Revenge Addiction (Episode 98)

Brent and Janis discuss the current research in neuroscience on revenge and how powerful it is in our own life. They talk about how our current culture is being lured into a form of revenge addiction.  They also look at how can we find freedom in our own life and have an impact in our current culture.

Transcript:

Welcome to Life and Love Nuggets, where licensed therapists Brent and Janice Sharp share how you can thrive in

your life, your love, and your relationships. Good morning, friends. Welcome back to Life and Love Nuggets. We're

glad to be with you today. Glad you checked in on this, but today we're going to look at something that we think is a

very powerful thing that's happening in our culture, in our personal lives, and it may be fueling what is happening in

our wider culture as well. And it is simply revenge. We all know the feeling somebody's done something to us or to

somebody that we love, and this thing comes up in us. I want to get them back. They need to pay. A few months ago,

I had heard that our oldest granddaughter had been bullied at school.

And I just, like, something in me just went off now. Her parents did a wonderful job of working with the school and

managing this well. But I'm. I was, like, ready to go get on a plane. I was ready to go snatch somebody and take care

of this. It was just wrong.

Yes. I've had clients who, their spouses betrayed them so badly, they've had these thoughts of wanting something

really bad to happen.

Dream about it.

Yes. Or couples going through divorce experience this a lot when they go through the legal proceedings because

they've been hurt and they want somebody to pay, they want that spouse to pay. And it's a painful situation. Any of

us can have those feelings, and it can be really powerful. Though we're not promoting revenge, we are going to talk

about revenge today because I think it's important for everybody. It's a natural emotional response, and it is

powerful. Any of us can feel that, and it's what we do with those feelings that really matter. James Kimmel, junior

researcher at Yale University, has written a book called the Science of Revenge. Understanding the World's Deadliest

addiction, which is interesting, and how to overcome it.

He's uncovered some studies in neuroscience of what happens in the brain when we've experienced an offense and

how the desire for revenge actually develops.

Yeah. So again, neuroscience has become this whole part of life that's becoming more and more explored as we

have greater capacity to access the brain and how the brain responds to certain things. And so his research goes

back to some research that was coming out in Zurich in the early 2000s, and they were studying this very interesting

phenomenon called altruistic punishment. So punishing other humans for wrongs they've committed, even when

there's no discernible benefit to the Punisher. So we think if I'm going to get something out of this, right, then we

might understand that better. But if, even if I don't get anything out of it, how do I. That there's still this desire to

punish. And so they did these studies. It started out on a pretty simple level. And people were participating in an

economic game.

And they had their opponent was set up where their opponent would do something dishonest or would do

something in some way that was betrayal. They found out if there was an opportunity to punish that person for being

dishonest, to make sure that they wouldn't do it again and it would be exposed. Even if they, the one that was

punishing immediately lost the game. So I lose everything. They would still go on and punish them. So I will pull the

roof down on your head. Even if I'm pulling the roof down on my head. Anyway, it's really fascinating. So the question

was asked, why would people do this? Why would they feel the need for this? And if there is not a material benefit,

the researchers hypothesize that there has to be some emotional or neural neurological benefit.

They hypothesized that it would manifest in the neurocircuitry centers of pleasure and reward in the brain. So that's

what they hypothesized and set out to see if that was true.And that explains a lot of my monopoly trauma with my family. So if my brothers are watching, I'm sorry if I pulled

the house down when you were cheating. But yes, it explains a lot. But in this game that they were talking about,

making sure that the person was punished somehow seemed to give a sense of pleasure or a sense of reward. And

they found that to be true even when the person was just imagining punishing the other person. And as you said,

even if it cost the punisher something, they were still. It's like, I still want them punished. They will pay, even if I pay

as well.

