Anger is part of the self-preservation instinct. He is our internal border guard, protects the territory, defends and defines borders. One of the most highly charged feelings. Do not confuse anger and aggression, anger is a feeling, aggression is a behavior, i.e. manifested feeling.
Anger, like any other feeling, has a functional attribute (a message to act for us) - “take action to stop attacks on our well-being.” Who violates a woman’s internal boundaries and her well-being?
Anger becomes a problem when it is inadequate to the situation and clearly excessive, when it gives rise to more and more new problems and affects a person’s health and well-being.
Consequences of excess anger: muscle strain, hypertension, stomach ulcers, eczema, psoriasis, headaches, asthma (psychosomatic symptoms), depression, endless conflicts, social isolation, anxiety, psychosis.
Let's now talk about the underlying causes and processes, about secondary feelings. When someone hurt you or made you feel unpleasant and you swore only about this, this is normal and natural, but when a child or a cat “mischieves” and you yell at him for twenty minutes “for everything in the world,” it’s time to figure it out reasons. Let's look at some models of anger.
Family anger
Some children grow up in families where feelings of anger dominate and aggression becomes the norm. At first, children are afraid of their parents and their aggressive manifestations, then they learn and internalize this type of reaction to certain events in life, and already in adulthood they consider anger and aggressive behavior an integral part of their personality. Mechanism of identification with the aggressor. Sometimes, even a short period of time is enough when mom or dad were “out of order” (divorced, seriously ill, depressed, completely without work or money), anger towards the child became excessive and disproportionate to the specific situation.
Symptoms and signs
To understand that a person is showing hidden aggression, it is enough to take a closer look at his behavior, which is observed systematically in practice. Among the main symptoms and signs of suppressed aggression:
- No open conflict
- Hiding sincere feelings
- Ignoring
- Hidden provocation
- Failure to complete a job
- Random insults
- Sullenness
- Stubbornness
- Avoidance
- Touchiness
- Fake forgetfulness
- Causticity, sarcasm, inappropriate humor
A person who demonstrates this behavior is much like a child who is unable to resolve a problem constructively, find a compromise, or give in.
angry girl holds up her hand to stop pretator and end the cycle of abuse
Anger as a way to achieve a goal
Sometimes anger is a motivator to achieve a goal, but in most situations you can do without it.
Many parents are convinced that only shouting and physical force can get what they want from their child. “That’s why when you speak calmly and kindly, no one does anything, but as soon as you start shouting or getting angry, everyone immediately obeys and fulfills all demands.” Both husband and children))) But when in a family parents fulfill their desires through shouting and aggression, children quickly “grab” this model and successfully use it in their lives. Most often, this parental aggression hides self-doubt, accumulated irritation and the inability to express one’s demands without attack.
Drugs and medicines
Treatment of aggression is possible both at home and in a specialized clinic. However, any measures must be discussed with competent specialists. During the examination, the doctor will establish the causes and characteristics of the manifestation of aggression, study the individual characteristics of the patient, and develop a rehabilitation plan, during which some amendments and adjustments may be made.
Often, not only traditional methods of therapy (trainings, conversations, preventive measures), but also medications and medicines are used to eliminate symptoms.
The duration of treatment is determined by the severity and duration of painful symptoms, the presence or absence of a critical attitude towards attacks of aggressiveness in the patient himself, concomitant diseases, psychological and biological characteristics of the body.
As preventative medications that a person can take on their own, there are vitamins, herbal infusions, and various dietary supplements available without a prescription. Using antidepressants or sedatives without consulting a specialist can lead to the most unpredictable consequences.
