Beyond The Cult Of Revenge

© Richard Bolstad

Kill Bill?

Quentin Tarantino’s recent box office movie hits “Kill Bill” (Part one and two) take to extremes the idea of revenge (action taken in return for an injury or offense). In the first film, the “heroine” (played by Uma Thurman) slices her way in graphic blood spurting detail through a hundred human beings on stage one of her mission to kill Bill, the “evil” crime lord who previously took away her unborn child and nearly killed her. The fact that enough grown human beings can sit through this carnage so as to make it a box office success reveals the mythic power of revenge fantasies in the twenty first century. In the film, the heroine is a strong, powerfully motivated and skilled champion of justice.

In the real world, on the other hand, those who indulge in revenge and in repeated revenge fantasies are not models of psychological and physical strength, but of multifaceted failure. People with higher “hostility” scores on the widely used Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) are more likely to smoke, drink alcohol excessively, be obese, have high cholesterol levels, and consume more caffeine (Williams and Williams, 1993, p 80). They are also five times more likely to die before the age of fifty (Williams and Williams, 1993, p 54). They are also more likely to be convicted for serious crimes. A 1995 study conducted by The University of Montgomery showed that the desire for revenge was such a significant contributor to crime that forgiveness training could drastically reduce offending rates. Revengeful people, then, are more likely to be unhealthy, and out of control in their lives.

The contrast between the heroic revenge fantasy and reality is as stark as that  between the famous “Marlborough Man” cowboy used to advertise cigarettes and the real life smoker dying of lung cancer. There is a saying that the person who seeks revenge should first dig two graves. This research reveals several reasons why the first grave tends to be their own. In this article I want to clarify how revenge does harm to the revenge seeker, and then what NLP-based alternatives we can offer the vengeful person. I hope the article will provide NLP practitioners with further tools to respond to what is an increasingly vengeful world.

So, firstly, what could be wrong with wanting to pay someone back for the harm they have done us?

Regret: Revenge as Correcting the Past

Revenge, by definition, requires the vengeful person to focus on past wrongs, and here is one source of the problems it creates. In the twentieth century, popular psychology encouraged us to review all the wrongs we have had done to us and explain our current lives in that light. However, in a recent essay summing up two decades of research on the causes of depression, Dr Martin Seligman says “I think that the events of childhood are overrated. It has turned out to be difficult to find even small effects of childhood events on adult personality, and there is no evidence at all of large – to say nothing of determining – effects…. If, for example, your  mother dies before you are eleven, you are somewhat more depressive in adulthood – but not a lot more depressive, and only if you are female, and only in about half the studies…. This means that the promissory note that Freud and his followers wrote about childhood events determining the course of adult lives is worthless. I stress all this because I believe that many of my readers are unduly embittered about their past, and unduly passive about their future, because they believe that untoward events in their personal history have imprisoned them. This attitude is also the philosophical infrastructure underneath the victimology that has swept America….” (2002, p 67-68)

In 2000, Dr Denise Beike and Deirdre Slavik at the University of Arkansas conducted an interesting study of what they called “counterfactual” thoughts. These are thoughts about what has gone “wrong”, along with what could have been done differently. Dr. Beike enlisted two groups of University of Arkansas students to record their thoughts each day in a diary in order to “look at counterfactual thoughts as they occur in people’s day-to-day lives.” In the first group, graduate students recorded their counterfactual thoughts, their mood, and their motivation to change their behaviour as a result of their thoughts. After recording two thoughts per day for 14 days, the students reported that negative thoughts depressed their mood but increased their motivation to change their behaviour. They believed that the negative thoughts were painful but would help them in the long term.

To test out this hope, the researchers then enlisted a group of students to keep similar diaries for 21 days, to determine if any actual change in behaviour would result from counterfactual thinking.   Three weeks after completing their diaries the undergraduate students were asked to review their diary data and indicate whether their counterfactual thinking actually caused any change in behaviour. “No self-perceived change in behaviour was noted,” Dr. Beike said.  Counterfactual thoughts about negative events in everyday life cause us to feel that we “should have done better or more,” Dr. Beike said. “These thoughts make us feel bad, which motivates us to sit around and to feel sorry for ourselves.” (Slavik, 2003).

Revenge is based on counterfactual thinking. Those who indulge in it are, this research suggests, likely to be less happy. Its promise of satisfaction is both illusory and addictive. This explains the high incidence of physical and psychological health problems amongst those who practice revenge.