You know, we all know that when somebody's offended us or harmed us that we can go over and over again thinking

through that pain or that rejection or that trauma or the thing that harmed us. And we have those arguments in our

head with people that we never talk to, but the arguments are stuck there. We know that when we do that, it just

causes us more stress and anxiety. It doesn't seem to make a difference. So what they found in the research is that

revenge gives us a zing or a hit of pleasure in the situation. And it's very unhealthy for us because we'll ignore or

diminish the cost to us. But we do it. It's automatic and we do it. This is a lot like another part of life where we ignore

the other.

Other parts of life where we ignore the negative outcomes in order to feel pleasure. So why do I eat cheesecake

when I know it's really bad for me? Why do people use drugs? Why don't people stop smoking when they've

developed a disease as a result of. Of smoking? Those things can hit the pleasure center of our brain. And even if it

has negative consequences, we do it anyway.

So the insight from the research shows that grievances activate revenge cravings. And those revenge cravings look

very much like drug addiction or all kinds of addictions as we're going to see. What was found out is that the

compulsion toward revenge is very similar to what substance users experience to continue to engage in behaviors

that have an immediate pleasure response, but where the pleasures wear off fast and ending up harming the one

with the craving. And so again, they found out that this was true in many types of addictions.

What was found was that the prefrontal cortex of the brain, or the executive brain, which is the part that helps us

make reasonable and logical decisions, not do stupid. Yes, to keep us from doing stupid, and gets overtaken by

these cravings. And just like addictions of all kind, that person acts out. Now, most of us imagine revenge actions

and have trouble of letting go of those thoughts. But it feels like we have no ability sometimes to control that, to be

able to let that go. So again, research shows that just in addiction, revenge seeking is very pleasurable. It activates

the pleasure center of the brain just as it does in addiction. And as you said, it's very short lived. The positive doesn't

last long.

Yes. So when I was studying this, I thought about movies that I've watched over.

The years, your kind of movies. Boy movies.

Somebody's done some horrible thing to somebody, you know, to a person or their family or the world. And the whole

movie is about seeking revenge for something that's happened in the past and getting back at them. And I

remember finishing the movie, feeling pretty darn good that it created some pretty. I mean, I'm vicariously.

Yes, you're conquering with the hero.

Yes. Vengeance somehow seems like we're righting the wrong, putting the world in order and it promises thissatisfaction and relief from pain. But again, we're not recommending this. But it's like other addictions. We can pay A

huge price for just a brief few minutes of satisfaction.

So revenge is not good for us.

That's what we're saying, basically.

Basically. But. But it's natural. Seeking revenge gets us in that old Hatfield and McCoy feud mode. You hurt me, so

I'm gonna seek revenge, and then that's gonna hurt you, and then you're gonna come back and hurt me. And then

before long, our whole family sent it, and it goes on for gener. We're trying to get back at one another. So a grievance

is what starts the whole thing. A harm of some kind. We carry that around in our mind, and it fuels that compulsion

towards revenge. Just kind of like the thought of a bar or casino may hit someone that's an alcoholic or a gambling

addict. The good news is, although it is human, it is. We don't have to let that cause harm to others or to sabotage

our own life and happiness by giving in to that urge.

So Dr. Kimmel's research, he did a study where he had people imagine. Now, this is a pretty startling study. Okay, so

just get ready.

I'm ready.

Where he had people come home who had a little pet, a little dog, and they found out that their pet was missing.

Well, after some, you know, research, talking to neighbors and whatever, they found out that somebody had taken

their little dog and used it as bait. Oh, in. In dog.

Dog fights.

Fights. And obviously the little dog was mauled and killed. You know, in this.

Now everybody listening to this wants to take revenge.

Well, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And everybody listening to this was like, what? They did what? They just wanted to get

this guy back. Okay. And so he had them do a very interesting thing. He had them play every possible character in

the story. They would play the one that it was my dog that was taken. They would play the one that actually took the

dog. They would play, like, the attorney. They would play the jury, the judge, and ultimately the executioner.

Oh, wow.

