Category: Anger Management

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Signs of an Emotionally Aggressive Relationship

emotionally aggressive anger management emotional aggression

Emotional aggression is the aggressive use of our own emotional states in an attempt to manipulate or control others, or in an attempt to make others responsible for our moods. If I hold others responsible for my emotional state, I am being emotionally aggressive. Likewise, if I attempt to control the emotional states of others against their will, I am being emotionally aggressive.

If you have beliefs that are leading you to react in ways that are emotionally aggressive, you may choose to challenge those beliefs so that you may replace them with new beliefs that do not lead to emotionally aggressive consequences.

One of the tenets of mindfulness is the realization that we are not our thoughts, and we are not our feelings. Thoughts and feelings are simply processes of the mind. We can choose to pay attention to those processes, or we can choose to ignore them.

Here’s a way to demonstrate that you are not your thoughts. Suppose I tell you that for the next ten minutes you are to avoid having any thoughts. Now further suppose that you attempt to avoid having any thoughts for ten minutes. About two or three minutes into this exercise, you catch yourself having a thought.

When you realize that you had a thought, what part of you is it that recognized that you had a thought? It couldn’t be your thoughts, because the thoughts are what you recognized. So that means that there is another part of you that is independent from your thoughts. This part of you is what practitioners of mindfulness call your True Self. The True Self is what recognized you were having a thought. The True Self is independent of your thoughts.

Your True Self is who you would be if you could ‘get out of your own way’ and live the life you were meant to live. Your True Self is who you are when you strip away all the masks that you put on in day-to-day life and get down to the business of being who you were meant to be.

Think for a moment about your own True Self. Suppose you could be anyone you wanted to be. Who would you choose to be? What things are keeping you from living in your True Self? When you act in an emotionally aggressive manner, are you being your True Self?

One way to tell if a belief is keeping you from being the person you were meant to be, is to consider the consequences of that belief. Most emotional aggression comes from beliefs that we can change the behavior of other people. In fact, the very definition of emotional aggression is: “Using our own emotional states in an attempt to control the behavior of others.” Emotional aggression occurs when others refuse to live up to our expectations of how we believe they should behave and what they should feel.

One of the marks of an addiction to emotional processes is the belief that we can and should tell others how to feel and what to think. If we have such beliefs, and if people fail to meet our expectations, the result can be emotional aggression. That is to say that we get frustrated that others in our lives resist our attempts to control their behavior, and we may react by becoming angry, or sad, or frustrated.

Because these beliefs are often embedded in processes that have become automatic, it may sometimes be difficult to identify those beliefs. The questions below may help you to identify some of these beliefs and patterns of behavior.

The first five questions are for your partner (if you have one). If your partner is willing to answer these questions, have him or her do so. If your partner is not willing, try to answer those questions as well as you can, based on what you think your partner would say.

The rest of the questions are for you to answer. Be as honest with yourself as you can in answering.

Sings of an Emotionally Aggressive Relationship

Does your partner:

  • Feel afraid of you much of the time?
  • Avoid certain topics out of fear of upsetting you?
  • Feel that they can’t do anything right for you?
  • Feel emotionally numb or helpless?
  • Feel trapped or imprisoned?

Do you:

