CHAPTER SIX
AGGRESSION OR COMPLIANCE
‘I feel powerless’
I worry that if I expose myself to anything upsetting or disturbing that it will take me over and send me back into a deep, black hole and I will not be able to get myself out. Lately I don’t even let myself watch television or read magazines, in case I see something disturbing and then can’t get it out of my head.
Look, I’m not aggressive—I just don’t give a stuff about what other people think … I tell it like it is, and if other people don’t like it that’s their problem … I’ll take on anyone, anytime, you better believe it … I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again.
If I have certain thoughts or images I must get rid of them straight away … I have this technique where I place all unpleasant thoughts in a separate mental sphere that I think of as separate from my own ‘good’ mind … I’m afraid that if I don’t get rid of these unpleasant thoughts immediately into the separate sphere, I won’t be able to stop them … I get very scared by the idea of having the ‘badness’ inside me.
I’m always avoiding answering the telephone, speaking with friends, or talking to anyone in authority ... I feel like I can’t say ‘no’ to anyone, so I just avoid them all the time … My heart races whenever there is a knock at the door, and I have to sit really still so they think no one is home … this feeling makes my body go all limp and weak, like I’m powerless to stand on my own two legs.
I was at this show and I saw this guy who was looking at me kinda outta the corner of his eye, you know, so I sorta sneered back just to make it clear I knew what he was up to … Anyway later on when the show was over he walked past me, and I think he mighta said something under his breath … but I don’t know what … anyway I thought to meself ‘You’re a smart arse, aren’t ya?’ so I went after him and hit him in the head, real hard … He never even saw it coming … [laughs] … What a moron!
Every time I have to do something hard I give up … I always rationalise it to myself by saying things like ‘I wasn’t really interested in it anyway’ … but deep down I think that I can’t do it, like I lack confidence in myself to push through … Not keeping going, has meant that I’ve failed at an awful lot of things in my life … I think I have often felt like a victim, like I’m not in charge of my own life.
Whenever I start to feel down or upset, the first thing I do is go and buy chocolate or something similar to eat. I’ll just sit there and stuff my face till I feel better. Most of the time eating stops the bad feelings … I think I learned to eat for comfort when I was a little kid and my mother was always being nasty and criticising me ... The point is, I feel powerless to resist the craving to over-eat … it just overtakes me.
I said to her [flatmate, who has been her best friend for about six years], ‘If you’re going to talk to me that way, then just get the fuck out of my place’ … I mean why should I put up with her crap, I don’t need this bullshit … No friend of mine tells me I’ve got a problem with anger … she’s meant to be on my side … What a fuckin’ joke that is!
IT MAY NOT BE OBVIOUS what all of these people have in common, yet all their comments arise from the same misconception. Terry, Seth, and the others may all appear to be as different as chalk and cheese, yet they are remarkably similar in one respect: they all behave as though they are powerless.
All of their comments are simply strong reactions to fear. In each case, at a deep level they feel powerless to defend themselves without either bringing in the heavy artillery of over-the-top aggression or shrinking into compliance. This reflects a deep-seated lack of confidence in their ability to get through difficulties. That is also why Jennifer, Seth, and Joanne have to stop their ‘bad’ thoughts and feelings, because they are full of fear that they are too powerless to cope with letting themselves experience any strong negative emotions. Perhaps more than any other negative assumption, this one keeps people locked into their own living nightmare, making recovery elusive.
DEVELOPING POOR LONG-TERM STRATEGIES
When people experience large amounts of fear, usually in childhood, they develop strategies that are an attempt to overcome and deal with the feelings of powerlessness that follow. It is frightening to feel powerless, and children want to stop such negative feelings quickly, and through whatever means are available.
However, children are simply too young to have sophisticated and subtle strategies at their disposal. Therefore they usually respond in a similar manner to that of a trapped and terrified animal when it is cornered and frightened: they use simple and straightforward strategies. Children learn to out-bully an equal or inferior enemy—often other children—by becoming ferocious and aggressive. They also learn to subdue a superior enemy by going limp and playing dead. This is a cowering strategy whereby the children become psychologically compliant to the forceful demands of others. Often they will learn to switch between these two strategies when more complex situations demand it. Once adopted, these strategies tend to persist, often for a lifetime, as well-practised habits.
Adopting the wrong strategy
People who have had difficult childhood experiences are more likely to adopt the strategies of aggression or compliance, or a combination of the two, rather than a more adaptive assertive response. This happens for two main reasons.
First, as we have seen, the higher levels of fear and insecurity usually begin at an early age, forcing children to come up with coping strategies when their level of sophistication is not sufficiently developed. They have to use whatever tools are available in order to defend themselves, even if those tools are still primitive. Assertive strategies require high levels of sophistication, and depend upon the person not overanticipating danger. As a result, assertive people are not reactive to fear but are aware of their own needs and preferences in any given situation. They have the communication and negotiation skills to secure those preferences, or an approximation of them, in consultation with and without over-riding other people. Children require close to two decades in non-threatening and encouraging environments to be able to learn and apply these sophisticated techniques. Children from negative environments lack any safe haven in which to develop and practise such complex skills.
Second, children who have experienced a negative childhood are more likely to adopt aggression or compliance strategies rather than assertive ones because the fear and insecurity they have encountered is often extreme in its intensity. Repeated encounters of high-level fear will oversensitise the limbic system within a child’s brain, creating disproportionately heightened fear levels in the future, whether situations are genuinely threatening or not. In contrast, assertion strategies depend upon not overperceiving threat. Assertion skills arise and depend upon expectations of goodwill, co-operation, and desirable results for all parties. It would be irrational for children from difficult backgrounds to assume such co-operation and goodwill. These children have often been exposed to hostility, criticism, and lack of co-operation.
As a result, children from negative backgrounds learn to perceive threat readily—often too readily—creating a tendency to experience higher levels of fear than is warranted by the situation. Over time, hypersensitised children become hypersensitised adults. The brain-habit has been formed: too much fear and too much intensity of fear has created the tendency to overperceive threat, and through practice these strategies become easily accessible, enabling children, then adults, to reach for them over and over again.
