How to Let Go of the Desire to See People Punished (James Kimmel, Jr.)

Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

Lemonada Media

Education, Self-improvement

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2025

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

James Kimmel, Jr., PhD, is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and the author of The Science of Revenge. He’s known in part for identifying compulsive revenge seeking as an addiction. He explains how perceived wrongs, grievances, and revenge desires—and how we deal with them, or not—affect us all. Actually trying to get revenge is pretty much always a lost cause—it simply makes us feel worse—but often, blanket forgiveness feels impossible. Which is why Kimmel came up with a simple but brilliant process that you can run through in the courtroom of your mind. For the show notes, head to my Substack. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Lemonada.
0:05.7	Hi, it's Elise Lunan, host of Pulling the Thread.
0:09.1	Today I'm talking to Yale Revenge and Forgiveness Expert, James Kimmel, Jr.
0:15.2	It's morning in New York.
0:18.2	Oh, God.
0:21.5	Hey, everybody.
0:22.6	I'm Mandy Patinkin.
0:24.0	And I'm Catherine Grotie.
0:25.2	And we have a new podcast.
0:27.1	It's called Don't Listen to Us.
0:29.4	Many of you've asked for our advice.
0:31.4	Tell me, what is wrong with you people?
0:34.5	Don't listen to us.
0:35.5	Our Take It or Leave It Advice show is out every Wednesday,
0:39.0	premiering October 15th, a Lemonada Media Original.
0:59.1	Hi, it's Elise Lunan host of Pulling the Thread.
1:05.3	On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we're here.
1:11.9	My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow. Here is today's guest, James Kimmel Jr., talking about the
1:19.7	simple process he created to deal with our revenge-seeking tendencies. It's a process he calls
1:25.9	the non-justice system or miracle court.
1:29.3	You can imagine getting the revenge you want, but you keep it inside your head where it's safe.
1:35.3	You evaluate whether it really would have helped you or not. It wouldn't.
	...

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