Revenge isn’t a word we typically use when we talk about toddlers. But if you’ve ever taken something away and gotten a swat in return, you’ve seen it in action. In this episode, I sit down with James Kimmel Jr., a Yale researcher and lawyer who was the first to describe revenge as a behavioral addiction. James shares how bullying as a teen almost led him somewhere he could never take back and how that moment shaped his life’s work. We don’t need a prescription to fix this – just forgiveness – and it starts with parents modeling this at home.  

We discuss:

• How years of bullying as a teenager pushed James to a breaking point

• What happens in the brain when we feel wronged and why revenge works like an addiction

• Why a lost turn or a taken TV remote can feel huge to a child

• How the urge to get even shows up as early as the toddler years

• Why forgiveness is a gift to yourself, not the person who hurt you

• Seeing the “bad kid” as a hurt kid who needs help managing a very natural feeling

• Why kids learn forgiveness best when they see their parents doing it first

To connect with James Kimmel Jr. follow him on X @jameskimmeljr and check out all his resources at https://www.jameskimmeljr.com/. Buy his book The Science of Revenge ⁠https://link.amazon/B00csEYQV⁠ (paid link)

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00;00;28;25 – 00;00;54;18

Dr. Mona

Hey, all, Doctor Mona here and welcome back to the PedsDocTalk podcast, because we are now an award winning podcast. I promise I will not be saying that every week, but it’s just so exciting because the show won two Signal Awards. We received the Gold Award in the family and child rearing category, which means the judges felt the quality, editing execution of the show was phenomenal, and the Listeners Choice Award, which is voted on by you, the public.

00;00;54;18 – 00;01;10;16

Dr. Mona

So thank you to you. Thank you to the judges. Thank you to my team. Thank you to my husband. I mean, this is an acceptance speech, I know, but this podcast is my passion project. I started it in the pandemic and I never knew what it was going to be. I just did it because I love it and I’m still doing it because I love it.

00;01;10;22 – 00;01;32;07

Dr. Mona

But to be recognized means so much. So please keep subscribing, downloading and sharing the show with your friends and family because that’s how the show can continue to grow and continue to get recognized in the public sphere. And I have two surprises coming before the end of the year, so stay tuned. I think you can guess it, but if you’re not able to, don’t worry, I’ll announce it by December.

00;01;32;09 – 00;01;54;06

Dr. Mona

Now let’s get into today’s conversation because I think this is one that’s going to change the way you look at some of your child’s most challenging behaviors. Have you ever wonder why your child hits their sibling after getting a toy taken away, or why they seem determined to get the last word when they’re upset? And have you ever felt so disrespected by your child’s behavior that your instinct was to yell, punish, or maybe even hit them back?

00;01;54;09 – 00;02;22;19

Dr. Mona

What if there’s something happening psychologically that we’re missing? What if some of the behaviors we see as defiance or disrespect are actually a child responding to feeling wronged? Now, when we hear the word revenge, we often think of something calculated, someone plotting to get even. But revenge can be much smaller than that. For a young child, it might look like hitting a sibling who took their toy, pushing someone who pushed them first, or lashing out because they felt embarrassed or treated unfairly.

00;02;22;21 – 00;02;44;19

Dr. Mona

And I think this is so important because sometimes we get so caught up in the disrespect that we miss what’s happening underneath. Today’s guest is James Kimmel junior, a Yale researcher, lawyer, violence researcher, and author of The Science of Revenge Understanding the World’s Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It. James has spent decades studying why humans want to hurt people who hurt them.

00;02;44;21 – 00;03;09;20

Dr. Mona

His work explores how feeling wronged activates pain and rewards systems in the brain, why retaliation can feel satisfying, and how forgiveness may help interrupt that cycle. And today, we’re talking about something that has huge implications for parenting. Why does revenge feel so good for our brains? How early can that desire to retaliate begin? And how might our own parenting responses unintentionally reinforce aggression?

00;03;09;22 – 00;03;30;02

Dr. Mona

Because if you ever felt like your child’s behavior brings out a harsher side of you, I think you’re going to find this conversation really enlightening. James gives us a different psychological lens through which to understand aggression, punishment, and forgiveness. And my hope is that you’ll leave this episode with more compassion for your child, and tools on how to deal with anger and revenge.

00;03;30;05 – 00;03;54;04

Dr. Mona

If you’re not already subscribed, make sure to subscribe to the PedsDocTalk Podcast. Download this episode and share it with someone you love and if something resonates with you, tag the stock talk podcast and stock talk on social media so we can continue the conversation. Now let’s get into it with James Kimmel Jr.

00;03;54;07 – 00;03;56;19

Dr. Mona

Thank you so much for joining me today James.

00;03;56;25 – 00;04;01;07

James Kimmel Jr

Oh, thank you, Doctor Moana for having me on your show. I’m really excited to be here.

00;04;01;09 – 00;04;26;11

Dr. Mona

I’m excited because, you know, we talk so much about various feelings, right? Like feeling frustrated, especially with young kids. Right? Frustration. Jealousy. Maybe they’re a little bit later on. Sadness. Joy. And I never really thought about revenge, you know, and it obviously is something that can show up early on. Tell us before we get into this conversation about revenge and how to break the cycle in childhood.

00;04;26;18 – 00;04;32;23

Dr. Mona

What made you so passionate about doing this work that you do, and learning more about the revenge and how it’s a behavioral addiction.

00;04;32;29 – 00;04;53;18

James Kimmel Jr

You know that for me, started as a child, right? So it’s kind of really appropriate that we’re talking about, kids and those, childhood years for me, you know, as a 12 year old, I was, my parents moved my brother and I from a suburban house to, out into the country to my great grandfather’s 200 acre farm.

00;04;53;21 – 00;05;15;16

James Kimmel Jr

And, this was a really great experience for a 12 year old boy. I was super excited about it. Really loved the entire, experience of being on a farm and having all this vast space around us. We had, small herd of Black Angus cattle, and we had pigs and chickens and things like that. So it was, it was a small farm.

00;05;15;16 – 00;05;34;11

James Kimmel Jr

It was not a working farm in the sense that we didn’t earn our living from the land. But all of my neighbors. And this was that vast distance where other farm kids and I wanted to, you know, befriend them as fast as I could. And even early on, I thought, man, what I’d really like to do when I grow up is become a farmer.

00;05;34;11 – 00;06;00;07

James Kimmel Jr

I mean, that’s just kind of really where I was focused. And as I reached out to them to befriend them and start hanging out on their very big and much bigger and very real dairy farms, where they would make their livings, you know, with their folks milking hundreds of cattle a day, twice a day. You know, they they didn’t really want me to be part of their community for, whatever reason at first.

