Being Aggressive

There have been a few people in my life who found me problematically aggressive. In all three cases, this came up around my being distressed, and that distress being read as an attack from which the person then had to defend themselves. My experience, in each case, was of being upset, and then having to deal with someone acting like I had attacked them. It’s not a helpful situation to be in.

One consequence for me was learning that expressing distress was likely to only make things worse. If something hurt or frightened me it was better to hide it rather than risk the escalation and further damage. That was my experience in my first marriage, where making me tolerate the intolerable was very much the name of the game. I was always the bad guy, always wrong, always to blame and was told explicitly that when I was upset I got very nasty and aggressive. I tried so hard not to do that, but never was gentle enough about how I cried if that was at all visible.

I’m not sure what was happening with the other two people who did this. Possibly they knew that anger would be a fair response to what they’d done and so inferred it where there was none. I don’t tend to get angry, I tend to get upset. Any anger I have normally goes inwards, which is problematic in different ways. 

I suspect I’m not an easy person to read, emotionally. I know I don’t express pain in ways that register with other people. I can describe pain or distress calmly even when in the thick of it – which when I was giving birth meant I got no pain relief! So, I’m not surprised if I confuse people around making sense of my emotions. I don’t throw things or break things, I don’t swear at people or verbally abuse them when I’m upset, and I’ve checked with Tom and he says I am not a shouty person. So it’s difficult to know where this impression of anger and aggression is coming from, because I’m fairly sure it isn’t me.

Tone policing is an issue that comes up all over the place. It’s the unsavoury trick of making the delivery of the message more important than the message. I see it used a lot to shut down ‘angry’ black women who are talking about racism. The classic response is white-woman tears and expressions of fear about the threatening tone of the person complaining. It’s a way of shutting down conversations and treating the person who has been wronged as though they are the aggressor. This protects the person who messed up from having to apologise or make any real changes. It can even serve to validate the harmful behaviour that started the whole process.

Have I been experiencing something similar? I honestly don’t know. I think all a person can do with this is look to their own behaviour. It’s useful to think about the situations in which we think other people are angry. It’s also good to ask how we deal with justified anger, and whether getting things right is more important than defending ourselves from criticism. We all make mistakes. Wanting a free pass to make mistakes and be exempt from consequences is a really toxic way to behave.