opening. And as I was doing that, I had this sudden moment, this flash of inspiration, just for a second or two, and I, I kind of could see two things into my future. One was, if I went through with this and did what I really wanted to do, at minimum, I'd be killing the guy who drove down that road that night, at least my identity. At a minimum, I'd be arrested. Maybe I'd be incarcerated, and I wouldn't be here with you today. And so that was just enough, these insights, that the cost of what I wanted was far more than I was willing to pay, that caused me to pull my leg back inside the car, shut the door, put the gun back down on the seat, and drive home. 

DACHER KELTNER: Wow. It's astonishing. You entered into the legal system. A lot of punitive approaches, long sentences in the United States, et cetera. Now we see more movements towards restorative justice and mediation. But you, in your experience in the law, have called it selling revenge to the masses. Yeah. And tell us about that and how you think more broadly at the cultural level about the place of revenge in American law. 

JAMES KIMMEL: Yeah. And even going back to that night, you know, when I left, I wasn't thinking forgiveness. I was thinking, "I want revenge." I really, really wanted it. I just wanted to come up with a way to get it at a much lower price. I wanted revenge on discount. And I eventually came upon this idea of getting into the professional revenge business, which is by becoming a lawyer. Legalized revenge, we sell under the brand name “Justice”, lawyers do. Not all lawyers do this, of course. It's litigators primarily, but those of us who litigate, and I was a litigator, we're engaged in finding people who have grievances and are looking for some sort of retaliation as a result of their grievance or some way to inflict pain on the other side, at a minimum to bend them to their will and to maybe get some money from it. But we're trying to inflict pain in a legal way. And of course, that's better than everybody engaging in vendetta-level street violence, but it's still the same process. It's the legalized form of it. And it-- what I found as a lawyer as I did it was is that I was getting these momentary bursts of pleasure at almost every small stage in every case that I handled, which is to say every time I could make a bad day for the other side or inflict pain on them, not only was my client feeling better because they wanted these reports and they were living vicariously through it, and you could tell that they were excited and they were just enjoying and reveling in it, and then suffering pain when it was a bad day for us. But I was also experiencing this myself by just being the dealer of this process. And what I found eventually is it started to seep into my personal life so that I was no longer just a professional avenger at work, but when I got home, I would need more of it, and I would start becoming an avenger with my wife and kids, looking for grievances and reasons to feel aggravated or angry or hurt or offended in some way, and then an opportunity could come to retaliate to kind of self-medicate and make myself feel better. And I eventually came to the just the tacit, you know, internal conclusion with no science at all. Am I hooked on something? I would separate myself from it for a small period of time, but I end up being drawn back into it, not only because of the money, which was good, but also because of the intense feelings of pleasure that I would get and that I would miss when it was absent for a period of time, and eventually became suicidal at one point, going, "I don't know what to do with myself. I hate this life. I don't know how to get out of it again." Am I an addict? Was the fundamental question. 

DACHER KELTNER: Sounding like an addiction. You shift from law to the lab, you know, and just on the law note, it's just interesting to think about some of the data, like the length of the prison sentence, the severity of the sentence doesn't really affect recidivism. So you could look at our two point some odd million people who are incarcerated as being people suffering from this addiction that we have in this very punitive culture. You move into the lab, and why did you think that the study of the brain on revenge would be the next move in your career to understand this phenomenon? 

JAMES KIMMEL: Through a series of really interesting coincidences that don't happen very often, even though I'm trained as a lawyer and I don't have a PhD in research psychology or neuroscience, I was able to get to the Yale School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry to do this work and to rely, of course, on neuroscientists and actual PhDs who really are very good at what they do to look into why we seek revenge and what's happening inside our brains. That was my interest. And that just happened to coincide with the very first neuroscience studies of what your brain on revenge looks like, and it is a fascinating world. 

DACHER KELTNER: And what does it look like in the brain when we seek out revenge like you did? 

JAMES KIMMEL: Yeah. So it turns out your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs, and that's not a metaphor. You know, neuroscientists have been able to put people inside of fMRI brain scanners, PET scanners, give them a grievance, that is a reason to feel victimized, and then an opportunity to retaliate and see what happens inside their brains when they do. And what they see is that the two areas of the brain that are most closely linked to the go circuitry of addiction, that is the motivation, the craving, the pleasure, this is called the nucleus accumbens and the dorsal strata. These two areas of the brain actually activate when you first experience the pain of a grievance. The grievance activates a different area of the brain called the brain's pain network, the anterior insula. That seems to cue the desire for revenge in the reward circuitry. And then the last piece of the puzzle is your prefrontal cortex. That's the stop circuitry that's supposed to be your cost-benefit circuitry that enables you to weigh decisions and consequences before you take a step, and that area seems to be shut down for revenge seeking. And now you get what is, in effect, compulsive revenge seeking, and I was experiencing that that very night, right? My stop circuitry saved my life at the last second, but I was all go until the last second.

