Tag Archives: aggression

Another Aggressive Personality Primer

The aggressive personality is out to win and often at all costs. Such a mindset and behavior always takes a heavy toll on relationships.

Channeling Anger in Healthy Ways

Channeling anger in healthy ways is a major key to personal empowerment. But you have to first appreciate the true nature of this highly misunderstood emotion.

Constructive Versus Destructive Relationships

Some things are well worth fighting for. But there’s a way to go about this enterprise that builds as opposed to destroys.

Principled Fighting Defines Assertiveness

Assertiveness is fair, principled, disciplined, fighting. And it’s the kind of just self-advocacy coupled with mindful concern for the impact on others that defines healthy character.

Fighting Fairly Defines Decent Characters

Fighting is an integral part of life. But how we fight matters. Fighting fairly, with principal, and constructively, with care not to needlessly injure is what decent character is all about.

Managing Anger and Aggression

Anger is a widely misunderstood emotion. Some have maligned it as an evil in itself. But it’s one of our most basic emotions. Nature put it there for good reason. We become riled to mobilize ourselves into action to remove a threat to our welfare. But just as being too frequently or intensely anxious can be problematic, being chronically or excessively angry can also cause trouble.

Command 8: Fighting Fairly and Rightly

Over the years I’ve counseled many individuals whose life became a shipwreck because they never gained mastery over their aggression. Sometimes they were overt about it. Other times, they were covert in their aggression (for manipulative purposes). Either way, they made a mess of their relationships and brought untold pain into the lives of many. For these individuals, acquiring the controls necessary to assert as opposed to aggress was truly the task of a lifetime.

Externalizing Blame Can Have Deadly Consequences

The tragedy we witnessed two days ago is an old, old story becoming far too commonplace in our character-deficient age. We live in a complicated, demanding world and there are too many among us who never developed the character resources to deal adaptively with life’s challenges – especially failure – and to profit from their experiences, including their disappointments. It’s far too easy to just point a finger. And sadly, for too many, it’s easier still to place that same finger on a trigger and shoot.

Aggression and Covert-Aggression

Covert-aggression is a particularly insidious type of fighting. That’s because victims of it can have a lot of understandable difficulty recognizing it in the first place and then defending themselves against it once they sense it. Being the victim of covert-aggression can make you feel crazy. In your gut, you think someone’s trying to get the better of you or abuse you in some way, but you can’t point to anything clear and obvious to back up your hunch. And it’s also like getting whiplash: You don’t really realize what’s happened to you until after damage has already been done.