Aggression (2)

This is a follow-up to my previous post where I wrote about anger and where it comes from. Here comes the description of the three ways of letting the anger out (as described in the book "Women at work" by Anne Dickson): direct and indirect aggression towards others and aggression directed inwards. None of them is healthy and neither of them is good.

Stereotypically aggression is often thought to be the same as anger. But it is a separate entity. Aggression is one of the possible responses to the natural emption of anger. One of. That means that there are other possible ways of expressing anger.

"Aggression has become normal, accepted, expected behaviour. But [..] the intention behind aggression is to blame, defeat, punish, score, crush, humiliate, win. Aggression is misleading because it is often a defensive response to fear, anxiety, to a sense of powerlessness."

/Digression/
I had an example of aggression towards me at work yesterday. It was Sunday and I went to work to use internet for a few hours. The Engineering Postdoc was there, working "hard" ("working hard" is the Japanese concept of working long hours, longer than the working week in the European sense, i.e. longer than 45-48h per week).

I dared to interrupt him and asked whether he could help me to translate an email I received in Japanese. It was five lines. I tried the automatic translation first, but it did not work, it resulted in the incomprehensible babble. So I asked him to help. He first tried the Japanese way of indirect refusal and even before I finished my question he told me that he does not have "experience with that system". So I simplified my question and asked him for help with Japanese translation. That got me an aggressive response, he shouted at me that he cannot help me because he is very busy.

I was dumbstruck. Ok, I understand that he may not like the interruption when he is focused on something. But surely there are other ways to tell someone "no" without shouting at them. Was this aggression caused by anger by this interruption or by the build up anger for other things? Was this build up anger caused by me or by other matters, by his experiment not working, by his resentment to working at the weekend, or by his general resentment of me?

Maybe he has some fears about my employment there in the same position as him, when he is older and grayer then me. Maybe he thinks about himself as at the top of hierarchy of the group, and having a younger foreign female at the same level threatens his position as a leader. This is probably the reason why he had told me off a few times already. He tried to bring back the established order and show me where my place is.

Well I will have to deal with that somehow, I am not exactly sure how yet. But for sure aggression is not an appropriate response to a polite request for help and I will not accept such a behaviour. I have noticed that he only allows himself to treat me this way when there is no one else present in the office. Maybe I will make the way he treats me a public knowledge? I need to think about ways of dealing with him.
/End of digression/

Coming back to other ways of expressing anger. The second way to deal with anger is the indirect aggression, which has the same intention to blame, but it is less obvious and less loud. This could be expressed as sarcasm, put-downs, gossip, sabotage, non-verbal gestures.

The third way of dealing with anger is aggression with the intention of blame directed inwards. This causes the belief that "the fault, the inherent defect, the fundamental flaw must lie within. The inwardly-directed blaming is expressed as self put-downs, self-negating beliefs, constant moaning, a victim stance, [..] harmful habits, addictive behaviour, depression, suicide attempts."

Reading about this has been an eye-opener. I can recognize all of those patterns, and I can see that I have exclusively used the last one in my last two months in Japan. I guess a more natural way for me would be the sarcastic, indirect aggression, but with the language barrier no one would even understand my sarcasm among students and I would not dare to be sarcastic to professors here (I have read somewhere that Japanese do not understand sarcasm and they just see it as a rude behaviour).

My unconscious way of dealing with anger by suppressing it turned into the third pattern and thus led to all my insecurities. I am glad I have read this book and got some insight into how the mechanics of letting the anger out work. I shall stop being so hard on myself, just because I can hardly cope with unfavourable circumstances.

Now I have to find some healthy ways of dealing with anger, because I do not think that the reasons that cause this emotion will go away by themselves any soon. (to be continued in the next post)