How Does An Aggressor’s Personality Develop?

Aggression results in many injuries and deaths, so it is important to continue to study how aggression develops. If you want to understand how violence manifests itself in a relationship and in other areas, you need to know how an aggressor’s personality develops. We also need to understand how they experience their relationships.

Research data shows that being a victim of or witnessing violence does not necessarily mean that you will be violent yourself in the future. However, studies also show that many aggressors do have a history of domestic violence (54%).

An aggressor’s personality develops in childhood and adolescence

Getting into a relationship is how we connect with the world, especially with emotional figures. From a young age, our connection system is activated in the face of a threat. When we are afraid, we look for the sense of security that our emotional figures provide, for example our parents.

On the other hand, this energy can sometimes turn into aggression. In this case, violence aims to get the emotional figure’s attention so that they can help.

It seems that especially borderline and antisocial aggressors have an insecure connection. This characterizes their way of bonding with emotional figures.

When this type of insecure connection is combined with exposure to violence, humiliation, and detachment, it can lead to personality disorder and violent behavior.

According to Dutton (2003), these factors together lead to a “diffuse identity.” In these cases, violence and emotional distance feed a vicious circle that destroys relationships.

What kind of background do aggressors have?

As we know, our experiences with emotional figures help to define our personality. According to Dutton (2003), there are many precedents regarding the family experiences of aggressors and the psychological and physical episodes they produce:

• Rejection and Humiliation : Low self-esteem, anger, and blaming external factors. Lack of emotional regulation, tendency to be violent and emotionally abusive often.
• Insecure connection : They are often jealous, feel anger, and want control.
• Victim and/or witness of physical violence: they have memories of patterns of violence and do not have positive resolution strategies. They have little empathy for victims of violence and tend to abuse, among other things.

• Rejection, humiliation and insecure connection: violence is central to their intimate relationships.
• Rejection, humiliation, insecure connection and victim and/or witness of physical violence: the integrity of their ego depends on the relationship, so check, mistreat and persecute them.

When the aggressor is afraid of being abandoned, it causes the need to control and hurt the victim.

The role of values ​​when it comes to violence and the effect on the personality of the aggressor

A young person with an insecure connection develops a value system that justifies how they see the world. Therefore, it also justifies the relationships they have with their partners.

These values ​​are transmitted through their family, peers, school, movies, and so on. Key values ​​associated with domestic violence include:

• Male superiority: including the myth of Superman, the husband as the breadwinner, tolerance for male promiscuity, control over the relationship and the right to demand domestic services from their partner.
• Way to understand violence: among other things, bad mood causes violence, men are often naturally jealous, breaking things is not aggression, and sometimes there are no alternatives.
• How they view women: Women are manipulative and see men as sources of money, feminists hate men and women like to be dominated or are just as violent as men, among other things.

Why aggressors resort to domestic violence

According to Holma et al. (2006), aggressors justify their violence in six ways:

• They believe that violence is natural.
• Violence is related to an aggressor’s inability to control some difficult situations.
• The aggressors believe they have been cornered.
• Their partner had upset them.
• They temporarily lost control.
• They use their traumatic past or stress to justify themselves.

It’s important to keep in mind that it’s not about winning the fight against the aggressor, it’s about doing what’s best for you. All violence is negative. Understanding how your aggressor’s personality has evolved is important.

When a victim of violence seeks help, professionals try to increase their self-esteem and self-confidence so that they can regain control over their lives.