So they would have a time where they got in each one of those roles. And so at first, the. When, you know, the. The

jury, the person that had been offended when they were asked, what do you think should happen to this person? And

this is the part that's rather startling. Many of the people wanted the person to be put in a kennel and wild dogs set

loose and have their way with them.Oh, dear.

That that's what they were imagining.

Oh, gosh.

That they should be killed. Now, again, they had to play every role. And they couldn't just say, that is the outcome.

And say, well, they should be put in a cage and mauled. You know, they actually had to be the one, the executioner.

They had to be the one that actually took the person, put them in the kennel and released the dogs on them. And

they also then played the role of the person who took the dog. And they found out that he was from a culture where

dog fighting was kind of normal, Dogs are dogs. And so yeah, of course you'd take some dog you saw, you know, and

use it as bait, that this was just normal practice. It was the way that the person was raised.

And so the judge went on, asked the participants, is first of all, is this wrong still happening? And they were all

saying, no, it's something that happened in the past, it wasn't happening right then. He also asked them, could you

imagine what if you just envisioned forgiving the person because they didn't know any better, it was just the way that

they were raised. Now, of course, nobody in the study wanted anything to do with forgiveness. It was not their

natural move. But he just simply asked them, what now that you know a little bit more about the person and their

story and you would have to actually be the one that puts them in the cage. I mean, those are some of the factors in

this.

So it's interesting because he found that even as people thought about forgiving something, they found that

forgiveness shuts down that revenge part of the brain, shuts down the pain receptors and the cravings that come

with it. And it actually helps you go back into executive function so that you could make good choices from there.

This particular author said that power of forgiveness is the most powerful self healing mechanism in the brain. And

yet we don't often tap into it. Maybe we want revenge too much. I'm always amazed when we study the brain of how

many of Jesus teaching just line up with it. It's like he created us or something, or he's God or something like that.

What a surprise.

In Matthew 18 it says, Then Peter came and said to him, lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how

often should I forgive? As many as seven times. And of course Jesus said to him, not seven times, but I tell you, 77

times we've talked before.

Another version is 70 times seven.

Yes.

Which is 490. Okay.

Yeah. And so we've talked about it before and it doesn't mean that they've actually harmed us 490 times. And I think

another version even acts like it's infinity or whatever.

Well, that's what the idea is. It's forever, basically.Yeah, but it's. That idea comes back to our mind over and over again.

490,000 times.

Exactly. So what if we imagine forgiving that person each time it came back to our awareness when those painful

memories or thoughts come to mind. If we can say, I choose to forgive, I choose to let go of this, even if I don't feel

like it, I'm still making that choice. Our brain responds to that because it's getting us back into that executive function

of our brain. We'd be shutting down the pleasure reward centers that are urging us on to get the revenge, and we'd

shut down those pain receptors and be back in our executive functioning again. We could find freedom through

forgiveness. Instead of being haunted by that, we could find freedom.

It's so fascinating that in the study it said, just imagining forgiveness. I do have a lot of people, when I talk to them

about forgiveness, it's like, well, how in the heck do you do that? I think we've been taught that it's like a light switch

that I go, okay, I forgive them. Okay. But then we all know that we still think about it. It comes back to us again. And

so this idea of every time it comes back to our memory, I get this opportunity, but just imagining it, that it's not even

doing it, but imagining it is actually impacting the brain. So this is very powerful, I think, in our personal life and

relationships. But what happens when it goes global, this whole idea of revenge?

So there was a study done with what are considered the three most dangerous people in all of history. Adolf Hitler,

Joseph Stalin, and Chairman Mao. It showed that each of them were what would be considered revenge addicts. I

thought this was really fascinating. I found it interesting. Fascinating and a bit troubling. As we're gonna see, the

story with Hitler was found in speeches he gave as he was just ascending into influence in the German culture. His

speeches were not about what he wanted to do to improve conditions in Germany or how the culture could grow and

thrive. Those were not what his speeches were about.