  • Humiliate, criticize, or yell at your partner?
  • Use abusive language
  • Ignore your partner’s answers
  • Mock or call your partner names
  • Yell, swear, interrupt or change the subject by turning blame back onto your partner?
  • Become emotionally aggressive towards your partner?
  • Twist your partner’s words?
  • Tell your partner what to think and how to feel?
  • Put your partner down in front of other people?
  • Say bad things about your partner’s friends and family?
  • Treat your partner so badly that your partner is embarrassed for your friends or family to see?
  • Ignore or put down your partner’s opinions or accomplishments?
  • Blame your partner for your own abusive behavior?
  • Make light of your own behavior and not take your partner’s concerns about it seriously?
  • Deny that the emotional aggression happened?
  • Shift responsibility for your behavior, or say that your partner caused it?
  • See your partner as property or a sex object, rather than as a person?
  • Have a bad and unpredictable temper?
  • Hurt your partner, or threaten to hurt or kill your partner?
  • Hit, slap, kick, choke, push, punch, beat, or restrain your partner to keep them from leaving?
  • Destroy furniture, punch holes in the walls, or damage your partner’s possessions?
  • Use the children or other family members against your partner?
  • Lock your partner out of the house?
  • Threaten to take your partner’s children away or harm them?
  • Threaten to harm other family members or family pets?
  • Threaten to commit self-harm, up to and including suicide, if your partner leaves?
  • Force your partner to have sex against their will?
  • Destroy your partner’s belongings?
  • Use blaming, shaming or guilt-tripping to control your partner?
  • Act excessively jealous and possessive?
  • Control where your partner goes or what your partner does?
  • Keep your partner from seeing their friends or family?
  • Make rules that it is impossible for your partner to keep?
  • Punish your partner for not keeping these impossible rules?
  • Force your partner into decisions they may not be ready to make?
  • Always insist on being right?
  • Refuse to ‘agree to disagree’?
  • Follow your partner to see what they’re doing and where they’re going?
  • Refuse to leave when asked?
  • Limit your partner’s access to money, the phone, or the car for other than budgetary reasons?
  • Withhold money as a means of control
  • Refuse to let your partner work, or interfere with your partner’s job?
  • Show up at your partner’s job to cause trouble?
  • Constantly check up on your partner?
  • Go through your partner’s emails, cell phone record, text messages, or other communications?

If you checked more than five items on the list above, you may have difficulties managing your emotional aggression towards yourself and towards others.

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Process Addictions

process addiction and emotional aggression

Emotional aggressors can sometimes become addicted to their gaslighting behaviors.

The three major symptoms of an addiction are withdrawal, tolerance, and loss of control. In substance abuse, “withdrawal” manifests in physical and psychological symptoms upon abstaining from the drug of choice. “Tolerance” means that it takes more and more of the same drug to get the same effect. “Loss of control” means that as a person becomes addicted to a substance, they start giving up other things in pursuit of the next “high.”

People with addiction issues lose control over their behavior to the point that their drug of choice is the only thing that matters. They’ll forsake family, friends, work, school and any social interaction in pursuit of their drug of choice.

With emotional aggressors the “high” comes from manipulating others emotionally. For the emotional aggressor, withdrawal manifests as getting irritated, upset or angry when they can’t control you. Tolerance shows up as needing more and more control over the emotional states of others to get the same “high.”

Eventually this leads to loss of control. The emotional aggressor becomes more and more abusive over time, losing control of their ability to respect appropriate boundaries. Over time loss of control means that the gaslighting behaviors have become automatic. They don’t have to think about it and may not even be aware that they’re doing it.

Sometimes these automatic emotional processes can become what is known as process addictions. Robert Minor (2007) defines process addiction as:

“A process becomes an addiction when the process becomes the center of life, the most important reasons for living, when a person becomes dependent upon the process for mood-altering relief from the rest of life. For someone addicted to a process, the process with all its using activities substitutes for taking actions that would change the circumstances of one’s personal life and society that demand addictions to relieve the distress.”

What this means is that emotional aggression can become a conditioned response to a given emotional situation. If emotional aggression is consistently used as an anxiety-management strategy in your interactions with others, then you may be in danger of developing a process addiction. Conversely, if your partner or loved one seems to go on auto pilot whenever there’s a problem that needs to be addressed, they might have a process addiction.

How do you recognize a process addiction? If you’ve ever found yourself interacting with your partner or another friend or family member in a predictable pattern, there may be a process addiction at work. This is especially true if you are using emotionally aggressive responses in such a situation.

Suppose you’ve had an argument so many times that you can predict what your partner is going to say, and your partner can predict what you’re going to say. In other words, you’ve had this argument so many times that it’s almost as if there is an unwritten script somewhere that dictates your responses to each other. You keep going through the motions of this argument, but nothing ever gets resolved. Does this sound familiar?