The dominant strategy typifies the person
Although most people who have come from negative childhood experiences use both aggression and compliance strategies, depending upon the situation, one of them is usually dominant. That is, over time, people are more likely to develop an overall personality ‘attribute’ of one or the other, so that their dominant presentation will be aggressive or submissive. Very likely, this occurs simply because they have found that a particular strategy has been more useful in the context of their particular life experiences. As a result, they have practised the strategy so often that it has become like an automatic response that appears intrinsic to the character or personality of the individual. In reality, it is not.
The passive-aggressive strategy
Not surprisingly, over time, people become very adept at using their particular strategies. Aggression comes to include passive aggression, where there is a hostile agenda that is never openly acknowledged. People who use this approach still assume, at a deep level, that they are too powerless to get what they want if they ask for it openly, and that they have to adopt indirect means to achieve the desired result. Whenever their hostility is questioned, they will usually deny it, since they have ruled out overt or open aggression as being too risky (for whatever reason). Passive aggression is used as the strategy of choice.
Nonetheless, the unacknowledged hostility is present, and it will have direct consequences in any social interaction. Passive aggression often takes the form of caustic ‘jokes’ and indirect ‘jibes’ that aim to undermine and disempower the targeted person while keeping the perpetrator hidden. In other passive-aggression situations, the true topic of discussion is hidden behind a different but related topic, which is often used as a vehicle for expressing strong emotions of hostility that appear unwarranted by the gravity of the related topic.
For example, a man told me recently that his mother often talks with extreme resentment about his cousin (the related topic). She talks about how the cousin is a ‘bad seed’ who is ‘self-centred’ and ‘never pays enough attention to his parents’, and how the parents ‘made all these sacrifices’ for the cousin who ‘never appreciates’ what was done for him. The man would become extremely agitated and upset with his mother when she launched into this topic, and for a long time he did not know why. Gradually, he realised it was because he sensed that she was really talking about him, and how he does not pay sufficient attention to her (the real topic). This has made him terribly upset because for many years he has been trying very hard to help his mother. When he tries to talk about this openly with her, she steadfastly denies any connection, making further caustic comments such as that he is ‘imagining things and is too sensitive’, and that he is ‘self-centred, always thinking everything is related to himself’.
In these sorts of passive-aggressive situations, clear communication is prevented, since demands are often masked or cloaked without ever being openly stated and discussed, and results are often subtly manipulated. Discussions that appear to be about trivial surface issues may be heavily loaded with strong emotions about ‘hidden agenda’ items. As a result, other people tend to become confused by the unclear demands being expressed, and the convoluted resolution processes they entail. Over time, they tend to walk away in frustration from these distorted negotiations.
The overtly aggressive strategy
People using an overtly aggressive strategy are just as problematic. Aggressive people will make demands that assume high levels of hostility on the part of others—usually when they don’t exist. The armed artillery of aggression is brought into a situation, creating an unnecessarily polarised situation. There are often no pleasantries, and no gentle discussion to explore a topic in a relaxed, friendly manner. The other person is perceived as the enemy from the outset. In line with this, rigid and uncompromising demands are delivered, with hostile body language to match. Not surprisingly, the other person will often feel unheard, railroaded, or bullied by the overt aggression. In the end, the process usually becomes thwarted by unnecessary hostility, frustration, and misunderstanding. Results arising from these situations are often unsatisfactory, or remain as continuing, festering problems.
Surprisingly, people using the aggression strategy often have no idea that they are doing so. They feel as though their reaction is a defensive one, and that they are defending and protecting themselves against an aggressor. But they are often misreading the situation. They have anticipated and perceived the other person or the environment as being hostile and threatening, usually when there are no grounds for doing so. This is often how child abuse occurs.
How child abuse can happen
When violence against children occurs, it is not usually because parents are deliberately horrible or mean. They very often have been subjected themselves to violence as children. As a result of the violence, the children (now parents) have been damaged, and have formed many negative assumptions and used many inadequate life-strategies—the use of overt aggression usually being one of them. The child abuse often happens because damaged parents perceive young children’s unrelenting cries and demands as being explicitly hostile towards them. In other words, parents misread the motives of their infants, who are simply crying because they need to be cared for. This misreading generally continues throughout childhood and often beyond, with parents perceiving their children as being forceful, bullying, and demanding.
A child is perceived as a ‘bully’ because, despite their ‘tough’ outward appearances, damaged parents feel powerless in relation to the demands of others—even those made by babies. As a result, they feel ‘forced’ to respond to the ‘demands’ of the children. Yet the parents cannot understand why a baby will not shut up when it is told to; its refusal to do so is taken as further evidence of a child’s ‘hostility’. Sadly, the continual misreading of children as being hostile can eventually lead to damaged parents believing that their children ‘deserve’ to be punished for trying to ‘force’ the parents against their will. The parents see themselves as the victims of these powerfully hostile children.
Although the result of child abuse is abhorrent, the thinking that leads to it is rational when you begin with assumptions of your personal powerlessness and the hostility of others. If you combine this with an inflamed situation, a screaming baby, and access to a well-practised strategy of overt aggression, you have, all too often, a recipe for disaster.
Perceiving threat too readily
People using the aggression strategy are oversensitised to threat. They perceive threat where there is none, because their brain has learned to habitually overappraise most situations as threatening. Take the case of Derek, one of the people whose words I quoted at the start of this chapter. In my view, Derek has misread the situation entirely. When I asked him for specific details about the person who had been supposedly looking at him sideways or muttering, he was unable to provide any clear evidence whatsoever of a potential threat. In fact, the evidence was to the contrary. The man Derek hit had been entirely taken by surprise. When I quizzed Derek further, it came to light that the man he had hit had said things like, ‘What was that about? What’s wrong with you? What brought that on? Are you from another bloody planet?’ Derek interpreted this as the man just ‘wanting to make an idiot of me’ when he ‘really knew what it was about’.