The very first words of the central Buddhist text the Dhammapada sum this understanding up with utter clarity. “All that we are is a result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him. He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me; in those who harbour such thoughts, hatred will never cease. He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me; in those who do not harbour such thoughts, hatred will cease. For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule.” In the light of research, we can see that the Buddha’s teaching is not a moralistic threat. It is a compassionate attempt to explain a fundamental truth which can set us free from suffering: Love alone leads to happiness. Jesus suggestion is similar in the central Christian texts: “Then Peter came to Jesus and asked “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times: but seventy seven times.”” (Common Bible, Matthew, Chapter 18, Verse 21).

Counterfactual thinking is made even more risky by the malleable nature of memory itself. “Memories” are constructed in the present, out of a jumble of data stored at previous times. They are shaped by our present brain; by our mood, our present belief systems and so on. As an example of the way the present-day brain shaped our memories, consider the studies of what is called “inattentional blindness”. When the posterior parietal cortex of the brain is damaged on one side, a very interesting result occurs. The person will fail to pay attention to objects seen on the affected side of their visual field. This becomes obvious if you ask them to describe all the objects in the room they are sitting in. If the affected side is the left, for example, when they look across the room, they will describe to you all objects on the right of the room, but ignore everything on the left. They will be able to confirm that those objects are there on the left, if asked about them, but otherwise will not report them (Kalat, 1988, p 197; Miller, 1995, p 33-34).

Edoardo Bisiach (1978) is an Italian researcher who studied people with such damage. He quickly discovered that this damage affected more than their current perception. For example, he asked one patient to imagine the view of the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, a sight this man had seen every day for some years before his illness. Bisiach had him imagine standing on the Cathedral steps and got him to describe everything that could be seen looking down from there. The man described only one half of what could be seen, while insisting that his recollection was complete. Bisiach then had him imagine the view from the opposite side of the piazza. He then fluently reported the other half of the details. The man’s memories were being assembled by his present brain system, and his present brain system was “faulty” so his memories were all altered accordingly.

Such is precisely the problem we face in working with the person who is revengeful. They may tell us that no-one has ever been kind to them, or that everything a certain person did was unkind and hurtful. Family Therapy developer Virginia Satir recognised this risk of memory, and considered that one of her main functions as a therapist was to help people reconstruct more useful memories, so that they could let go of their obsession with revenge. In the transcript of her work called “Forgiving Parents” (Andreas, 1991, p 104-107) Satir deals with a client, Linda, who claims that her mother never nurtured her, never tucked her in at night, and never bathed her. Virginia simply says “I don’t believe it.” and Linda eventually concedes that maybe her mother might have bathed her every so often. Linda comes to accept that her holding on to anger at her mother has stopped her taking charge of her own life and defining her relationship with her mother in her own terms.

Mind Reading: How Revenge Justifies Itself

Because the most important thing to learn about communication is not how to read others minds or agree with the way you experience things. It’s how to live in the real world where people can’t read each other’s minds, and where others don’t always have the same values, beliefs and responses you do. Truly successful communicators are those who know that they can’t read others’ minds and have learned instead how to check carefully what others mean. Truly influential people are those who realise that other people have their own needs, their own ways of making sense of the world, and their own desires, and who know how to help other people meet those needs in a way that also works for the influencer.

The biggest problems in communication happen when one person assumes they know what another means. Have you ever been in the situation where someone else completely misunderstood you? Where they thought they knew what you meant but actually hadn’t listened to you at all? And maybe they carried on being upset about what they thought you had said, when really you didn’t say that at all? This chapter is about that experience and how to solve it.

What about the situation where you thought you knew what someone else was suggesting, and you agreed with them… but later discovered that they meant something completely different. Something you never would have agreed to. Ever had that happen? Actually, some people feel like their whole marriage was based on that kind of misunderstanding, or their whole job! Even more dramatic, sometimes a whole community feels like they have been put in that situation.

We would like to believe that when we say something to someone, the message they get is the message we intended to send. Actually, the situation is somewhat more complicated than that. Let’s take an example: Robyn and Belinda are sharing an apartment together.    Robyn comes home from work and feels pleased to see Belinda.  She decides to communicate this.  If Robyn and Belinda were both telepathic, Belinda could have “read her mind.”  But being human, Robyn needs to choose some action or words to be a message about the feeling she has.  She filters her internal experience (thoughts and feelings) into words.  The message she says is “Hi!  How was your day?” When Belinda receives this message she has to decide what it means.  She filters the message into an “internal representation” or map of what Robyn thought and felt. 