00;06;00;07 – 00;06;22;28

James Kimmel Jr

And I, I didn’t understand that for a while. And I think later, I can I’ve concluded that in part, it was because we, we weren’t, quote unquote, real farmers who made our living from the land. My dad was an insurance agent. So anyway, as they kind of continued shunning me and kind of keeping me out of their, their in-group, I was in the out of that, I wasn’t going to be deterred.

00;06;22;28 – 00;06;45;29

James Kimmel Jr

And I kept trying and trying and, I joined so I classes in school and I really focused on, you know, going to farm shows and everything I could to, to show that I was interested in. I was bonafide and that only moved them beyond shunning to bullying. Unfortunately. And the bullying, you know, became verbal at first and then it became physically aggressive.

00;06;46;02 – 00;07;08;19

James Kimmel Jr

Different kinds of acts, different kinds of assaults. And so now we’re I’m growing older at this point. I’m, I’m like entering, you know, age 14, 15, 16. So on middle teen years, at this point, and I’m getting bullied and, this was early 1980s, not a lot of, anti-bullying programs in schools, or at least not in my school.

00;07;08;22 – 00;07;34;07

James Kimmel Jr

And, so it’s kind of putting up with this on my own and trying to figure my way through it, mainly by just trying to tolerate it, because there were many of them, one of me, some of them were a lot bigger than I was. And so one night, you know, we’re all home alone. My my folks, my brother and I were asleep in the middle of the night, and we were awakened to the sound of a gunshot, which was startling, but not entirely unusual.

00;07;34;07 – 00;07;53;06

James Kimmel Jr

So we, you know, we jump out of bed, we look outside, and I see a pickup truck that is owned by, one of the guys had been tormenting me, so he. You know, I’m about 16, 17 at this point. So is. So is he. So are they, his group of buddies. And it starts taking off down the road from our house.

00;07;53;09 – 00;08;12;19

James Kimmel Jr

So we look around the house to see if there’s any damage. Don’t see anything at all. Figure maybe they’re just out spotlighting deer, which is illegal, but common, are not uncommon, I should say we go back to bed. I wake up the next morning to, And before going to school, one of my jobs is around. Take care of our animals and feed and water them.

00;08;12;21 – 00;08;33;03

James Kimmel Jr

The cows, the pigs. And this, sweet, beautiful, beagle that we owned a hunting dog named Paula who lived out in a pen. And when I, when I went out to her, her pen to feed and water her, I unfortunately found her, lying, dead in the pen with a bullet hole, in her head, in a pool of blood, unfortunately.

00;08;33;03 – 00;08;42;05

Dr. Mona

Gosh. Wow. And so that was the gunshot. Oh, my goodness. And so this kind of prompted your work on, like, what caused this sort of behavior in these children?

00;08;42;12 – 00;09;00;12

James Kimmel Jr

Yeah. I mean, I won’t say at that time it prompted my work. There was a long journey between quiet and now, of course, and, and and part of it was so managing that, you know, a couple of weeks later, though, was the, the even more, almost horrific event that occurred, which is, you know, about two weeks later.

00;09;00;13 – 00;09;20;15

James Kimmel Jr

So we called the police. They weren’t going to do anything. And they did that 2 or 3 weeks past. I’m home alone at night now. No parents, no brother. And I, you know, hear a vehicle come to a stop in front of our house. I, you know, get up to see what’s going on. I see that same pickup truck taking off, and there’s an it flashing and explosion at about the same time.

00;09;20;20 – 00;09;45;07

James Kimmel Jr

And they had just blown up our mailbox. So, you know, with that explosion went what was left of my self-control. And, I had been probably shooting guns since about eight years old on the farm. We had plenty of guns in the house. My dad had a loaded revolver in the nightstand, and I grabbed it. And I took off, after them in my mother’s car, and I chased them down eventually and cornered them by a barn.

00;09;45;10 – 00;10;08;21

James Kimmel Jr

And, you know, so there’s about 3 or 4 heads, that I can see in their pickup truck. And my car is behind them with my bright beams on, and, you know, they start slowly getting out and squinting through my headlights to see who had just chased them down their long country lane and what I what I knew at that moment was they were unarmed in the sense they had nothing in their hands, and they couldn’t have known that I had a gun.

00;10;08;24 – 00;10;38;14

James Kimmel Jr

And so I really had the full element. Surprise here. And I, you know, opened the door, started to get out, grabbed a hold of the gun to confront them. And at the last second, I fortunately had this kind of just quick insight that, you know, if I went through with this and, you know, finally got the payback that I’d been waiting years now, to get, to finally let you set the record straight, and, due to them, what they had done to my dog and what they’d been doing to me all this time.

00;10;38;17 – 00;10;58;24

James Kimmel Jr

You know, the guy who left, if I was still alive after, it would not be the same as the one who drove down there. And. And I knew that I wasn’t a murderer. That wasn’t the way I was raised. That wasn’t what I wanted to identify with at all. So I had just just enough control there to be able to stop at the last second and go, I’m not going to go through with this.

00;10;58;24 – 00;11;17;08

James Kimmel Jr

And I, you know, I got back and pulled myself back in the car, put the gun down, and I drove home. I still wanted revenge there. That wasn’t a forgiveness moment at that point in time. I just knew that I wasn’t willing to pay that heavy of a price, you know, to get, the revenge that that I would have liked to have had at that time.

00;11;17;10 – 00;11;40;02

James Kimmel Jr

But that moved me on. I had to quit the idea of being a farmer, and I, moved to the idea of becoming a professional revenge seeker by going to law school and becoming a lawyer. You know, that’s that’s because what what lawyers do, especially litigators and prosecutors, we are hired revenge seekers. We just do the legal form of revenge, which we use by the brand name justice.

00;11;40;05 – 00;12;04;06

Dr. Mona

Very fascinating. And I love that we’re talking about this in childhood as well. Right. This is obviously a parenting platform and a lot of my followers are either parents or are grown ups taking care of children, whether they’re educators. And sometimes you described obviously a situation that happened and what you felt. And you know, kids those slam doors, they’ll snap back at siblings or try to get even in these sneaky ways that we may not label as revenge.

00;12;04;06 – 00;12;14;26

Dr. Mona

But these are often dismissed as bad behavior or big emotions. But how do they actually reflect the early roots of revenge? And what might those early roots look like in childhood?

00;12;14;29 – 00;12;39;03

James Kimmel Jr

That’s a great question. And so since becoming a researcher at Yale and kind of sidelining most of my legal practice, although I’m still a licensed attorney, what we’ve learned from neuroscience and this is, from neuroscience studies at universities around the world about 60 neuroscientists have begun really over just the last 20 years. So up until about 20 years ago, science has completely ignored the concept of revenge.

