The Aggression You Won't Let Yourself Have

Some people cannot disagree. Not in any large or visible way, but in the small situations where disagreement would be ordinary, where someone has gotten something wrong, or asked for something the person doesn't want to give, or is heading somewhere the person doesn't think they should go. The moment for pushing back arrives, and the person watches it pass. The word that wanted to come stays in the throat. Afterward, there's a particular kind of self-recrimination that follows: I should have said something. Why couldn't I just say something.

What's underneath this, almost always, is not weakness or lack of conviction. It's a fear of one's own aggression that runs so deep the person has stopped noticing it as fear. What they notice is the reflexive accommodation, the smiling agreement, the careful avoidance of any moment in which they might have to take a position that would land hard on someone else. The aggression is so thoroughly disclaimed that it doesn't feel like aggression any longer. It feels like having no preferences. It feels like being a reasonable person.

It is, in fact, a sophisticated act of management, and the thing being managed is the dread of what one's own anger might do if it got loose.

Two patterns I see often tend to come together, and together they reveal something the patient often cannot see while inside it.

The first is the inability to assert. Not just the inability to be angry, but the inability to take up the small amount of space that ordinary disagreement requires: to say no, to say I'd rather not, to say I see this differently. For many people, asserting feels indistinguishable from attacking. There is no felt-sense difference between drawing a reasonable boundary and detonating a relationship, because both register, in the body, as the same dangerous act: doing something to another person that they didn't want. The person who can't assert isn't lazy or conflict-avoidant in some superficial way. They are operating under an internal regime in which any directed force, even the most measured, is felt as violence.

The second pattern is what happens to the aggression that doesn't get expressed. It doesn't disappear. It goes somewhere. Often it goes into the body: the shoulders that won't unclench, the jaw that holds tension the person isn't aware of carrying, the lower back that flares whenever a particular conversation needs to be had and isn't, the autoimmune condition that worsens during periods of unspoken conflict, the depression that descends, sometimes, when there's nothing to be sad about, only a great deal that can't be allowed to be angry. The body has limited options for holding what consciousness refuses, and it tends to use what it has.

These two patterns reinforce each other. The aggression can't go outward, so it goes inward. The body suffers, which then becomes another thing the person has to manage, another thing not to make a fuss about, another reason to keep accommodating. The cycle is complete and self-sealing.

Underneath both is a third thing, which is usually the most painful to discover. The person living this way often carries a private conviction that their aggression, if it ever did come out, would be catastrophic. Not just unpleasant, not just larger than the situation called for. Sudden, disproportionate, ruinous. They are sure, often without being able to say where the certainty comes from, that they have inside them something dangerous, and that the lifelong work of containment is what stands between that something and the people they love. The accommodation is not weakness. It is, in the person's felt experience, a protective service rendered to everyone around them.

This is where Winnicott becomes useful, because he wrote about exactly this knot, and he wrote about it in a way that turns the usual moral framing on its head.

Winnicott's late paper "The Use of an Object" makes an argument that is easy to miss because it sounds so strange at first. He proposed that in early development, the child has to discover that the people they love can survive their aggression. Not endure it grudgingly. Survive it, in the sense of remaining intact, remaining loving, remaining present, without retaliating and without collapsing. This survival, repeated over time, is what teaches the child that aggression is not annihilating. It is, Winnicott argued, what allows the child to eventually relate to other people as separate, real beings, rather than as fragile extensions of the self that have to be managed (Winnicott, 1969).

The implication is significant. If the early environment did not survive the child's aggression, if the parent collapsed in tears, or retaliated, or withdrew, or made the child feel they had done irreparable damage, then the child does not learn that aggression is survivable. They learn the opposite. They learn that their aggression has the power to destroy what they love. And they organize their subsequent life around making sure it never gets out.

This is, in my experience, the actual source of the somatic patterns and the inability to assert. Not a constitutional gentleness. Not a moral commitment to non-conflict. A deeply laid conviction that one's own aggression is too dangerous to be expressed, because the people who first encountered it could not metabolize it. The patient has been carrying, often since before language, a felt sense that some part of them is too much. The accommodation is the lifelong attempt to make sure that part stays contained.

What complicates this further is that aggression, when held this tightly for this long, does sometimes erupt. The person who has spent forty years not asserting can, in the right circumstances, lose it. The pressure builds, the situation finally crosses some invisible threshold, and what comes out is, in fact, disproportionate. Not because the person is dangerous, but because aggression that has been refused all ordinary outlets does not arrive in ordinary form. It arrives, when it arrives at all, as flood. And the flood then becomes retrospective confirmation of the original belief. See, the person tells themselves. I was right to keep it locked down. Look what happens when I don't.

The trap is now closed on all sides. Aggression is forbidden because it might erupt. It erupts, when it does, precisely because it has been forbidden. The eruption justifies the forbidding. The forbidding ensures the eruption. Around and around it goes.

What depth-oriented work offers, in this territory, is something slow and counterintuitive. It is not assertiveness training. It is not learning to express anger in measured doses. It works at a different layer of the difficulty: the conviction, often laid down before language, that one's aggression is dangerous to the people one loves. What is needed, at the level the conviction lives, is something more like Winnicott's developmental scene played out again, in present time. The person needs an experience of bringing their aggression toward another person, in small, real, age-appropriate ways, and discovering that the other person survives. Doesn't crumble. Doesn't retaliate. Stays present, stays connected, stays themselves.

This happens, in the consulting room, in small increments. The patient gets annoyed at the therapist and risks saying so. The therapist receives it, doesn't apologize excessively, doesn't withdraw, doesn't punish, and the session continues. Nothing dramatic. The patient discovers, very slowly, that the small acts of friction they have spent their life preventing do not in fact produce the catastrophe they were braced for. The body, which has been holding a stance for decades, begins, in increments, to let some of it go.

The aggression you won't let yourself have is, very often, the aggression that would have made an ordinary life possible: the small daily assertions, the unspectacular pushbacks, the routine acts of being a person with a point of view. When that aggression is reclaimed, it doesn't make you dangerous. It makes you finally available, to others and to yourself, in a way that the lifelong accommodation never permitted.

That turns out to be a great deal less destructive than the years of management ever suggested it would be.

References

Winnicott, D. W. (1969). The use of an object. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 50, 711-716.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Tavistock Publications.

David Brown is a psychotherapist in San Francisco specializing in depth-oriented psychodynamic psychotherapy. He writes about the inner life, the clinical work, and the things hiding in both.