Category Archives: Dorothy Says

In Tell Me Your Secret, one of the characters is out for revenge. Is she justified or will she be damaging herself and everyone around her?

 ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’ I think that’s the revenge quote I have heard most over the years. And it’s the one that makes the most sense: someone hurts or humiliates you, you don’t retaliate straight away, instead you take your time to formulate a way to hit back at the person who did that to you.

Your plan is very careful, very detailed and perfect, so when it comes time to execute your plan, that person will – possibly literally – be on their knees, begging your forgiveness. And in that moment, you will be able to indulge yourself in that other popular payback saying: ‘revenge is sweet’.

Will you, though? Will you? Because while revenge may seem to be a very important, integral part of our society, and a lot of our entertainment particularly – books, movies, films, music – seems to be have payback at its core, the reality of revenge is very different from the thoughts of it.

You see, from all I’ve learned while researching my fifteenth book, it seems ultimately, revenge rarely provides the sense of justice or balancing of the cosmic scales that you crave.

In Tell Me Your Secret, policewoman Jody has been hunting a serial killer called The Blindfolder for fifteen years. She made a catastrophic mistake all those years ago that allowed him to carry on killing and now she feels responsible for every life he takes. She is desperate to catch him, but even more desperate to put a permanent end to him. As she says: ‘I realised what I had to do. I had to find the Blindfolder and then, I had to kill him.’

While he didn’t do anything physically to her like his victims, she is still living in the aftermath of those crimes and believes getting revenge will alleviate her guilt.

When I came to research this element of the book, I found out lots of surprising things about the psychology of revenge. And, as usual, it wasn’t what I was expecting. Psychologists who have studied this subject for years have come to pretty much the same conclusion: the revenge you seek is unlikely to give you the cathartic closure or soul-deep satisfaction you’re after.

In a series of studies, American psychologists Kevin Carlsmith, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Gilbert, found that people regularly predict inaccurately how they’ll actually feel after they’ve taken revenge on someone . . . in other words they think they’ll feel much better afterwards but are often hugely wrong about that.

In fact, the psychologists found, people are much more likely to feel worse than if they hadn’t carried out the punishment/act of vengeance in the first place.

According to them, when you seek revenge on someone what you’re actually doing is focusing your anger on that person and anger is an emotion that only grows the more attention you lavish upon on it. As Carlsmith, Wilson and Gilbert say in their 2008 paper: ‘Anger led to punishment [revenge] which led to increased rumination about [person who is the target of revenge], and this rumination may have prevented people from engaging other strategies . . . that would have allowed them to move on and think about something else.’

They continue: ‘Participants failed to anticipate these effects, possibly due to their lay theories that punishment would improve their mood.’ In other words, if you’d focused on letting go of what was done to you, how you were wronged, rather than focusing on that other person, you might have been able to get on with your life and been happier as a result.

I’ll be honest, this does seem a bit of a tall ask and counter-intuitive to how you feel when we’re hurt. Over the years I’ve had many a showdown with those who have crossed me. By the time my elaborate and brilliant plan has been executed, the person who has wronged me is left a mere wreck while I look on from my perch as their destruction takes effect. Obviously this is all in my head. But feeling like that seems perfectly normal to me and wanting to carry out the revenge seems perfectly normal too.

However, the psychologists advise dealing with the negative feelings that the incident has thrown up and then moving on. Because you’re the one who will suffer – focusing on the act of revenge and carrying it out will only mean your mind is occupied and taken up with negative space the event created. And if your mind is occupied with nothing but thoughts of revenge, that obsession can consume you.

In Tell Me Your Secret, Jody is one of those people consumed by the need for revenge. Nothing is going to stop her finding and ending this killer – and she is so focused on that she starts to do questionable things to reach her goal including using innocent victims such as Pieta, one of The Blindfolder’s living victims, to reach that end.

And that’s the unsettling thing I uncovered in my revenge research – the pursuit of it can totally take you over, it can alter who you are, turning you into someone without boundaries who is willing to do anything and use anyone to get what you want. There might be some satisfaction at the end of it, but it will most likely be fleeting and will leave you feeling worse than when you began. And destroy everything else around you in the process.