DACHER KELTNER: That's incredible. Really, it speaks to how neuroscience can really help us too. So, you know, I have clinical colleagues, they are very careful about the use of the word addiction, but you're making the case that this can be an addiction. Tell us how you make the case that this is a moment of revenge. It really has the properties of addiction, and maybe you should seek treatment, if you will. 

JAMES KIMMEL: The definition of addiction is, simply put, the inability to resist an urge or desire to take something like a drug or alcohol, tobacco, or to engage in a behavior like gambling or, you know, food or gaming, those types of things, despite knowing the negative consequences of doing so. So if you have this urge and you have an inability to resist it, and it starts hurting you or other people, then you generally qualify as having what the rest of us commonly call an addiction, or you might. And doctors in addiction medicine are not afraid of calling it addiction at all, 'cause that's what their patients are calling it, and that's what we all understand. 

DACHER KELTNER: And I wanna get to your approach to sort of softening and transcending, if you will, the vengeance cravings that you write about. So tell us about the non-justice theory and how you're developing this approach to reducing these vengeance cravings. 

JAMES KIMMEL: While the neuroscientists were working on what does your brain on revenge look like, criminologists and behavioral scientists were looking at what is the primary motivation in almost all forms of violence, from intimate partner violence and youth violence and bullying up through street and gang violence, violent extremism, police brutality, genocide, war, the whole range, top to bottom. And the one universal answer is, oh, surprise, revenge seeking. It's the perception of being wronged that motivates somebody to wanna hurt another person, which gives true meaning and real validation to the concept that many people have probably heard, which is hurt people hurt people, right? That's why, you know, I call it the world's deadliest addiction, because to gratify this addiction, many times it results in shooting and killing people and all forms of violence that we witness in our world around us. So if that's true that revenge is the world's deadliest addiction, what neuroscientists have also been finding over the last twenty years is that forgiveness is detox because it actually neurobiologically reverses the circuitry that is activated after a grievance for revenge. 

DACHER KELTNER: The science of forgiveness after these messages from our sponsors. 

DACHER KELTNER: Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. We've been talking with James Kimmel Jr. about revenge, how it can take hold in the brain, how it can feel rewarding in the moment and how deeply rooted it seems to be in human experience. So what happens in the brain when we move away from retaliation and instead forgive? We're continuing our conversation with James Kimmel Jr., moving from the neuroscience of revenge to forgiveness 

DACHER KELTNER: James, what does forgiveness do to us neurophysiologically? What does the research show? 

JAMES KIMMEL: So what early studies have been showing is that when you forgive, if you put somebody in an fMRI brain scanner, you give them a grievance and an opportunity to forgive instead of retaliate, it shuts down, it stops the brain's pain network, that anterior insula. So forgiveness actually is being shown to stop pain. That is an enormous neurobiological benefit from what we've long thought of as, you know, some sort of soft spiritual practice. The other thing that it does is it seems to shut down that pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction. So that ghost circuitry that I was telling you about, that is shut down. And then the other thing that forgiveness does is it activates or reactivates the prefrontal cortex, that decision-making executive function and self-control circuitry. So it's giving you three neurobiological benefits from forgiveness that are really just enormously important that make me consider forgiveness almost a human superpower or a wonder drug, and we haven't even known that until very recently. 

DACHER KELTNER:I agree. 

JAMES KIMMEL: So it's important, I think, to get that out to people because here's a drug that's free. You don't need a prescription. You don't need a pharmacy. You manufacture it inside your brain. You're your own pharmaceutical company right there ... inside your head. And it's giving you all these enormous benefits for nothing, and it's available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I just don't think you can get enough of it. 

DACHER KELTNER: Yeah. In one of your wonderful Wall Street Journal articles, you wrote, "Imagine what our world would look like," and I'm thinking about the polarization of today and the war in the Middle East, et cetera, if people could just say the words, "I forgive." And we're starting to turn to this part of your work, but what led you concretely to the emphasis on forgiveness? And then really importantly, like when you have these people who are addicted to revenge that you've portrayed, like what do you do to get them to shift to forgiveness?

