The world is a confusing place. From reading news and generally observing life, it looks as if aggression is rewarded regularly.
The obnoxious driver with the flashy car swerves into the prime parking spot while the politician with the most venomously outrageous lies gets elected to power. Most of us don’t want to be that person. Their behaviour seems ugly and antisocial. We live is a society that promotes niceness as a tool for social cohesion and general happiness.
However, always forcing a smile and agreeing with everyone while failing to express our views and needs is a recipe for simmering resentment that, at the end of the day, leaves one unfulfilled and unhappy.
“It’s the quiet ones you gotta watch,” the late iconic comedian George Carlin once said.
It’s a cliché referring to the cumulative rage that can be released when a normally quiet, agreeable person explodes like a steam engine with a malfunctioning pressure release valve. Everyone gets injured, as a result.
Aggressive, knee-jerk, reactionary behaviour to challenges and interactions has the same catastrophic and injurious result by taking an opposite path to destructive results.
If we are too passively silent or abrasively loud, excessive niceness and its antithesis behaviour, abrasive aggression, can lead to resentful feelings when our needs and thoughts are unheard.
Resentment and anger are some of the base ingredients for chronic depression, substance abuse and, eventually, isolation from family and friends.
As a reaction to the stresses of navigating a complicated world, passive-aggressive actions are often a default survival position. Trying to disguise aggression as something more benign is a way of avoiding responsibility for consequences of bad behaviour. Being purposefully late for a meeting to inconvenience someone is an example of passive-aggression. There is always a handy excuse but the goal is to hurt someone specific.
In a perfect world we would use an assertive style to communicate with each other, expressing our thoughts and wishes clearly and directly while respecting and recognizing the wishes and beliefs of others. The assertive style of communicating, sadly, is not modelled by world leaders in business or politics currently.
Many psychiatrists have diagnosed current political and business leaders as psychopathic narcissists; a serious antisocial disorder that is not treatable. It’s a disturbing link.
Personally, reflecting on my life choices that led to decades of destructive, isolating substance abuse; it was the debilitating passive behaviour that stacked the odds against me. There was no chance of happiness or success because of the anger and resentment that my passivity fuelled. The self-harm of addiction is a vicious parasitic cycle that is bizarrely normalized.
The cause and effect of life is invisible to an addict. Unfortunately, mindfulness and self-awareness are not sold by the case at the beer and wine store along with the colourfully marketed products on the shelves.
Maybe the hardest paths lead to the best destinations.
I can assertively say assertive behaviour and consideration of other people’s choices is a path to a better normal, whatever that is.
Robert Skender is a qathet region freelance writer and health commentator.
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