The Assertiveness Delusion: How Behaviour Science Dehumanised Us and Called It Empowerment

You know that humanity has lost its soul when decency and kindness have been replaced with assertiveness training to survive in the socially engineered jungle of Homos Productivus.

You feel it in the workplace. You want to keep your job or get ahead? Forget about the old-style values of integrity and competence! Learn to be more assertive!

You feel it in the business world. Is no longer a matter of what new good solution you bring to the world’s problems – you just have to assert dominance over the market.

The Virus of Assertiveness and What Is It Transforming Us Into?

There are many misleading teachings in human psychology and therapy pretending to help you overcome the pain and misery unleashed by the powers behind the approved science of what human life is and how it should be lived.

One such misleading teaching is “assertiveness training”. Learning to become more assertive.

The Context

Assertiveness training was born out of behaviour therapy. It began in 1949 with Andrew Salter, whose book Conditioned Reflex Therapy presented assertiveness as a tool to “treat” what he called “inhibitory personalities” — people suffering from anxiety, shyness, or emotional restraint. He believed these traits could be unlearned through stimulus-response conditioning – echoing material science’s logic that the human is nothing more than an evolved animal.

Salter’s ideas were later adopted by Joseph Wolpe, a South African psychiatrist active in the 50’, known for treating so-called “neuroses” — a catch-all term at the time encompassing anxiety, phobias, guilt, submissiveness, depression, and the many unrecognised signs, at the time, of trauma.

Drawing heavily on Pavlov’s classical conditioning, Joseph Wolpe developed “systematic desensitisation” — a repeated, gradual exposure to anxiety-inducing situations while being taught to relax.

A gaslighting of the sufferer into ignoring the causes behind their symptoms and distrusting their natural alarm systems. A program of psychological domestication training the sufferer to adapt to traumatic realities they had every right to resist.

The Context of Behavioural Supremacy

The behavioural sciences of the 1950s emerged as a mechanism to explain away inequality without threatening the systems that produced it. Cloaked in academic language and data-driven objectivity, this school of thought recast social failure as psychological failure, and poverty as evidence of individual defect — not systemic dysfunction.

Trauma, when acknowledged at all, was framed as maladjustment — a personal inability to cope, rather than a rational response to violence, oppression, or deprivation. The underlying assumption was clear: those who suffered were not victims of structural injustice, but of their own poor conditioning, inferior intelligence, or pathological personality traits.

This perspective, rooted in an unspoken but ever-present class supremacy, treated the lower classes not just as economically disadvantaged but as psychologically inferior stock — a population to be studied, reprogrammed, and made socially functional within the confines of their economic cage.

The result? A science focused on individual behaviour modification, not structural reform. A science of control masquerading as care. Rehabilitation instead of justice. Conditioning instead of compassion.

Beneath the clinical detachment was an unspoken social eugenics: fix the poor, not the poverty; treat the victim, not the perpetrator; uphold the system, kill the soul.

Behaviour therapy, the clinical lab coat of post-war psychology, provided the perfect stage for such theories. It reduced the human psyche to a set of conditioned behaviours, and assertiveness became its golden child — later mass-marketed in the 1970s through a wave of self-help books as the universal cure for timidity, social anxiety, depression, and low self-worth.

But beneath the surface of this seemingly empowering concept lies a deeper question:
What exactly were we being trained out of — and into?

The Untold Version

After decades of studying the effects of trauma on human behaviour – aka “neurosis”, therapists discovered that one of the many patterns all victims of trauma had in common, was a shattered psyche. A fragmented, shallow version of self. A shadow of what they used to be before the trauma. As such, suffered greatly with low self-esteem and confidence, lost the sense of self-direction in making decisions, live in constant fear of being disapproved and rejected, and mould into an inauthentic version of them/ourselves: ‘the people-pleasers’.