00;12;39;03 – 00;13;15;15

James Kimmel Jr

And why we want to hurt the people who hurt us. That’s been an unanswered question from a scientific perspective. For all those years, thousands of years, really hundreds and thousands of years. So now we know from, brain scan studies that what happens is that when you experience or perceive a grievance which is any real or imagined perception of having been mistreated, treated unjustly or unfairly, shamed, humiliated, betrayed, disrespected, any of these things, these, we can see this activating the pain network inside your brain.

00;13;15;15 – 00;13;42;08

James Kimmel Jr

That’s the anterior insula, the pain network. And when the anterior insula, activates for a grievance, that’s this type of, pain. Psychological pain, primarily, but also physical. But if it’s being done to you in this unjust manner, as you see it, then what occurs is humans have evolved, you know, since about the Pleistocene epic, the Ice Age, to derive enormous pleasure from hurting the people who wrong us.

00;13;42;11 – 00;14;05;18

James Kimmel Jr

What what occurs is the brain doesn’t like the pain of a grievance. And when that anterior insula activates, it wants to rebalance itself with a dose of pleasure. And we’ve evolved. So that pleasure comes from retaliating, snapping back, hurting back, getting back at at somebody or paying them back, for what we think they’ve done to us or we can target a proxy.

00;14;05;18 – 00;14;27;05

James Kimmel Jr

We don’t always get revenge against the person who really wronged us. We might get revenge against somebody who had nothing to do with it at all. For a whole host of reasons. But what occurs inside your brain is to get the pleasure, the, you know, the pleasure, craving and reward circuitry of the brain, which is the nucleus accumbens in the dorsal striatum.

00;14;27;05 – 00;14;54;12

James Kimmel Jr

Those areas activate and we get a quick dopamine hit followed by a fall off. And this prompts us to go and seek revenge. Or at least begin to start fantasizing and ruminating about it if we’re not actually activating on it. And so that gives us this drive toward actually carrying out revenge, revenge seeking acts in order actually to make ourselves feel better from this grievance.

00;14;54;15 – 00;15;32;11

James Kimmel Jr

And if our prefrontal cortex, which is there, the executive function center of the brain is there to stop us from making decisions that have negative consequences for our self and others, if that is inhibited or hijacked, then there’s nothing to stop us. Between that desire for revenge and carrying it out, and this has been observed, you know, the desire for revenge has been observed as early as the toddler years, and you could think about taking an ice cream cone from from your toddler, you might get, you know, a swing back or some, response from the toddler that is aggressive.

00;15;32;17 – 00;15;40;06

James Kimmel Jr

And that is this quick desire to make themselves feel better because they feel wronged by what has just happened to them.

00;15;40;13 – 00;16;10;08

Dr. Mona

This is so fascinating. I love neuro nerding out on neuroscience. So thank you so much. I think it’s you explained it so beautifully and I love that you just gave that toddler example because it makes sense. And I see that also in like my five year old. Right. Like if he feels wrong, if you feel shamed humiliated that terms you just use beautifully that that he’s trying to get that control and that retaliation, whether it’s by acting out, whether it’s by trying to hit me, whether it’s by doing some behavior that is obviously that sort of revenge behavior.

00;16;10;08 – 00;16;29;24

Dr. Mona

And I think, you know, your story to talk off to, start this conversation, talked about something more drastic, like obviously violence with a gun, but these micro moments is what we’re talking about here, right? This micro moments and using what you just mentioned, maybe explaining to the listener how this can also mimic addiction because you talk about how this is addictive behavior.

00;16;29;24 – 00;16;37;17

Dr. Mona

So maybe, you know, for someone who may not understand the neurochemicals and neuroscience of it, how what you just explained would tie into that.

00;16;37;19 – 00;17;02;01

James Kimmel Jr

Yeah. Great question there because this can can evolve into addiction. So the desire for revenge itself, that seems to be, the leading theory is, is that that’s an adaptive strategy that goes back to like, caveman days. But here in 2025, where, you know, we’re living in the modern world, the need to retaliate for wounds, to just the ego.

00;17;02;01 – 00;17;31;26

James Kimmel Jr

Right? Which is usually what, or is often a lot of the time, what’s happening. Usually we’re not experiencing a threat to our mate or to our, you know, our, our shelter or things like that. That happens, but not nearly as often as we retaliate for wounds to the ego like disrespect, betrayal, humiliation, things like that. So, what though, when it the way it becomes addictive is if we’re unable to control the desire to retaliate despite knowing the negative consequences.

00;17;32;01 – 00;17;58;16

James Kimmel Jr

That’s kind of the broad generalized definition of what is an addiction, an inability to control a behavior despite its negative consequences. And we might add to that. And if it becomes habit forming, you know, and you you explain, you know, with your own toddler, you know, your toddler or under your five year old, your five year old might, do, you know, have a retaliatory response on occasion or you might have a toddler that’s always retaliating.

00;17;58;16 – 00;18;31;12

James Kimmel Jr

Right. And and if that’s the case, it’s not that we can say, oh, that person has an addiction, but he or she might be struggling with how to manage these powerful desires to retaliate and how to manage their grievances and make themselves feel better in safer, non retaliatory ways. And so we should be looking at and considering a child who’s having those difficulties and begin to support them because, you know, as I used in my own example, the bullying started years before the ultimate act that almost occurred, right?

00;18;31;12 – 00;18;55;05

James Kimmel Jr

The ultimate act of violence. And it started with small things and, you know, but they were constant and they were repetitive and they were, you know, kind of beating on me for years and years and years up until this final horrific act. And that can happen to kids all the time. Revenge seeking happens inside of family units, you know, between spouses, right, or intimate partners.

00;18;55;11 – 00;19;29;11

James Kimmel Jr

It can happen between children’s siblings. It can happen, between parents and children. It can happen in almost any direction. Caregivers, teachers, friends, other relatives. And it’s a family has this is a way of solving problems, which some families do. You you might want to rethink that as a strategy because it’s teaching your child, perhaps to engage in behaviors that they might not be able to control at a critical moment later in their lives.

00;19;29;13 – 00;19;43;06

James Kimmel Jr

And the mere provocation of other people is sort of inviting this to occur, because you start the cycle by maybe humiliating or shaming another person or disrespecting them.

00;19;43;09 – 00;19;50;27

Dr. Mona

Now let’s take a quick break to hear from our sponsors who support helps us keep bringing you this show.

00;19;51;00 – 00;20;09;08

Dr. Mona

I also love what you mentioned earlier about how it’s not always going to be for the person that they’re upset with, like you mentioned, about how you know, if you’re feeling like the shame, the humiliation that sometimes it’s going to go in, maybe a family unit too. If it’s between a parent like two parent, it may go down to a child, or a child may do it to another sibling.

