A More Detailed Discussion: Why are we so surprised that some people become so angry? Why are we perplexed that others tend to be particularly aggressive? Just as importantly; Why are we more tolerant of others who develop a style of anger and aggression that they camouflage as 'Assertive Behaviour'? Of course, there are other 'identified' individuals and groups who are labelled 'Passive-Aggressive'. A strange & dubious category indeed. The tendency is to contextualise these expressions of emotion and forget that they are powerful, natural mechanisms for self protection and for advancing our species at times of personal, environmental and social need. Anger and Aggression are much maligned, while dishonest and abusive forms 'Assertion' are frequently commended, in preference to honest expressions of justifiable anger and perfectly appropriate forms of defensive aggression. Lets get something established as basic facts. Aggression is a natural phenomena that we all have in some measure, unless there is a serious failure in the instinctive mechanisms for self defence, tribal advancement and the protection of our offspring. Sometimes these failures can be due to damage to, or incomplete development of the what is often called the 'lower' brain. This is a bit of a put-down of this incredible area development, which has served us for thousands (some would say millions) of years. When this essential bit of our body works well, it works with the so called 'higher' brained functions to produce the rich and sometimes frightening, range of personal and social outcomes. It is the complete absence of any form of aggression that is biologically abnormal and dangerous. The presence of aggression is biologically normal for our species and it always shows up in some form in all physically healthy humans; unless, that is, a child / person has become so negatively socialised that they have had this survival instinct completely beaten out of them, physically, emotionally &/or intellectually. Now, if there is anyone who would like to argue, I am game. I still have an ability to aggressively argue my case, with aggression appropriately channelled through intellectual and verbal channels, with an 'assertive' non-verbal edge that communicates 'don't mess with me'. Ok, so I am Passive Aggressive by some intellectual standards, I will crucify that pathetic argument at another time, thereby confirming that trait. Socialisation is a wonderful advancement that human beings have developed (although some 'Neanderthal types' may insist that socialisation is pussy). It allows us to develop alternative ways of organising ourselves in agreeable, collective ways, that enables human being to advance beyond simple survival. It does this by moderating, taming and directing this aggression through more constructive channels and establishing ground rules for the expression of 'defensive' aggression and the the aggression that is used towards extending our boundaries. If we have a healthy balance of natural aggressive instincts, channels for redirecting the surplus energy of aggression and alternative social means for protecting the individual against abusive individuals, institutions and Nation States, then this normally works quite well. We learn individually and culturally all the time and, on balance, we seem to be moving in an increasingly positive direction of social organisation and democratically Collective, Just and equitable methods of organising ourselves towards cooperative ends. Human Rights Treaties have evolved from the stage of "don't kill the women and children" (but you can rape and enslave them). It is not perfect, of course. As I mentioned earlier, we still have a few Neanderthal types who physically, intellectually and emotionally bully people, thereby triggering these basic defence mechanisms in the most peaceable and constructive of people. In fact, those who are intellectually most reliant on these primitive traits tend to be the ones who 'loose it' the worst. This happens when their underlying socially immature aggression get the better of them. Even these clever individuals, who hide their more selfishly aggressive intentions, behind a smoke screen of 'intellectual assertiveness' and working for the best interests of those who 'haven't got it yet', show their true colours (red) eventually. This basic survival function remains in place. When individual professionals and official representatives of the Institutions of Law, Justice and Social Security, & Social Welfare and Health (that have been put in place to mitigate against those situations which naturally produce aggressive responses) fail in their duty. When they fail to effectively provide adequate opportunity for the positive expression of human energy and expression, or the physical, emotional, psychological and cultural defence of the person, anger rises and (when ignored as a reasonable warning of resistance to an abuse) aggression demonstrates itself in ways that can not be ignored (but is so often misunderstood). This said, there are some people who have 'sociopathically', abusive attitudes. They have chosen, without justifiable cause and having adequate