The pattern: Since the psyche of the trauma survivor is shattered and the locus of power and authority over their life was no longer with them but with the world, with the perpetrators, the little self-defence they/we have left at our disposal are the natural remaining survival mechanisms:

Freeze: Because by virtue of being assaulted, violated, transgressed, we’ve been deprived of the first round of self-defence: fight or flight.

Fawn: Appeasing or pleasing others to avoid conflict or rejection.

Avoidance: Doing or not doing what we would like or normally do in order to avoid danger, people, confrontations.

Denial or Escapism: When you feel powerless in a world denying your right to be who you are and are meant to be without being punished for it, your options are limited to either paying in kind, denying this cruel reality, or/and escaping in a world of your own making where this world and its cruel people cannot touch you.

Rationalisation: Creating logical explanations for irrational or harmful behaviours:

“She didn’t mean that. She is probably very stressed and didn’t realised what she said.”

“He is not a bad man. He just looses control when he drinks.”

And the worst, the turned against ourselves rationalisation:

“I must have said, done something wrong. There must be something wrong with me for people to keep treating me like I’m worth nothing, like I’m a pariah.”

We try to come with all sorts of ‘reasonable explanations’ for the harmful behaviour of others.

We put it down to either external factors (she must be stressed), or to our own fault (I must have said something wrong), but never to the abuser. Because to admit that we’ve been, yet again, abused, takes us back to the dark, painful places we worked so hard to come out of and leave behind.

Any explanation other than that painful truth is better than facing the cold, cruel reality: We’ve been again abused. Our dignity has been again violated. Somehow, this seems to happen only to us, not the rest of the team, other people. Somehow, we feel as if we carried a sign: ‘easy target, abuse at will, I won’t fight back’.

So, we double our efforts to fit in. To avoid punishment and exclusion.We become chameleons, taking whatever form, shape, and colour our environment wants from us.

We’ve learned the hard way that the world doesn’t accept us the way we are.

The lesson our perpetrators taught us was that we don’t matter, except in ways they find a use for us.

That’s why sexually abused children adopt unseemly courtesan behaviours.

That’s why the abused wife behaves like a domestic Goddess.

That’s why the abused student becomes a nerd.

That’s why the abused employees work themselves to the bone, give all they’ve got to the employer, at the cost of their health, their family, their children.

The abused and traumatised self has learned to survive by anticipating the dysfunctions of the perpetrator and tending to these dysfunctions willingly, before they are violently imposed on us.

Rehabilitating the Victim, Not the System: The Weaponisation of Therapy

These are the patterns. The symptoms. What psychology and the therapeutic field then got badly wrong, was to mistake the symptoms for the cause, and to create, as a result, interventions and techniques addressing the symptoms, but never the cause. The perennial misattribution and misdiagnosis in our material medical science.

From the attachment theory and other convoluted psychobabbles to our subject – assertiveness training, the problem the so-called specialists attempt to treat is never the perpetrators or the sick social structure favouring them, but you.

Yes, ‘trauma’ (not the perpetrator?) caused you all these scars and impacted your behaviour and health. But – (and this is the part that mainstream psychology and therapy don’t say out loud) – is because you were too ‘nice’, too kind, to sensitive, too shy, too naïve (too weak). You didn’t know how to stand up for yourself.

Ready for the bigger lie of all? You have no or weak boundaries.

By a sleigh of hand, from victim, you’ve became your own perpetrator against whom the might of modern science is deployed to treat.

Instead of addressing the root cause of trauma: a world taken over by psychopaths, by dark forces hell-bent on destroying everything there is pure and good in humans – through poverty, wars, low quality education barely sufficient to create obedient work slaves, our respectable and trustworthy scientists invest your hard-worked tax money to come with sophisticated treatments to the only problem they see from their privileged positions: You and your god damned sensibilities.

They’ve created diagnostics and therapies to treat who? Those who inflict pain or those who sustained it?

The whole model of medical science, psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, personal development and all New Age nonsense, are all misguidedly focusing on treating the victim and not the perpetrator.

Conveniently sanitised of their social damning implications, we have the abstract “trauma therapy”.

