“I want him to die,” Abigail said during her therapy session. “I know I’m not supposed to say that, but it’s how I feel.”
In 2022, a shooter fired into a crowd during an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois, killing seven people and injuring another forty-eight. Abigail was sitting along the parade route in the line of fire with her grandchildren.
“Can you imagine his death? The death that you want him to have?” I, her trauma therapist, responded.
“I imagine it often.”
“Talk me through it. How would it happen?”
“It’s not that hard to have someone killed in jail. You only need to get to an inmate or a guard who wants money and either believes they can get away with it or doesn’t care if they get caught. I would pay someone to have him killed. I don’t care how it’s done. I’d just want him to know that I was the one who paid them. I was the one who killed him.”
“Imagine doing that.”
Abigail closed her eyes, and her face twitched.
“What does it feel like?”
“Empowering.” 1
Revenge fantasies can restore feelings of empowerment.
Embracing revenge fantasies can help you recover from trauma, as these fantasies can reestablish feelings of empowerment after feeling persistently powerless. Trauma researcher Judith L. Herman writes, “The revenge fantasy is often a mirror image of the traumatic memory, in which the roles of perpetrator and victim are reversed.”2 Revenge fantasies could help you to regain some semblance of power, which can aid in recovery.
Some trauma survivors live with revenge fantasies for months, years, decades, or even a lifetime. Those who have embraced them can notice a decrease or disappearance of these fantasies over time, as feelings of empowerment are restored. I’ve noticed that revenge fantasies are only present when they are needed, and tend to leave when their purpose is served.
Revenge fantasies can encourage emotional processing.
“Notice that empowering feeling. Where is that in your body? I asked Abigail.
“In my chest,” she responded, beginning to cry. “I couldn’t save them. I watched them die, and I couldn’t save them.”
That was the last time that Abigail experienced a revenge fantasy about killing the shooter, and the first time that she was able to access her survivor’s guilt. Abigail’s anger paved the way for her to experience, express, share, process, and integrate her grief and guilt.3 Without exploring her revenge fantasy, I don’t know if Abigail would have been able to engage in this deep level of emotional processing that was needed.
Embracing revenge fantasies can help facilitate your emotional processing, which is required in trauma recovery. Anger is often a path to processing fear and grief, rather than a dead end. Revenge fantasies can help you to walk this path just long enough to reach the emotions that will bring you catharsis and long-term change.
Safety Frist
“Are you having any thoughts or plans of harming him?” I asked Abigail.
“No, I wouldn’t actually do it,” she replied. “That’s not who I am.”
“Are you having any thoughts of hurting anyone else or yourself?”
“No, I wouldn’t hurt anyone else and never myself.”
“It sounds like you have no intention to act upon these thoughts. Do you feel safe enough to explore your revenge fantasy?
“I do.”
Before Abigail embraced her revenge fantasy, she spent five months building safety, which included establishing a trusting therapeutic relationship with me, increasing her ability to utilize her support system, learning coping skills to manage overwhelming emotions and trauma responses, and taking steps to reinforce her agency.4 Then, I conducted a safety assessment. Only after all this work did we acknowledge her fantasy, as establishing and maintaining safety must occur before exploring revenge fantasies.
The goal of embracing fantasies is to assist in emotional processing and restoring empowerment, not to achieve revenge. Acting out revenge fantasies may not support trauma recovery and might put your safety at risk. Your safety is always the top priority. You must feel safe enough before you embrace your revenge fantasies. If you do not feel safe, don’t explore or embrace your fantasies. Instead, focus on restoring safety.
Not a good fit for everyone
Embracing revenge fantasies isn’t beneficial for every trauma survivor, just as no method of trauma recovery works for everyone. “Repetitive revenge fantasies are known to increase distress,” writes psychologist Michelle P. Maidenberg. “Violent, graphic revenge fantasies may be as arousing, frightening, and intrusive as images of the original trauma.”5 Many survivors report that they feel safer exploring their revenge fantasies with a trained clinician or a trusted member of their support system than they do bythemselves.
If you do not feel safe exploring revenge fantasies or if exploring these fantasies makes you feel unsafe, stop and reestablish safety. If you explore your fantasies and notice no emotional movement—in other words, if you are just as angry as you were before, or even more so, and no other emotions are coming to the surface—this method may not be effective for you.
Need more information?
For more information about how revenge fantasies can be helpful in trauma recovery and specific methods to embrace them, read my book, You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms.
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- Amanda Ann Gregory, You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2025), 73.
- Judith Herman, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (New York: Basic Books, 2023), 189.
- Amanda Ann Gregory, You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2025), 89.
- Amanda Ann Gregory, You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2025), 86.
- Michelle P. Maidenberg, “The Intrigue of Revenge Fantasies,” Psychology Today, published April 6, 2021, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beingyour-best-self/202104/the-intrigue-revenge-fantasies
