Assertiveness is an act of kindness.

This is an idea I keep coming back to, again and again.  It’s something I say at least once a week during a therapy session, and almost every time I do a speaking engagement, regardless of the topic.

In this article that I wrote several years ago, I talk about the different styles of communication: aggression, passivity, and assertiveness.  To summarize, aggressive communication is when you devalue the needs of others in order to get your own needs met.  Passive communication is when you devalue your own needs in order to meet the needs of others.  Assertive communication is a healthy balance, in which you acknowledge that the needs of others are important, while also recognizing that you deserve to have your own needs met.  Here’s a fun Venn diagram that demonstrates this:

 

Assertiveness is All About How You Deal with Anger.

Anger, like all emotions, serves a function.  It says, “hey, my rights are being violated and I need to protect myself.”  Anger comes to the rescue when something squishier and more vulnerable is on the line.  Let’s use a metaphor to explore this:

If you imagine an archetypal princess being rescued from a dragon by an archetypal knight, the knight serves an important role.  If the knight doesn’t step up and put his sword through the dragon, the princess will get eaten alive.

Think of the princess (regardless of your gender) as everything inside you that’s vulnerable: fear, sadness, hurt, and shame, to name a few.  And think of the knight as everything that serves the function of protecting you from injury: anger and jealousy, among other things.  No one would argue that the knight is bad.  In fact, without him, the princess wouldn’t survive.  But sometimes he gets a little bit overenthusiastic and mansplainy and the princess doesn’t get to express herself.

The knight is important.  But the princess is important, too.

Anger is a secondary emotion.  This means that it’s an emotional response to another emotion.  Usually, if you peek underneath anger, you’ll find one of the quieter, more vulnerable feelings is at its core: sadness, hurt, fear, or shame.  (Sound familiar?)  When anger is expressed in a way that isn’t healthy, one of two things happens:

  1. You yell. It alienates people. All you’re trying to do is get your needs met, but instead you burn bridges.  The person you’re seeking understanding from responds either with their own anger, causing them to engage in a contentious battle, or with a softer primary emotion (such as fear), leading them to withdraw from you entirely.
  1. You shy away from having a difficulty conversation. Your anger gets quietly buried, and your needs never get met.

 

Why is Assertiveness an Act of Kindness?

It is much, much easier to be aggressive or passive than it is to be assertive.  If you look again at the Venn Diagram at the beginning of this article, you’ll notice that when you’re either aggressive or passive, all you need to consider is one side of the story:

“What are my needs?”

Or

“What are your needs?”

It takes thoughtfulness to be assertive.  It takes creative thinking, wordsmithing, emotional self-regulation, and several deep breaths.  And because of this, when you’re assertive, here’s what you’re saying:

I value you.  I value our relationship.

I value you so much that in addressing what just happened, even though I feel hurt, I want you to feel respected and safe.

I value our relationship so much that I want to make sure my needs are met so that underlying anger doesn’t fester into resentment.

I value you so much that even though this is a difficult conversation to have, I want to sit and talk with you until we’ve reached a resolution – or at very least an understanding – that we can both live with.

I value our relationship enough that it’s worth the time and energy to work through this thing.

I value our relationship enough that I don’t want to tell myself stories that will make me angrier and angrier.  I don’t want to grow this antipathy towards you as those stories snowball bigger and bigger in my head.  I want to clarify your intentions, and my own, and I want us to try to understand each other.

I know that if I just lean into anger, my secondary emotion, I’ll explode and yell and you’ll feel betrayed, violated, confused.  I’ll do serious, lasting damage to our relationship, and all the apologies in the world can’t undo what I’ve said in a moment of untempered rage.   So instead I want to talk to you about my primary emotion.

I know that if I ignore my anger because I’m only valuing your needs, I’ll be scared of my own capacity for exploding, so instead, I’ll simply stop returning your calls or asking you on social outings.  I’ll minimize contact, and in a few years, you’ll be nothing more than somebody that I used to know.

It’s a lot of work for me to be assertive, and that’s not always work I choose to do.  Sometimes I simply minimize the amount of involvement I have with a person who has offended me.  Sometimes I rip into someone.

But I value you too much for that.