Of course, it is not difficult to see that the man whom Derek hit was completely shocked and nonplussed by Derek’s behaviour. He would have assumed that Derek was behaving offensively, simply because, in all likelihood, he would not have perceived any hostility before he was hit. But Derek perceived himself as behaving defensively, because he had assumed prior hostility in the other person.
In this instance, the man Derek hit did not retaliate physically. However, this type of misunderstanding often leads the recipients of the aggression to become violent or abusive in retaliation or defence, thereby leading to an escalation of hostilities. Even when recipients do not counter-attack, they will be reluctant to keep talking to aggressors, leaving them even more isolated and alone. Whether the aggression is physical, verbal, or veiled, a person on the receiving end may judge the situation as too ridiculous or too risky to get involved in, and may simply walk away.
In fact, marginalisation and isolation are the regular costs of using the less-adequate strategies that arise from negative assumptions created in childhood. Derek regularly got himself into these types of violent predicaments because he was still being controlled by his negative past, which had sensitised him to unduly perceive threat in other people’s behaviour. Derek typically used primitive strategies (physical aggression) to counter and camouflage the fear arising from his incorrect perception of threats.
The compliance strategy
When people use a compliant or cowering strategy, they also misread the situation in which they find themselves. These people are as much stuck in the past as their aggressive peers. When they learned this strategy as children they felt, quite rightly, that they were unable to openly defend their own interests. They became overly sensitised to threat, seeing more than was present. They learned to hide and disappear, making themselves small and insignificant to the ‘enemy’, so as not to aggravate difficult situations. But children grow into adults, by which stage there is usually no longer any reason to hide. Unfortunately, their assumption of threat persists, as well as their assumption that they are powerless to deal with those threats. As with aggression, they will keep using compliance as a well-practised strategy until they decide definitively to change.
The compliance strategy is inadequate. I do not mean it is inadequate in a moral sense, but rather that these strategies produce more costs than gains in the long term for the people who use them. By way of contrast, an adequate strategy ensures personal growth and development, and has fewer costs in the long term.
JUDY
During her negative childhood Judy learned to adopt the strategy of compliance. She and her brother were often scared as children when their divorced mother regularly partnered with various men. Judy and her brother were constantly insecure, not knowing who their mother would bring home next. The men came and went, making the children’s lives unstable and unpredictable, and their mother would make many compromises in order to try to keep her relationships with the men going. Her children usually came last. Even on occasions when the male partners assaulted Judy and her brother, the mother would take no action to protect her children. Indeed, the mother would often clearly side with the male partner against the children at times when it seemed unfair to do so. When one partner made a sexual pass at Judy, her mother called Judy a ‘liar’ when she tried to tell her. It was easier to dismiss her daughter as a liar than it was for her to confront the man in her life.
When Judy first came to see me she was 30 years old. She had been in a relationship with a man called Peter for the past two years. As part of the assessment process I saw Peter on his own for a couple of sessions to get his perspective on the relationship. As it turned out, he had also come from a negative childhood, so his strategies were about as marginal as the strategies Judy was using.
Judy’s past had taught her to agree with and go along with Peter’s decisions, even when she did not really agree with them. Judy attended to Peter’s every need. She cooked, cleaned, smiled, and dressed for him. She spent her life trying to please him. She gave up her friends for him. She had her hair styled the way he liked it; and if he liked it, she liked it. She was careful to protect his ego, letting him take the lead in whatever tasks they were doing. When they were going out, she always told him she wanted to do whatever he wanted to do. She was happy ‘just being’ with him; she thought she was lucky to have him. Peter had his own business as a plumber, and Judy promoted, supported, and extended Peter’s business interests. She put her time into his career. Judy had seen no need to develop a career for herself. She had sex for him, even though she did not really like it ‘that much’ for herself, and she hardly ever had an orgasm. When I asked Judy why she was so passive in sexual activity, she said that she thought it was better to let him take charge: ‘It made him feel more satisfied’.
For about the first year the relationship appeared to be stable and free of conflict. Judy believed she had achieved her aim. She had established a liaison that appeared to be long term. Judy believed that she had done this by putting her own grievances aside for the greater good and harmony of the relationship. She had complied. She had put the needs of Peter above her own on the basis that a long-term relationship would be the likely result.
When I asked Judy for her rationale for using this compliant strategy, she wasn’t sure. She just did it automatically. When I probed at length, Judy finally told me that she believed that a long-term relationship would be the likely result because she thought that over time Peter would see that he was on a ‘good thing’ in staying with her. She was ‘good to him’, and ‘looked after him’. Peter ‘got his own way’. When I pushed her about what costs it might entail for her, Judy thought that it did not really matter so much if she had to give up on things for herself; the benefits of the relationship were worth it.
This may have appeared to be the case in the first year, when the relationship seemed to be going smoothly, and there were no big disagreements. Judy believed that she had built a close, intimate connection. But she had deluded herself. Peter told me separately that, from early on in the relationship, he had been having affairs and sexual encounters with other women without Judy’s knowledge. Many women. Two years later, Peter was extremely bored and frustrated within the relationship; he felt that he no longer loved Judy. Even though he got his own way, she never challenged him; she was a ‘nothing’. He was sick of having to make all the decisions. Peter felt trapped, but too guilty to leave. He said that he definitely wanted to leave, and he thought that it was only a question of time until he did so. In the meanwhile, his frustration at feeling trapped grew. He started to make cruel verbal assaults on Judy that he felt terrible about afterwards. Lately he had started to push Judy physically, although he had not hit her. Not yet.
For her part, Judy became depressed and anxious as her relationship with Peter deteriorated. She started having panic attacks, and was spending large amounts of her time ruminating about Peter. She couldn’t get her mind off how she was trying so hard in their relationship, yet Peter had so little appreciation of her. Deep down, Judy knew she was losing the battle in their relationship, but she did not know what to do about it. Over time, Judy’s feelings became more overwhelming, and she felt that she could not cope. It was this crisis that was the catalyst for her to come and see me for assistance.
