Breaking Free of Revenge

Parenting from prison had never offered advantages, until the day my teenage son told me how he felt about his best friend being shot in front of him.

“Dad, I wanna get even,” he told me over the phone.

I flashed back to the day thirteen years before, when one of my best friends was shot, and I picked up a gun in the spirit of revenge. As I listened to my son describe his emotions, I thought about what I wished someone had told me all those years ago.

Rather than lecturing him and risk him losing the desire to communicate with me, I began by asking him how he felt. My son, who was fifteen at the time, took his time to respond. “Sad. Angry. Hurt. Frustrated,” he said, before admitting that he wanted revenge.

His reaction wasn’t surprising – it’s easy to understand the desire for revenge in response to traumatizing violence. In the new book The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World’s Deadliest Addiction – and How to Overcome It, James Kimmel Jr. explains that neuroscientists have shown that the desire for revenge can be as strong as an addict’s desire for drug. That’s especially true for young people who don’t have mentors or counselors to help them process trauma in a healthy way. Too often, they cope with drugs, alcohol, and other reckless behaviors – including violence.

Because I got caught up in those destructive cycles when I was young, it wasn’t hard to understand the emotions my son was struggling with. I wanted to be with him, and I knew connecting on the phone wouldn’t be easy. Would I be able to find the right words? Would he listen when I spoke?

During the thirteen years I had been incarcerated, my son and I had struggled to maintain a healthy relationship. Oftentimes he would refuse to pick up the phone when I called, and when he did answer the conversations often felt forced. Later he told me that he was hurt by my absence and embarrassed that I had been an accomplice in a murder, which made it hard for him to respect me as a father. I knew his feelings were justified. I had made some horrible decisions at a young age and, despite my efforts to be a better person, I couldn’t erase the consequences of my choices. But I was determined to do my best to help him.

Photograph by David R. Frazier Photolibrary, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo.

I took a deep breath and asked him to listen to me closely, that I wanted to tell him the unvarnished truth about my experience. He fell silent, and I told my story.

In 2009, I had just pulled out from the driveway of our home, headed toward South Center Mall to grab a new outfit and a pair of shoes. There was nothing unusual about the day – traffic was light and the sky was gray, typical for Seattle. I was listening to the radio at an obnoxiously high volume when I felt my cell phone vibrating in my pocket. I picked up and heard my son’s mother crying hysterically. She explained that one of my best friends had been shot seven times at an auto parts store and that he may not survive.

Feeling the emotion of that day all over again as I talked with my son, I paused to collect myself and then continued.

When I heard that my friend had been shot and might die, I could feel the knot in the pit of my stomach. With eyes swollen from tears, I drove to my best friend’s residence. His family had already received the news, and when I pulled into the driveway I could hear the screams of his grieving mother. Over and over she asked, why? Why did it have to be her child lying in a hospital bed fighting for his life? I understood the question but had no answer for her. Other friends and family members tried to comfort her, but how do you console a mother whose child might die from gun violence?”

My son listened as I continued.

That level of grief can be suffocating. As an adolescent, I wasn’t prepared to navigate such extreme emotions. I had no one to comfort me, no one to help me process my experience. Unlike some kids, my biological father wasn’t present to coach me through such moments. He left my mother and me before I had learned to walk. My stepfather was physically present but emotionally absent; he and I never established a deep enough bond for me to share my burdens with him, and he was a violent man himself. What healthy insights about how to respond to violence could he have offered me?

Left to my own thoughts and feelings, I picked up a gun, believing that retaliation would make me feel better about what had happened to my best friend. Before I could fully understand the consequences of that choice, I was convicted as an accomplice to murder and three counts of attempted murder in the second degree. I received a sixty-three-year prison sentence for a crime I committed two weeks after my twenty-first birthday.

“You were only two years old,” I told my son.

Rather than criticize my son for wanting revenge, I wanted to validate his feelings, to recognize the impact that trauma has on young people. You have a right to be sad and hurt, I told him, a right to be angry and frustrated. What he felt was normal, but he could control how he responded and avoid the destructive reaction that would alter the course of his life and the lives of those around him. 

“Son, when you shoot someone, you risk physically altering their lives in ways that are irreversible,” I said. “I have close friends who are unable to walk, work a job, or play with their children because they were paralyzed by a bullet.” And, of course, picking up a gun could mean ending a life. “No matter how apologetic you are for taking someone’s life,” I said, “your apologies can never bring them back.”

And the damage isn’t limited to victims; the violence will affect their friends and families as well. They have parents, spouses, kids, and people who care about them. When you shoot a person, their loved ones will face emotional trauma of their own. That shouldn’t be hard to understand, I said, asking my son to consider how painful it was to watch his friend lying in a hospital bed.

Finally, I spoke of what firing a gun can mean to the shooter.

“When you shoot someone, you risk forfeiting your life to the prison system, where you are confined to a cage and separated for decades from the people you care for,” I said. “Your family connections will be reduced to prison phone calls. When they come to visit you, the joy of seeing one another in person will be overshadowed by the sting of going separate ways when visiting hours are over. Your imprisonment will weigh heavy on the hearts of those who love you.”

It hurt to emphasize this, but I asked my son to consider how my imprisonment has weighed on his life.

After describing the reasons not to retaliate, it was just as important to offer him alternatives to picking up a gun. I reminded him that his friend was lying in a hospital bed and could really use his love and support. I pointed out how standing by his friend’s side could help him heal and overcome the physical, mental, and emotional traumas of being shot. He could use his experience to advocate against gun violence and help break the cycle of violence, possibly saving another family from the same hurt that he feels.

The counsel I offered my son was rooted in my Christian values. The Bible warns us, “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow” (Gal. 6:7). When we sow seeds of violence, it produces pain and heartache for everyone involved. I didn’t want my son to seek revenge and reap those outcomes. I believed that Jesus had something better for him. If he could overcome his desire for revenge, I was convinced that God would use this painful experience to produce something good, even if my son couldn’t understand that in the moment.

Before we ended our conversation, I reassured my son that I loved and believed in him, and that I only wanted the best for his life. According to my son, this conversation helped him reconsider picking up a gun and making a mistake he would have to live with forever.

But I know how easily events can go the other way. Five years before that conversation with my son, I watched my friend Blake wrap his arms around his son, whom he had not seen in over a decade, in what should have been a joyful moment. But that father-son embrace took place behind the razor-wired fences of Washington State Penitentiary. Fifteen years after his father had gone to prison, Blake’s son had been sentenced to life in prison after another act of gun violence.

In The Science of Revenge, Kimmel acknowledges that “revenge addiction” is part of our evolutionary history but suggests ways we can overcome it, starting with forgiveness, which can heal our pain rather than just mask it. That message is crucial.

Violence in our communities isn’t going to stop immediately. When young people face violence, they need someone to listen to them, love them, and genuinely empathize with them. If we fail to help them process violent experiences in a healthy way, we’ll continue to lose them, either to death or to the prison system.