[Intro to Healing Steps Series]

When you are a target of relational aggression, the last thing the aggressor and her collaborators want you to do is speak out. The first thing you often lose, as a result, is your voice.

Step 1: Speaking Your Truth
Song: Backstabber
(For lyrics and more songs: www.soundclick.com/dreamsinger)

The very nature of relational aggression can make your objections seem trivial or childish. Depending on how covert the abuse is you can wind up sounding like a whining 4 year old in the back of the car with her sibling - “She looked at me! She touched me!” But it’s more than that.

Relational aggression is cruel and cruelty hurts. It goes beyond just names and words. It goes beyond someone’s opinion of you. Relational aggression seeks to hurt you through other people.

It’s one thing if someone thinks you’re this or that. You can learn to ignore that. It’s much harder to ignore other people’s treatment of you, much harder to confront the hostility, when it’s expressed through many people.

I don’t care what people think until it interferes with my ability to live my life or function adequately in my environment. This is what relational aggression does.

And what about that female directive to be nice?

The same dynamic that makes it more likely for girls to use covert aggression puts pressure on you to be silent, to not make waves, to not appear to be a bitch.

But you need to speak out. You need to speak your truth, first to yourself, and then to another. Because relational aggression is crazy-making. It undermines and invalidates you, attacks your ability to discern or make sense of your reality. To begin to heal is to take that back. Where relational aggression invalidates you, speaking out and being heard validates your experience, your perception.

“Backstabber” was a first step to finding my voice in this situation with relational aggression. I needed to write it…more importantly, I needed to sing it. There was a peculiar sense of satisfaction for me to be able to express this anger and the pain I was feeling through a creative venue…even if it was only to me, at first.

It didn’t matter that for years the only people to hear this song were my songwriting partner and me. I gave voice to the anger and pain I was feeling. That did its healing work, just the same. When you acknowledge what is inside you, a healing can occur that is nothing short of beautiful.

Sometimes the one who trivializes what we are going through the most is our own selves.

Don’t do that. You deserve better from you.

“Backstabber” isn’t the only song to come out of this experience. “Dancing Cranes” and “For the Sake of Love” followed. They are more loving, more understanding than “Backstabber”. But neither could have been written - at least, honestly - had I not given voice and audience to the anger and pain I felt in “Backstabber”, first.

It was the beginning of my healing with relational aggression.

When someone uses relational aggression, they are afraid of their anger. The first step of healing would be to give voice to yours.

[Intro to Healing Steps Series]

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