Peer support no woman asked for

A field guide to female aggression and the foundations of coercive control

The belief that women are naturally better at relationships has given us no reason to examine how badly we sometimes behave in them.

I compiled this repository of articles for feminists, anti-feminists, non feminists and women with no interest in either camp because female covert aggression belongs to all of us regardless of our political stance. Men, I’m not leaving you out — this might help you understand what the hell is going on.

Feminists, you can’t smash the Patriarchy while upholding a toxic matriarchy. A movement that wants men to examine their use of power loses credibility when women protect the ways we control, exploit and punish each other while fluctuating between empowerment and powerlessness according to whatever works for us. Calling this behaviour internalised misogyny or blaming The Patriarchy gives women the perfect culprit for avoiding responsibility for our own actions and their consequences.

Anti-feminists...not so fast toward the escape route. Feminism didn’t invent female aggression. Women were competing, excluding, gossiping, humiliating and destroying each other’s reputations long before anyone had a gender studies degree. Intrasexual competition to secure the best man is just one of the factors driving our aggression. Remember the mean girls? Maybe you were one of them or maybe you were hurt by them. Some of those girls remain suspended in adolescence throughout adulthood and become your horrific manager or your frenemy. Traditional femininity gives the same aggression a different alibi. She calls it protecting womanhood and standards instead of feminism, and never has to look at her own conduct.

Feminists blame patriarchy and anti-feminists blame feminism, and both hand women an external culprit for female aggression driven by feelings we haven’t learned to examine or restrain. Anger, envy, shame and fear come with a bag of allsorts conditioned beliefs that can make another person responsible for our discomfort. Blaming an ideology saves us from examining what we are capable of generating all by ourselves.

This repository contains all my published research and behaviour-thwarting guides to date on female covert aggression and control tactics. Together, these articles show the many ways women use other people to regulate feelings we have yet to learn to tolerate, examine and take responsibility for, and why it’s time we did.

This is peer support you didn’t ask for.

Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash

The purpose

It usually starts small. A woman encounters another person whose way of being activates discomfort. I use way of being because virtually anything about another person can make a woman uncomfortable. She perceives that person as the problem, then reacts with behaviour that shifts the power dynamic in her favour and soothes her discomfort.

She might try to gain access to the person, establish herself as their equal, assume authority over them, diminish their standing or recruit others to help put them back in the place where she believes they belong.

The aggression is often outside the woman’s awareness because she views her conduct as a reasonable response to someone else. She believes she’s offering advice, improving an idea, protecting a group or correcting a problem. Her explanation allows her to interfere with another person while preserving her self-image as caring and well intentioned.

Narcissistic behaviour in a relationship or interaction, also known as interpersonal narcissism, centres one person’s comfort through attempts to control another person. It emerges when someone feels discomfort and assumes the person who activated it should change to make them feel better. The kicker is that she is probably unaware that this is what she’s doing, which makes pointing it out exasperating when you’re on the receiving end and can see it clearly. An immature woman won’t be able to see what you see because her priority is protecting her ideal self-image — I’m a caring and compassionate person who doesn’t hurt people.

This capacity exists in all of us. The task, which is not everyone’s priority, is to catch the moment when an internal reaction leads us to self-soothe by controlling another person.

Women receive little help with this because we’ve inherited the myth that we already possess the relational qualities required to manage it. It’s as though our comfort with discussing emotions (I know, not all women) means we have empathy, and that fluency in therapy speak proves we’re caring and mature.

If you read on, you’ll see why this myth doesn’t hold up.

The microfoundations of coercive control

Coercive control gets everyone’s attention once intimidation, surveillance, isolation, restriction or threats have formed a recognisable pattern of abuse. By then, the person doing it has supplied the receipts. Far less attention goes to the earlier manoeuvres that pass as a woman being caring, helpful and apparently burdened with standards everyone else keeps failing to meet.

Women can control people during perfectly ordinary interactions. A woman can question another adult’s judgement under the cover of concern, overrule her wishes in the spirit of compassion, appoint herself adviser without waiting to be asked or recruit group approval until resistance becomes socially expensive. She doesn’t need to issue a threat when disapproval, humiliation or exclusion communicates the consequences perfectly well. The other person works out the costs of disagreement and starts adjusting ASAP.

I describe these behaviours as the microfoundations of coercive control because they show how women establish influence, punish resistance, and train other people to anticipate consequences. Calling every intrusive woman an abuser would turn a serious construct into mush. Examining the behaviour carefully allows us to see women using the same basic moves that appear in the sustained patterns described by coercive control and abuse researchers, without assuming every woman who uses them will become an abuser.

She might sincerely believe she’s helping, protecting, educating or defending standards while using another person to settle her own discomfort. This allows her halo to remain perfectly in place while the other person feels pressured to comply to earn their peace.