Protracted separation processes
During pregnancy and in the first years of the baby’s life, the mother is in a symbiotic fusion with him, since for the child it is a matter of survival. It is unnatural for an adult healthy person to be in such a total fusion with another person, which is why nature designed the hormone oxytocin and its increased production in women during pregnancy and infancy. The hormone is responsible for acceptance, emotional attachment, harmony and calm. But when children grow up and become more independent, the woman’s hormones return to normal. She is no longer ready for the level of intimacy and fusion that she had before. Women have a need for their own personal space and a part of life separate from children. If this does not happen in reality, the child does not start the mechanism of gradual separation, separation from the mother, the woman begins to experience a strong and powerful feeling of anger. She realizes it through minor scandals with her husband, irritation with children and others, if of course she knows how to show this anger, or she restrains herself, accumulates anger and gradually unloads it into her body - muscle strain, armor, pain in the back, spine and chest. There is another process when a woman’s body does not have enough of the hormone “oxytocin” and there is virtually no parental instinct; in the first years, pregnancy and maternity leave are incredibly difficult. Those. there are two directions here - acceptance, love and merging in the first years with the child and further gradual separation in subsequent years. Where there is movement with slipping, we work in that direction.
What causes female aggression?
Bartolome Esteban Murillo, “Two Women at the Window” Illustration: Wikimedia Commons ...What is the effect of hormones on the brain and other sensory systems discussed in previous chapters? How much do hormones determine our behavior - both good and bad? In this chapter we will look at different hormones, but we will mainly focus on one, namely the one that is inextricably linked with aggression: testosterone. Looking ahead, I will immediately note that testosterone has much less to do with aggression than is commonly believed. And at the other end of the line is usually the hormone oxytocin: it has acquired a status associated with warm, kind-hearted and prosocial behavior. So, with oxytocin, everything is not as simple and obvious as they think...
Maternal aggression
In female rodents, the degree of aggressiveness increases during pregnancy and reaches a peak during childbirth. Obviously, such aggression reaches maximum values in those species that are characterized by the threat of infanticide.
During late pregnancy, estrogen and progesterone increase maternal aggression by secreting more oxytocin in certain areas of the brain, which again brings us back to oxytocin promoting maternal aggression.
I will give two examples that will illustrate the complexity of the endocrine processes involved in aggression. Estrogen is involved in the process of generating maternal aggression. But it can also reduce aggression, increase responsiveness and improve the degree of recognition of emotions. It turned out that there are two types of estrogen receptors in the brain, and they regulate its opposite behavioral effects. In this case, the quantitative expression of these effects is regulated independently of each other. What we see: the same hormone, the same amount of hormone, but with a different final effect. And it depends on what the brain is pre-tuned to.
The next difficulty: as we already know, progesterone, acting together with estrogen, promotes maternal aggression. However, progesterone itself reduces aggression and anxiety. One hormone, the same amount - and a diametrically opposite result depending on the presence of another hormone.
Progesterone reduces anxiety in a very clever way. Once in the neuron, the hormone is converted into another steroid, which in turn binds to GABA receptors, making them more sensitive to the inhibitory effect of GABA, and thus the brain calms down. Here is an example of a direct dialogue between hormones and neurotransmitters.
Female aggression with fists
Female aggression - apart from maternal aggression - is traditionally seen as passive, hidden. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a leading primatologist at the University of California, Davis, noted, until the 1970s. almost no one even thought to study competition among women.
However, females are often aggressive towards each other. This observation is simply dismissed with the help of an argument from the field of psychopathology: if, say, a female chimpanzee behaves aggressively to the point of killing, this behavior is explained by the fact that she is, um... abnormal. Or female aggression is seen as a hormonal “release”. In female chimpanzees, small amounts of androgens are synthesized in the adrenal glands and ovaries; supporters of the “release” believe that the synthesis of “real” female hormones occurs somehow inaccurately and some male hormones are also inadvertently released. And since evolution is a lazy lady, it did not bother to remove male hormone receptors from the female brain, and this is how testosterone aggression in women turns out.
Such judgments are incorrect for a number of reasons.
It is incorrect to think that female brains do or do not contain testosterone receptors simply because they share the same pattern as male brains. In females and males, androgen receptors are distributed differently, and in females they are denser in some areas. Evolution has very actively selected for the effects of testosterone in females.
More importantly, female aggression makes sense from an evolutionary point of view: strategically calibrated aggressiveness increases fitness. Depending on the species, females fight for resources (food, nesting areas, etc.), drive female rivals lower in the hierarchy to infertility, and kill other people’s cubs (this is what chimpanzees do, for example). And in birds and (rarely) primates, whose evolution has commanded males to be caring fathers, females compete with particular fury for such a treasure.