Whatever way I looked at it, Judy and Peter’s relationship was a sham. (I should explain that, while Peter’s strategies were inadequate as well, it is Judy’s compliance strategies that I am examining at length here.) What Judy had really done was to sidestep conflict. In the process, she had denied herself the opportunity that conflict provides to engage in negotiation. It is conflict, and the negotiation that arises from it, that provides the opportunity for lengthy discussion and mutual resolution and, in turn, provides the way for a relationship to deepen over time. Judy had left herself in a situation where she and Peter moved along in parallel, without apparent conflict (until later, when the frustration set in), but also without genuine closeness.
It became obvious in their relationship that, after a while, Peter got sick of no contribution coming from Judy. Peter was expected to make the decisions, and he wanted some real input, beyond bland agreement. The trouble was that, deep down, Judy believed she lacked the power to defend her own interests. The notion of conflict was scary—too scary to attempt, even when Peter would implore her to tell him what she really thought about an issue. Staying in the bunker felt safer; it was what she had always done. So, when implored, Judy would insist that it was really what she thought, even though she knew that she was probably telling a lie. It felt imperative to Judy not to contradict or offend Peter. She believed she had to behave in a very safe manner, or else strong feelings of fear would overwhelm her.
But using the compliance strategy incurred some real costs for Judy. To carry it out, Judy had to stop taking risks, and she had to stop contributing her views in an honest way. Adopting the strategy meant that Judy prevented herself from taking the opportunity to explore, through open discussion, what she really did think on all those issues she evaded. She prevented herself from gaining insight into her own motives, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. She made herself a stranger to herself.
The compliance strategy may work briefly, but in the end authentic relationships depend upon an equal contribution, mutual fairness, and reasonable input from both parties. Above all else, authentic, loving relationships depend upon mutual respect and trust. When Judy became a doormat to Peter, and did everything to please him, she ended up defeating her own aims. Her original aim was to build a close and loving relationship. In subordinating her own views and feelings to those of Peter, he came to view her with contempt, as a walkover.
Peter ultimately lost respect for Judy, and the loss of respect led to a loss of love. Peter was determined to leave Judy, and he did, taking with him a buoyant ego and his lucrative career, and leaving behind a diminished person with a bad hairstyle. Judy had no career prospects; in short, she had chosen a losing strategy.
In situations like this, a person may stay with a compliant partner for some time, mostly because of feelings of obligation or guilt. This is basically because the compliant strategist has apparently made so many sacrifices for his or her partner. Notice, I use the word ‘apparently’. In reality, the compliant person has never brought essential ingredients to the relationship. Judy had never brought truth, openness, authenticity, or strength to her relationship with Peter. She had never been willing to take the risk of trusting either herself or Peter. She had never taken the risk of trusting that there was sufficient goodwill between herself and Peter so that differences could have been worked out.
In this way, although it might appear that Judy was giving up everything generously, there had been a lack of generosity about the important aspects of building a truly intimate relationship. Instead, Judy had subjugated herself without true agreement. She had pretended to agree, but there was no real honesty and, therefore, there could not have been any true meeting of their minds and hearts. There is a world of difference between subjugation and trusting your partner enough to take the risk of displaying yourself truthfully, freely, and openly. It is hard to lay yourself psychologically naked in front of your partner. Really hard. For Judy, it was too hard.
Peter still thought he needed Judy for quite some time to do things for him, and to keep on giving in to his wishes and demands. But need is very different from love. Love is an interactive state of being, based upon mutual honesty, respect, and trust. It is difficult to either respect or trust someone who collapses and yields to your smallest whims, whereas it is easy to respect people who have self-respect and who are prepared to stand up for what is important to them. If people can stand up for their own beliefs, they can also stand up for you when you need assistance. A strong person can be relied upon; a compliant person cannot.
Nonetheless, using the compliance strategy produced some short-term gains for Judy. It reduced initial conflict and made the relationship appear to be stable. It also created some feelings of guilt and obligation in Peter. It made Peter think he ‘owed’ Judy something since she seemed so willing to give up so much for him. These guilt feelings almost certainly extended the time that Peter stayed around.
But, in the end, the losses were greater for Judy. She allowed her fear of conflict to prevent her from having a truly deep and fulfilling relationship. She pre-empted the opportunity of negotiation by prematurely offering agreement and sacrifice. She stopped any chance of deeper resolution of problems between herself and Peter. In avoiding deeper discussion, Judy prevented herself from learning and gaining insight into herself, Peter, and their relationship. Judy failed to take the risk of trust, failing to show her authentic self to him. Over time, Judy lost the respect of Peter and the long-term love that could have ensued, because love is difficult (probably impossible) without respect. In the end, with the relationship too far gone to be retrieved, Peter left Judy for someone who was stronger. Sadly, the ending of the relationship created in Judy a new reservoir of unexpressed resentment for her losses.
HOW TO CHANGE
Holding on to the assumption that you are powerless leads you to adopt the aggression and/or compliance strategies. In order to change, you must:
• Learn how not to feel powerless. In other words, you have to increase your confidence in yourself. This will help reduce your estimations of threat and danger because you will feel more competent to deal with situations.
• Learn that you can tolerate distress, that you have the power to resist negative feelings taking over.
• Break free of people or groups who reinforce your negative assumptions of powerlessness.
• Learn different strategic responses apart from aggression and/or compliance, so that you can become more assertive.
Build your self-confidence
Learning to become confident in yourself is not a vague concept. Often, when people come to see me they say that they just want to ‘come in for a few sessions so they can get confident’, as though simple positive thinking will do the trick. Although your thoughts do contribute, my work has taught me that confidence is largely anchored in real and measurable skills. As a rough guide, you get more confident the more skills you persevere with and learn. People often find this hard to accept.
Sometimes people like to think that they could do what other, more confident people do if they just had the same level of confidence. But making it as, for example, a successful actor involves more than just going for auditions and waiting to be discovered. It involves many other skills, such as the development of sustained internal motivation, risk-taking skills, organisational skills, analytic and interpretation skills, communication skills, good judgement, assertion skills, perseverance, and self-marketing skills, just to mention a few.