All of his speeches focused on his grievance and the grievance of the German people against some of the political

leadership in Germany and the Jews at the end of World War I, where they allowed the signing of the Treaty of

Versailles to not be in favor of. Of Germany. So historians now suggest that the cause of World War II was how

World War I ended. The treaty put Germany under extreme reparations for how they started World War I. And the

politicians that signed the treaty were considered by Hitler and some Germans to have betrayed Germany. And

within a few years, he had set up an entire system of revenge, promising that if he was in power, he would retaliate

and go against any internal enemies and then their external enemies. He obviously delivered on that promise. Yeah.

Then another man, just a few years before Hitler's rise to power, another man called Joseph Stalin in Russia, he was

in exile at the time, and he was asked by one of his comrades, what is your greatest pleasure? In response to that

question, Stalin said, my greatest pleasure is to choose one's victim, prepare one's plans, minutely slake an

implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There's nothing sweeter in the world. That's what Stalin said. He was 36

at the time and not yet in leadership, but it's saying that his greatest pleasure in life is revenge. So historians can

trace that theme back into his teenage years, and it became a theme of his life. And then in the 1920s, Chairman

Mao in China writes to his party bosses and shares about the terror that he has unleashed in the countryside of

China.

He encouraged peasants to rise up against landlords and put them on trial and set loose violence against them. He

is known to have written the leaders of the Communist Party at the time and said he had unleashed terror in the

countryside and that the feeling he had was an ecstasy he had never experienced before. So in each of these, we

see this compulsive revenge and the initial pleasure that is experienced that feeds the addiction. And then Dr.

Kimmel, in his book, looked at it, just fascinating to me, the top 20 conflicts of all human history, where most of the

deaths have occurred, it suggested that over 450 million people have been killed in wars and these conflicts. And the

top 20 account for 360 million out of that, 450.He found that 19 out of the 20 of these were a result of compulsive, addictive revenge seeking.

Wow.

Of course, the highest of these being World War II, which had over 60 million deaths. Ultimately. Amazing.

Yeah. Well, and then Dr. Kimmel goes on to look at our modern conflicts, Israel, Gaza, Russia and the Ukraine. And

the language is all about revenge, gratification. It's, you harmed me and I want to get you back. It's getting

gratification from that, which, of course, then I harm you, then you want to harm me back, and then I harm you. And it

just has continued on and on, and that can go on for years or again, generations.

So we can look abroad, we can look throughout history, see this pattern, but don't we hear this kind of thing in our

modern political climate. These people did this bad thing, and we need to get them back. Seemingly developing

whole groups of the culture that are, in essence, according to this research, addicted to revenge. And now we have

something in culture that's never been seen before that just fans the flame of all this and increases the impact we

have. The onset of technology, which our brains are just having a hard time keeping up with. You know, it's just so

much. Dr. Kimmel goes on to talk about social media networks and the role that they're playing in this grievance

revenge cycle. These algorithms that have been developed that are designed to engage users. We all know that if

you have any kind of.

We don't do much in that, but I have a little something on Instagram where we can stay up with our family. But you

can tell that the algorithms kind of keep feeding you similar things, you know, that you've looked at. And he's

suggesting that the. One of the ways users are being engaged today is by tapping into this revenge addiction cycle.

So at light speed, politicians can engage people and now almost instantly have millions of people holding the same

grievance at the same time, multiple times a day.

Yeah.

So our political world has learned that they can use this system to inflame the desire for revenge, almost creating a

mass addiction reaction to certain causes. Of course. He uses the January 6 issue at the Capitol as an obvious

example of this. Social media was used to propagate the stop the steal. I mean, that was the message. So these

people did this bad thing and stole something. And so we got to get back at them. And whatever side of the political

aisle you may be on, everyone had to be shocked when they were watching how this stimulated the attack on the

Capitol building. And so it's this immediate way of getting thousands and millions of people going a certain direction

against a certain people.