I call such arguments Index Card Arguments, because it’s as if you’ve both written the argument down on an index card somewhere. You know that if you say this, your partner is going to say that, and your partner knows that if they say that, you’re likely to say this. If you could agree to write these arguments out on index cards and number them, you could both save yourselves a lot of time by saying, “Okay, we both know how this argument is going to turn out, so let’s just skip the argument and say that we had Index Card Argument #45, and take it from there.”

If you find yourself constantly having Index Card Arguments, it could be a sign that there is a process addiction occurring.

If nothing ever gets resolved from these repetitive arguments, then ask yourself honestly why you continue to engage in them. Do you feel better afterwards? Do these arguments cause you to feel more keyed up and anxious? Do they change your emotional state in any way? Are they taking your mind off of anxiety, depression, or bad feelings?

If you or your partner are using emotionally aggressive arguments as a means of managing your mood, then you may have a process addiction.

Minor, Robert N. (2007). When Religion is an Addiction. Humanity Works, St. Louis, MO.

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Emotional Aggression and Gaslighting

emotional aggression and gaslighting

One of the concepts we frequently talk about in Mindfulness-Based Ecotherapy is emotional aggression.

Emotional aggression and gaslighting usually go hand-in-hand. Gaslighting is used to perpetuate a perpetrator’s emotional aggression.

Emotional aggression is the aggressive use of our own emotional states in an attempt to manipulate or control others, or in an attempt to make others be responsible for our moods.

If I hold others responsible for my emotional state, I am being emotionally aggressive. Likewise, if I attempt to control the emotional state of others against their will, I am being emotionally aggressive. The Emotional Aggression Questionnaire allows you to assess whether or not you are prone to act in emotionally aggressive ways. Some statements emotionally aggressive people might make include:

“I won’t be happy until you do _ for me.”
“It’s your fault that I feel this way.”
“You made me feel _”
“You just need to stop feeling this way.”
“We’d get along just fine if you’d do things my way.”
“You have no right to be angry at me.”

People who are being emotionally aggressive usually rely on gaslighting to manipulate others with their emotions.

People who have been gaslit often feel anxious or depressed. Victims of gaslighting can develop mental health problems, including substance abuse issues and even thoughts of suicide. For this reason it is important to recognize what emotional aggression is and to be familiar with its dynamic when working with patients and clients.

Some of the signs of gaslighting include:

  • Doubting that your feelings and your reality are accurate or valid
  • Feeling that you’re just being too sensitive
  • Believing that you have no right to feel the way you do
  • Questioning your own judgment and choices
  • Questioning your own perceptions
  • Being afraid to speak up because it might cause conflict with someone who is being emotionally aggressive
  • Emotional cutoffs – shutting down in conversations about emotions because you don’t feel heard or valued
  • Feeling vulnerable and insecure
  • Feeling you’re always “walking on eggshells” when dealing with a person who is being emotionally aggressive
  • Feeling isolated and powerless
  • Doubting your own sense of self-worth and instead believing what an emotionally aggressive person is telling you about yourself
  • Being disappointed in yourself and who you have become – this is especially true if you fear disappointing an emotionally aggressive person
  • Feeling confused most of the time when talking to an emotionally aggressive person
  • You’re always “waiting for the other shoe to drop;” expecting something bad to happen all the time
  • You feel like you are never good enough and you’re always apologizing
  • You second-guess yourself and find it hard to make decisions
  • You assume others are disappointed in you and never seem to be able to give yourself the benefit of the doubt
  • You wonder what’s wrong with you
  • You eventually give up on making your own choices and instead leave the decision-making to the emotionally aggressive person

If you recognize any of these signs, you may be the victim of an emotionally aggressive person. Next time we’ll talk about some common statements used by emotionally aggressive people and how to deal with them.

Grampian Women’s Aid: Coercive Control: 10 Signs It’s Gaslighting
http://www.grampian-womens-aid.com/newsevents/gaslighting-10-signs