Aggression is my nemesis. I cannot experience it in any normal manner and fear it more than anything else. I believe our society does not understand aggression and deals with it badly, if at all. To me it is a mistake to equate aggression with violence, even though it is one of its faces. As I understand it, it is a drive, an energy. It can be used to fuel courage, it can be used to achieve goals, it can be used to fulfill needs, it can be used to defend oneself and their boundaries when needed. And it can also be used to do harm. It is not connected solely to anger, but also to joy, love or passion. Intellectually I see this as an integral human thing, neither good nor bad. And I’m so deeply terrified of it!

(It's getting weird with the definition itself, though. Google and wiki seem to know mostly the aggression=violence meaning, only occasionally there is an article or two from the perspective I am using, some thesauri do include such a wide definition, but I'm getting confused. Can be a language thing, I'm not a native speaker and I'd wager there's a subtle connotation change. But I don't know of a different English equivalent. Boldness does not encompass it. It's surprisingly frustrating)

Anyway, what I often see around me is a multitude of people who try to get ahead by being passive-aggressive rather than assertive, who then go home and consume violent movies – and to their eyes that makes them good. And then, from time to time someone explodes with all the suppressed rage around, so we send them to anger management courses. It points me to a systematic mismanagement of this principle.

From previous experience with other rejected parts of myself, accepting and cultivating is the way. But I am so afraid of getting lost in it. I am afraid of losing myself to it. It’s all those stories you hear of cruelty, organized mass murder, war atrocities – and then you realize those are just ordinary people, like me or you, just put in an environment where to them this was…. acceptable. What makes them any different? What makes me different? If I were in a frenzied crowd screaming for blood, would I join in? If I “knew” it’s OK to do so, would I set people on fire? And what if I had been hurt by those people? Would that be enough turn me into someone like that?

How do I tackle this huge amorphous blob of a concept?