00;20;09;08 – 00;20;09;29

Dr. Mona

Is that correct?

00;20;10;00 – 00;20;29;04

James Kimmel Jr

Yeah, that’s really true. So I mean, you can tell a classic kind of example is let’s say you’ve had, you know, as an adult, maybe you had a bad day at work in which, your boss or a, coworker disrespected you, right? Treated you unfairly or accused you of something you didn’t do. So you can’t really retaliate.

00;20;29;04 – 00;20;49;09

James Kimmel Jr

Maybe at work because that might cost you your job. So it’s a high price for that retaliation. So maybe what you do then is you come home, you’re still carrying this, and so you identify, you know, your intimate partner or a child who, it’s safer to retaliate against as proxy for the person you really wanted to get after.

00;20;49;16 – 00;20;58;28

James Kimmel Jr

It’s, the classic example then, is like kicking the dog, right? We we come home, we kick the dog, we sort of we we consider that. Well, we took it out on the day.

00;20;59;01 – 00;21;00;14

Dr. Mona

I’ve been there. Oh, gosh.

00;21;00;19 – 00;21;01;09

James Kimmel Jr

You’ve been there, right?

00;21;01;10 – 00;21;07;23

Dr. Mona

Oh, I, I regret admitting it. But now I’ve learned and I don’t kick the dog anymore. But yeah.

00;21;07;25 – 00;21;28;14

James Kimmel Jr

Right. You might take the dog and the poor dog. It can’t defend itself. But you can do it because it can’t defend itself. So yeah, it’s just an example and certainly not trying to bring that out. But it’s an example of how we seek revenge by proxy. And that can happen to children, by children against children in all directions that way.

00;21;28;20 – 00;21;49;17

Dr. Mona

I love that you use the word grievances. I think it’s just such a good way to kind of embody that. It’s a feeling of it can be multifactorial, of what’s causing that child to feel a grievance. Right? Maybe it’s as small as like a lost turn or they lost a game, or it’s a bigger betrayal or it’s social exclusion, like there’s so many grievances that we all have.

00;21;49;17 – 00;22;06;14

Dr. Mona

And in a developing brain of a child, especially a toddler like you just mentioned, like taking away a remote, labeling it as a grievance right in our brain as an adult, we’re like, it doesn’t really matter, but like putting it into, an understanding of this is a grievance for a child and how are they going to respond to it?

00;22;06;14 – 00;22;12;27

Dr. Mona

And their response is a good mirror into their feelings and their behavior. And so I love that you use that terminology.

00;22;13;02 – 00;22;41;09

James Kimmel Jr

That’s excellent insight. And, way to think about grievances is that they’re, almost infinite in number and they’re always in the eye of the beholder. So what is significant to your child and that may be suddenly stimulating, this urge to retaliate, right, or to hurt the person who ran them, even if you or a thousand people, as a panel of judges would think she’s like you said, it’s a it’s a TV remote, let’s calm down.

00;22;41;12 – 00;23;02;16

James Kimmel Jr

Kind of doesn’t matter if it’s triggering revenge desires inside your your child. That’s important. And you need to start looking in that and helping them manage those revenge desires and hopefully, calm them down as quickly as possible. And that’s also true about adults. Something that might be, you know, you consider a big grievance in your life.

00;23;02;16 – 00;23;22;23

James Kimmel Jr

Somebody insulted or betrayed you. Other people seeing the same thing might not have had any reaction to that. But if it’s real for you, it can generate these powerful revenge desires. And suddenly something that your child has said spurs in your own mind. This. Wow, they just crossed the line. I am going to come down and I’m going to come down hard.

00;23;22;29 – 00;23;49;11

James Kimmel Jr

And that may be, you know, all of a sudden runaway, revenge seeking that could become addictive, particularly in adults, in a family, if that becomes a pattern, where that’s what people are doing, you can kind of figure out whether you might have an issue with this by going, am I punishing my child right now to teach a lesson purely or because I kind of feel good when I do it?

00;23;49;14 – 00;24;11;25

James Kimmel Jr

And there are a lot of times I’ve I have two children who are adults now, and I can recall moments when I would carry on, a punishment, because I was kind of like, I mean, the lesson was taught, but I kind of kept going. And, you know, I didn’t understand at the time. This was before I really, you know, embarked on this 20 year research journey.

00;24;12;00 – 00;24;21;21

James Kimmel Jr

I didn’t understand what was taking place, and kind of controlling me, but it was kind of out of my control at that moment. And it’s something to really be aware of inside your own family.

00;24;21;22 – 00;24;43;02

Dr. Mona

And you just use that word control. Do you feel like there’s a deep connection between revenge and control then? Because it sounds like, you know, so if retaliation, right is often how kids may test power, especially when they feel powerless. So whether it’s being teased by a classmate or, sibling sabotaged a game. So is there revenge, like almost a way to have control over a situation?

00;24;43;04 – 00;24;52;10

Dr. Mona

Or is it more just that it feels good to, like, get this out and feel like they, you know, that they can do something to protect themselves and their integrity or their feelings.

00;24;52;12 – 00;25;20;10

James Kimmel Jr

Yeah. I think that, what the research shows is that we seek revenge because it makes us feel better. And the role of control, there is one is stopping us from seeking revenge. So there’s that executive function control circuitry that you’re talking about, this idea of maybe sort of using revenge to get control of a situation and that sort of leads me to something that that I think is important for everyone to understand.

00;25;20;10 – 00;25;54;28

James Kimmel Jr

And that’s the difference between self-defense and revenge seeking. So self-defense is, you know, we’re, I’m, I believe that I’m facing, you know, an imminent threat or an active, attack or assault on me, whether physical or psychological. And I need to do something to protect myself. And that’s going to activate the amygdala, right? That’s going to activate your, you know, instantaneous emotional response fight or flight instinct that’s there to protect you and help you survive in this world.

00;25;55;00 – 00;26;22;18

James Kimmel Jr

That’s not revenge seeking because you’re facing an imminent threat or revenge seeking, on the other hand, is when somebody has wronged you. And it’s now when they did that was in the past. And the arrow of time, you know, it always moves forward and it moves forward quickly. So, you know, you could get insulted now. But five minutes later, that insult can’t be seen, experienced with any of your senses or anybody else’s in the world for the rest of your life.

00;26;22;20 – 00;26;57;14

James Kimmel Jr

So that is only, if it’s alive at all. It’s only as a memory, a thought formation inside your brain, which is the same place that revenge desires. Form is a thought formation inside your brain. That’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about revenge seeking is punishing people for something they’ve done in the past. But we will often try and rationalize our revenge seeking by saying, well, you know, I’m going to use it as a deterrence or I’m going from a future harm, or I kind of used it to prevent an active threat, and there was no active threat at all.