Interestingly, there are species of animals in the world - among them primates (bonobos, lemurs, marmosets, tamarins), Cape hyraxes, rodents (California and Syrian hamsters, naked mole rats) - in which females are socially dominant and behave more aggressively than males (often They are also physically stronger). The most famous example of social gender inversion is spotted hyenas; they were studied by Lawrence Frank and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley. In typical social predators (lions, for example), the females hunt, and the males only “come down to dinner” and they get the first piece. Among hyenas, males in a subordinate position hunt; the females then drive them away from the food they have obtained and give the cubs the opportunity to be the first to get enough. Just imagine: in many mammals, an erection is a signal of dominance, like “a man has come with a tool.” With hyenas it’s the other way around: the male gets an erection if the female terrorizes him. (“Don’t attack me! Look, I’m just a harmless male!”)
How can we explain female competitive aggression (whether in “normal” species or changelings with inverted social roles)? It would be logical to assume that androgens are to blame; indeed, females with modified sex roles have testosterone levels that are the same or even higher than those of males. Hyena cubs are born “pseudohermaphrodites” - this is not surprising, because before birth they were in their mother’s stomach, and there is so much testosterone there! Female hyenas have a false scrotum and no external vagina, but they have a clitoris the size of a penis, which is also capable of erection. And even more - some of the differences that are usually found between the brains of male and female mammals are not found in hyenas and naked mole rats. This reflects the fact that their embryos receive a lot of male hormones.
From the above, one could conclude that females in species with inverted gender roles behave aggressively because they are exposed to increased exposure to androgens, and, accordingly, the decrease in aggression among females of other species is explained by reduced levels of androgens.
And then objections arise. To begin with, we are familiar with species (for example, Brazilian guinea pigs) in which females have high levels of androgens, but they do not behave aggressively and are not dominant over males. In contrast, females of some bird species with inverted roles do not have elevated androgen levels. Moreover, as in males, individual differences in androgen levels do not predict greater or less aggressiveness in females, whether of a species with classical or inverted sexual behavior. In general, in females the level of androgens does not increase during periods of aggressiveness.
And there is logic in this. Female aggression is associated mainly with the reproduction and survival of offspring: first of all, it is maternal aggression, but also competition for a sexual partner, “home” places, food during gestation and feeding. Androgens disrupt processes associated with childbirth and cause confusion in established maternal behavior. As Hrdy noted, the presence of androgens puts the female in a difficult position: she must balance the advantages of aggressiveness with the disadvantages of its reproduction. Ideally, androgens in females should affect the “aggressive” areas of the brain and not affect the “reproductive-maternal” areas. This is exactly how evolution worked, as it turned out.
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Premenstrual aggression and irritability
Here we inevitably come to the topic of premenstrual syndrome (PMS): this is a set of symptoms that accompanies menstruation, when the mood deteriorates, irritability increases, and the stomach swells due to the accumulation of fluid, pimples pop up... There are a lot of all sorts of implausible rumors and legends about PMS. (The same goes for PMDD, a premenstrual dysphoric disorder in which symptoms are so severe that a woman is unable to function normally; it affects 2–5% of women.)
This topic is bogged down in two contradictions at once: what is the cause of PMS/PMDD and how is this syndrome related to aggression? The first question is some kind of horror. In general, is PMS/PMDD a physiology or a social superstructure?
According to extreme views (“it's just a social phenomenon”), PMS is entirely a product of specific cultural conditions. Margaret Mead pioneered this view when she argued in her 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa that Samoan women did not change their mood or behavior during menstruation. Mead sang blissful pictures of Samoan life, which portrayed Samoans as the most peace-loving, kind-hearted, sexually free primates east of the bonobos. And then anthropologists took the idea further by suggesting that women from any “loincloth” culture do not experience PMS. Well, if, accordingly, in some culture there is an uncontrolled spread of PMS (in the American, for example), this means that the interests of women are infringed upon and their sexuality is suppressed. Such views can even be criticized from the standpoint of socioeconomics; Take, for example, this pearl: “With the help of PMS, women express dissatisfaction with their oppressed position in American capitalist society.”