Holding the view that all you lack is confidence protects you from having to face the fact that you need to develop more skills and knowledge. It protects you from having to acknowledge your weak areas. Sure, it is almost certainly not your fault that you lack these skills. Many environments discourage skill acquisition. But, until you squarely face the fact that you need more skills, you will never become more confident. To become confident you must change your behaviour. If you just go on telling yourself that you could make it ‘if only I had more confidence’, you will have succeeded in protecting yourself from facing the cold, hard truth; yet you will also have denied yourself the opportunity to identify the real problem. You will have identified the problem as an elusive confidence problem rather than a skills problem. An elusive confidence problem can continue unabated for years on end (or even a lifetime), whereas you can constructively deal with and overcome a skills deficiency.
Picture two men who are seventy years old. One is actively engaged, enthusiastic, happy, capable, smart, independent, and interested in other people, politics, business, and life. The other is disengaged, bored, complaining, incompetent, mentally dull, needy, and focused inwardly on his health. There is no surprise about this result. It was predictable and never a matter of chance that these two people ended up this way. Each of their decisions and the way each behaved led them to these different points. One man chose to keep developing skills that continued to build confidence and to open him up to the world. The other man chose to avoid small things that he found hard, making him lose confidence, and making him close down and become bitter, needy, and complaining.
It is important to remember that in every day of our lives there are at least several decisions we have to make about what course of action we will take. Do you learn how to do your own taxation or is it easier to let your husband do it for you? Do you learn to use the washing machine or have your wife do your washing for you? Do you accept an offer to speak to an audience or leave public speaking for ‘stronger’ people? Should you ring a close friend to apologise for behaving badly or just leave it and hope the other person gets over it? Do you discuss a difficult issue with your spouse or do you bury the problem, hoping it will go away? Each small decision seems insignificant in the larger scheme of things, hardly worth worrying about. Still, a lifetime of decisions adds up, and in the end we become the sum of those decisions. I cannot stress enough how important it is to keep choosing to be bold and brave, gradually learning the skills that will build your confidence.
Basically, if you do not feel very confident, you have to learn more until your advanced skill level enables you to be proficient in different areas in your life. You cannot be proficient at everything, but be sure to take on courses that move you out of your comfort zone and expand you. The skills should challenge you because they are new to you. Join a public-speaking group if you are afraid of people scrutinising you. Take up a musical instrument, or singing, or join a creative art course if you think you lack creativity. Attend a series of computer courses if you feel behind in technological skills. Obtaining advanced skill levels involves perseverance over long stretches of time—sometimes keeping on for years in a particular area—despite setbacks. Of course, setbacks are sometimes hard to stomach; we all want to be better than we are.
As you might expect, feelings such as frustration and disappointment seem subjectively worse to people who have experienced negative childhoods. This is because they already hold a whole lot of unfortunate assumptions that are reinforced and keep them feeling negative about themselves, the world, and other people. These assumptions all combine to create pervasive feelings of despair and pessimism that lower their overall mood, making them feel depressed and powerless in response to strong emotions.
If you are one those people, you must keep on persevering in a systematic way until you have acquired the skills you need. Never let feelings of powerlessness stop you; just keep on building your skills.
Tolerate your negative feelings
Feeling powerless in response to strong emotions prevents recovery because it manifests itself in distress intolerance. As I have said, distress intolerance is a condition in which people feel that they cannot tolerate even the prospect of strong emotions because they are convinced such emotions will overwhelm them and take them over (because they feel too powerless), leading them into never-ending despair. As a result, they believe they have to obliterate all strong negative emotions—or the emotions will obliterate them. So people with distress intolerance avoid strong negative emotions through whatever means they can find: pills, alcohol, smoking, drugs, overeating, self-harm, mental checking, time-consuming rituals or behaviours, seeking reassurance, physical escape, counteracting thoughts, mental rehearsal, distraction, aggression directed at an external target. You name it—it’s been done.
Of course, thinking that you cannot tolerate distress is one of the greatest misconceptions around. In my view, distress intolerance is one of the biggest barriers to recovery. Thinking that you cannot tolerate distressing feelings is simply not true. Strong negative emotions may feel overwhelming when you are a child and have little power in the face of adversity; but once you become an adult this is old baggage, old thinking styles that are still being applied, despite their lack of current relevance. As an adult, you have as much power and ability to tolerate strong emotions as anyone else. They are just feelings; you can live with them. We all have to.
Some people make the mistake of believing that recovery means being completely free of all negative feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Recovery is about no longer being afraid of negative emotions, about trusting yourself to let the feelings in. We all have negative feelings; they are part of the wide repertoire of human experience. They are part of what makes humans complex and interesting, without which we would be one-dimensional and shallow.
Without experiencing negative feelings we would not be alerted to those parts of ourselves that we still need to work on. Vital opportunities to change ourselves would be overlooked. Negative feelings guide us to these deficiencies, helping us to learn what is continuing to limit us. Interestingly, though, by not being afraid of negative emotions we become far less controlled by them. Not being afraid sets us free. The negative emotions no longer rule our lives; they simply provide the occasional helpful insight.
Negative emotions sometimes arise when we make hard decisions. For example, we might decide to object to something that most other people agree with. When we make this sort of decision other people might apply pressure to get us to renege. They might try to make us feel bad or guilty or ashamed for swimming against the tide. In this situation we have to decide what we believe is right, without being afraid of our own negative feelings or responding to the pressure from others. If you make the decision to object, accept responsibility for it as an adult, and learn to live with feelings of shame or guilt. It is not as hard to do as you might think.
So stop trying to keep negative feelings away. You probably do not even know you are doing it. Let negative feelings in, and simply live with them. This is the only way to teach yourself that you are powerful enough to cope with them. It is time to outgrow your past, to stop it from controlling you. Your negative feelings are nothing to be afraid of, so stop the behaviours that are distracting you from them. Whatever it is that you are doing to camouflage those feelings, you must stop doing them. Give up the overeating, the smoking, the overuse of alcohol, and the overuse of mental checking or worrying. Stop these habits; they are getting in your way. Just live with any negative feelings; they are part of normal life.