Why does carrying out revenge leave you feeling worse? For several reasons, apparently. The main one is that those of us who don’t have sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies will feel bad about what we’ve done. And we’ll often feel bad about feeling bad, as well as miring ourselves in constant thoughts about the initial event and what we did in response. You basically don’t get any respite from thinking about what happened even when it’s supposedly ‘settled’ by carrying out revenge.

So, does that mean all revenge will leave a bitter taste in the mouth? No, not quite. German psychological scientist Mario Gollwitzer, found that it isn’t the act of revenge and seeing the person suffer that actually will make revenge ‘sweet’ – it’s the person realising why you are punishing them and acknowledging that they did you wrong. ‘The finding that it is the offender’s recognizing of his wrongdoing that makes revenge sweet seems to suggest that — from the avenger’s perspective — revenge entails a message,” Gollwitzer told The Association of Psychological Science. “If the message is not delivered, it cannot re-establish justice.”

That says quite clearly, if the person who has hurt you doesn’t understand what they did and accept your ‘punishment’ for their transgression, then you won’t feel anything like the satisfaction you’d expect. And in many ways that is handing your happiness to the responses of a person you know is capable of hurting you.

So, what are you supposed to do? How do you get over something terrible that has been done to you? Try to let it go, it seems. You take back power over that situation by not allowing what happened to define you.

Focus all that energy on taking care of yourself physically, mentally and emotionally. Instead of revenge being your project, make a better life for yourself your goal instead. Remember that other revenge saying? ‘The best revenge is living well’ that’s probably what’s good for you. I’m sure indulging in a little revenge fantasizing can’t hurt though – it’s more a case of not letting it consume you.

Jody in Tell Me Your Secret is altered by the pursuit for revenge. Do you think you would be? Or have you been? What are your experiences of revenge or getting payback? Have you been on the receiving end of revenge, how did it alter your life? I’d love to hear from you.

Feel free to email me or contact me on social media so we can start a conversation about it.

Talk to you soon.

Dorothy x

You can buy Tell Me Your Secret from:

AMAZON YOUR LOCAL INDEPENDENT BOOK SHOP WATERSTONES

In Tell Me Your Secret, one of the characters survives a weekend with a serial killer. Would you manage to make it out alive?

When I was researching Tell Me Your Secret, I read a lot about what it takes to survive a traumatic experience. In case you don’t know, my fifteenth novel is about two women and their deadly connection to a serial killer. One of them, Pieta, is abducted by a man calling himself The Blindfolder and held for a weekend during which she is told: ‘If you want to survive this weekend . . . there is only one thing you must do – keep your eyes closed . . . For forty-eight hours you must not open your eyes. If you do, I will end you.’

When I began the book, I tried it out: I tried to keep my eyes closed for as long as humanly possible . . . and discovered I wasn’t very good at that. I could do it for a time – maybe fifteen or twenty minutes – but I’d inevitably fall asleep. And what was the first thing I did when I woke up? Opened my eyes, of course. That didn’t bode well for me, did it?

Then I went a bit deeper, thought about it some more – I wasn’t in a life-threatening situation lying in my own bed or on the sofa, I didn’t really have the motivation or terror that Pieta and the Blindfolder’s other victims had. So, would being in fear for your life cause you to do as you’re told or would it result in failing completely? Why do some people survive traumatic situations while others perish? And, would I be likely to make it in that sort of situation? I had to find that out before I could write the book.

I’ll be honest with you, I had to wade through A LOT of frankly unsettling stuff and ‘research’ to get the information that would help me find the basis for my story. (Pro tip: avoid anything labelled ‘survivalist’ unless you want to dive down that deep hole of people with questionable ‘politics’ planning for their version of the end of the world.)

What I found after wading through the scary stuff, gave me a lot to think and talk about. The main body of research I found came from ‘survival psychologist’ John Leach who has conducted a lot of work analysing the behaviours and patterns of those who actually don’t survive extreme and traumatic events.