If we take the opinions of such extremists as a starting point, it turns out that in “repressive” societies those women who are most oppressed will suffer the most from PMS. That is, women with strong PMS symptoms should experience anxiety, depression, be neurotic, hypochondriac, sexually repressed, obedient to religious prohibitions, they hide from difficulties instead of solving the problem. In general, there is not a single decent Samoan among them.
Fortunately, the wave of such ideas has largely subsided. Numerous studies have identified shifts in brain chemistry and behavior that accompany the normal process of the reproductive cycle; Moreover, behavior changes both during ovulation and during menstruation. And PMS is an extreme, painful case of such modulations. At the same time, let us take into account that the symptoms of PMS, this natural physiological phenomenon, vary from culture to culture. Chinese women, for example, describe the effect of PMS as not being as strong as Western women (and it is not known whether they really do not feel so bad, or whether they are simply used to not complaining). Considering that there are over a hundred symptoms of PMS, it is not surprising that they are emphasized differently from society to society.
Other primates also show perimenstrual changes in behavior and mood, so it's clear that biology is at play. Female baboons and vervet monkeys become more aggressive and less friendly before estrus (monkeys, as far as I know, are not oppressed by American capitalism). It is interesting to note that among baboons only dominant females become more aggressive; subordinate females simply do not have the opportunity to express aggression.
These findings strongly suggest that shifts in behavior and mood have a biological basis. The social aspect is that they came under the jurisdiction of medicine, received the names of “pathologies”, “syndromes”, “disorders” and acquired “symptoms”.
What is the basic biology of PMS? The generally accepted theory indicates a sharp drop in progesterone levels as the regulation approaches, which means its sedative, calming effect is weakened. Based on this, PMS is the result of too sharp a decrease in progesterone levels. However, there is not much evidence to support this theory.
Another theory, which has some facts, is built with an emphasis on the hormone beta-endorphin: it is known to be released during physical activity and triggers the so-called mild intoxication. runner's euphoria. According to this theory, the cause of PMS lies in abnormally low levels of beta-endorphin. In general, many explanations have been proposed, but none of them provide certainty.
Now let's turn to the question of how much PMS is associated with aggression. In the 1960s Research by Katharine Dalton (who coined the term "premenstrual syndrome" in 1953) showed that women committed crimes more often during the perimenstrual period than at other times (which may only mean that they are easier to apprehend during such periods, rather than a greater propensity to commit criminal acts). Another study, a study of girls in a boarding school, found that a disproportionate number of reprimands for bad behavior occurred when the offenders were menstruating. Note that in studies conducted in prison, they did not distinguish between violent and nonviolent crimes, and in school, both disorderly conduct and tardiness were considered disorderly conduct. Thus, it is not yet very clear whether women become more aggressive during their periods or whether women who are naturally aggressive act more assertively during these periods.
Nevertheless, lawyers have been quite successful in using PMS as a valid reason for mitigating punishment and seeking “limitation of liability” in the courts. Here, for example, is the sensational case of Sandy Craddock in 1980: she killed a colleague, and in addition, she could boast a list of more than 30 convictions for theft, arson and assault. At the trial, it was discovered that Sandy, for some unknown reason, but fortunately for herself, for years had carefully recorded in her diary not only the days of her menstruation, but also recorded her trips to the city “in search of crimes.” As it turned out, these days coincided so much that she was given a suspended sentence and prescribed progesterone treatment. But the story didn’t end there: when her doctor reduced her dose of medication, during her next period Sandy was arrested for trying to stab someone with a knife. So what: again conditionally and again drip progesterone.
Indeed, judging by the results of all these studies, a small number of women experience PMS of such intensity that their behavior can be classified as psychotic, and the court must take this into account as a mitigating circumstance. Ordinary pre- and postmenstrual changes in behavior and mood do not particularly correlate with increased aggressiveness.
Translation: Yulia Abolina, Elena Naimark, Doctor of Biology. sciences
