Healthy Aggression: What Many Women Miss When Setting Boundaries
Updated: Sep 17
How to access your protective energy
By Jana Denker
Maybe just reading the word aggression makes you uncomfortable, like something in you is contracting. I know. But hear me out. I don’t mean becoming harsh, hurting people or imposing your will on someone else.
But something else: your protective energy.
Think of a lioness with her cubs. She can be soft and deeply attuned to them. She cares for them, plays with them. But when something threatens them, she protects. Fiercely. Her softness is still there. Both capacities belong to the same animal.
Many women are much more comfortable with one of these energies than the other. We may know how to care, understand and stay connected, while force, anger or the impulse to push something away feel far less familiar.
Healthy aggression
This is why I find what Peter Levine's work so useful. He uses aggression not as a synonym for hostility or violence, but for our capacity to act and protect ourselves. Levine also connects this energy with vitality. When access to this protective engery becomes difficult, we still may know intellectually where out boundary is while struggling to embody it.
"No, that doesn’t work for me." The words aren’t difficult. Standing behind them can be.
Healthy aggression matches the circumstances
Come back to the lioness, laying in the shade with a fresh kill. Hyenas approach. She lifts her head. A low growl. They come closer, she rises. This is my territory. Closer still, and she moves towards them. Enough. Back off.
She doesn’t attack everything around her or pursue the hyenas once the threat is gone. There is something to protect, and her response matches the threat.
There is a grounded clarity underneath it: This is mine. You cannot have it.
Of course, most of us aren't defending a meal from a pack of hyenas. But we do have territory. Our body, our time, our home, our work, something we have created, someone we love or a value we aren’t willing to abandon.
And this is where healthy aggression becomes relevant for communication. A boundary isn't only something we know, but something we express with our whole body and another person encounters it.
Your words say no, but every muscle apologizes for it
When I work with a client on setting a boundary, the sentence itself is often not the most interesting part. It’s what happens around it.
The little laugh before the no. The voice that suddenly becomes lighter. The explanation that arrives before anyone has asked for one. The shoulders that draw in while the words are trying to draw a line. Your words say no, but every muscle apologizes for it. And the other person feels the mismatch between a rehearsed line and the message the body sends. Very often this is where the boundary fails - despite the script. This softening is not a communication failure. But relational, we are trying to say no without disturbing the connection.
There is nothing wrong with warmth. Giving someone a reason can help another person understand us and keep communication open. But there is a difference between choosing warmth and automatically softening yourself because your own firmness feels uncomfortable.
And that discomfort isn’t always only about the conversation you’re having.
Firmness can rub against an identity built around being accommodating or easy to be with. If you have spent much of your life being the understanding and helful one, or the person who keeps things running smoothly, a clear no can feel strangely unlike you.
Interestingly, this doesn’t necessarily mean you have difficulty accessing protective energy at all. Many women who struggle to advocate for themselves become remarkably clear when someone they love needs protecting. A woman who softens her own no may have no trouble speaking up for her child, defending a friend or intervening when someone else is treated unfairly.
The force is there.
What can feel unfamiliar is allowing that same protective energy to move on your own behalf. Anger may feel incompatible with being loving. Taking up space can feel selfish. You can know intellectually that your boundary is reasonable and still feel uncomfortable with the version of yourself who expresses it.
This is another reason the right words aren’t always enough. You can practise the sentence in your head and know exactly what you want to say. But when it is your body in the conversation, the old response may still appear.
Sometimes the body needs a different experience.
Try this: meet your protective energy
This is a somatic exercise that can help you to reconnect with your protective energy.
Stand facing a wall and place both hands against it.
Begin to push. Not as hard as you can. Just enough to feel the resistance of the wall and your body responding to it.
Stay there for a moment.
Then, while you continue to push, say out loud:
"No. This doesn’t work for me.”
Don’t try to sound more confident. Don’t make your voice deeper or louder. Just let the resistance be there while you speak.
Release the wall and pause.
Then try it again. Push. Feel the resistance. Say your no. Notice whether anything changes in your voice or in the way the sentence comes out.
The point isn’t to practise being aggressive. It’s to become familiar with the experience of having force available while you speak.
You may notice a change. You may feel strong, uncomfortable, slightly ridiculous or unexpectedly emotional. There isn’t a response you’re supposed to have.
What interests me is the experience itself: allowing your body to encounter firmness without requiring you to become hard.
Come back to the lioness
I don’t think the aim is to turn a soft woman into a hard one.
I’m much more interested in increasing the range she has access to.
The lioness doesn’t stop being warm and caring when she gets up.
She simply knows when it’s time to get up.
You may also like 3 Types of Boundaries every woman should know.
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Jana Denker vor 3 Stunden
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