Friendship Series: Understanding Relational Aggression in Adult Friendships
- Admin
- Sep 23
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 24
Relational aggression is subtle, strategic, and often misunderstood. Therapy helps decode its emotional toll and offers a path back to clarity and self-trust.
Relational aggression refers to behaviours that manipulate social dynamics to inflict harm. It is not loud. There is no shouting or confrontation. Instead, it shows up as exclusion from plans, gossip framed as concern, sarcastic remarks passed off as jokes, or quietly withholding praise and affection. It is quiet but calculated. Over time, it leaves people feeling destabilised and emotionally unsafe, often without clear evidence of what went wrong.
Although often associated with adolescence, relational aggression is not confined to schoolyards. It continues into adulthood and takes on new forms. There is less open drama and more strategic social manoeuvring, often within group chats, office politics, parenting circles, or spiritual communities. What makes it so difficult to name is that each incident can be explained away. Yet taken together, the pattern creates a persistent sense of exclusion or rejection.
Understanding why this pattern persists in adulthood, and how therapy can help disrupt it, is an important step toward healing and relational safety.
The mechanics of relational aggression
Relational aggression often works by staying just beneath the threshold of what would be considered overt conflict. This includes:
Withholding invitations
Leaving someone out of key decisions or conversations
Spreading gossip that erodes trust
Using humour to belittle
Ignoring messages while remaining visibly active in group spaces
Because these behaviours are indirect, they rely on plausible deniability. The person on the receiving end often feels the hurt but struggles to articulate it without sounding dramatic or overly sensitive. This ambiguity is not a bug, it is part of how relational aggression functions.
In adult settings, these behaviours are frequently rationalised as personality clashes, social drift, or someone just being busy. But over time, they can have very real emotional consequences. A 2018 article published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health noted that social exclusion activates the same pain pathways in the brain as physical injury. Relational aggression does not need to be visible to be harmful.
Why it confuses adults
In childhood, exclusion might look like being left out of a birthday party. In adulthood, it looks like not being added to a group email or being praised in public but criticised in private. The harm is often buried in tone, timing, or omission.
What complicates this further is the cultural expectation that adults should know how to navigate social nuance. When something feels off, many people blame themselves rather than the situation. They wonder if they are imagining things or being too sensitive. This kind of internal questioning often prevents people from addressing the issue directly or seeking support.
Women are particularly socialised to maintain harmony and avoid confrontation. As a result, they may endure indirect hostility in order to avoid appearing confrontational, emotional, or “too much.”
What therapy reveals beneath the surface
Relational aggression is frequently rooted in early attachment wounds, and individuals may benefit from therapy that works with these early relational injuries, including:
Schema Therapy: early beliefs that shape how we respond
Schema Therapy explains that many people unknowingly carry forward beliefs formed during childhood. These schemas act as internal rules that guide how we interpret social interactions.
Someone who frequently finds themselves hurt by relational aggression may have schemas such as:
Defectiveness: believing they are inherently flawed or unworthy, which makes any exclusion feel deserved.
Subjugation: believing their needs do not matter, which keeps them from confronting hurtful dynamics.
Emotional Deprivation: believing others will not meet their emotional needs, which leads them to accept distance or coldness without protest.
On the other side, those who engage in relational aggression may carry schemas like Entitlement, which justifies the need to maintain control or superiority through subtle dominance. Alternatively, Emotional Inhibition may lead someone to push others away instead of acknowledging vulnerability or emotional discomfort.
Therapy helps clients become aware of these underlying beliefs and provides space to challenge them. Through practice and relational feedback, clients begin to rewrite the rules they’ve been living by and expand their emotional range in relationships.
Internal Family Systems (IFS): mapping the inner reaction
IFS views the mind as made up of different parts, each holding a protective role. When relational aggression occurs, these parts often become activated in predictable ways.
For example, in the person being excluded:
A pleasing part might try to smooth things over, blaming oneself for the tension.
An exiled part carries old memories of rejection, shame, or humiliation.
A firefighter part may suddenly block, ghost, or emotionally disengage to avoid further hurt.
In the person using relational aggression:
A manager part may carefully curate who is included and who is not, attempting to control social dynamics to avoid vulnerability.
Beneath that, an exile part may carry unhealed pain from past betrayals, abandonment, or deep insecurity.
IFS does not judge these parts. Instead, it helps people meet them with curiosity and compassion. As each part is understood and supported, the need for extreme protection begins to subside. Clients are then able to respond to social situations from a place of clarity rather than fear or reactivity.
The impact of naming it
Relational aggression gains its strength from staying hidden. Naming it breaks the cycle. Once people recognise that what they’re experiencing is a form of emotional manipulation—not simply a social misstep or personal flaw—they can begin to set boundaries, assert their needs, and evaluate which relationships feel safe enough to invest in.
Therapy offers the psychological scaffolding to do this with intention. It is not about blaming others. It is about recognising how past and present dynamics intersect, and building the internal tools to choose something different. Not every friendship will be repairable. But with insight and support, people can move away from relationships that drain them and toward those that nourish them.
Restoring Peace is a private mental health centre offering counselling and psychotherapy for individuals, couples, families, and groups facing challenges such as trauma, anxiety, depression, grief, and relational issues. Learn more at www.restoringpeace.com.sg or WhatsApp us at +65 8889 1848. For updates and resources, join our Telegram group: https://t.me/restoringpeace
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References
Cillessen, A. H., & Mayeux, L. (2004). From censure to reinforcement: Developmental changes in the association between aggression and social status. Child Development, 75(1), 147–163. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2004.00660.x
Golmaryami, F. N., & Barry, C. T. (2015). The roles of callous–unemotional traits and relational aggression in predicting adolescent girls’ externalizing behaviors. Personality and Individual Differences, 77, 91–96. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886915005735
McEachern, A. G. (2012). Adult Relational Aggression: Evaluation of Conceptualisation and Measurement. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Southern Mississippi]. https://aquila.usm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3166&context=dissertations
Morin, A. (2018, October 17). Relational aggression: Bullying hidden in plain sight. GoodTherapy. https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/relational-aggression-bullying-hidden-in-plain-sight-1018174
Seltzer, L. F. (2012, November 12). Revealing the hidden nature of relational bullying. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/passive-aggressive-diaries/201211/revealing-the-hidden-nature-relational-bullying
Taylor, K. (2023, October 30). Why the pain of being excluded can be as bad as a physical injury. CNN Health. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/30/health/relational-aggression-cyberbullying-teens-wellness
Keywords
relational aggression, emotional bullying, covert conflict, schema therapy, IFS therapy, therapy for friendships, adult friendship breakdown, emotional manipulation, people-pleasing, psychological safety, social exclusion, therapy for social anxiety, relational trauma, emotional boundaries, assertiveness therapy
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