This is your brain on revenge

This became a source of contempt from the neighboring kids whose fathers tilled the land. My dad walked into his office in town around 10 a.m. wearing a suit and shiny shoes; their dads were in their milking parlors before sunrise, wearing overalls and manure-covered boots.

I was desperate for the farm kids to like me. I joined Future Farmers of America, built a hay wagon from scratch, gushed about heifers and harvesters at farm shows and wore the same style of western jeans and trucker boots they did. None of it worked, and when their shunning didn’t deter me, they turned to bullying.

Late one night when I was about 17, my family woke to the sound of a gunshot; I recognized a farm kid’s pickup truck speeding away. The next morning I found our beagle, Paula, with a bullet hole in her head. Two weeks later, I was home alone when there was an explosion. The same pickup roared off as smoke from our mangled mailbox soared into the cornfield.

I wanted revenge, bad. Living in the country and being hunters, we had plenty of guns. I grabbed a loaded revolver from my father’s nightstand, jumped in my mother’s car and tore off into the night, shouting and cursing at the top of my lungs.

I didn’t get revenge that night, but eventually I went into the professional revenge business: I became a lawyer. The way I saw it, lawyers get paid, a lot, for selling revenge to the masses. Getting revenge for my clients occupied the next 20 years of my life.

By the end, I was little more than a briefcase-carrying version of the kids who had bullied me. I threatened and retaliated my way through grievances involving the people who hired me, as well as personal grievances I had with my family, friends, neighbors and sometimes even myself. It seemed like I was addicted to revenge, but so were people everywhere, from sparring couples to disgruntled employees, road ragers, gangbangers and spiteful politicians.

I began to hate what I did for a living and descended into a professional and psychological crisis. One night, I found myself alone contemplating suicide.

Can you become addicted to revenge? I stopped being a litigator and spent much of the next two decades trying to find out. Neuroscientists at universities around the world were beginning to use scanning technology to study what happens inside your brain when you seek revenge. With a psychologist, I co-founded a mental-health peer-support agency and hired Yale School of Medicine researchers to help develop a program for prison inmates, including therapy for vengeful urges. Eventually Yale offered me the opportunity to do such research myself.

It turns out that your brain on revenge looks very much like your brain on drugs. In a 2004 study published in the journal Science, participants were given the opportunity to retaliate against players who betrayed them during economic games, but at the cost of bankrupting themselves. PET scans of their brains showed activation of the dorsal striatum, part of the circuitry involved in habit formation and addiction.

A decade later, a study published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience subjected participants to noise blasts and gave them the chance to retaliate. Functional MRIs revealed activation of their nucleus accumbens, part of the brain most implicated in pleasure and craving. The brains of participants who didn’t seek revenge showed successful intervention by the prefrontal cortex—the area of the brain responsible for executive function and self-control, which appears to be hijacked during addiction.

Grievances, real or imagined, appear to cue the brain to crave revenge in much the same way that stress and anxiety, or seeing drug paraphernalia or places of drug use, cue the brains of addicts to crave narcotics. Addiction scientists describe this mechanism as part of the brain’s system for maintaining balance between pleasure and pain, calibrated partly by levels of dopamine.

Being harmed or treated unfairly, or experiencing anger, disgust, guilt or shame, activates the brain’s “pain network"—specifically, a brain structure called the anterior insula. Getting revenge, or even just fantasizing about it, releases dopamine and produces feelings of pleasure that cover up the pain and restore balance, for a while.

As with drugs and alcohol, however, the effects wear off quickly. Taking revenge, psychologists at Colgate University have found, produces negative consequences in the long run, including anxiety about becoming a victim of continued escalation of the conflict.

We’ve all experienced the urge to punish people who violate social norms or mistreat us. Most of us control these urges, perhaps briefly fantasizing about the deliciously terrible things we’d like to do before moving on with our lives, leaving the pain of the past where it belongs, in the past.

But not everyone is so successful, not all grievances are the same or experienced in the same way, and we’re not always able to control our revenge cravings. Human history is filled with horrifying examples of compulsive revenge seeking, from cruel acts of interpersonal violence to nation-sized conflicts.

Now that we know the addictive underpinnings of revenge-spurred violence, we also can begin to use addiction-recovery approaches to counteract it. These might include public health campaigns and school programs to warn about the addictive danger of revenge, as well as addiction treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, self-help programs and possibly anti-craving medications, similar to those in the GLP-1 family that are so successful against overeating.

Neuroscience has also recently shown a simpler and more potent method of addressing revenge addiction and violence. It’s called forgiveness. A brain-scan study at UCLA found that participants who chose to forgive rather than retaliate reduced activity in their brains’ pain network and reward circuitry, and increased activity in their self-control circuitry.

This suggests that forgiveness is a freely available wonder drug that reduces—rather than merely covering up—the pain of grievances, eliminates revenge craving and bolsters executive function. We now have neuroscience support for the ancient forgiveness teachings of Jesus and the Buddha.

To be sure, revenge is everywhere. Studies show that most people have experienced recent revenge desires. Sigmund Freud believed that in our minds we are hourly doing away with the people who wrong us. We don’t have to look beyond our own homes, schools, streets, workplaces, government buildings, TVs, computers or smartphones to see the damage.

Can we help an entire nation that has become addicted to revenge? It may not be as difficult as it seems. We simply need to follow the modern science and ancient teachings about forgiveness. We need to Make America Forgiving Again.

That night when I was 17, I eventually cornered the farm kids. They climbed out of the truck, three or four of them, squinting back into my headlights. They were unarmed and didn’t know I had a gun. I grabbed it from the passenger seat and started to open the door. And then I had a sudden insight: The cost of getting the revenge I craved was more than I was willing to pay. I put the gun back down and drove home, terrified at what I’d come within seconds of possibly doing.

It took me decades more to realize what I needed to do instead. Imagine what would happen if each of us, and our political leaders, understood two simple words: “I forgive."

James Kimmel, Jr. is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. This essay is adapted from his new book, “The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World’s Deadliest Addiction—and How to Overcome It," published by Harmony Books.