The Future-Past Framework of Assertiveness: Cognitive Suppression, Fear, and Growth
First published: 11.03.2025
Leading author: William Parvet
Assertiveness is often misunderstood as a simple trait of confidence or dominance, but in reality, it is a dynamic, feedback-driven force that is both biologically rooted and highly malleable. Unlike more rigid personality traits, assertiveness expands or contracts based on past experiences, cognitive restructuring, and external reinforcement. The concept of "future-past" explains how assertiveness is subconsciously regulated by past failures and successes, shaping present confidence levels and influencing future decision-making. However, true assertiveness cannot be sustained merely through rationalization or passive adaptation — it requires active confrontation with self-imposed limitations, cognitive suppression mechanisms, and fear-based constraints. This is where Structured Internal Value Hierarchies (SIVHs) play a crucial role, serving as a cognitive framework that not only strengthens assertiveness but ensures its alignment with long-term meaning, purpose, and psychological resilience.
Assertiveness is a unique sub-trait — one of the most biologically inherited yet highly malleable aspects of personality. Research suggests that assertiveness is approximately 50-70% biologically determined, meaning that while genetic predispositions establish a baseline, the capacity for modification remains substantial. Unlike fixed traits, such as height or facial structure, assertiveness can be trained, redirected, and significantly influenced by cognitive and environmental factors.
The existentialist concept of "thrownness" (Heidegger’s Geworfenheit) describes the circumstances into which a person is born — aspects that are unalterable and define one’s initial conditions. These include biological constraints (body proportions, voice pitch, genetics), historical context (time and location of birth), and social conditions (early family environment, culture, and class status).
However, while thrownness provides the foundation, it does not fully determine the trajectory of assertiveness development. Many external and self-imposed factors influence how assertiveness is expressed, meaning that an individual is not merely a product of their thrownness but an active participant in shaping their assertive capacity.
Understanding Assertiveness in Context and the "Deadly Combo"
Psychometric analyses have demonstrated that assertiveness should not be viewed as an isolated trait that dominates other personality dimensions. Instead, it functions as an internal force, one that requires the right psychological conditions to manifest and expand effectively. Assertiveness is not merely a product of genetic predisposition but a dynamic interplay between multiple personality sub-traits.
A person’s inborn assertiveness potential can only be fully realized when certain inhibitory traits are low enough to allow it to surface. There are three key psychological barriers that restrict assertiveness from fully manifesting:
High Withdrawal (Neuroticism Subtrait). Individuals with high withdrawal are prone to anxiety, hesitation, and overthinking in social situations, making it difficult for them to channel assertiveness effectively. Low withdrawal, on the other hand, fosters resilience, reduced fear of confrontation, and greater willingness to take social and professional risks.
High Orderliness (Conscientiousness Subtrait). Excessive orderliness tends to create rigidity and a need for structure, which can constrain the ability to adapt and assert oneself in volatile or competitive environments. Particularly in entrepreneurial and leadership settings, lower orderliness allows for greater strategic flexibility and risk-taking behavior, amplifying assertiveness.
High Agreeableness (Both Politeness and Compassion). While compassion and politeness are socially desirable, excessive levels of these traits restrict the ability to assert dominance, negotiate aggressively, or challenge authority. Assertive individuals often display lower politeness and moderate-to-low compassion, enabling them to confront obstacles without excessive concern for external validation or emotional distress.
Conversely, certain subtraits serve as assertiveness enhancers, multiplying its effect manifold:
High Industriousness (Conscientiousness Subtrait). Industriousness ensures relentless effort, resilience, and long-term strategic persistence, which, when paired with assertiveness, creates highly effective leadership and goal attainment.
High Openness to Experience. Openness fosters adaptability, innovation, and the ability to navigate uncertainty, which helps assertive individuals seize new opportunities and influence others effectively.
High Openness to Ideas. This cognitive flexibility ensures deep analytical capabilities, foresight, and the ability to restructure frameworks dynamically, allowing assertiveness to function in strategic, rather than purely reactive, ways.
This precise configuration forms what can be termed the "Deadly Combo" — a personality profile that is highly correlated with elite leadership, dominance in competitive environments, and an ability to predict and create success in social and business settings.
The optimal configuration for high-impact leadership is:
✔ Very high assertiveness
✔ High openness to ideas
✔ High openness to experience
✔ Very high industriousness
✔ Lower orderliness (flexibility over rigid structure)
✔ Lower compassion (selective rather than universal empathy)
✔ Low politeness (allowing for direct confrontation and negotiation power)
This profile maximizes social and strategic influence, allowing individuals to strive aggressively toward goals, confront obstacles with minimal hesitation, and predict success in complex environments.
The Role of GMA and Age in Assertiveness Development
Assertiveness does not exist in a vacuum — it interacts dynamically with General Mental Ability (GMA) and life stage factors. Across different age groups and intelligence levels, assertiveness is shaped by different primary obstacles:
At lower GMA ranges, assertiveness is often constrained by a lack of cognitive foresight and strategic thinking, leading to impulsive dominance rather than calculated influence.