His argument is that there isn’t such a thing as a ‘survivor personality’, more a way of responding to any given situation that will have a significant impact on your mental attitude going forward. He focused a lot on those who don’t survive these situations to give clues on what people can do to increase their survival chances.

He talks a lot about how the speed with which your brain can process and adapt to new information will help you to make the right decisions at the right time.

Basically, when something awful happens, how quickly can you assess the situation and react in a way that will save your life? Because, according to Leach and lots of other research, 70 to 80 per cent of people – the majority of us – will freeze in traumatic and extreme situations and will not know what to do. Only up to 15 per cent of people will actually react appropriately, immediately.

As one American social psychologist called Jerome Chertkoff told the BBC: ‘Being in a situation where your life is in danger increases your emotional arousal, and high arousal causes people to limit the number of alternatives they consider. That can be bad when trying to determine a course of action, since you may never consider the option most likely to result in escaping safely.’

This neatly explains, I think, why people don’t immediately run or fight back when they hear a fire alarm or if they’re attacked – they literally can’t. They are rendered inactive by, what psychologists have identified as shock, initial denial and disbelief at what is happening.

Not surprising, really, since very few of us are constantly prepared to be suddenly thrust into a life-threatening situation like a fire or, in the case of Pieta from Tell Me Your Secret, being abducted by a serial killer.

That’s why you should always take with a huge pinch of blarney anyone who claims they would absolutely respond in a particular way – ‘I wouldn’t sit around waiting to be told what to do, I’d do x, y and z’ or ‘I would totally fight if that happened to me’, etc – if their life was threatened.

The truth is, those people – just like the rest of us – have no clue how they would react. They can pontificate all they like, hoping that they’re right, but they can’t know until they are actually there.

Way back in 1999, I was doing work experience at the Independent on Sunday over in Canary Wharf, London. Trying to show how diligent and all round excellent I was, I decided to stay late to finish off the work I’d been given. That was the night a bomb was detonated nearby in the Docklands.

To me, it sounded like thunder, to a few people I was working with, it sounded like a bomb so they grabbed their stuff and ran: the 15 per cent who act appropriately, immediately. They found a nice pub nearby and spent the next few hours there. Me, I was still thinking it was thunder even though other people had screamed and some were crying in absolute terror. That was me, in denial because even though I’d grown up with the bomb threats most of my life, I still couldn’t comprehend it happening right by me.

A lot of people did the same: we stayed where we were because by the time we processed what was happening and tried to leave, it was too late – we weren’t allowed to exit the building because they weren’t sure if there were other bombs set to explode. So, we sat there, us in the 70 per cent group, anxious and scared, essentially waiting to be told what to do.

Interestingly, I don’t remember being with anyone who would be in the third group identified – the 15 per cent, who aren’t part of the 70 per cent, who act either immediately or after the shock has worn off, but actually cause more harm than good and ramp up the likelihood of not surviving, while putting everyone around them in danger.

Hours later, the alarms came on and over the PA system we were ordered to evacuate the building. All of us moved then – at speed. We – true to our 70 per cent-er roots – were spurred into action by someone telling us what to do. And all of us survived to tell the tale. In that instance, freezing or not acting didn’t do us any harm.

And sometimes, not acting is, according to the experts, much better than acting rashly and without any thought (the other 15 per cent I mentioned), which is much more likely to end your life. Taking a few moments to assess the situation and try to work out the best plan may look like freezing and it may actually come from inaction, but it’s probably the most likely way to escape safely.

In Tell Me Your Secret, Pieta does manage to survive her encounter with the serial killer called The Blindfolder, but not in the way people might expect – as she confesses later on in the book: ‘I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep my eyes closed for forty-eight hours. I didn’t. I didn’t keep my eyes closed for forty-eight hours.’

I like to think I would be able to do what was necessary – calm down enough after the initial panic, denial and ‘freeze’ to work out a way to save my own life. But would I be able to do what Pieta does? I’m truly not sure.