Yeah, Mobilized. So some would ask, okay, so does all reaction to being harmed fall into this revenge addiction

pattern? What we're talking about here are hurts and harms that have happened in the past. If you're in harm's way, if

somebody's breaking into your house, for example, and you're defending yourself, that's different than holding on to

grievances or grudges or things from the past. You know, we've talked before on and on about the difference

between forgiveness and trust. Forgiveness is a release of those past offenses, but trust is feeling safe from further

harm. If somebody's not safe in your life, it's appropriate to protect yourself from further harm. We're not saying

forgive them and let them harm you. It's appropriate to protect yourself about.

What we're talking about today is the trap of carrying grievances from the past and how it can hold us in bondage

from really finding peace in our lives, letting those things go. And we've talked about, and you mentioned, it takeswork to let those things go. We have to continually let go of those past hurts, those past harms as they come to

mind and release them in God's hands. I often encourage somebody, when it comes to mind, either imagine it fading

to black in your mind or imagine a curtain going down over it.

Covering it.

Yeah, covering over. Eventually, if we do that every time it comes to mind, then it's going to happen less often and it's

not going to be as intense until eventually we go, oh, wow, I don't think about that anymore. Or we might use

something tangible sometimes. I have. Now, I've said this before, but I have people write something out on paper

and then they burn it, and I encourage them to look at the paper turning black. And then when that thought comes to

mind, then go back and go, no, that's burnt, that's gone. I've let it go. On our trips to Iona, which we could talk about

forever. But on our trips to Iona, we had one day where we hiked a.

Little island in Scotland.

A little island in Scotland, three miles long. We love it. It's the most peaceful place in the world. But we had one day

that we all hiked to a very remote beach. And were asked ahead of time to really pray about something that we felt

like the Lord wanted us to let go of. And then when we got there, we searched around until we found a rock that

would represent that. And we took time and we prayed and we threw it out into the ocean. And then when that

thought would come to mind again, it would be, nope, I left that in the ocean off of Iona. And so we could release

that and let it go. As we understand more about how God created our brains, we can see that there's freedom in

forgiveness.

It's not only a path to peace, but it also releases us so that we don't have to have that addiction, revenge response.

We can love and we can be loving to people around us.

So fascinating to me that the research shows that just imagining forgiveness, just contemplating releasing the

offense again, whether you feel like it or not, whether you think it's justified or not, but just imagining it actually calms

the brain in this pleasure, pain revenge center and allows our executive functioning to lead us. I'm reminded of Jesus

on the cross so often when it comes to forgiveness. Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing.

They're reacting out of their own fears and pains and whatever it might be. That's an executive brain function, a

choice that we make for healthy and living a good life. Not a response, not this knee jerk reaction from the pleasure

center of imagining harm to others. This releases us. It really releases us from this automatic addiction response

and it's a pathway to freedom.

So we recognize that people do hurtful things in this life. We will have trouble. The scripture says they do that out of

their own hurts, their own fears, their own insecurities. In releasing them, we are releasing ourselves to a path toward

freedom and peace as Jesus directed us to forgive. We believe this is not just a plan on how to be a good person,

how to get our little brownie points, do the right things who are acceptable to God somehow, or to satisfy our church

leadership in some way. It is a direction to freedom because God knew were going to be heard in this life. And he

has a way for us to find peace and freedom in the midst of chaos, in the midst of real human life.

So it's a pathway not only to freedom in our personal life, and I think this is our responsibility as people of faith to

find freedom in our own personal life, but it's also for our communities and ultimately the world. Now, we can't fix all

of that, but we can do our part. Yeah, so hopefully you're hearing something today that gives you a greater feeling of

agency that you actually can do something about this, even when people have hurt and harmed you. And it's not

justified, it's not okay. But there is something you can do to find freedom and to be able to walk in peace. So for

today, go in peace. Blessings as you go.The Life and Love Nuggets Podcast is a 501c3 nonprofit and is supported by gifts from people like you. To donate,

go to lifeandlovenuggets.com donate this podcast is produced by Clayton Creative in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The content

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