This is part of Revenge Week, a series about how vengeance runs America, from the White House to cheating spouses to that bad boss who totally deserved it.
Imagine that you have two adorable pets: a dog named Harley and a cat named Lucy. They had been abused and were in bad shape when you rescued them from an animal shelter, but you’ve nursed them back to health. You love them both very much, and they love you. They’ve become part of your family.
One day, you’re called out of town on an emergency. You rush around to gather your things and ask a neighbor in your apartment building—a young guy named Billy—if he can take care of Harley and Lucy while you’re away. Billy and you have exchanged small favors before, and he’s always been nice to your animals. He agrees.
When you return several days later, you find Lucy asleep in your apartment, but Harley isn’t there. You go to Billy’s apartment and ask if he has him. Billy tells you that, unfortunately, Harley broke free during a walk and ran away. He says he’s been looking everywhere but hasn’t been able to find him. Billy apologizes, seems ashamed, and offers to help continue searching for him. You’re distraught. You begin to believe you’ll never see Harley again.
A week later, a guy named Sean knocks at your door. He seems drunk or high and asks if you can get him another bait dog like the one you gave Billy. You don’t know what he’s talking about. Sean explains that he and Billy love dogfighting, and that Sean trains his champion dog, King, by putting weaker dogs in the ring with him. Sean says that Billy told him he got a scrawny dog from you a few weeks ago. They put it in the ring, and King snapped its neck almost instantly. He asks again if you can get him another bait dog.
You’re sickened and horrified. After telling Sean to leave, you confront Billy. He denies doing anything to Harley and seems offended, but nervous. You remember that he acted guilty when you came home from your trip and then angry after searching for Harley. You threaten to call the police unless Billy tells you the truth.
Billy finally admits that he put Harley in the ring with King. Billy says he threw Harley’s dead body in a dumpster and isn’t sorry he did it because it was only a dog. He becomes angry and threatens to harm you if you tell anyone that he’s engaged in illegal dogfighting.
So, how do you feel right now? Do you want revenge against Billy?
My colleagues and I at the Yale School of Medicine used a version of this story in a study and found that participants’ revenge urges toward Billy soared and their feelings of benevolence toward him plummeted after reading it. When I read the story to a group of about 100 psychiatrists at an American Psychiatric Association convention in New York City and asked them what punishment Billy should receive, the most popular suggestion was that he should be locked in a cage with vicious dogs and torn to pieces.
Revenge is an act designed to inflict harm on someone because they’ve inflicted harm on us. We could yearn for anything after we’ve been mistreated, like a scoop of ice cream, a nap, or a relaxing massage. But what most of us really want is the other person’s pain—and for them to know that their pain is because of the pain they’ve caused us.
The desire for revenge is the root motivation for almost all forms of human violence. From childhood bullying to intimate partner violence, urban violence, police brutality, mass shootings, violent extremism, genocide, and even war, perpetrators of violence almost always believe they’re victims seeking justice.
Recent neuroscience discoveries reveal a chilling picture: Your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs. Brain imaging studies show that grievances—real or imagined perceptions of injustice, disrespect, betrayal, shame, or victimization—activate the “pain network,” specifically the anterior insula. The brain doesn’t like pain and tries to rebalance itself with pleasure. Pleasure can come from many things, but humans have evolved to feel intense pleasure from hurting the people who hurt us, or their proxies.
Over the past two decades, more than 60 neuroscientists at universities around the world have conducted brain scan studies demonstrating that when you’ve been wronged and begin to think about retaliating, the brain’s pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction awakens. The nucleus accumbens, associated with craving, and the dorsal striatum, associated with habit formation, spool up just as they do when drug addicts experience stress or see a place they connect with getting high. Dopamine levels appear to surge and crash, producing the familiar sensation of craving. But unlike other addictions, to gratify revenge cravings, you’ve got to hurt the people who hurt you (or, again, their proxies). And when you do, you experience pleasure … for a while. But then, as with other addictions, the pain returns with a vengeance, leaving you feeling worse but wanting more. It may also expose you to the other person’s revenge cravings to hurt you—and leave a trail of wounded people in your wake.
Wanting revenge when you’ve been wronged is natural and is believed to have evolved as an adaptive strategy. But in modern societies, people often seek revenge for injuries like wounded egos that have little to do with survival or procreation. And if the prefrontal cortex—the area of your brain responsible for executive function and self-control—is hijacked or inhibited, then you might seek revenge for pleasure despite the negative consequences to yourself or others, like the destruction of families, careers, and other valuable relationships, and the perpetration of psychological and physical violence. That’s the common definition of addiction: the inability to resist powerful urges despite the negative consequences.