At higher GMA levels, the primary limitation is neuroticism—once neuroticism is low and openness to ideas is high, assertiveness has the highest potential for expansive, strategic execution.
Thus, across all timeframes, the two most significant predictors of assertiveness expansion are:
Very high openness to ideas (allowing for strategic vision and complex problem-solving).
Very low neuroticism (removing self-imposed hesitation and emotional volatility).
Internal and External Assertiveness
When analyzing the manifestation of assertiveness, it is crucial to understand that assertiveness is not merely an internal trait but a dynamic interplay between internal confidence and external validation. Assertiveness should always be viewed as a feedback-driven system, where internal assertiveness fuels external actions, and external responses reinforce or weaken internal assertiveness.
An individual’s internal assertiveness represents their self-perception of their own ability to influence others, set boundaries, and take decisive action. This internal trait is partially biologically inherited, but its development is largely shaped by environmental reinforcement, personal experiences, and cognitive restructuring. If internal assertiveness is strong but remains untested in real-world interactions, it may manifest as overconfidence or self-deception rather than actual assertive competence.
Conversely, external assertiveness refers to how effectively assertiveness is applied in real-world interactions — whether in negotiations, leadership, conflict resolution, or competitive settings. External assertiveness requires social calibration, meaning that a person must learn to adjust their level of assertiveness based on external feedback. If external assertiveness is consistently met with resistance or failure, an individual may begin to doubt their internal assertiveness, leading to inhibition and self-censorship.
The Assertiveness Feedback Loop
✔ Strong Internal Assertiveness + Successful External Feedback → Reinforced assertiveness (assertiveness grows).
✔ Strong Internal Assertiveness + Negative External Feedback → Recalibrated assertiveness (adjustment or overcompensation).
✔ Weak Internal Assertiveness + Successful External Feedback → Gradual assertiveness-building (growing confidence over time).
✔ Weak Internal Assertiveness + Negative External Feedback → Assertiveness inhibition (reinforcement of passivity or avoidance).
The strongest assertive personalities are those who continuously test, adapt, and refine their assertiveness based on external validation while retaining enough internal strength to withstand temporary failures or pushback. This is why highly assertive individuals often display low neuroticism, as it enables them to persist through resistance without excessive emotional destabilization.
The Role of SIVHs in Assertiveness Calibration
A Structured Internal Value Hierarchy (SIVH) plays a critical role in filtering external feedback and ensuring that an individual’s assertiveness remains stable and goal-directed rather than erratic or excessively influenced by short-term failures.
Without an SIVH, individuals may overreact to negative feedback, leading to hesitation or excessive self-censorship.
A strong SIVH filters feedback selectively, ensuring that constructive criticism is integrated while irrelevant noise is ignored.
This allows assertiveness to be adaptive rather than reactive, creating a resilient and goal-oriented assertive personality.
The Future-Past Conceptualization of Assertiveness
Of all personality traits, assertiveness exhibits one of the most dynamic and recursive developmental patterns, influenced by both internal cognitive processes and external environmental interactions. Unlike more static traits, assertiveness tends to oscillate over time, growing or diminishing in feedback-driven cycles. This fluctuation is largely tied to the interplay between past experiences, subconscious inhibition, and future expectations, which together create a non-linear, self-reinforcing trajectory for assertiveness expression.
To better understand this, we turn to an evocative quote by David Lynch from Twin Peaks:
“Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see, one chance out between two worlds, fire walk with me.”
While the quote is poetic and cryptic, it captures a deep psychological truth that aligns with how assertiveness develops, is inhibited, and can be expanded. Let’s break this down in relation to the cognitive mechanisms and neurochemical factors governing assertiveness.
The Darkness of Future Past – Non-Linear Time and Assertiveness Suppression
The phrase "Through the darkness of future past" can be understood through a neuropsychological lens, particularly in relation to assertiveness suppression and serotonin modulation.
✔ Past experiences with success or failure strongly influence our current level of assertiveness — not just consciously, but at a deeply subconscious, often repressed level. These past events shape our serotonin regulation, which in turn determines our confidence, social positioning, and risk tolerance (DeYoung et al., 2007).
✔ The mind does not process time in a linear fashion when it comes to assertiveness regulation. Past experiences are not stored as neutral records but as emotional imprints, which means failures and successes continue influencing present assertiveness levels, even if we are not consciously aware of them.
✔ Suppression mechanics distort how we process past failures — the “darkness” refers to the way the unconscious mind inhibits full access to certain memories in order to reduce emotional discomfort. However, by doing so, it also prevents cognitive integration and assertiveness expansion.
The Magician and the Archetypal Need for Wisdom
In Jungian psychology, the magician represents the Wise Man archetype — the inner figure who seeks clarity and higher understanding (Jung, 1969).
✔ Assertiveness requires a cognitive "magician" — a reflective, meta-aware self that actively deciphers and restructures suppressed fears and misinterpretations of past events.
✔ Without this internal process of conceptualization and integration, assertiveness remains stunted, as the person cannot fully recognize or resolve subconscious self-limiting mechanisms.
