YES – UNLESS YOU DO THE STEPS –
Nov. 3, 2025 – Alongside painkillers, food, and technology, one psychiatrist worries about the addictive potential of getting back at people — or even thinking about it.
James Kimmel knows the danger well.
Now a psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine, he once was moments from being a teenage murderer. In a lecture given Wednesday, Kimmel explained how he wielded a loaded gun against school bullies after years of worsening torment — and why he didn’t fire.
“At the last second, I had this split second of insight,” Kimmel told his audience at the remote Community Conversations event hosted by the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “If I went ahead with this, I’d have, for the rest of my life, to identify as a murderer — and that was not an identity that was acceptable to me.”
It was just enough time to break the spell of “sweet revenge” — a psychological phenomenon that, Kimmel argued, works very much like any other drug.
When people are harboring a grievance, no matter its validity, Kimmel said, “It’s a very real pain. And your brain really, really doesn’t want pain — and so it instantly scrambles to rebalance that pain with pleasure.”
Decades of functional MRI data show the result: As subjects fantasize about settling scores, the brain’s reward and pleasure centers flood with dopamine — just as they would from gambling or tobacco.
And, just as with gambling or tobacco, the high doesn’t last. “It spurs us to go further, fantasize even more heavily, or go and take a physical act of revenge — to get that hit again and again,” Kimmel said.