00;26;57;20 – 00;27;18;00

James Kimmel Jr

So we have to be kind of honest and clear with ourselves and other people about what’s going on here. Is this an act of self-defense, which is okay and you need it, or is this an act of punishment for wrongs of the past? Those are revenge seeking, and that we do for pleasure? Not really to, you know, save ourselves from an imminent threat.

00;27;18;00 – 00;28;05;12

James Kimmel Jr

We’re doing it for the pleasure of hurting that person, to make ourselves feel better. One more comment real quick. As for deterrence, revenge seeking is not a great deterrent. And the reason is, is because revenge seeking is universally found now in studies in public health data and law enforcement data around the world. Revenge seeking is the primary motive for almost all forms of intentionally inflicted human suffering and violence that goes from bullying up through intimate partner violence and street and gang violence, police brutality and abuse of force, even including violent extremism, terrorism, genocide and war, all those things usually have is their root, some perception that somebody was wronged and they now

00;28;05;12 – 00;28;09;13

James Kimmel Jr

need to punish them for what they’ve done there. That is the difference.

00;28;09;16 – 00;28;30;25

Dr. Mona

Well, that’s why I think this is such a powerful book and obviously important because again, we’re talking about kids doing kid things, but you’re talking now about the repercussions of what would happen in the future, like the gun like gun violence and, obviously terrorism and things like that. And so that’s why I think I, as a pediatrician, looking at a public health lens, understand that importance.

00;28;30;25 – 00;28;41;24

Dr. Mona

Is there anything else you want to add on why you believe this is so important that parents are understanding? From a young age because of what it what you think it can prevent or what the data shows that it can prevent in the future.

00;28;42;00 – 00;29;05;27

James Kimmel Jr

Yeah, that is really a key. The key insight is if we start to teach it to, to teach kids how to manage these revenge desires, first of all, we need to teach them. Let’s think of it this way. We have, health classes in our schools for other potent, very potent cravings. You know, drugs, alcohol, tobacco. We have it for sex education.

00;29;05;27 – 00;29;40;04

James Kimmel Jr

Which sex is another potent craving that we all have to face and manage? We don’t teach our kids in those classes or almost in any systematic way in our society how to deal with these powerful cravings that will suddenly develop inside of a human mind at almost light speed. And that can lead to bullying, because almost all bullies feel that they themselves were victims before they started bullying, or other, other, other destructive behaviors.

00;29;40;04 – 00;30;01;01

James Kimmel Jr

We, you know, our schools have and are always grappling with school violence, youth violence and sometimes, you know, really serious forms of, of violence in schools. And most of that is motivated by a desire for revenge that’s been left unmanaged. So maybe we could talk about what are some techniques that parents can use.

00;30;01;01 – 00;30;01;12

Dr. Mona

Solutely.

00;30;01;17 – 00;30;03;05

James Kimmel Jr

To, to do this right.

00;30;03;08 – 00;30;04;14

Dr. Mona

What a great segway. Yeah.

00;30;04;14 – 00;30;36;15

James Kimmel Jr

Yeah okay. So we’re here right. So like it’s like okay, you’ve scared me. Now that please, scare me right? Sure. So, there are two ways to think about this, because it’s an addictive process and because it is, resident inside the brain, and we can see it and it treads the same addiction reward circuitry as other addictions from a professional perspective, from a, you know, a medical perspective and a psychological perspective, we could use addiction types of strategies for prevention and treatment.

00;30;36;20 – 00;31;01;10

James Kimmel Jr

That would include first, educating kids in the population about revenge desires and how they form and how they can become dangerous if if unmanaged, we can use cognitive behavioral therapy and other types of, therapies that we use for, other addictions. And this would be more appropriate, right, for, you know, maybe high schoolers and beyond, maybe middle school age.

00;31;01;12 – 00;31;22;27

James Kimmel Jr

Probably not at all for, for, for, you know, primary school, elementary school kids. That’s one way. But there is a more potent form of response that we can use that doesn’t even require a professional. And that’s called forgiveness. So it turns out the brain science of forgiveness is just as fascinating, if not more than the brain science of revenge seeking.

00;31;22;29 – 00;31;47;26

James Kimmel Jr

Let me tell you what happens inside your brain if you simply imagine forgiving, something, somebody or just a grievance and not not at all the person and not even communicating with the person who wronged you, that you’re forgiving them. You just imagine what you would feel like. What occurs inside your brain is, the first thing is, is that imagining forgiveness shuts down the anterior insular pain network.

00;31;48;02 – 00;32;09;07

James Kimmel Jr

So it actually takes away the pain, unlike revenge seeking, which just gives you a short dopamine hit that covers up the pain for, you know, minutes to an hour or something like that at best. So forgiveness actually stops pain. It’s kind of like a wonder drug in that sense. It’s unbelievable. And yet we kind of don’t don’t see it that way.

00;32;09;07 – 00;32;33;10

James Kimmel Jr

Maybe because in part it’s been tied up with religion. And what I’m talking about is the science of forgiveness, which fits with but doesn’t require our religion or spirituality to activate or use it. People can use it, you know, whether you’re an atheist or not, it doesn’t matter. So it shuts down the pain network. And then the second thing it does is it shuts down that pleasure and craving and reward circuitry of addiction.

00;32;33;10 – 00;32;59;24

James Kimmel Jr

That’s that nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum area. Those both go silent. So you’re no longer being plagued and, tormented by, and obsessed over trying to get back at the person who wronged you. Forgiveness shuts that area down. And then the last thing it does is it activates or reactivate that prefrontal cortex, part of the brain, which is your executive function, decision making, so that you can make good cost benefit decisions.

00;32;59;26 – 00;33;38;24

James Kimmel Jr

So I, I recommend that, you know, we ought to be teaching forgiveness as a true public health strategy. And that can begin in the earliest years of childhood development. You know, once kids are obviously verbal and things like that, but once they’re experiencing revenge desires, they can also experience because we’re all hardwired to do it in the same way we’re also able to understand what forgiveness would feel like, and we can use that as a technique for reversing all of these dangers, and improving, for instance, the culture in a, in a first in your family, then in your, you know, community in your school, these things can be done.

00;33;38;24 – 00;33;57;29

James Kimmel Jr

And I’m happy to report, since my, my books come out, I’ve been getting more and more queries from educators and people that, you know, provide curriculum to schools about, you know, developing a forgiveness curriculum. And I’ve developed one called the school nine Justice System, which I don’t know if we’ll have time to talk about, but I’m happy to do that.