How do you think you’d do? In a stressful situation, do you tend to panic and continue in a flap until someone calms you down? Do you always know exactly what to do at any given moment? Do you take some time to come to terms with things as they develop? Do you think, that given what you’ve read here, and what you’ve seen of the world, that you can never really know what you’ll do until it’s actually happening?

I really would love to talk about this. So drop me a line via the contact me section of this site or on social media.

Speak soon.

Dorothy X

You can buy Tell Me Your Secret from:

AMAZON YOUR LOCAL INDEPENDENT BOOK SHOP WATERSTONES

I’m often asked if would I go back and revise anything I have written in my previous books. It’s a tempting thought, but even if I could, I wouldn’t.

Admittedly, there are elements to my previous stories that I wouldn’t have written in the same way were I to be working on them today, but everything I’ve penned in the past is part of the journey to where I am today, so I wouldn’t, even if I could, rewrite their history.

That seems a strange thing to say when I’m literally trying to explain why I decided to change the title of my ninth novel. Back in 2013 when I was writing it, The Flavours of Love was the perfect title. It was a nod to the title of the cookbook that Saffron, the main character, is writing as a tribute/way to connect with her late husband, Joel. The novel is about cooking and our often fetishized relationship with food that sits incongruously with the constant societal need for people to be slim. At that time, The Flavours of Love fitted the story to a tee.

Clearly other international publishers thought so, too – in Portugal, it was called The Aromas of Love (Os aromas do amor), in Iceland it was called Taste of Love (Bragð af ást), in Bulgaria it was called The Tastes of Love (Вкусовете на любовта) – all pretty faithful to my original title. In June 2014, when Alma Littera – my publishers in Lithuania – came to publish the book, they asked if I had any other titles. The Flavours of Love didn’t translate well over there, and they wanted to focus more on the other themes of the book – the elements that deal with loss and bereavement; about how one moment can change the rest of your life. How grief can shape you into a completely different person.

The fact they wanted to focus on that, and the fact that in the book Saffron’s life is counted out in days before and after ‘That Day’ Joel died, brought me to the title: That Day You Left. My Lithuanian publishers were happy because that title did exactly what they wanted. They eventually settled on: Ta ̨ diena ̨, kai tu iš ̇ejai, which translates as The Day You Left.

Skip forward five years where I, and my publishers at Headline, are looking at giving my backlist of books shiny new covers. This made me wonder . . . should I give The Flavours of Love a shiny ‘new’ title, too? One that focused on the other, arguably more important, part of the story? When I floated the idea of changing the title to my editor, I think she was surprised at first but was very enthusiastic about doing it.

I’m nervous about the change, to be honest. I adored The Flavours of Love and that was its name for so long. . . But you know what, I’m also feeling the fear and doing it anyway because I love That Day You Left just as much. And, at the end of the day, whatever it’s called, it’s still the same story, still the same characters and still something that I hope thrills, moves and entertains you.

I hope you enjoy That Day You Left as much as I loved writing it.

Dorothy Koomson, 2019

The countdown to publication continues with a fabulous competition! I’m giving one lucky person the chance to win a gorgeous pot inspired by TELL ME YOUR SECRET. And the best bit? It will have been lovingly painted by me! Watch the video clip to find out how to enter… #22Days

ENTER HERE: https://smarturl.it/potterycompetition

Next episode in the TELL ME YOUR SECRET series is now out! The characters in my stories often have a ‘quirk’ or hobby. In this book, Pieta’s quirk resulted in me taking up pottery. Find out more: https://smarturl.it/TMYSpreorder

Hello! This is the next episode of the #TellMeYourSecret video series. Today, we’re going to Brighton Marina to find out why it’s such an atmospheric setting for some of the book’s scenes. (I’m really working those hands in this vid!) Pre-order your copy (link: http://smarturl.it/TMYSpreorder) smarturl.it/TMYSpreorder

Just click on the cover to read the first 50 pages of Tell Me Your Secret.

Hello! Episode 3 in the TELL ME YOUR SECRET video series is a special competition! You could be in with a chance to win some rather snazzy armwarmers AND get your hands on a limited-edition early reading copy of TELL ME YOUR SECRET! (You can see the prizes in the video.) [THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED!]