But what if Belinda filters in something else?  It may be that recently Robyn has been asking a lot of very personal questions of her, and seemed very critical of her lifestyle.  Perhaps lately Belinda’s been thinking that Robyn is trying to find out too much about her private life.  This time she may filter in an internal representation of Robyn stepping up this campaign. 

When Belinda has these kind of internal representations, it will change her emotional state (she’ll get “upset”) and her return message will be rather different; maybe  “Why don’t you leave me alone. Stop digging into my life!”  Now, when Robyn filters that message, she may make an internal representation of Belinda being angry at her, or not wanting to live with her.

Once this process has begun, it can escalate.  Robyn’s state is changed as a result of her  internal representation of Belinda not wanting to live with her.  (Robyn is also “upset”).  If Robyn fires back “You always sound so angry!  Can’t you just be friendly?”

Belinda could now filter in “proof” that Robyn has been digging into her life and analysing her. 

The most important truth about communication is that the internal representation you make after receiving a message is not the same as the message.  It has been filtered by your brain.  The same is true of every internal representation you make after each experience.  As Alfred Korzybski said (1994, p 750), “The map is not the territory.”

If you look at the conversation above, you can see the meaning that both Belinda and Robyn believe that they can read each other’s minds. Consider the message that Belinda has filtered from Robyn’s message.  Belinda assumes that Robyn’s one comment about her being angry proves that Robyn is digging into her life in an ongoing way. When Robyn says, “You always sound so angry.  Can’t you just be friendly” you can hear some of her filtering. She has made a guess about Belinda’s emotional state without even noticing that this is her own guess (Belinda actually said she felt upset, not angry). Robyn also assumes that Belinda will know what “friendly” means to Robyn.

What could either of them do to step out of this dilemma? The simplest solution would be to use the skill of reflective listening to check their perception (Bolstad and Hamblett, 2000). For example, for Robyn to say “Can I just check; you’re annoyed that I ask so many questions?” or for Belinda to say even earlier “I’m not sure just what you’re asking for here. Are you wanting to know all the personal details about how I was feeling today, or is this just a friendly check in?”

Let’s take another example. Here is a statement from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Hitler, 1943, p 655).

“Our task, the mission of the National Socialist movement, is to bring our own people to such political insight that they will not see their goal for the future in the breath-taking sensation of a new Alexander’s conquest, but in the industrious work of the German plow, to which the sword need only give soil. It goes without saying that the Jews announce the sharpest resistance to such a policy. Better than anyone else they sense the significance of this action for their own future.”

This statement, first written in 1925, seems to reassure people that Hitler does not intend to create an empire; merely to gain enough land for German farmers to plow. The people who are afraid of this action are the Jews, he says, because they will lose most from it. Hitler assumes that he knows what “all” Jews are thinking (he says they “sense the significance…”) and even that he knows how everyone else is thinking (he says the Jews know this “better than anyone else”). He is so sure of his mind-reading that he says “It goes without saying…”. This kind of mind-reading is one of the main dangers in Hitler’s speeches and writing. He was convinced that he was living in a world where all Jews hated him and “his people”.

Wherever there is conflict and revenge-taking in the world, we will find people assuming that their map of what has happened is “real”: people sure that they know what is “really” happening and that they can tell what their antagonists are thinking and feeling. The first step to solving these conflicts is not to give those people more tricks for reading the minds of their “enemies”, or more skills for forcing their enemies to accept the “true” map and suffer the revenge they deserve. The first step to a solution is to help both sides understand that the map they have in their mind is not the same as the real territory.

On September 13, 1993, the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, sworn enemies for over five decades, shook hands and signed the Oslo Peace Accord. For some time after this, positive progress was being made towards an agreed on solution to the entire Middle East conflict. In the work to create this agreement, it became clear that the most important obstacle to peace had been the mind-reading by negotiators from both sides. The chief Palestinian negotiator, Abu Ala walked out at one point and confided to the Norwegian Foreign Minister “I will never come back. This is a charade, this is a bluff, the Israelis are exploiting us and using all this time for nothing.” The Israeli Foreign Minister was directly involved in the discussions, and he confided “The whole time I had doubts about whether they were pulling our leg, or whether it is possible to work with them.” (Watkins and Rosegrant, 2001, p 160 and p 157). Only when skilled facilitators enabled both sides to let go of these mind reads, and the resulting thirst for revenge, was progress able to be made.  Sadly, both leaders then went back to revenge obsessed communities. Rabin was assassinated just two years later, and by 2006, the PLO was voted out and Hamas took over the  Palestinian Legislative Council.