Same mechanics, different costume — relationships, workplaces, communities, political groups. Pressure, status and social consequences, dressed up as whatever makes the target easiest to manage.

Photo by Katherine Hanlon on Unsplash

Relational skills must be learned to cultivate relational competence

I developed intellectual skills in learning how to investigate, debate, and establish the credibility of my knowledge during my scientific training. They helped me examine evidence and persuade other people that my interpretation had merit while being able to pull apart theories by spotting biases and holes in arguments. These are excellent skills for developing my judgement in assessing quality information but they certainly didn’t teach me how to relate to another person.

I learned about reflective practice through the rigour required to become an effective group facilitator. It helped notice my assumptions and suspend interpretations to attune to someone else’s experience and understand their perspective. I had to listen closely, test what I thought I had heard and notice when my own reactions interfered with the process and restrain them. This was mindblowing and an addicting process until I realised I was too invested in how people experienced me as a facilitator. So, I also had to develop emotional detachment to remain impartial and objective, while also engaging the group through a learning process.

Emotional detachment allows a person to think while someone else is expressing distress, anger, outrage, or a perspective that challenges their own. It makes genuine empathy possible because empathy requires enough objectivity to distinguish the other person’s experience from the story we are telling ourselves about it.

Without this discipline, we project. We hear another person through our own history, decide what her experience means and respond to our interpretation. We can sound deeply empathic while relating almost entirely to ourselves.

Women are prone to mistaking emotional expression and involvement for connection. We might feel strongly in response to someone, call it being empathic, and assume the intensity tells us something accurate about her. We validate her feelings, reassure her, offer solutions or tell her what her experience means. Each response can centre our need to feel helpful and bring her distress into a form we can tolerate.

Our caring identity can also convince us that we understand another person before we’ve made a serious attempt to do so. We act on the compassion we feel toward someone we believe needs protection while ignoring the person directly affected by our intervention. The certainty that we're helping removes the curiosity that would have shown us who was actually being hurt.

The feelings driving female aggression

Shame, envy and anger and their associate constructs provide information about what another person has activated in us. Trouble begins when a woman treats her emotional reaction as evidence of someone else’s wrongdoing and employs control and punishment to relieve it.

1. Narcissism and narcissistic behaviour

2. Covert narcissism

3. Shame

4. Envy

5. Anger

6. Cluster B traits

Aggression dressed as care

Female aggression often hides inside the qualities women believe prove our goodness. A woman weaponises compassion when she uses the language of empathy, care and protection to claim authority over another person, overrule her wishes or recruit others to enforce a correction. Her caring identity gives control such respectable cover that she might feel wounded when someone objects.

1. Soft control

2. Passive aggression

3. Attacking through praise

4. Toxic connecting

5. Toxic compassion

6. Toxic positivity

7. Shaming with toxic positivity

8. Toxic validation

9. Dumping feelings

Connection as a Trojan horse for extraction

Women don’t always attack the woman who threatens them. Sometimes we befriend her, praise her and invite her to collaborate, then help ourselves to whatever makes our preferred self-image more convincing.

1. Knowledge Vampires

2. Fake connector

3. Toxic collaboration

4. Feminist controller

5. Social Injustice Warrior

When the group protects aggression

A woman can avoid examining herself indefinitely when a group supplies the right villain and rewards her version of events. Tribalism provides excellent laundering services.

1. Enabling bullies

2. Female moral superiority

3. Responsibility laundering

4. Wound preservation

5. Virtue performance

6. Ideological conformity

7. Spiritual coercion

8. Feminist aggression

9. Dissatisfaction and domination

Women can explain these behaviours through patriarchy, feminism, trauma, neurodivergence, spirituality, compassion or good intentions but every explanation can become another hiding place when it saves us from examining what we did to another person.

We can’t confront female aggression while we keep pointing to how caring we are whenever someone raises how badly we behaved. Caring about people is no substitute for learning how to relate to them. We don’t get those skills for free just because we’re women.

I hope you enjoy this field guide to navigating female aggression, including your own.

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Hacking Narcissism is for people trying to make sense of and effectively navigate a morally distorting and chaotic age. When moral development is disincentivised, people lose reliable reference points for discernment and struggle to distinguish between what’s real, what’s performative, and what’s covertly shaping their perception.

Narcissistic traits are expressed in everyone (often referred to as Cluster B traits). They flourish during periods of moral decline because they help secure status, protection, and significance in environments where norms of what appears correct, rather than what is grounded in moral principles, regulate behaviour. The effect of this behaviour is experienced in all types of relationships, including in workplaces, where people can be punished for violating norms they never agreed to and were never made explicit.

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