opportunity to take another course of action, to take abusively aggressive attitudes towards others. This may be partly due to their experiences and may even due to some natural disposition. The important point is that this 'style' is quite different to the 'reactive' anger and aggression that most ordinary people sometimes present. The only apparent differences may be 'when' the 'anger' was originally provoked and the degree of choice and power that the person had, to take alternative, effective and legitimate courses of action. Very often, lazy professionals and officials choose to lump all people into the same group. They sometimes refuse to distinguish between those who are expressing legitimate frustration and those that have no appreciation of other's needs (and simply want to have control over others). This is sometimes because it is too much trouble, sometimes because there is not enough time (and they don't have the courage to speak up about this). Sometimes it is because the person is a sociopath, or psychopath, able to adequately mask their tendencies to dupe susceptible employers, or identify an employer, or a boss, who has similar attitudes who will accommodate to them. It is a characteristic of some to project their failures, fears and inadequacies onto others and to find physical and even intellectual justifications to keep the dominant 'power' in any kind of relationship. This can be true of some partners, parents, bosses, officials, professionals and even groups and sub-cultures. It is the characteristic of such individuals not to be able to see the part that they play in the generation of anger and fear in others, and actually enjoy the effect that they have. The legitimate reaction to their miss use of power and refusal to acknowledge the prejudicial impact of their institutions, often means they misrepresent the 'natural' anger they and others generate. That said, it is a fact of life that these people exist and often gain positions of significant power over others. They are often very clever, often deluded, quite intransigent and can wield significant intellectual influence. Many of us are aware of the personality which is every bodies friend at work, or in the pub, but is found out to beat up and otherwise abuses their partner and kids. There are other good people who have been significantly influenced by these prevailing attitudes, within some sectors of some institutions. They become convinced of the prejudiced assertions and follow the lead of these convincing, sometimes charismatic, but otherwise 'misfit' officials. It is one of those strange features of 'insight' that those abusive people reading this material will not recognise themselves as having this problem (or will be unwilling to acknowledge it as a problem). Others of you, who have found themselves becoming increasingly and 'dissemblingly' angry, will see what is happening to them and have a very good idea why. There comes a point, in expressing legitimate anger, when it becomes completely 'disabled' as a means of getting justice, or a fair resolution. This is because these abusive individuals (and institutions) have covered their arses so well, often provoking your reaction and using this as evidence of their correct assessment (Active use of the principle of 'Self Fulfilling' Prophesies). This situation requires what I describe as the 'Sheep in Wolves Clothing' approach. Unless you obtain someone who can present your case better (Solicitor or Advocate), or provide you with equally clever ways of dealing with such abusive people, you will need to learn to play their 'game plan' better than they do. These are quite simple Game Plans, they are not Rocket Science. Firstly you have to recognise that 'Anger Reactions', however natural and justified, are not working with these people. They have what is properly understood to be 'Passive Aggressive' attitudes. Their aggression is intellectual and emotional, underhand and rationalised. It is more dangerous and powerful than hitting out. If your anger has become so magnified, by constant put-downs, put-off, lies, rationales and statistics; If the anger that you feel can no longer find the focus of the problems that you continue to experience; If those you are trying to explain your distresses to, or disclose abuses to, seem incapable of understanding your frustrated predicament; If the professionals, or the officials you are speaking to, seem incapable of seeing through your frustration and anger; you will need to take stock and look at taking a new approach. Hopefully, recognising that you are not alone and that others (equally as clever as these people), have identified these incompetence's, failures and abuses, will sustain you. How you resolve your anger, get it back to an even keel and redirect it in ways that are more effective, will depend upon your natural inclinations and personality. Some things will work better than others and it is different things for different people. Lots of professionals and experts have many ideas how this can be done. Some, like me, take a social-dynamic perspective, some take a more psychodynamic stance, others take more extreme 'clinical' approaches (identifying anger problems as being organic, or a feature of personality). There is something to be learned from all, about how people tick and how people rationalise 'anger', even righteous, reactive anger. I suggest that you use the search engine below to find the different perspective and get a sense of what can be usefully gained from each, including those that feel are completely out of touch with your own (and sometimes just about everyone else's) reality. Most of the sites will give you some information for free. Be your own filter, find out what works for you and 'empowers' you to win this battle with the ignorance and prejudice. This will require you to understand your reactions better, but will also give you insight into how professionals and institutions of various types, think and behave the way they do. Just to give you a further perspective. There are many good ideas and techniques that have been discovered to improve our relationships, family, culture, social, work and personal lives. I never ceased to be amazed how these can be so widely misunderstood and misrepresented; so don't be too surprised at the variations and the incorporated prejudices you will find. Some of these you will be inclined to dismiss, but check them out non-the-less. There is always something to be learned from seeing how people think and often snippets of useful information, techniques and concepts that you can add to you more effective resolution of the difficulties you are facing. I have included a 'protected' search engines below. The first is a filtered Google Web Search, for you to find sources of internet information, to help with the notion of anger, aggression, assertion and 'Passive Aggressive', etc. The second engine is a Site Search, for you to find other pages on this site, which deal with this topic in various ways. In your searches, please remember that anger and aggression are firstly natural reaction to threatening situations. More often than we appreciate, these various 'threats' go on for a long time and our antagonists are so skilful at provoking anger, that we become 'disabled' by our anger and other people's un-insightful reactions to it. It is often deliberate. Much of what you read from the various experts will give the impression that uncontrollable anger is a symptom of a form of mental illness. Well on rare occasions it is. Usually though, uncontrollable forms of anger are an outcome of long term, intolerable circumstances which generated the 'mental illness' that you eventually feel, because the communicating effect of anger was ignored, or dismissed. Clinicians tend to see the superficial and link this with the fundamental. In this way outcomes of repeated negative experiences are often seen as symptoms, when in fact, they are natural reactions which we are socially made to feel embarrassed about. Anger is such a 'corrupted' natural response. Anger is, as I have said, a natural response. When its justifiable expression is repeatedly put down as 'unintelligent', 'childish', 'immature', 'abusive', 'working class', 'antisocial', 'unjustifiable', 'undignified', 'paranoid', etc., it can become magnified to the point of resentful violence; repressed into poor physical and emotional health; manifest as forms of serious psychosis and schizophrenia; suppressed into into silent, depressive rage; transformed into spiteful, intellectual abuse; &/or rationalised and displaced into intellectual control and manipulation. These last to forms are the principle 'styles' of repressed, rationalised distortions of the otherwise healthy socialisation of 'anger control' (supposedly with fairness, justice and competent equality before the Law as the arbiter). Corrupted and Institutionalised forms for 'repressing' and 'suppressing' people's anger, perpetuates the circumstances that generate mental ill health and perpetuate the increasing expression of individual and social forms of anger. This is the way that parents try to control children into becoming clones of themselves, or extensions of their ambitions; bosses are able to maintain illegitimate control of people, while maintaining seriously unhealthy working environments; how teachers, health & social care, legal, policing and other professionals, try to maintain control of people's behaviour in the inadequate services, relative ignorance, and frankly abusive manifestations of their professional competences. Many professionals make a very good living out of these corrupted forms of intellectual understanding and misdiagnoses (in the broadest clinical and social sense of the term). They both get paid to put right what their professions have helped generate and in the process, are often able to reproduce those same circumstances which will generate new 'distressed' customers in the future. This is not a conspiracy, believe me, it is a form of collective incompetence and intellectual ignorance, the same kind that produces so many (and increasing) social, relationship and personal problems. We become embarrassingly incompetent in our increasingly intellectualised forms of collective delusion. The rate at which clinicians discover new 'behavioural' conditions