Punishment: Revenge as Correcting the Wrongdoer

Let us next imagine that our memory of the wrongs done to us is perfect, and our perception of the other’s action impeccable. Even if it doesn’t make us happy, can revenge at least have a positive effect by punishing genuine wrongdoing? The evidence about the results of punishment gives a very clear “no”. Consider the researched results of punishing children, for example. People who receive high levels of punishment as children are four times more likely to beat their spouse than those whose parents did not hit them (Gordon, 1989, p72). E. Maccoby and J. Martin found that children of parents who use punishment more show less evidence of “conscience”, poor self control and more withdrawn responses (Gordon, 1989, p91). B.F. Skinner demonstrated in his research back in the 1950s that these sorts of results are found consistently in the punishment of both animals and people. John Platt summarises Skinner’s findings that “punished behaviour always comes back, along with such additional behaviour as attempts to escape, or to evade punishment, or to retaliate.” Skinner says this is why windows are broken in schools and not in drugstores. (Platt, 1973, p29).

Another example of the failure of punishment is the prison system. In a comprehensive summary of the current research on prisons, Michael Tonry and Joan Petersilia say “People are sent to prison and jail partly because of moral ideas about deserved punishments: people who do certain things, it is widely believed, deserve to be punished. However, utilitarian ideas about public safety provide at least as strong reasons for imprisonment: Sending people to prison enhances public safety, it is widely believed, by incapacitating them, by rehabilitating them, by deterring them and others, and by reinforcing basic social norms about right and wrong.” (Tonry and Petersilia, 1999, p 3).

The evidence though, shows that while prisons may extract revenge, the result does not reduce crime. “Presumably most people would conclude a priori that a quarter-century’s quintupling of the prison and jail population must have reduced crime rates. There has, however, been relatively little research in recent years on deterrence and incapacitation, and most authoritative reviews of both subjects conclude that while such effects exist, they are probably modest” (Nagin 1998). So also concluded the most famous examination of the subject, the 1978 report of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Research on Deterrent and Incapacitative Effects (Blumstein, Cohen, and Nagin 1978). Similar conclusions were reached in successive decades by National Academy of Sciences Panels on Criminal Careers (Blumstein et al. 1986) and Understanding and Control of Violence (Reiss and Roth 1993), and by an exhaustive recent survey of research on deterrence effects commissioned by the Home Office of England and Wales (von Hirsch et al. 1998).” (Tonry and Petersilia, 1999, p 5)

Unassertiveness: Revenge as the Last Hope

If revenge is neither helpful for the vengeful person’s happiness nor helpful for righting wrongs, then what other function does it serve? Why do people do it? To understand the answer we need to contrast those events which lead to the most vengeful thoughts with those that do not. In their book on family therapy, John Grinder, Richard Bandler and Virginia Satir emphasise the absolute importance of the freedom to see, hear, feel and talk about “what is NOW instead of what should be, could be, was or will be.” (1976, p5). It turns out that the ability to do this or not is the distinguishing feature which determines whether revenge will be contemplated. When a person is afraid to see, hear, feel and talk about their experience in a relationship, they are far more likely to hold on to feelings of resentment and to nurture a desire for revenge. Social psychologist Daniel Gilbert studied the length of time that people harboured ill-feeling after being involved in or witnessing an insulting interaction (Gilbert et alia, 2004). People said, prior to the study, that they thought they would hold onto their dislike of a rude stranger for longer if the stranger insulted them, rather than if they merely saw the stranger insult someone else. In reality, they held on to their annoyance much longer when they only observed the insult. This seemed to be related to their experience of being unable to do anything about the insult that they merely observed. Gilbert noted that it is the “petty” problems, which people do not feel able to do something to solve, that actually distress us more in the long term. Fantasies of revenge, and ongoing resentments are indications that a person feels unable to take action to get their needs met.

