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Maybe this is wrong, but it sounds like you were in toxic relationships, ones which you were able to escape by asserting your boundaries. Asserting yourself is
by bduerst 5y ago
Maybe this is wrong, but it sounds like you were in toxic relationships, ones which you were able to escape by asserting your boundaries. Asserting yourself is a little different than being hostile and/or violent, which is what aggression is usually considered.
In any case and semantics aside, congrats on removing relationships that were pushing you inwards and making you unhappy. Like the article mentions, brain pathways and behavior are like hiking paths, it's incredibly difficult to forge new ones and continually use them until it's normal.
- PaulHoule 5y agoI have been reading a lot of books by this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Stoller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Stoller and up until his late book Sexual Excitement: Dynamics of Erotic Life he uses the word Hostility to mean "desire to hurt others" whereas aggression is the desire to make your mark in the world (e.g. it is "aggressive" to try to put the soccer ball in the other team's goal.) By the time Excitement was written people started splitting the meaning of aggression to frame it as a bad thing (as Stoller said hostility was) and used assertion to describe the positive side of what Stoller called "aggression" and there is a short passage where Stoller talks about this change in terminology. Stoller uses the terms "hostility" and "sadism" for phenomena that are more common than people might think. If you ever get some pleasure out of causing somebody to suffer, even in some small way (e.g. flag somebody's post and imagine them suffering from the feeling they are being persecuted) you are being "sadistic."