“The World’s Deadliest Addiction Is Popping Up on Brain Scans. And It’s Not Even a Drug. It is revenge…”

There’s a Slate article floating around the web, posted back in July of this year written by James Kimmel Jr., author of the book The Science of Revenge, which talks about the world’s deadliest addiction being revenge. Considering the current opioid epidemic, I find this statement very difficult to believe. Maybe the inflammatory nature of it is being used to sell books, who knows.

I’m not going to link to the article here because 1) I find the opening story so vile, most likely included to grab your attention and piss you off, and 2) depending on where you source the article, it requires a subscription.

Here’s the author’s takeaways from the article:

“Forgiveness is a neurological superpower”

Ten years ago I wrote the below blog entry about forgiveness. I think forgiveness helps release us from some of those destructive feelings of revenge. Forgiveness is about us, not them. There were times early on when I told my husband I felt like he should have to actually go live with the other woman, and introduce her to his parents as the woman he left his wife for, abandoned his children for, etc… It was all just the rantings of a very hurt person who had been betrayed. It kind of makes me chuckle now, picturing Blue Eyes introducing that woman (low down dirty alcoholic drug of the moment) to his high falutin’ judgy parents. LOL.

Interestingly enough, I chose him introducing his drug to his parents as punishment and not for example, me cheating on him and throwing it back in his face. A couple things about that thought. First, I would never do to him what he did to me for the same reason I didn’t want it done to me. It hurts, really really bad and I’m not the type to knowingly hurt people. It also breaks all my rules of marriage, and I am a rule keeper. Also, Blue Eyes wouldn’t be hurt in the same way I was because he is broken. He would believe he deserved it in some way, and he didn’t. Neither did I. Second, forcing him to expose himself to his parents was actually more hurtful as their feelings mattered most to him. I won’t go into how painful that is for me to admit, but it’s true. Their judgment obliterated everyone else in his life. So obviously I would not have really wanted him to humiliate himself in such a way. Again, the rantings of a betrayed partner, never meant to be reality. My healing included forgiveness for my own good.

I will never tell him I forgive him

In the article the author, I think, is speaking to a bigger picture, of a national even global issue at the root of a lot of violence and abhorrent behavior.

For me, it comes down to the issue of self control and culpability. In my mind, the dog fighting perpetrator in the opening story deserves prison, not to be locked in a cage with vicious, killing dogs.