When we feel able to solve problems, we are more able to forgive and to re-establish a relationship. The ongoing desire for revenge, then, is a clear indication of the person’s inability to express the feelings they have had in response to their beliefs about what the other person was doing. The more people are socially restricted in their ability to acknowledge, express and resolve resentments, the more revenge fantasies will proliferate. Thus, revenge fantasies especially appeal to children (as in the “Home Alone” series of movies) women (example movies are “Kill Bill”, and “Thelma and Louise”) and ethnic groups who are marginalised or have lost major conflicts (note the street celebrations in the Palestinian territories immediately after the September 11, 2001 destruction of the American World Trade Centre).

Paradoxically, the inability to effectively redress wrongs and the thirst for revenge go hand in hand. In my book Transforming Communication, I emphasise that “Although unassertive and aggressive behaviour seem very different, they are really only the opposite sides of the same coin. Both unassertive and aggressive people believe that things can’t be sorted out so that both theirs and others’ needs are met. Both of them think that ‘someone has to lose’. Both are afraid to take the risk of discussing the matter openly. In fact, many people swing between unassertive and aggressive and back. When they are unassertive they build up resentment which pushes them to explode aggressively. When they’ve been aggressive they feel guilty and resolve not to be so violent again, and so become unassertive.” Aggressive and revengeful behaviour, to restate, is not a sign of strength. It is proof of an inability to get ones needs met assertively. It is the response of the weak in the face of a force that, at some level, they perceive as more powerful.

Brain Scan Results: Revenge as Addiction

What makes some people more prone to revenge seeking than others? Dominique de Quervain of the University of Zurich (2004) placed research subjects in scenarios where they had the opportunity to forgive or seek revenge for unfair playing, and then studied their responses with positron emission tomography (PET) scans of the brain.

In her study, two people with equal amounts of money interact anonymously. They are told they can increase the money they earn if they cooperate. Person A is then given the chance to give a certain amount of his money to Person B. If he does, the researcher quadruples the money B receives. B then is given the choice to either keep all the money or split the take with A. If B keeps the money instead of sharing it, A’s could decide to censure B. The type of censure available differed in three different versions of the experiment. In the first version of the experiment, A could choose to fine B a set amount of money. In the second version, A could fine B, but with a requirement that the amount of the fine be also deducted from A’s own money: a scenario in which the betrayed person has to pay for the revenge they get. In the third version, A could only deliver a symbolic censure, but could not actually take money as punishment.

De Quervain and her colleagues found that people showed the greatest satisfaction, as measured by the activation of a pleasure centre in the brain called the caudate nucleus, when they levied a maximal fine at no cost to themselves. There was lower, but still substantial, satisfaction when they had to “pay” for the revenge. There was virtually none with the symbolic censure. Those participants who showed the most caudate activation when levying the fine in the “free revenge” scenario were the ones willing to spend the most when “paid revenge” was the only option. That is to say, those willing to suffer to pay someone back were those who got the most pleasure from revenge.

A second area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, was also activated when players needed to weigh the satisfaction derived from punishment against the monetary cost of punishing. According to de Quervain, understanding the role of the prefrontal cortex in altruistic punishment may also help researchers better understand psychiatric disorders characterized by abnormal social behaviour or addiction. In such disorders, a reduced activation of the prefrontal cortex has already been demonstrated by research. “Deficits in prefrontal cortical functioning may contribute to these psychopathologies by a disturbed ability to weigh beneficial against negative consequences of an action,” she said.

The same two brain circuits determine whether someone engages in impulsive antisocial behaviours, addictions or revenge seeking.

Instead of Revenge

At the social level, our best hope for a revenge-free world is to create a society where all human beings have the freedom to express their truth and to have their needs met. That’s a tall order, but we have increasing evidence that we can make progress in this direction. My own training course, Transforming Communication, is designed to increase participants’ ability to ensure that both their own and others needs are met. Our previous research suggests that the course can effectively eliminate bullying amongst school children, for example, even when only their teachers have formally learned the skills (Bolstad and Hamblett, 2000).

At the individual level, there are a number of NLP based processes designed to move beyond vengeful thinking and to “forgive”. Forgiveness does actually remove the immediate health dangers of revenge-thinking. Charlotte van Oyen Witvliet at Hope College says her first study of 35 men and 35 women showed extreme physiological differences between forgiving and non-forgiving states. The individuals’ cardiovascular systems sped up when they recalled the person who they believed had offended them. And the individuals’ stress levels were greatest when they thought about revenge rather than forgiveness. She has since studied 100 military veterans and the evidence supports her original impressions.