Move out of your comfort zone
For real change to occur, it is essential that you break free from groups that tend to reinforce old negative assumptions and their ensuing inadequate strategies. Often, what happens is that people band together, forming groups with others who hold similar assumptions to themselves. The old saying that ‘opposites attract’ does not hold in the real world. In fact, people are much more likely to congregate with others who are similar and with whom they feel an affinity. For example, people who hold positive assumptions about the world, themselves, and other people, and who use flexible and adaptive strategies, form networks with others who do likewise. These adaptive strategists often form business and political networks and social clubs, co-operating with and assisting intra-group members with career pathways and the like. The positive assumptions these people hold are reinforced by the people they surround themselves with, locking in their perspectives more strongly.
People who hold negative assumptions and use inadequate strategies also gravitate together, forming groups. These groups tend to hold less legitimate societal power because the members do not function in such an adaptive manner. Extreme examples can be seen in the formation of such groups as religious cults and fanatical right-wing or left-wing groups, whose negative assumptions can direct them easily towards conspiracy theories and rigid ideologies about society.
By congregating together and reinforcing their adopted ideology, these groups may develop a phenomenon known as group think. This occurs when groups become increasingly isolated from the mainstream of society, and their ideas become more and more extreme, without external influences to moderate them. As the views within the group become more self-referencing, radical views and behaviours can be formed and reinforced. In its most extreme form, this phenomenon can lead to mass suicides or terrorist activities, when alternative perspectives are not tolerated or heard. However, while these types of groups can often appear cohesive on the surface, they are often profoundly unstable and fraught with conflict because of enormous misunderstandings and the use of poor intra-group strategies in dealing with conflict.
More often than not, though, people who hold negative assumptions form groups centred around their inadequate strategies. These groups take varying forms. People who use excessive alcohol to numb any negative emotions may congregate in hotels, where everyone gets drunk under the guise of, say, playing darts or snooker, and pre-existing friendships with non-drinkers are gradually sidelined until only drinkers remain in the friendship circle. Others may congregate in drug groups, where everyone shoots up under the guise of being cool, rebellious, and marginalised from mainstream society. Some people form ‘victim support’ groups. While they can occasionally be helpful, many victim support groups serve to reinforce negative assumptions of powerlessness. The stated aims of these groups is usually to take action over specific problems, but people often sit around behaving like victims, complaining about grievances and supporting each others’ self-defeating strategies. Those (often teenagers) who favour a bullying strategy form gangs, in which everyone acts tough and invulnerable, and bashings of other people are carried out to bolster the members’ own inadequate self-esteem. There are many other groupings; these are just some obvious examples.
If any of the above applies to you, be aware that belonging to such groups will reinforce your feelings of powerlessness and make it difficult for you to break free. It is imperative to move away from (or change) groups that reinforce your negative assumptions, and to try to gain entry into groups that will challenge your assumptions. I don’t want to pretend that the process of extraction from or change within your old group will be easy. Apart from the entrenchment process referred to above, old group members almost always resist member advancement, preferring the old status quo where there is no pressure on them to make changes.
The process of extraction or change can sometimes be helped by forming a close, one-on-one friendship with someone who has positive assumptions and is not a group member. You must extend your usual social circle to find such a person. It might be necessary to join a new club, take up a university course, and be open to different ways of thinking. There may be a basis of exchange that enables a relationship to occur. A person with negative assumptions may combine rat-cunning, street intelligence, and emotional depth into a charismatic persona. This can be so appealing to someone with positive assumptions that a mutually beneficial relationship can be formed. During the course of such a relationship, you and your friend need to become aware and analytical about your misconceptions, and to be clear about wanting to change these in collaboration. As the friendship strengthens you may be able to gradually gain entry into your new friend’s social circle, while at the same time extracting yourself from or changing your previous social circle.
Develop better strategies for assertion
Finding new friends and joining different groups will require you to develop a wider repertoire than your usual aggression and/or compliance strategies. If you don’t, members of the new group will walk away in confusion and frustration, leaving you marginalised and emotionally alone yet again. More flexible strategies allow you to strengthen interpersonal relationships, not erode them.
Being able to strengthen your interpersonal relationships depends very much upon you not assuming hostility about the motives of another person. Instead, you need to assume co-operation and benevolence until clearly shown otherwise. Before every social interaction, remind yourself that others have goodwill towards you. This is difficult when your early life has geared you towards excessive threat-appraisal, but you must be absolutely determined to assume benevolence on the part of others.
During social interactions do not to give too much information about yourself, especially personal information; you are not compelled or under threat to do so. For the most part, engage in fairly superficial conversation and only, very gradually, over a period of several months, take the conversations slightly deeper each time if you are interested in becoming friendlier with a particular person. Often, people with negative childhood experiences feel compelled to divulge excessive information to others as though they have no boundaries or limits to the demands of others. You are not under threat to give up information. It is part of becoming more sensibly assertive to learn to maintain your own boundaries. So, slowly does it.
Work out your preferred result
Apart from not assuming hostility in others, the next most important aspect of learning assertive strategies is that of becoming aware of what result you would prefer in any given situation. Fear responses are all reactive. They are about perceiving a threat or a demand, and then feeling too powerless to do anything more than defend yourself through aggression and/or compliance. You must learn to become proactive so that the result you would like is considered as much as any other. It is important that, early on, you identify your preferred result and the reasons you might favour it. Where you are not sure of what you want, delay the negotiation.
Here is a simple example. If someone telephones to ask you to attend a charity ball and you are not really sure whether you want to attend, simply say that you are not sure what you are doing and that you will check your diary and ring back. You have then delayed negotiations. At this point, you must work out your preferred result. To help you do this, ask yourself the question, ‘If there were absolutely no pressure whatsoever, would I want to spend that evening going to a charity ball?’ If your answer is, ‘Yes, it would be great fun’, then you have your answer, and you can ring the person back to accept. On the other hand, if your answer is, ‘No’, ask yourself two more questions: ‘What are the consequences of me not attending the charity ball?’ and, ‘Am I prepared to live with those consequences?’ Remember that the consequences will be both positive and negative.