What does this compulsion look like throughout human history? In ancient times, Roman emperors staged public revenge spectacles in arenas and coliseums, feeding those who offended them or the state to wild beasts, forcing them to fight each other to the death as gladiators, and crucifying, incinerating, beheading, and scourging them for the pleasure of the cheering elite. During the Inquisition and witch hunts of the Middle Ages, aggrieved Christian leaders staged public revenge spectacles in villages and towns across Europe, torturing and slaughtering alleged infidels, heretics, and sorcerers with the strappado, the toca, the rack, the wheel, and burning at the stake.
In more modern times, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao achieved a combined death toll of some 102 million people by waging a world war that included murdering—or ordering or encouraging the murder, torture, or starvation of—approximately 38.5 million people who they believed wronged them for things like betraying their nation (Jews in Germany), refusing to give up their land and possessions (peasants and landlords in communist Russia and China), and disrespecting or opposing them. By my estimate, of the top 20 human atrocities of all time, identified by researcher Matthew White in his book Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History, 19 were the result of compulsive revenge-seeking. They left an estimated 336 million people dead.
These are enormous numbers, and they don’t include the daily acts of revenge-fueled violence humans experience, which lead to untold misery and loss of life. The World Health Organization estimates that violence-related injuries kill approximately 1.25 million people every year. According to the Centers for Disease Control’s National Violent Death Reporting System, the most common circumstance of violent death is “injury during an argument,” often in the pursuit of revenge to punish a real or imagined injustice. FBI and Secret Service studies and data show that most mass shooters are acting in accord with a personal grievance to achieve a measure of revenge.
By understanding the desire for revenge as the result of an addictive brain-biological process, and that revenge is the primary motive for almost all forms of violence, we can, for the first time in human history, develop evidence-based public health approaches to prevent and treat violence. On the prevention side, this might include things like school programs and public health campaigns to warn about the addictive dangers and risks of revenge use. On the treatment side, interventions could include revenge addiction counseling, cognitive behavioral therapy, peer support, self-help strategies, and, one day, maybe even medications like the naltrexone and GLP-1 drugs (such as Ozempic) that have been shown to control compulsive cravings for food.
But neuroscientists have discovered a different, more potent and widely available remedy for revenge right inside our own brains: forgiveness. Researchers conducting fMRI brain studies have discovered that when you simply imagine forgiving a grievance—without even informing the transgressor—you deactivate your brain’s pain network (the anterior insula)—stopping rather than merely covering up the pain of the grievance. You also shut down the nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum—the brain’s pleasure and reward circuitry—which stops intrusive revenge desires. Finally, you activate your prefrontal cortex, restoring executive function and self-control so you can make decisions that are in your own self-interest.
In other words, neuroscience shows us that forgiveness is a sort of wonder drug that stops pain, stops revenge craving, restores rational thinking, and helps set you free from the wrongs and traumas of the past. On top of that, it’s free, available without a prescription, and you can use it as often as needed to lessen your pain and revenge fantasies whenever memories of a grievance return. There’s now scientific evidence supporting the ancient forgiveness teachings of Jesus and the Buddha.
Forgiveness is a form of self-healing that benefits victims, not perpetrators. And you can do it without being forced to accept or endorse what happened to you—and while preserving your right to defend yourself from present or future threats.
Despite these benefits, forgiving can seem difficult at first. To help people safely release their revenge cravings and experiment with forgiveness, I’ve created a method known as the Nonjustice System that’s contained in my book and in the free Miracle Court app. “Nonjustice” is a word I coined that means abstaining from seeking justice via revenge, but still processing the pain of being wronged—it’s a middle step between revenge and forgiveness. The Nonjustice System and the app allow you to put on trial anyone who has ever wronged you while playing all the roles yourself: victim/prosecutor, defendant, judge/jury, warden, and even judge of your own life. You get to be heard, hold the person accountable, and imagine revenge, and then experience what nonjustice and forgiveness would feel like. In the study where we used the story of Billy, participants who experimented with nonjustice found that their revenge desires decreased, feelings of benevolence increased, and that they were able to think things through and achieve a sense of empowerment.
And speaking of Billy: Since he has threatened you and said he intends to continue dogfighting, you should probably report him to the authorities and take steps to protect yourself. But as for what he did to Harley, an act of cruelty and a tragedy that happened in the past, the option that’s in your own best interest is to forgive him internally rather than plot ways of harming him. Unfortunately, Harley won’t be coming home. But if you want to relieve the pain of losing Harley and avoid becoming a perpetrator of incalculable harm like Billy, you should resist your craving for revenge. Otherwise, you’re no better than him.