The strategy of forgiveness can be learned, as shown in research by Fred Luskin, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project (2002). “We teach people to rewrite their story in their minds, to change from victim to hero. If the hurt is from a spouse’s infidelity, we might encourage them to think of themselves not only as a person who was cheated on, but as the person who tries to keep the marriage together. Dr Luskin tested his training with five women from Northern Ireland whose sons had been murdered in the troubles there. After undergoing a week of forgiveness training, the women’s sense of hurt, measured using psychological tests, had fallen by more than half. They were also much less likely to feel depressed and angry. “Forgiving isn’t about condoning what happened,” emphasises Luskin, “It’s about breaking free of the person who wronged us.”

One NLP process designed to create forgiveness is Steve Andreas’ Forgiveness Pattern (Andreas, 1999, p 3). In this pattern, Steve has the person notice that vengeful thinking does not align with their own highest intentions and skills. They then change the submodalities of their internal representation of the person who they feel has wronged them into the submodalities of a person they have forgiven. Along the way, they check for any internal objections to this change, and ask for the higher intention of the part of them that objects to the change. Once this intention has been identified, Steve has them find a new and more congruent way of reaching that intention while being able to forgive the person.

A second NLP process designed to meet this aim is Lucas Derks’ Silent Abreaction (Derks, 1998, p 110-111). In this process, modelled from classical hypnotherapist Wolberg, Lucas has the person imagine a movie where they are able to see themselves taking revenge on the person they are angry at. They continue until they feel either a loss of interest in revenge or even a positive compassion. Now they ask “What resource/s was this other person lacking, the lack of which led them to produce the behaviour which hurt me?” They go back to a time in their own life when they had that resource, represent the resource in colour, and imagine flowing it into the other person. Once they feel neutral in response to the other person, they then check if there is any part of them that would object to this change. As with Steve Andreas’ process, they then find the higher intention of this part and find a new more congruent way of reaching that intention while being able to feel OK about the person.

Summarising

In popular culture, revenge is presented as a noble activity undertaken by heroes and leading to a satisfying conclusion. Actually, vengeful people tend to suffer a number of ill-effects from their stance, in terms of physical and emotional health. There are several reasons for this. Here we explored four:

1. Revenge involves concentrating on past events that were unhappy to say the least. This kind of counterfactual thinking is depression-generating. Furthermore it is based on the mistaken assumption that our recollection of past events is the most accurate description of what objectively happened. Actually, our memory is not so reliable.
2. Revenge usually involves the vengeful person making guesses about the internal experience and intentions of the other person. In this situation, they are able to fantasise  a malevolence which seems to justify revenge but is in fact completely fabricated. We see this danger of mind reading in even the most dramatic international conflicts.
3. Revenge is based on the assumption that punishing wrongdoing will lead to the future protection of ourselves and others, and even to a change in the wrong-doer’s behaviour. In practice, punishment most reliably leads to feelings of resentment in the other person. However, in social and personal situations, punishment has not been shown to diminish future repetition of the problem behaviour.
4. Revenge based actions and thoughts are most prevalent in those who feel unable to express their concerns and get their needs met. The focus on revenge is already an indication that the person has a reduced sense of being in charge of their life. Paradoxically, it is the unassertive and the oppressed who are most likely to fantasise and to take revenge. Revenge, then, tends to come from a position of weakness. It involves the same brain circuit activation pattern as addictions and other impulsive pleasure seeking behaviour.

What can you do if you find yourself obsessed with “paying someone back”? And what can we enable our clients to do in this situation? Firstly, we can teach them the skills that enable them to move beyond mind reading and beyond unassertive self-victimising. These are the skills of reflective listening and conflict resolution, which we teach in Transforming Communication. Secondly, individuals can be guided through NLP processes such as the Steve Andreas’ Forgiveness Process and Lucas Derks’ Silent Abreaction process; NLP techniques which enable them to find better ways to meet the intention behind revenge, and to shift their internal representation of the person they felt vengeful towards.

Richard Bolstad is an NLP trainer and developer of the Transforming Communication course for co-operative relationships. He can be contacted at richard@transformations.org.nz 

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