is increasing faster than the rate that good researchers and clinicians resolve previously discovered conditions and the problems that they created. Only a few 'behavioural' conditions have any real, organic foundations. The rate at which legislators and lawyers generate new laws is greater that the rate that trusting, gullible and dedicated lawyers and police officers are able to resolve crimes and re-establish the social peace, fairness and justice. The laws just create new criminals, who then have little to loose, but to perpetuate the challenges to a bureaucratic justice system, which is incompetent to understand the causations. Most importantly, the rate at which education, health, social care professionals and governments generate, revise and change: policy documents; legislative and practice guidelines; assessment pro-forma; prescriptive solutions; emergency procedures; reviewing schemes; risk assessments and management schemes; mental capacity assessments; vulnerable child and adult procedures; complaints procedures; mission statements; web site access; information and record keeping systems; planning strategies; strategic operations; business units; crisis management systems; audits and evaluations; (........ the list grows), professionals barely have time to meet up with you. We have become practically and socially incompetent in implementing our sophisticated, highly intellectualised, commercially and psychodynamically rationalised, dissemblingly prescriptive forms of educational, social welfare, health and justice system practices. The only people who have the time to read and digest all this bumph, are those so detached from their professions (and from their clients / patients / students), that they should never have been trained and employed in the first place. They rapidly progress to the management echelons which generate more of this pretentious, largely misunderstood, inefficient, largely misguided and often negligent and abusive 'intellectual' crap. Such systems have now become so de-skilled, overwhelmed and incompetent that they often employ and even 'produce' people who can only work through prescriptive direction (regression to the mean) and with limited insight, responsiveness, flexibility and adaptively to needs and circumstances. They are, not surprisingly, unable to cope with people's natural, resulting anger and frustration, either of the staff, the clients and patients, the community, or even the result of the demands of increasing government legislation and directives, etc.. Small wonder these systems are able to respond to peoples natural felt anger and frustration and dismiss it as 'abusive'. Sadly, we live in the real world and this is where things are at at present and will stay, until the whole artificial edifice collapses under the weight of its paperwork and inevitable data overload. Therefore, you will need to get an understanding how these ridiculous, cumbersome systems operate and why and how the professionals in them often behave in the ridiculous and sometimes abusive ways that they do. Getting angry just doesn't work with these desensitised agencies. You need to get clever and get even. Stay cool, recognise their incompetence's and weaknesses and, like some of the professionals that you meet, get into their heads and play their head games back at them. Don't worry about becoming too corrupted by having to take on this survival strategy. If you are naturally a forgiving, frustrated human being; struggling to maintain a balance between self interest, the wellbeing of your friends and family, fairness and justice for others and a sense of charity for those even less well of than yourself; you are unlikely to become to similar to one of these ignorant bar-stewards who have stomped on your opportunities to get you anger and frustrations expressed. You are unlikely to become the condescending Pratt who you are now seeking to diminish, by the power of the same 'game plan' (or 'head game') that they have used to disable yourself. It can be fun being a 'sheep in wolves clothing', I really recommend it. Try and smile with each intellectual blow you land and each legitimate complaint you register. It can be very therapeutic, but never forget, a skilled abuser is always going to have the emotional edge over you. You need to build up slowly, practice the Art and you will need to stay sharp, keep good records (better than theirs), keep important people informed, get all the support you can get, take good advice and use what seems best suited to yourself and the problem you are facing. Most importantly, don't allow yourself to become defensive. You will need to learn the tactical withdrawal. Pulling out of the confrontation on your terms, just before you loose confidence, or immediately following a winning blow from you opponent. Tactical withdrawals are just clever ways of puling out of a situation where you have lost the thread, the initiative, or have come across and new abusive style, or put-down. The best ones are those you observe in you 'opponent' and in other abusive encounters you have experienced, even as a child. They typically involve lowering the