00;33;58;02 – 00;34;17;27

James Kimmel Jr

But the simple act of imagining forgiveness, usually, if you ask your kid or an adult, how would you feel if you forgave this wrong right now? Give them a couple of seconds to imagine it. They almost always go, oh, I would feel a lot better. I would feel like this weight lifted off my shoulders. And there it is.

00;34;18;00 – 00;34;32;07

James Kimmel Jr

It happens instantaneously. It’s very potent. And with all due respect to pediatricians and like my daughter is one, you don’t even need a doctor to prescribe this for you. You can use this yourself at home. You don’t have to go to a drugstore and you don’t have to pay any money for it.

00;34;32;10 – 00;34;52;00

Dr. Mona

I love that forgiveness is the antidote to this because. And you said something so beautiful about how I think the misconception is that when we think about forgiveness, we think that when we if someone wronged us, right? Whether it’s a bully, whether it’s a parent, whether it’s someone we think that the forgiveness means that we’re telling them, hey, I need you to forgive me.

00;34;52;00 – 00;35;17;02

Dr. Mona

And that’s what forgiveness is. But you said it perfectly. And I agree that it’s about self. Like, you don’t even have to talk to the person who did that. And I use the example that my dad growing up was physically hurtful, like with discipline. And it caused me revenge behaviors with other people. Like we talk about. Right? Meaning I had this feeling of hurting my dog when I would get upset like this sort of deflecting, right?

00;35;17;02 – 00;35;18;00

Dr. Mona

Yeah. And I would.

00;35;18;03 – 00;35;18;17

James Kimmel Jr

Revenge my.

00;35;18;17 – 00;35;36;18

Dr. Mona

Practice. Right. And I had this whole revelation. I actually read this book. It’s the the book of whole pono. Pono, the Hawaiian practice of forgiveness and healing. It’s a very good book. It was a very spiritual book. And that book actually enlightened me about this whole idea of forgiveness. And obviously your book as well as like at how it connects so deeply to revenge.

00;35;36;20 – 00;35;55;17

Dr. Mona

But it’s through that, right? I didn’t I didn’t expect my father to say, oh, I’m sorry, Moana, for hurting you when you were a kid. It was more for me to release that sort of self shame, guilt, anything that made me feel like I was responsible for it and say, you know what? It wasn’t me. I it’s a different time and I love that.

00;35;55;17 – 00;36;18;20

Dr. Mona

I think there’s such a negative perception around forgiveness. I think when people hear it, they think, well, that person did me wrong and they need to be. They need to know they did me wrong. And of course there’s boundaries. But this is more for self, right? This is more for like the healing of self so that we don’t use revenge as a go to coping strategy, which I think so many people do.

00;36;18;23 – 00;36;24;17

Dr. Mona

Now let’s take a quick break to hear from our sponsors who support helps us keep bringing you this show.

00;36;24;20 – 00;36;35;04

James Kimmel Jr

Oh yeah, I think the perception is that the word give inside of forgiveness is a gift to the person who just slapped you in the face. It is.

00;36;35;06 – 00;36;35;15

Dr. Mona

Right?

00;36;35;17 – 00;36;52;24

James Kimmel Jr

It’s not. And I get it. Who wants to do that? I don’t want to. I don’t want to give you a gift right now. You’ve hurt me, possibly very deeply as you experienced. And I’m sorry to hear. What what happened? But the gift is to yourself. The gift of forgiveness is always going to be to yourself. And it create.

00;36;52;25 – 00;37;15;29

James Kimmel Jr

It is a possibly the one of the most potent and effective ways of self-healing that humans have. And we’re hardwired to do this. But by treating it in this negative way, we’re, we’re denying this form of healing to ourselves, and we can heal from a lot of trauma, you know, by by by forgiving it that way.

00;37;16;01 – 00;37;45;01

James Kimmel Jr

And I want to, you know, just quickly tie back to when we were talking about the difference between self-defense and, revenge, but also between revenge. Self-Defense and forgiveness. So forgive. Forgiving someone doesn’t mean, staying in toxic relationships. It doesn’t mean, become somebodys doormat. And it doesn’t mean not defending yourself, from actual threats that are happening to you.

00;37;45;08 – 00;38;18;03

James Kimmel Jr

So self-defense, like I said, is a is a different part of the brain, and it’s for a different purpose. It’s to save, save yourself and protect yourself. But these acts of punishment are usually often toxic. And they’re not healing. Forgiveness, on the other hand, heals the wrongs of the past, whereas revenge seeking just takes those runs of the past and it keeps planting them right in the middle of your present and your future, so that you keep on ruminating about the past and letting your present, your future, be contaminated by and ruled by these wrongs of the past.

00;38;18;03 – 00;38;40;04

James Kimmel Jr

And kids need to understand that. And and learn. Oh, I could just move on from that thing in the past and it. I don’t have to become some hyper avenger like a superhero in a movie. That’s I mean, it’s an idealized version of superhero life. Although most superheroes are depicted accurately as usually getting seriously hurt or killed many times over.

00;38;40;04 – 00;38;48;28

James Kimmel Jr

Right? I mean, it’s it’s not really a great life for a superhero, because avenging is not a great strategy for healing from the wrongs of the past.

00;38;49;00 – 00;39;06;13

Dr. Mona

And, you know, I, I love that we’re talking about how this is going to be preventative for the for our society, right? I mean, I give the small example that I have a, I have a trainer, like I work with a trainer and he gets very upset when people walk over his mat and he gets so agitated. And I we’ve had a long discussion.

00;39;06;13 – 00;39;23;18

Dr. Mona

I’m like, is it the person or is it something from the past? Like, have you felt wronged? Have you felt like you’ve been shamed and like, we really talk about it because I’m, you know, we’re working out and I’m like, like, I’m very into this thing. And we’ve got into the fact that he feels like in his childhood that people weren’t listening or looking out for his space.

00;39;23;18 – 00;39;50;24

Dr. Mona

He felt like he wasn’t seen. And how it goes back to roots and childhood. It goes back to roots. And sometimes, you know, his tendency when he was growing up was to want to punch, right? Like he wanted to physically react. And that’s what he’s trying he has undone as an adult. But imagine all those people who are not listening to the show, who’s not reading your book that have taken those revenge tendencies and have made it into a violent situation.

00;39;50;24 – 00;40;12;21

Dr. Mona

Right. And it yeah, it goes back to it’s not even about violence against the person who who made the issue. A lot of these issues can happen from a parent child relationship that maybe the child felt wronged, and now they take that out on domestic partners. They take that out on children. And I see that, you know, I don’t I always look at that whole picture of like a family and I’m like, where did this come from?