Not:

rape recovery
enslavement and poverty recovery
parental abuse by a parasitic imperial system that worked the parents into alcoholism and other addictions to cope with their oppression, causing family breakdown, childhood abuse and neglect as a result.

The insidious inversion is sickening when you take the time to analyse it.

Even innocent children, who are too young to be expected to have any ‘strong boundaries’ or know how to stand for themselves, are not exempt from this inverted diagnosis.

Sexually molested children are described by scientific studies in abstract, sanitised terms as suffering from “childhood trauma”, or “childhood sexual abuse” – instead of being identified as they are: innocent victims of a system that allows to roam free, and largely unpunished, sick, sadistic, demonic pedophiles ruining not only childhoods, but entire lives.

The entire mental health industry is pushing down your throats slogans to make you better accept that you are the one needing fixing, and not the system and its psychos that broke you. Not the unjust social structure allowing such criminal transgressions against the human soul to happen. Not your perpetrators and abusers.

You!

So, they’ve come up with sophisticated ‘scientifically proven’, ‘evidence-based’ slogans redirecting the focus from the perpetrators to their victims.

You, the victim, falling chronically, sometimes terminally ill as a result of these abuses, are conveniently treated for your mental health condition (and most physical conditions caused by your emotional toils).

“We all have mental health,” goes the slogan meant to take the sting out of the bleak reality that people are falling like flies from the ongoing mass oppression and systemic abuses.

Doublethink at its best! Because the reality is that we don’t all have ‘mental health’.

1 in 4 adults and 1 in 5 children no longer have ‘mental health’.

And even the statistics are sanitised. “1 in 4 adults suffer with a mental health condition” – is, to say the least, a misnomer.

How can anyone suffer from a health condition? Being mental or physical?

Health is something we enjoy, not suffer!

Saying that you suffer from ‘a condition’ is like avoiding answering whether you are in a committed relationship or cheat on your partner: “It’s complicated”.

The same way, describing what you are really suffering from is…complicated. So, for the sake of brevity, let’s just say that you suffer from a con – dition.

If, throughout generations, you’ve been abused, kept in poverty and denied basic human rights to grow, develop, and fulfil your innate potential by a rotten system built on inequality, and you’ve broken down, unable to face another day of this ordeal, squeezed of your last remains of endurance – don’t fret! There is ‘a scientifically recognised condition’ for all that: Depression.

Incidentally, your con-dition, is a multi-trillion $ industry keeping many people in high functions, at sky-high pay, from your depression-inducing hard labour’s taxes.

Take your pill, go to their Mental Health Approved “practitioners” (wonder what they practice?), and be patient, because, apparently, your con-dition is for life. And all they could do for you is help you cope with it, reduce its symptoms and impact on your life, especially your work life (what other life is there?), and your productivity (finally the truth! You are a ‘human resource’, here to produce, not to lament about your feelings caused by your enslavement.)

After all, why do you think they call you, ‘the patient’?

Along the pills and the alembicated ‘therapeutic interventions’, you are taken through the grinder of rehabilitation.

Given that your good nature crumbles under the pressures of this morally corrupt system, you need to be reformed. Brainwashed. Cognitively-behaviourally retrained. Indoctrinated into doublespeak to the point where you become totally desensitised to your con-dition, or totally mad.

White becomes black. Left becomes right. Up is down. And your pain from a lifetime of abuse and injustice is nothing more than a result of a ‘brain chemical imbalance’, or your CBT untrained mind’s ‘maladaptive thinking’.

There’s nothing wrong with the system, thank you very much! Nothing to see here. Nothing to change. But there is quite everything wrong with you – starting with the way you see things and how your brain misinterprets what’s happening.

You need to toughen up a bit. To stop catastrophising. Just because you’ve been abused all along is not a predictor that you’ll be abused again…

…At least, not in 44% of cases, as so far, the little honest science left admits that 56% of women abused in childhood become abused in adult life.

But let’s not get lost in details here. The aim is you getting better and returning to work asap, right?