JAMES KIMMEL:  Let's just talk about that for a second to start. The perception is forgiveness is very hard or it's a gift to the person who wronged you. You know, you're being soft, you know, just you're signing yourself to being a forever victim. You're pardoning other people. That's not what happens with neurobiological forgiveness or what psychologists refer to as decisional forgiveness. You can get these benefits that we were just discussing by making an internal decision that you don't share with another human being to forgive what happened to you as a means of healing yourself from the wrongs of the past. And here's how easy that can be and how quick and powerful it can be. So even you right here, if you think of a grievance that you might be carrying around that you haven't been able to release. I'm not gonna ask you what it is, so don't worry. But if you just think of a grievance that you might have, and for a moment, think of that pain that you have, and now I'm not gonna ask you to forgive it. I'm just going to suggest that you use your imagination to imagine what it would feel like if you did. Don't forgive it. Just imagine what it would feel like if you forgave a grievance that you had, and now tell me how that feels. 

DACHER KELTNER: I had a specific concrete situation in my mind, and I felt relief, and I felt a sense-- Like the tension around it dissipated. It sort of dissolved. 

JAMES KIMMEL: Yeah. It happens really fast, right? I mean, it's not as complex as we think. So what's going on inside your brain? From a neuroscience perspective, it seems that even imagining what forgiveness would feel like, momentarily at least, stops the pain of the grievance, and it's shutting down the anterior insula. It's stopping the revenge fantasies and rumination, and it's activating that prefrontal cortex. So you're getting those benefits immediately. So there are ways to forgive that are very powerful and that can release you from the wrongs of the past and restore our lives after we've been wronged because we need a way of self-healing. 

DACHER KELTNER: I love your description of it as sort of this wonderful system up there in the mind that you can access at any time. It's this wonderful calming down of vengeance and a sense of understanding and ease. And I'm just curious, you know, with all this work on revenge and your turn to forgiveness and then, you know, the kind of bullying and menacing and violent harassment that you experienced, that has to have an enduring place in your mind. What's the role of forgiveness in your life right now? 

JAMES KIMMEL: Yeah, forgiveness for me is something I take daily. And I do that because it really is healing, and I want to be healed. I experience grievances galore, like we all do, and I have found that I can discharge them and move on with my life and become productive by letting that stuff go, even though I may not have any conversation with the person who wronged me or offended me at all. But I'm doing it really, truly for myself. And this doesn't take away the, you know, the spiritual value of forgiveness at all for people. For people who see that spiritual value, it can be enormous, and it can have a lot of implications for the spiritual life. But if you are only even focused on the medicinal, I call it the medicinal value of forgiveness, it's so enormous. It's important to think about revenge seeking as something that's always focused on punishing people for the past, right? We're always wanting to hurt somebody or retaliate against them for something that happened in the past that's no longer in the real world, right? We can't experience it again with our senses once it's moved into the past. And yet we keep dragging this sense of victimization and the pain of it back from the past into our present, and it contaminates our life. It stops us from being productive. Revenge rumination and revenge fantasies can really take over, you know, your life and your thinking and your brain. How can you get yourself out of that? How can you stop it and go back to your present moment and your future and have a good present life and a future life? And the answer to that really is to forgive that and let that go. And that's not a trite statement. I mean, that is a neurobiologically grounded statement in stopping the pain that is inside your brain and moving on and leaving the past in the past where it belongs and moving forward into your present. So I really, anytime that I'm struggling, I'm always using that to let it go so that my present and my future are just absolutely fulfilling and joyful.

DACHER KELTNER: So well put. James Kimmel, thank you for your book, The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It. Thank you for your work and your broad vision, and thanks for being with us here today. It's been a wonderful conversation. 

JAMES KIMMEL: Thanks. I really enjoyed it 

DACHER KELTNER: Next time on The Science of Happiness, we explore the power of role models, how the right mentors can help us navigate complex institutions, overcome obstacles, and find our way forward. 

GILBERT MURILLO: Even when I was incarcerated, he wrote me letters like stipend, financial aid. And I, I never knew that you could get money at the college. Like financial aid and demystifying it. 

DACHER KELTNER: And how they help us build character. 

GILBERT MURILLO: One thing I did learn is about his character attribution is being very noble. You don't see that a lot now. 

SHUKA KALANTARI: This episode is produced by Alexa Lim. Our associate producers are Emily Brower and Anna Zou. Our producer is Truc Nguyen. Our sound designer is Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our host is Dacher Keltner. I'm Shuka Kalantari, the executive producer. Thank you for listening to The Science of Happiness. Have a wonderful day