So it turns out..

I'm starting my business degree, well I've started my business degree. First up, a summer school paper, doing Business Communications. It has very little to do with business, in fact most of it I learnt during a stint of CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy) after D was born. But anyway we learn about how people communicate, the nuances of non verbal communication yada yada yada and yesterday we broached the topic of behaviour styles, and what conflict management suits what behaviour style (you get the drift right?)

WELL! there are 4 behaviour styles, Aggressive, Submissive (or passive), Manipulative  (submissive and aggressive rolled into one) and Assertive. Well 3 out of 4 are pretty self explanatory (a,a,s) but the one that caught my attention AND had a good 15 minutes explanation of it was the manipulative, now I'm going to assume you think (as I did) that it means they are manipulative, and for SOME you'd be right but for the majority they aren't manipulative, in fact they try to be as honest and up front as possible. But then there's the full explanation, it is caused by some negative happenings in the childhood (no one that is hasn't had negative happenings iykwim???)  the person would usually be submissive, choosing not to speak up if something makes them uncomfortable or upset or feel anything but happy, these people have poor self esteem that isn't helped through the usual channels (do something good = feel good about yourself) in general they're usually mistaken for depressed people with their general lack of happiness but on the flip side they have this aggressive side that comes out under pressure, explosive temper, uncontrollable moods prone to being more easily upset and difficulty controlling the emotions that they feel when dealing with others the list goes on! Not only are these types of people very rare, these people are also more often than not bipolar, and during an up cycle don't show ANY of these traits instead tending to be more of an assertive behaviour style (which is good, can be argued it's the "best" type to be) Well I was sitting there thinking, tick, tick, tick, tick, the longer my tutor spoke the more uncomfortable I was getting, she kept looking at me so I started to feel like she was plucking all of this out of my head!

Now behaviour styles are a funny thing, they're like temperament, part of who you are, the general makeup of what shapes you, of how you make decisions, react to certain situations. But there is some good news in all of this, you CAN change who you are at a basic level, if you were one of the others, why would you? In my extensive experience with various counsellors and psychiatrists I learnt with a lot of hard work and even more perseverance you can overcome any and all short comings in your head.

So it turns out we have an aggressive and manipulative behaviour types living under the same roof.. Life makes just that little bit more sense now.