“You don’t need to know how you broke your leg in order to heal it.”

Where have we heard that before?

As part of your rehabilitation, you’ll need to learn not only to reframe your thinking to stop seeing danger where there’s none, but to develop ‘healthy boundaries’ (to defend yourself from the non-existent dangers/perpetrators), and to become more assertive.

If your ‘live and let live’ good, kind, and honest nature caused you to suffer and become ill in this sick world, the obvious ‘evidence-based treatment’ is for you to be less youand more like the world you suffer from.

More assertive is code name for more aggressive, more pushy, more narcissistic, more self-centred, more domineering.

Don’t believe me? Have a look at the definition and synonyms of the word itself:

“Assertive (adjective) in the sense of confident (Collins dictionary)

Synonyms

feisty (informal)

pushy (informal)

strong-willed”

Let’s see how (the elite-dominated) Cambridge dictionary presents it to the masses:

“Someone who is assertive behaves confidently and is not frightened to say what they want or believe: {As long as what you want or believe doesn’t disturb the status quo – of course! My addition.}

If you really want the promotion, you’ll have to be more assertive.”

And there you have it! Coaxed in the dog-eat-dog acerb competition language of the psychotic system, always, of course, in the context of work, because what would you be here on earth for if not to work your soul out and fight for promotions?

Since is the workplace that now breaks people, you’ll need to take some “assertiveness training” to better deal with your toxic, narcissistic managers and sycophantic colleagues.

From a humble, kind, and honest human communicating from a place of camaraderie, you’ll learn how to “set boundaries” and keep or put everyone in their place. At arm’s length. With no personal sharing. Distant, cold, polite, “professional” – assertive.

You want that promotion you’ve been waiting for for decades? Well, don’t wait for your toxic work environment full of assertive hyenas to give it to you on merit. Do what they do, only better. Be what they are, only worst.

The assertiveness lie is, like the rest of the brainwashing interventions, meant to distract your attention from the cause of human suffering to the desired results by the system: a feral zombie, ready to walk on cadavers if that pleases the masters and favours your ascension above the crowd.

Is an insidious dehumanisation of the few sensible souls that kept their integrity despite the ordeals they’ve been subjected to.

If instead of admitting and correcting the cause of human suffering – the corrupt to the core system – you reframe the problem as residing with your victims, you are safe to be as dysfunctional and as tyrannical as you want, and get Nobel Prizes, while you are at it.

The remaining few escaping the mass formation are nothing but ‘conspiracy loons’ against whom you’ll enact laws restricting their free speech, give some draconic examples of what happens to those daring to be assertive in other ways than permitted, and you’re off to a great New World Order where you could take your mask and gloves off because there’ll be little to no one to dare opposing you.

We don’t need assertiveness training. We need to reclaim our humanity!

We’ve been gradually dehumanised, desensitised to our and other people’s suffering by powers who needed obedient cheap labour to carry on their world domination agenda. Now that they’ve almost achieved their aims, what do you think they’ll do with 8+ billion people taking up ‘their space’? Now that people have started to wake up, they misdirect your anger against their system to anger against each other.

Divide and conquer. Children against parents. Managers against “staff”. Vaxxed against non Vaxxed. Neighbour against neighbour. Religion against religion. Left against right. Science against spirituality. Fact checkers against conspiracy theorists. Women against men. Minorities against majority. Take your pick! We built their new Tower of Babel, and we’ll be the ones to dismantle the scaffolding beneath our feet for them.

That is, if we carry on pretending that everything is fine as we are walking willingly into dystopia, assertively taking each other out, one scaffolding bolt at a time.

We need to focus on healing the cause and no longer the symptoms.

For that, we need to expose them. We need to raise awareness of how this sick system is getting away with it. And only after we’ve became aware, we need to go back to basics, retrieve humanity’s imprisoned and battered soul, heal it, and start building anew.

A world in which assertiveness is no longer needed — because we finally remember that we are sacred beings, not evolved animals.