00;40;12;23 – 00;40;36;18

Dr. Mona

Including my father. Right. Like he felt wronged. So he his father did the same thing to him. He felt wrong. So now that’s what he knew. And I’m like, I’m not going to do that because I’ve learned a different coping strategy. When I’m feeling shamed with my grievances and things like that. And so I love that we are continuing to talk about foundations, why this is important in childhood and what this is going to prevent.

00;40;36;20 – 00;40;54;19

Dr. Mona

And I would love, you know, with our final time, you know, you talked about your school not justice system maybe taking us through an example. So like let’s just say an example of a kid in a school, how we can apply that. You know, sort of forgiveness model or what we can start with even before that are we, you know, okay, like okay, the feeling but not okay.

00;40;54;24 – 00;41;05;20

Dr. Mona

The behavior. Like how do we start for a parent listening that’s like my kid wants to be, let’s say, a bully or has been bullying. How can we use this in a model with the non justice system.

00;41;05;22 – 00;41;25;07

James Kimmel Jr

Or is a bully victim. Let’s do that because either way you know victim. Is it so people who are people who’ve been victimized by bullies and I can use myself as an example can often become bullies which you know I almost did that very night with a gun, but I went on to become a legal kind of bully.

00;41;25;07 – 00;41;51;11

James Kimmel Jr

I describe in the book, you know, where I got very into this gratification of getting revenge on behalf of other people to the point where I was just doing it for my own benefit, my own pleasure, you know, and I, you know, I consider myself kind of a recovering revenge addict in that sense, but, the, I guess, to, to, to understand this process, it’s called the non justice system or it’s called the, the school non justice system.

00;41;51;11 – 00;42;16;04

James Kimmel Jr

And there’s also an online app. It’s free. It doesn’t even have any in-app purchases called Miracle Court. It’s all the same thing. And what it does is what we what we know from you know what trauma, psychologists and psychiatrists will say is that to recover from psychological harms and physical harms that have a psychological component, trauma victims really need, so these are people with grievances, if you think about it, just a grievance.

00;42;16;04 – 00;42;38;20

James Kimmel Jr

Right. So it’s a very, probably very serious grievance that they haven’t been able to get past. But they need this experience of being heard, and they need the experience of holding somebody to account and holding somebody who account doesn’t mean, getting revenge against them. It means kind of focusing on this person did this to me. It’s accountable in the sense, like we do with accounting.

00;42;38;23 – 00;43;06;05

James Kimmel Jr

We found out where the money went and why, but we’re not punishing somebody for moving it. That’s a different thing. So, You know, Sigmund Freud said that we’re often through our throughout our lives. We are all almost daily and hourly going through our lives with this courtroom of the mind. That’s my my language. But this courtroom of the mind where we put on trial the people who wrong us and we try convict sentenced and punish them inside our heads.

00;43;06;07 – 00;43;36;16

James Kimmel Jr

And then, you know, we at the last step, we have to decide, are we going to make this punishment happen in the real world or not? So we’re already doing this, and kids are sort of instinctively doing this. It’s like I’ve been wronged. You’re the one who did it, and now I’m going to need to punish you so we can take control of that, that process and in this, in this non justice system, you get to put on trial or your child, does anybody who’s ever wronged or mistreated you or them for anything.

00;43;36;19 – 00;43;57;11

James Kimmel Jr

But in during this trial or for kids, it’s called a school. It’s based on a school disciplinary hearing. So I don’t use a criminal trial. Is the model I use a a school disciplinary hearing to make it more kid friendly. And I’ve developed this with a group of, practitioners. It’s Clifford Beers, family, mental health clinic in New Haven.

00;43;57;11 – 00;44;17;01

James Kimmel Jr

And the way it works is you, during these trials or these hearings, you play all the rules, you use the victim. So you’re the victim prosecutor. You then become the defendant, the person who wronged you. And you have to imagine testifying as to what their story would be. What would they say in their own defense, their side.

00;44;17;04 – 00;44;40;16

James Kimmel Jr

And then you go on to you play the judge in the jury, finding guilt or innocence and coming up with a punishment. If you want that, then you’re the, warden or the assistant principal who has to imagine administering that punishment. You don’t get off the hook. And it’s important that we don’t because, you know, you can’t, become the instrument of somebody else’s pain without experiencing pain yourself.

00;44;40;21 – 00;44;59;07

James Kimmel Jr

It’s important to learn that, it’s like, you know, the hammer hitting a nail. You think, oh, poor nail, but also poor hammer. The hammer experiences the same impact that the nail does. Can’t avoid it. And then in the last step, the child or an adult, in the adult version, plays judge of their own lives, in effect.

00;44;59;10 – 00;45;19;28

James Kimmel Jr

And you look back upon the trial and you can ask yourself, did it make you feel better? Did it give you everything you wanted? And almost in no cases does it you feel good that you were hurt and it allows you to be hurt. You feel good that you were able to safely release your revenge desires by a magic thing in your, you know, imagining punishing the person who wronged you in any way you want.

00;45;20;00 – 00;45;45;04

James Kimmel Jr

But all of a sudden, all that pain comes swooping back in and you start to realize, revenge didn’t actually help. So then you’re invited to consider this idea of forgiveness just for yourself internally, and you’re asked to imagine how would you feel if you did it now? And in most cases, people have this very kind of, you know, important euphoric moment, right?

00;45;45;04 – 00;46;12;09

James Kimmel Jr

This almost miracle moment in which they feel good again. And the answer is you can keep feeling that way by continuing to forgive each time the pain comes back, until it stops coming back all together. So that’s, that’s an available thing. Like I said at Miracle court.com, to use as an adult the kid’s version. I don’t have it out in the public because it really needs to be, set up with, with schools, and things like that.

00;46;12;09 – 00;46;41;01

James Kimmel Jr

But there’s a way we can teach it in groups, and then there’s a way that individual kids who are struggling with revenge, desires, or victimization can use it so that this round of victimization doesn’t become the next round of perpetration. Victors be, victims become perpetrators. So we want to really focus on kids who have been victimized so that we catch them early enough before they become a perpetrator of the next round of suffering, against someone else.

00;46;41;06 – 00;46;59;13

Dr. Mona

What a great final point, because that goes back to the fact that it goes back to the addiction, right? Obviously, when they start to do it more and more, they become the perpetrators and they become it becomes like that cycle of like wanting to continue to do it more until we intervene. And I love this because, you know, in my platform I talk a lot about feelings, parenting, coping skills.

00;46;59;13 – 00;47;33;27

Dr. Mona

And it sounds like with revenge, we’re taking it as this feeling. We’re not holding judgment to it. We know that it is, that it exists, but we also are not allowing behaviors like retaliation, violence, things like that. We’re promoting that self insight for that child, whether depending on the age and the development of the child. And then we’re giving that healthy coping skill like forgiveness in this example, which I think is literally that triad of like how we help with feelings with so many children and I think when we don’t do that is when obviously people start to internalize, feel like this, okay, well, this is who I am.

