2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
In therapy, there is a client request such as "help me to be less aggressive", "I find it difficult to endure aggression against me", etc.
Before deciding what to do with your own and someone else's aggression, you need to understand what phenomenon we are dealing with.
Wikipedia provides such a definition of aggression - "motivated destructive behavior that contradicts the norms of coexistence of people, harming the objects of attack, causing physical, moral damage to people or causing them psychological discomfort."
From this definition, we can conclude that aggressiveness is always evil. As evil is the challenge of other people psychological discomfort. Non-aggressive people, of course, should, in theory, evoke affection and psychological comfort, like photographs of cats on social networks.
In Gestalt therapy, aggression does not initially have any evaluative load and acts only as an activity aimed at changing the surrounding world. Those. it is any activity of a living being - from the physical occupation of space in space, breathing, consumption of resources from the outside (water, food), to the removal of the waste of this consumption from the body.
One of the basic concepts of gestalt therapy is - contact boundary … This is the border that separates our body from the environment, the way we come into contact with the things around us, animals, people, the atmosphere. Contact in this case means any - visual, physical, auditory. Due to the fact that we need resources from the environment for life (while humanity has not yet learned to feed on a rich inner world), it is constantly necessary to somehow violate or regulate this border (move closer or move farther) to meet our needs (complete the list of needs can be viewed from Maslow and other authors, or you can feel it by listening to yourself), to make contact with the environment.
The manifestations of aggression are both a fight and a kiss, as well as food consumption and a request to give up a seat in transport. Aggressive behavior is any behavior aimed at satisfying needs. That is, in fact, any behavior. While a person lives, he contacts the environment, changes boundaries, defends them or violates them.
Aggression by the way of manifestation can be divided into the following types: active and passive.
If everything is more or less clear with an active person - a person indicates his intentions or takes what he needs in one way or another (buys, receives as a gift, obtains in the wild or from the depths) or gives other people (or animals) then, he considers necessary to give or refuses unnecessary, then with the passive the situation is somewhat more complicated - in this case the person does not designate his needs (realized or not), but tries to satisfy them implicitly - sabotaging other people's actions or refusing his own, does not refuse gifts, but devalues them, storing them in the farthest corner of the closet, while not expressing their true attitude towards the donor or other source of benefits, for example, the employer (in this case, the money can be lost or spent in gambling).
Fritz Perls (founder of Gestalt therapy) proposed a “food metaphor” to describe the cycle of satisfying needs: pre-contact (“I think I'm hungry, I should eat something”), contact (“there was an apple somewhere, but in the refrigerator, go to the refrigerator, get an apple "), contact (" bite into an apple, eat it, chew, enjoying the taste "), post-contact (" enjoy the memories of the apple taste, feel full ").
According to the result of manifestation (satisfaction of needs), aggression can be divided (for example, the “food metaphor) into:
- dental: what is needed is taken from the environment, and the needs are satisfied (a piece is taken off the apple, chewed, digested, we enjoy satiety). In relations between people, it manifests itself as a clear expression of their desires and satisfaction of their needs, upholding their boundaries and respect for other people's boundaries, the ability to freely communicate with those with whom you want and not communicate with those with whom you do not want.
- annihilation: the object of satisfying the need is destroyed (the apple is crushed in the fist, hunger is not satisfied), the need is not satisfied, we are looking for other objects to destroy, we eat instant noodles. In relations with people, with the exception of extreme cases, such as murder, it manifests itself as devaluation of people, refusal to communicate with important people through scandals, quarrels, insults and other ways to ruin one's life. This is not to say that this method is unambiguously bad - if a person is bitten by a mosquito, then swatting this mosquito will satisfy the need for comfort (not talking about Schopenhauer with him?).
- destructive: the needs are not met, but the contact is not interrupted either (the apple is thoroughly chewed until the taste is lost and continues to be chewed further). In relationships with people, it manifests itself as a dependent relationship, for example, living together with a chemically dependent partner.
Thus, aggression cannot be removed in therapy. But it is possible to develop those ways of displaying aggression that will contribute to the healthy satisfaction of human needs.
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