The next emotion of failure is aggression. Yet aggression is even more villainized in peoples minds than frustration is, and ignores huge parts of how the human mind works. It’s seen as more dramatic than frustration, but it is just another part of what is a very natural aspect of how we function.

Aggression doesn’t mean violence. To exert our will in the world, even to decide to give to another or help another get what they want, is inherently an aggressive act. It isn’t wrong. Studies show that more so than even love, there is a need in human beings to be able to express and release aggression. Even more so than affection, aggression needs outlets. They have found a direct relationship between the ability to feel both. They have shown that your capacity to feel love and affection follows a direct ratio to your ability to feel aggression.

When you get frustrated it means your energy got blocked, and a very natural instinct is aggression. The energy has to go somewhere, but aggression isn’t synonymous with anger. We let ourselves feel thwarted, and often blame the world for it. So we let our aggression out in destructive rather than constructive ways.

Can you release aggression as deep sadness? Actually that’s a different emotion, but yes it must be honoured also.

I guess you push the threshold of your ability to feel? Actually, no.  To deny aggression is the pushing of a threshold, because you have to resist to keep whatever code of conduct you feel the aggression denies. So having that code is even in itself a sort of aggression against yourself, and tends to inhibit self expression. It operates on an assumption that if you don’t have that code that you will hurt people and do bad things. Most people who did hurt people, if not all that I ever knew, had very strict codes of personal conduct.

Aggression is a feeling, anger is an emotion. Anger is a learned behaviour when you feel aggression and don’t know what to do with it. They are not synonymous. When you are walking with someone you are attracted to and maybe have been dating only for a little while, to make the decision to grasp their hand. That is aggression. Aggression isn’t inherently hostile. It’s the ability and willingness to act on what you want, wilful action. But when we get frustrated we get into anger and the aggression will go somewhere, because we can’t wilfully act the way we want.

So instead we turn the aggression on ourselves, expressed as self rejection, or we lash out at people who often have had nothing to do with our frustration. Aggression has a purpose to carry us forward. If we can’t go exactly where we at first intended, aggressions proper purpose is still to carry us forward to self fulfilling action. It isn’t bad.

So we get frustrated, then angry, but can’t acknowledge the aggression. It then burns away and we get stuck and not go forward. Aggression being frustrated. Then feeding more aggression. ‘I hit a wall so I just need to try harder’, but that isn’t how life works. If you hit a wall you go around it, but you don’t stop and say I can never pass this wall. Or sometimes you do just need to say this wall exists for a valid reason, and I don’t have to conquer it.

Awareness would be the key component to either losing yourself to frustration, or reassessing and channelling it in an effective direction? Yes, so frustration and aggression aren’t bad. They are wake up calls to remind you something is very important. They arise when you are challenged, and we are inherently challenge seeking creatures because we are goal seeking creatures.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~