00;47;33;27 – 00;47;49;23

Dr. Mona

I’m like and sadly, I don’t think a lot of grown ups and I think you might agree, understand that so much of their behavior is rooted in this, right? The ones who are the perpetrators, they don’t have this insight until they read a book like yours, or listen to a conversation like this, or they’re like, oh my gosh, this is cyclical.

00;47;49;23 – 00;48;09;03

Dr. Mona

And maybe it’s from multiple events in my life. Maybe it’s from one event in my life that just continued. And I never had someone tell me, how are we going to process this? So thank you for creating this book to explain it in a way and offer really good tools so that we can get people and hopefully, you know, children and young adults and adults out of the cycle.

00;48;09;05 – 00;48;29;09

James Kimmel Jr

Well, thanks for this platform to be able to get this information out there. And thank you for such a beautiful and excellent summary of the whole thing right there. That, that, that you’ve given us. It’s just, you know, it’s incredibly important and it’s a movement. And this is, as I said at the beginning, science has ignored these feelings.

00;48;29;11 – 00;48;48;20

James Kimmel Jr

Up until about 20 years ago. And humanity, you know, we sort of left it to poets, playwrights and prophets to explain revenge seeking. And and that’s been a, you know, it’s been a mistake. And maybe it’s also been just because we didn’t have the technology to really understand it. But now we know it’s not, you know, evil people born to do evil things.

00;48;48;22 – 00;49;11;29

James Kimmel Jr

That’s not really a thing at all. What it is, is we all have this desire for revenge. Some of us, it’s, you know, more potent than others. And some of us due to all sorts of socio, economic, social, psychological and even genetic factors have a greater or lesser ability to control it and find certain grievances more potent than others.

00;49;11;29 – 00;49;44;01

James Kimmel Jr

And like I said, it’s always in the eye of the beholder. So getting this out there and reframing what we see as the bad kid, as a kid who is probably a kid who himself or herself has felt victimized and is now retaliating, and we can intervene to redirect that in a very effective way and, and, and maybe for that child and what might become or be perceived as a truly, evil quote unquote pattern throughout their lives, which didn’t have to be there at all.

00;49;44;07 – 00;49;50;09

James Kimmel Jr

It’s not about evil. It’s about getting control of these, these natural desires when we feel wronged.

00;49;50;13 – 00;50;08;19

Dr. Mona

I love that final statement. I was going to ask you for a final, uplifting message for everyone listening. I mean, I feel like what you had just said about these kids are not bad kids. We’re trying to help them. But is there anything else you’d want to add as an uplifting message for anyone hearing this and being like, is my kid a psychopath or are they going to, you know, go into this revenge addiction?

00;50;08;19 – 00;50;10;28

Dr. Mona

What would be that message for parents listening today?

00;50;10;29 – 00;50;35;13

James Kimmel Jr

Yeah, the final message I would I would want to give to to parents is give your kid the gift of a true superpower and teach them how to forgive. It is a it’s a superpower. It’s easy to use, and you will change your family’s dynamic. If there’s a lot of stress and toughness in that, you can change that very quickly by everybody getting on board and using it, including you as the parent.

00;50;35;15 – 00;50;57;18

Dr. Mona

Love that you just said that because all the times we focus on the kids and my platform is very parent. If you’re not doing this, don’t expect your kid to even try to do it because they need that model. James, this is such a wonderful conversation. Now where can everyone go to stay connected? So getting your book, your obviously, I know you had alluded to so many different resources, but say them all again, I will be adding them to show notes so that everyone can stay connected.

00;50;57;19 – 00;51;20;08

James Kimmel Jr

Yeah, that’d be great. Thank you. So, James Kimmel, JD.com is my personal website. It has a lot of information, including a quick free quiz that you can take to see you know, what your relationship truly is to revenge seeking. So that’s a pretty kind of interesting and fun thing that you can do, but it may be illuminating. It also has a lot of other information and ways to point.

00;51;20;14 – 00;51;48;17

James Kimmel Jr

The second is the Miracle court.com. It’s the word miracle court.com. That’s where this free app is the non justice system app. It’s an audio I lead you through those five steps of this trial. It’s for adults. But you know adults have these problems in spades. So please use it. It’s free. My book, The Science of Revenge, is available, and I think every potential, book selling place there is.

00;51;48;17 – 00;52;05;18

James Kimmel Jr

So I won’t give you a bunch of websites there, but wherever you might want to find a book is where you’ll find it. Or just Google it. And as I said, my bio is also and other information is on my Yale platform. So you can check me out there by just googling Kimberly Yale.

00;52;05;20 – 00;52;18;24

Dr. Mona

Wonderful. I will be adding all of that. Thank you so much for joining me today. This is such an enlightening conversation. Like I said, I love nerding out about the why and the science, and you’ve spent a lot of your life doing that. So thank you for sharing your expertise today.

00;52;18;26 – 00;52;25;06

James Kimmel Jr

Yeah. Thank you doctor Mona, what a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate it.

00;52;25;09 – 00;52;42;25

Dr. Mona

I’ll have to be honest, I saw James Kimmel Junior on some of the biggest podcasts, including Oprah’s podcast, and I was like, is this really going to apply to kids? And boy, did it. My biggest takeaway sometimes we get so focused on stopping our child’s behavior that we forget to understand what’s driving it, and revenge can be one of those things.

00;52;42;28 – 00;53;03;15

Dr. Mona

When a child hits, lashes out, or tries to get even, we may immediately see disrespect. But as James explained, sometimes underneath that behavior is a child who feels wronged, embarrassed, or treated unfairly, and what feels like a small grievance to us can feel huge to a child and can feel like they want revenge and it can feel addictive.

00;53;03;17 – 00;53;20;25

Dr. Mona

Now remember, boundaries matter. But I also want us to think about how we respond when our kids hurt us or someone else, because we can feel disrespected. And sometimes our instinct is to yell out or punish harder or hit them. But I love James question are we punishing our child to teach a lesson? Or because in that moment it feels good?

00;53;20;28 – 00;53;40;09

Dr. Mona

And same thing that we have to think about for our child? I hope you enjoyed this conversation and remember, if it resonated. Share it with your partner, a fellow parent, a neighbor, anyone who finds this show valuable and make sure to tag the PedsDocTalk podcast and PedsDocTalk with your biggest takeaway. Thank you for listening.

00;53;40;09 – 00;53;48;29

Dr. Mona

And until next time, remember, we can be kind and firm, and sometimes the most powerful way to teach respect is to model it when it’s hardest.