Vengeance

French poet Charles Baudelaire knew something about hatred and revenge which he regarded as futile, insatiable forces. He likened them to a bottomless barrel into which Vengeance pours endless blood and tears only to be drained by secret holes. The “red strong arms” of those bitter, destructive impulses doom the afflicted, be it an individual or a society, to a “universal bestiality” which inevitably leads to exhaustion without resolution. Maybe so, but still . . .

. . . . the urge for lurid, annihilating retaliation – vindication, satisfaction, the no-good bastard’s head upon a plate – must have come from somewhere, perhaps from some animal reflex of self-protection. How this atavistic impulse can turn into savage brooding is the subject of tragic theater (Hamlet?), generational blood feuds, and tribal dynamics throughout the millennia.

We’d like to think this old brutal arrangement might be tamed or at least mitigated by the laws of the state as it dispassionately metes out justice uncomplicated by private passions. There’s some irony, then, when it’s the very application of the law (think lawfare in politics) that itself becomes the vehicle of choice in such vendettas.

In any event, we will move from the land of the poets to the world of the psychologists to get behind the vengeance impulse with the somewhat surprising observation that the desire for revenge can actually be a form of addiction (click: Revenge Is The New Addiction). The science behind “grievance-triggered revenge craving” is described in terms of the real pain being activated in the anterior insula part of the brain throws it out of balance to such an extent that the brain seeks a rebalance by activating its pleasure and reward circuits which triggers the release of dopamine.

The good news is that humans get an enormous amount of pleasure and dopamine release by simply thinking about retaliation or revenge. The bad news is that this process can shut down that part of the prefrontal cortex responsible for self-control. The worse news is that the pleasure one might receive in fantasizing about revenge does not carry forward once that no-good bastard's head is actually brought upon a plate.

The actual feeling can then devolve into greater anger, regret, or even fear of escalating retaliation. In fact, the very act of revenge tends to further anchor the original wrong such that the rumination takes on a life of its own. We might discuss the article’s suggestions regarding the role of CBT, mindfulness, and forgiveness to shut down this pleasure and reward circuitry.

Easier said than done, of course, whether we’re talking about vengeance at the wholesale or retail level. Compare and contrast, for example, our country’s response to the temptation for revenge as a policy choice: post-WWII, the United States wisely declined to exact vengeance upon Japan and Germany, but instead helped to rebuild them; on the other hand, the country’s post-1980 Middle East posture in the aftermath of the Iran hostage crisis unleashed the darkest impulses as Ahab’s harpooners straggled on deck.

And so it is with respect to our life journeys. Then-member Heidi Piper experienced an out-of-the-blue sucker punch that shattered her nuclear family but the temptation to anger and vindictiveness, she ultimately realized, would be like taking rat poison intending to vanquish the offender. That insight opened her up to new life dimensions and ways to interact with the world, a journey that was chronicled in her piece: Heidi’s Journey.

The lesson: your life has less to do with actual events than it does with how you react to them.

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