How to Coach Yourself and Others Beware of Manipulation | Page 211

80. Giving Assent: Appearing to Cave In while Digging in Your Heels
Source: Dr George Simon
0 ne of the more difficult to detect tactics is
giving assent. This is a favorite tactic of the
aggressive personalities. (See
“Understanding the Aggressive
Personalities” and “Understanding the
Aggressive Personalities, Part 2”.) When a
person is determined to have his way but is
not gaining sway with you because you’ve
dared to call them on their aggression and
you’re holding your own ground, they
might feign the willingness to back-down,
back-off, or accede to your call for change.
This “okay, okay!” tactic is the disturbed
character’s attempt to get you off their back
by insinuating that they understand what
you are asking and are willing to accede to
it while they actually have no intention of
changing their stance. The eminent
researcher Stanton Same now pointed out
that assenting or false concession is a
shrewd way to appear cooperative without really meaning it.
For the aggressive personalities, nothing is more distasteful than submitting themselves to anyone or
anything. That’s the main reason their lives and the lives around them end up like a shipwreck. Cavingin is so distasteful that the best they will usually muster is a half-hearted or purely superficial assent to
what is being asked of them. Anything more than that is too much like surrender. It often takes many
long months of artful non-traditional therapy to bring such individuals to the point that they can
appreciate that “winning” in the long-run often involves conceding in the short-run.
Providing treatment to aggressive personalities who use the tactic of assent is a real challenge for
therapists trained in traditional modalities that advocate that the therapist not adopt an authoritarian but
rather an unconditionally accepting stance. What the aggressive personality needs to learn — perhaps
more than any other lesson in his life — is to genuinely give-in, give-way, or submit occasionally. So,
in the therapeutic encounter, they need to learn how, when, and where to concede. True concession
necessarily involves both the recognition of and submission to a higher power or authority. If the
therapist is unwilling to facilitate this during the therapeutic encounter, no such learning can take place.
In my early years as a therapist, I avoided the authority position like the plague. Then, after realizing
that my character-disturbed patients would probably never improve