Consider the consequences
The positive consequences of not going to the charity ball might include the fact that you would be able to spend that time in other, productive ways. You might spend the time forming closer bonds with people who are important to you, thereby creating more meaningful relationships. Alternatively, you might spend the time advancing your knowledge and skill levels in some area of interest that is important for yourself or important for the overall progress of humanity. Or you might spend the time achieving a higher level of fitness so that you can be more productive in your life generally. Or you could spend the time resting and taking a break, so that you become a more relaxed, calm, and open person.
While these alternatives might seem self-centred to some people, it is important to remember that human progress would have been severely hampered had many individuals not been internally directed in their pursuits. In Italy, Leonardo Da Vinci might never have completed his anatomical drawings, mechanical plans, or paintings. In Spain, Antonio Gaudi might never have created such astonishing and beautiful architectural feats. In the United Kingdom, J. K. Rowling may not have written the Harry Potter series, thereby denying millions of children (and adults) the pleasure of exploring the empowering and imaginative themes in her books. All of these things matter. These personal endeavours accrue, all over the world, for the global progress of humanity. It is just that they are less obviously beneficial in day-to-day life than a charity ball.
The negative consequences of not attending the charity ball would include the likelihood of some people interpreting your decision as the act of an uncharitable, selfish, lazy, or uncaring person. This could have a two-fold effect. The first might be personal injury: if you think that other people might think of you in such negative ways, it might upset or wound you. The second could be injury to your reputation: if other people see you as selfish, lazy, or uncaring, it might damage your social reputation, and this in turn might damage your career prospects. Another negative consequence of not attending the ball might be the injury done to the recipients of the ball (that is, whoever the charity was raising funds for).
In the end, you have to weigh up these issues for yourself and decide whether you can live with the consequences, or whether a compromise might alter the consequences. For example, after weighing up these factors you might decide not to attend the charity ball, preferring instead to spend the time more productively pursuing your own endeavours, whereby you and the wider community would benefit more in the long run. If you were concerned about the injury done to the charity recipients by your decision, or the damage done to your social reputation, you could make a donation to the charity.
I suggest that it is not helpful to place too much emphasis on the consequence of what others might think and the personal injury arising from this. If you are like most people with a negative childhood, you place a disproportionate emphasis upon what other people think and your own distress resulting from their disapproval. Let me explain this distress intolerance. You probably think that you ‘could not bear it’ if someone thought you were selfish, lazy, or uncaring. So you keep saying ‘yes’ to things simply to avoid the distress of negative appraisal by others. But every time you reflexively say ‘yes’ you are doing yourself (and others) damage. You are preventing yourself from learning that you can tolerate the distress of other people’s negative judgements. So what if some people do not like you? We all have to live with that. You get over the personal injury. The cost of pleasing everyone means you never achieve what you want in life, and that might be a loss for the whole of society—not just for you.
Convey your preference in a friendly, clear, and relaxed manner
Once you have decided upon your preferred result it is relatively simple to convey it clearly and in a friendly manner. This might be something like: ‘Hi, Jennifer. Sorry I can’t make the charity ball. I’ve got other commitments that evening’. There is no need to give details of what your other commitments are; you are not a fearful child having to provide a detailed account for your whereabouts. You are an adult, an equal party, and it is enough that you say you have commitments.
Be assertive in conflicted situations
There is an infinite number of situations in which assertion strategies are helpful. A more potentially conflicted situation occurs when people feel others are somehow limiting or invading their rights, and where limits have to be set on the other person’s behaviour.
Joanne, who I quoted at the start of this chapter, felt that her mother was always ringing her up and being critical. The criticism was unrelenting. Joanne was either too fat, too lazy, too greedy, too selfish, too single, too career oriented, too upwardly mobile, and so on and on. In this situation, Joanne needed to work out her preferred result. She asked herself the question: ‘If there were absolutely no obligation or pressure to have conversations with my mother, would I want to have any?’ Her answer was that she would like to keep talking to her mother, but only if her mother stopped being so critical of her.
I suggested to Joanne that she could do two things. First, she could talk clearly to her mother. Second, she could put in place a system of reinforcement to encourage or deter certain behaviours of her mother’s, thereby ensuring Joanne’s own rights within the relationship. Before taking these actions we discussed both the positive and negative consequences that would be likely to arise from the actions, and Joanne decided that she could live with them.
In speaking clearly to her mother, Joanne chose to follow some steps that I suggested. She first made what I call a connecting statement. This is an authentic positive statement that connects you to the other person. You say as much that is positive as you are able while being truthful. This helps in two ways: it makes you feel more connected and positive towards the other person, thereby making you less likely to assume hostility in the other; and it makes the other person less likely to misinterpret your motives as hostile. It puts you both on the same side, rather than setting up a conflict situation. So, Joanne made a statement along these lines: ‘Mum, you know I love you very much, and our relationship is one of the most important things in my life’. Since Joanne’s mother was central in her life, she could make this connecting statement in a totally truthful way. However, for other situations it could be changed to statements like, ‘Matt, on the whole, I have found it very pleasing to work with you, and you have shown yourself to be highly conscientious in a number of areas’ or ‘Sue, I have enjoyed our friendship very much and I have really appreciated your willingness to offer help to me when I have needed it’.
After Joanne had made the connecting statement, she then needed to speak clearly, softly, and vulnerably to her mother. She was not to go on the defensive, but at all times keep a soft body language, and a soft gaze with her eyes. There was no need for hostility.
To help with clear communication, I suggested Joanne use certain guiding words at the start of each step. So Joanne ended up saying to her mother:
When you [ring me up and make critical comments about many aspects of my behaviour, such as when you say that I am too lazy, or too fat, or too greedy, or too selfish]
I feel [terribly upset and hurt by these criticisms, as though my feelings do not matter to you].