intonation of your voice, speaking deliberately slower and more precisely (giving you time to think, regain composure and create an effective impact). Stopping the conversation, breathing slowly, standing up straight and counting to 10, really does work quite effectively. These withdrawals can be achieved with statements like, 'Look I have not got time to mess around like this', '. . . . . . get this sorted out and get back to me when you have got your act together'; '. . . . I will give you a bit of time to sort your head out'; '. . . . . . look, I think you need to think this through a little better and perhaps have a chat with your line manager'; ' . . . . . I really think we need to stop right here, before this becomes a slanging match, don't you?'; and ' . . . . . . look, I think I had better leave, before I say something that I am going to regret. Frankly, I have never been so insulted'. When you are brave enough you can try ' . . . . . I have rally had enough of this ******' and '. . . . What a condescending and abusive attitude to take!' Perhaps we have to do this more formally. To survive this increasingly 'intellectualised', 'very defensive', largely inept and rather self centred style of professional aggression; you will need to practice being on the offensive, don't allow yourself to become defensive in response to their mind games. Try to be painstakingly fair and demonstrably (and even sickeningly) forgiving, whenever it feels appropriate. You may noticed, this mimics the characteristics of some of the most abusive and dishonest people, who often presented as the pillars of society. It is the archetype political figure - it all looks and sounds good on the surface and they always have the quick answer. It is the classic, insurance salesman's pitch - 'I am just thinking of you'. 'Butter would not melt in their mouth'. 'They are everybody's best friend'. They are demonstrably understanding and take great pains at exhibiting their intelligent insight, valuable personal experience (usually that of their victims) and 'sympathetic' style of often pretentious empathy - they often work on your fears and insecurities. 'Playing back' such a role, or that of the 'completely rational, emotionless, belligerently fair thinking and yet totally desensitised sociopath', can completely disable the more pretentious and abusive personalities. This is a form of 'mirroring'. They see themselves through your 'mildly mimicking' reactions and it is quite discomforting and disabling to them. Just to Summarise:
Now, by doing using these techniques, you may be accused of being 'Passive - Aggressive', or just plain sarcastic. You should not worry about this, so long as you don't make it your way to deal with everyone. It is just a lovely way of dealing with people who have proven to be dishonest, or abusive. Another trick, with people who have been particularly manipulative and dishonest with you; is to take this very calm and slightly ingenuous approach for most of the conversation, politely restate your request and then; Firmly and quietly aggressively, with a slightly lowered & deeper voice, tell them, very briefly, but in no uncertain terms, what you think and insist they leave (perhaps telling them to get things sorted). Unfortunately, those techniques of 'asserting' yourself, which can be very helpful in reducing feelings of anger, or getting people to do things without having to be coercive, they can also be used to disable people, or to get unfair advantage over them. Anger is fine, if it is proportionate and in response to actions that deserve that response. Anger only really becomes a problems when we store it up over time. Sometimes this is because we let others 'disable' out attempts to protect ourselves in some way, often (ironically) having them 'assert' themselves in their unreasonable stand against our very reasonable anger at bad treatment. It is always best to speak up for ourselves early & confidently. Take the confident 'offensive', try not to be 'defensive'. By being defensive you are accepting a battle on 'their' terms and on 'others' grounds. By 'reactive assertion' and being more on the offensive, we have more control over the field. We are not interested in a battle, this is our ground and they are not coming onto it, unless invited. Sometimes it can be as simple as putting up one hand, palm forward and stating very firmly, in a low pitch. 'Stop, don't even go there!'. 'No' - No, No... Then assert you conditions and requirements (close the door) and turn away. The Web Search link below will provide some good insights but you may want to take some of the basic assumptions with a pinch of salt. Have fun but become skilful at to ducking and diving. Have a little think about it for a moment. I will be back with more. . . . . . . . © Terry Couchman; Visitweb / Your Choice; Dec., 2009. |
Why are we so surprised that some people become angry, that others tend to be particularly aggressive and that still others develop a style of anger and aggression that they camouflage as 'Assertive' Behaviour. Of course, there are those other 'identified' individuals and groups who are labelled as 'passive-aggressive'.