WHY REVENGE SEEMS SWEET AND HOW IT HURTS US

August 23, 2026

On the night of January 21, 1995, twenty-year-old Tariq Khamisa was delivering pizzas in San Diego. He was a university student, engaged to be married, and working part-time to support himself.

 

At one address, he was confronted by four young gang members who wanted the pizza without paying for it. Tariq refused. A fourteen-year-old boy named Tony Hicks pointed a handgun at him and fired. The bullet entered Tariq’s chest. He died shortly afterwards.

 

When Tariq’s father, Azim Khamisa, received the news, he collapsed on his kitchen floor.

 

Relentlessly, he pursued the legal course, even though he felt many times that he should himself shoot Tony Hicks. Hicks was arrested and prosecuted. Although he was only fourteen, he was tried as an adult, convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison.

 

THE STRANGE HAPPENING

 

Yet something extraordinary began happening within Azim Khamisa.

 

He knew of the innocence of his son, but he also understood that the fourteen-year-old who pulled the trigger had also been shaped by abandonment, gang culture, and adult failures that had preceded the murder.

 

This recognition did not absolve Hicks. Khamisa reached out to Tony Hicks’s grandfather, Ples Felix. Together, they began speaking to children about violence, moral choice and forgiveness.

 

Khamisa founded the Tariq Khamisa Foundation in his son’s memory. After Hicks was released from prison in 2019, he too joined the foundation’s work, speaking to young people about the consequences of violence and the possibility of moral transformation.

 

Yet for most of us, it is revenge—not justice and forgiveness—that seeks to bring peace.

 

That distinction lies at the heart of one of humanity’s oldest inner struggles. Why does revenge feel so satisfying? How can forgiveness release us without weakening our commitment to justice?

 

WHY REVENGE FEELS LIKE A REWARD

 

When someone betrays, humiliates or injures us—even if we have imagined it—the mind registers more than pain. It perceives an imbalance.

 

Something has been taken: dignity, security, trust, status or love.

 

Revenge appears to restore the balance.

 

In a landmark experiment published in Science, Dominique de Quervain and his colleagues studied participants in an economic trust game. When one player violated another’s trust, the injured participant was given an opportunity to punish the offender.

 

Brain imaging showed increased activity in the dorsal striatum. Participants were prepared to incur greater personal costs merely to punish the wrongdoer.

 

The finding was unsettling. Effective punishment activated neural systems associated with anticipated reward. The brain could experience retaliation as gratifying.

 

This helps explain why news of an adversary’s failure may bring a secret surge of pleasure.

 

But the reward is short-lived. To sustain the fantasy of revenge, the brain must repeatedly reactivate the original grievance.

 

The insult must be heard again. The betrayal must be reconstructed.

 

WHEN THE BODY KEEPS RETALIATING

 

Anger is not merely an idea in the mind.

 

It is a whole-body event.

 

When anger rises, the sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for confrontation. Heart rate and blood pressure increase. Attention narrows around the perceived threat. Muscles tighten. Digestion and other non-urgent functions may temporarily receive lower priority.

 

This response is useful when immediate action is required. It becomes destructive when a remembered or perceived insult repeatedly activates the same emergency machinery long after the danger has passed.

 

A 2024 randomised study led by Daichi Shimbo found that only eight minutes of induced anger temporarily impaired the ability of blood vessels to dilate normally. The study demonstrated a plausible biological pathway connecting repeated anger with cardiovascular risk.

 

Rumination prolongs this biological occupation.

 

Other experimental work has similarly found that individuals who habitually forgive may show more effective physiological recovery after recalling betrayal than those who remain strongly unforgiving.

 

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CAPTIVITY

 

Revenge also alters the architecture of attention.

 

The injured person—whether the injury is actual or imagined—begins monitoring the offender, who may be totally innocent.

 

Has he prospered? Has he suffered?

 

This is the paradox of resentment. We may refuse to speak to someone, yet converse with them continuously in our mind. We may remove them from our home, yet install them at the centre of our consciousness.

 

Anger appears to initially protect dignity. But research shows that persistent anger impairs concentration and may cause bodily disease.

 

Forgiveness, by contrast, has been associated with lower anger, reduced anxiety and depression, and greater hopefulness and psychological well-being.

 

The value of forgiveness is therefore not that it changes the past. It changes the frequency with which the past is permitted to invade the present.

 

FORGIVENESS IS NOT ACQUITTAL

 

Many people resist forgiveness because they confuse it with absolution.

 

To forgive is not to say that no wrong occurred. It is not forgetting, excusing, condoning or minimising harm. It does not require an abused person to return to danger.

 

Most importantly, forgiveness does not extinguish justice.

 

Forgiveness asks: How long must the wrongdoer continue to live inside the injured person?

 

A woman may forgive an abusive spouse and still seek protection, divorce and prosecution.

 

Forgiveness does not cancel accountability. It prevents accountability from degenerating into an endless appetite for another person’s suffering.

 

THE ANCIENT KNOWLEDGE OF UNFORGIVENESS

 

Long before neuroscience mapped reward pathways or measured vascular function, spiritual traditions understood that hatred reproduces itself within its bearer.

 

The Dhammapada states:

 

«“Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is an eternal law.”»

 

This teaching is not a command to tolerate evil. It is a statement about causation.

 

Hatred used as a weapon must first be manufactured within the person who intends to wield it.

 

The Bhagavad Gita identifies a neurological truth in spiritual language. Under intense anger, perspective narrows. Anger begins to possess the mechanism by which we judge.

 

The Sikh tradition identifies krodh, uncontrolled anger, as one of the forces that obscure consciousness.

 

This does not require passivity before injustice. Sikh history is filled with resistance to oppression.

 

The deeper principle is that courage need not be contaminated by hatred.

 

WHAT FORGIVENESS DOES TO US

 

In an influential laboratory study, Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet and colleagues asked participants to recall a real interpersonal offence while imagining either unforgiving responses or forgiving ones.

 

When participants rehearsed grudges, they experienced increased heart rate, blood pressure and skin conductance. Forgiving imagery produced comparatively calmer emotional and physiological responses.

 

Forgiveness did not alter the external event. It altered the body’s present response to the remembered event.

 

RELEASING THE INNER DEBT—PRACTICE

 

Every grievance creates an invisible account:

 

“You owe me the years I lost.”

 

“You owe me the life I might have lived.”

 

Sometimes restitution is possible. But some debts cannot be repaid.

 

To make our peace dependent upon payment is to grant the debtor permanent control over our future.

 

Begin with one grievance. Do not choose your deepest wound first.

 

Bring the incident gently to mind. Notice where it lives in the body: the tightened jaw, the contracted chest, the shallow breath.

 

Do not suppress the response. Acknowledge it.

 

Say inwardly:

 

“What happened was wrong. My pain is real. Justice may still be necessary. But I am willing to imagine a life in which this pain no longer governs me.”

 

Do not force yourself to forgive. Simply imagine what release might feel like. Notice even the smallest softening.

 

When the grievance returns, repeat the exercise.

 

Forgiveness is seldom a single moment. It is a discipline of refusing to let yesterday repeatedly commandeer today.

 

Forgiveness offers something more radical: freedom even while justice takes its course.

 

The prison may have been built by another. But the key, sometimes, has been placed in our own hands.

 

Parneet Sachdev, IRS, is the Chairman of Real Estate Regulatory Authority and a leading author.