I’d prefer [that you refrained from making these sorts of global criticisms about me from now on. If you feel critical of certain things I do, as is your prerogative, I must ask you to keep it to yourself; there is no need for you to convey your criticisms to me].
How do you feel [about what I have just said? Do you have any comments or suggestions? Can you suggest any ways that we could make this happen?]
I want to explain why I suggested the steps outlined above. First of all, a sentence formulated as ‘When you …’ is a statement of specific behaviour; it is not an overall criticism. For example, you do not say, ‘When you are a scumbag, I feel …’ It might make you feel better, but calling someone a scumbag is a global criticism. It is not specific to particular situations, and it is like a total negation of that person. You must be very specific in describing the person’s offending behaviour. Do not get into blaming behaviour. Simply describe the problematic behaviour, preferably quoting the person’s own words.
When you say, ‘I feel …’, you are not expressing your surface emotion. Usually, the surface emotion is anger or hostility towards the other person because of whatever he or she has been doing. However, it does not help, nor is it accurate, to describe the invulnerable, surface emotion. This blocks clear communication, and sets up a ‘red herring’. It is better to describe the vulnerable emotion that is underneath the anger. When we are angry, it is almost always because we have been hurt and we feel emotional pain. Generally, the greater the surface anger, the greater the underlying pain. For example, a child may be furious (the surface, self-protective emotion) with a single parent for choosing an abusive partner over themselves. But, underneath, the child is upset, despairing, heartbroken, devastated, and inconsolable that the parent did not have enough love to protect the child’s interests (the underlying, vulnerable emotion).
People can spend a lifetime expressing the invulnerable, surface emotion of anger and never get any closer to solving the real problem: that of feeling disappointed, let down, devastated, and heartbroken. It takes courage and strength to express the vulnerable emotion, because it involves saying, in effect, that you are wounded and hurt. It means laying yourself open. Interestingly, though, if you allow yourself to be brave and express vulnerable emotions, the situation is far more likely to be resolved, because the connection is more direct. You can see your own pain more clearly, keeping the focus where it ought to be. The other person can also more clearly see your pain, and this builds empathy rather than hostility. When you get angry you drive people away from you.
On the other hand, if you express the surface emotion of anger, other people are more likely to go into counter-hostility mode, making resolution difficult. Not only this, but in getting angry you have effectively let them off the hook: they do not have to seriously consider your concerns and take responsibility for their own behaviour. You have allowed them to feel offended by your angry words, and to feel perfectly justified in retaliating with angry words. This, of course, leads to a greater escalation of the conflict without much hope of resolution.
‘I’d prefer …’ is simply a clear statement expressing the preferred result you have worked out beforehand. Again, the more specific you can be, the better. Give clear and concrete preferences where results can be observed and measured in behavioural change. Note that Joanne did not just ask vaguely for her mother to change her attitude towards her; she specified the observable behaviour of asking her mother to refrain from expressing global criticisms, even if she felt critical.
The next step, of ‘How do you feel about what I’ve just said …’, is about two things. By asking this question you are making sure that you have not overridden the interests of the other person, and you are ensuring that the other person has an opportunity to express any concerns. There is never any point in railroading a person for a particular result, as that person will passively resist it and undermine its later implementation. This step is also about working out how the result can be achieved in day-to-day life. It is about developing a plan of action for change. In promoting discussion, you are trying to get the other person to commit to a result and trying to get both of you to contribute ideas as to how it can best be achieved on a daily basis. The more the other person contributes to and invests ideas in the plan, the more that person has committed to a mutual result.
In the case of Joanne and her mother, both discussed how Joanne would behave if her mother accidentally slid back into making global criticisms. It was decided that Joanne would simply say, ‘I’ve got to go’, and end the telephone conversation immediately, thereby negatively reinforcing her mother’s behaviour. Alternatively, it was agreed that Joanne might give a clear warning, such as, ‘Mum, that is an overall criticism, and you know that if you continue down that path I will finish this conversation immediately’. Beyond that, Joanne decided there would be no engagement in debate about whether or not the criticisms were valid or invalid, as had always happened in the past. In the past, hours of conflict had been spent on whether Joanne’s or her mother’s interpretation of the criticised behaviour was the correct one. It was, ‘You are selfish because you did …’, and ‘No, I’m not selfish because only last week I did …’. It had just kept going around in a vicious circle.
In working out her preferred result, Joanne had decided that she did want a relationship with her mother, but only if her mother refrained from global criticisms. In other words, she was prepared to forgo the relationship with her mother if her mother was not prepared to change her critical behaviour. Joanne had worked this out at the beginning when we considered possible negative and positive consequences of being assertive with her mother. This guided Joanne into realising that she could assert her own will on the relationship; she did not have to be a passive recipient of criticism. In other words she could set limits, so long as she was willing to live with the consequences. Joanne realised that she could determine what she was prepared and not prepared to tolerate. She decided that there was to be no debate about the wrongs and rights of critical comments; the criticisms were simply not to be made. If her mother wanted to persist with global criticisms, as was her prerogative, she would need to find someone else to do it with. This forced Joanne’s mother to take some responsibility for her behaviour if she wanted to continue having a relationship with her daughter.
Identifying your preferred result does not mean that you become inflexible about it. There are many times when the process of discussion produces results that turn out to suit you even better than the one you thought of. For example, even though you cannot afford a pay drop, you may decide to tell your boss that you wish to work fewer hours as you are feeling too overwhelmed with work-task demands. On the other hand, your boss might suggest you work the same number of hours without any drop in salary, but start and finish earlier so you have fewer interruptions from telephone enquiries and can complete your tasks with less stress.
Working out your preferred result enables you to understand what is going on, and what you are prepared and not prepared to tolerate. It is about defining a situation from your own perspective—not the perspective that is being imposed upon you. Ultimately, though, using assertive strategies is about realising you are not a victim, you are not powerless, and that you can define your life and your relationships as you see fit.