One Chance Out Between Two Worlds – The Moment of Cognitive Breakthrough
This part of the quote can be directly linked to existential transformation — the pivotal moment where an individual either remains trapped in past-based inhibition or transcends it by recognizing its mechanisms.
✔ Assertiveness increases when the individual cognitively restructures past failures not as permanent limitations but as feedback for future adaptation. This reprocessing shifts assertiveness from a passive reaction to circumstancesinto an active tool for future success.
✔ This is the core of self-actualization — the ability to process past suppression mechanics, extract insight, and integrate them into a higher level of self-command (Maslow, 1968). Only by reframing suppressed memories and their emotional weight can an individual break free from unconscious inhibition and move toward self-determined action.
✔ In existential psychology, this moment represents the decision point between passive surrender to past conditioning and active restructuring of future potential. This echoes Kierkegaard’s "Leap of Faith", where one must confront the void of uncertainty and choose to transcend previous limitations, even in the absence of absolute guarantees. The "one chance out between two worlds" is the threshold between fear-based stagnation and assertive self-mastery.
Fire Walk With Me – The Necessity of Destruction for Growth
The final line, "fire walk with me," signifies the psychological purification process necessary for assertiveness transformation. True assertiveness expansion requires cognitive and emotional confrontation — a destruction of past self-deceptions and a direct reckoning with fears that have long suppressed confident action.
✔ Fire represents the painful but necessary purging of outdated self-conceptions, mistaken interpretations of past failures, and avoidance mechanisms. The process of burning away false narratives is what allows assertiveness to emerge as an unshakable force rather than a reactive defense mechanism.
✔ Cognitive exposure therapy models demonstrate that facing suppressed fears (through active recall and restructuring) leads to a permanent increase in assertiveness (Carver et al., 2008). This aligns with modern psychological research, which confirms that gradual, intentional exposure to fear-based constraints rewires the brain, decreasing avoidance behavior and reinforcing assertive action.
✔ By "walking through fire," an individual systematically destroys the old psychological frameworks that limit them, paving the way for assertiveness to expand. This process is deeply symbolic and archetypal, resonating with Biblical imagery — in Genesis 3:24, after the Fall, two cherubim with flaming swords were placed at the East of Eden, guarding the way back to the dwelling place of God. This flaming barrier represents the psychological threshold that must be crossed—only those who endure the purification of fire can reclaim their highest self.
The Future-Past Model: Assertiveness as a Cognitive Time Integration System
In the simplest terms, this entire conceptual model can be summarized as follows:
Our present level of assertiveness is subconsciously shaped by past external events, particularly failures and successes.
These experiences are often suppressed, meaning their full impact on our confidence is “hidden” in the cognitive background.
A person’s ability to process and integrate suppressed fears determines their assertiveness trajectory — facing fears leads to expansion, avoidance leads to contraction.
True assertiveness growth happens when an individual transcends the false constraints of past failures and restructures them into future opportunities.
Thus, assertiveness should not just be seen as a personality trait, but as a function of how effectively a person integrates past and future cognition into a singular, self-actualizing trajectory.
Assertiveness as a Valuable and Enhancable Trait Through SIVHs
Developing and expanding assertiveness is crucial for psychological well-being, personal agency, and internal strength. While it is possible to reconceptualize past events to an extent, this process alone is insufficient for true transformation—one must also actively confront, integrate, and leverage assertiveness to reshape the trajectory of their future.
Many Eastern philosophical traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism offer valuable frameworks for rationalizing past experiences, reducing attachment to suffering, and cultivating internal peace. However, these approaches often emphasize acceptance and detachment rather than active confrontation of fears. While reinterpreting past events can serve as a psychological coping mechanism, it does not inherently cultivate assertiveness — it may help one let go, but it does not “invite the fire walk” of transformation.
True assertiveness expansion requires a direct confrontation with the cognitive and emotional resistance generated by past failures, self-imposed limitations, and suppressed fears. The strength built through this process is not merely a function of retrospective rationalization but a deliberate psychological restructuring that aligns one’s present and future actions with long-term meaning and self-determination.
However, this assertive transformation is only sustainable if it is anchored to something stable, meaningful, and enduring. External assertiveness, when developed without a coherent internal structure of meaning, often results in short-term bursts of confidence followed by periods of doubt, regression, or external validation dependence. This is where the Structured Internal Value Hierarchy (SIVH) becomes essential.
SIVHs as the Framework for Assertiveness Expansion
A monotheistic and singular Structured Internal Value Hierarchy (SIVH) provides the lens through which one understands "future past"—allowing assertiveness to be directed toward opportunity, rather than trapped in cycles of self-doubt or avoidance.
✔ An SIVH anchors assertiveness to a singular, overarching goal, ensuring that increased self-confidence is not just a reaction to external validation, but a deliberate, self-reinforcing system of growth.
✔ It provides a cognitive filter, allowing individuals to interpret past failures as lessons, not identity markers, and prevents assertiveness from being dampened by suppressed fear-based memories.
✔ It structures assertiveness as a function of meaning, ensuring that the motivation to expand one’s influence, leadership, and resilience remains consistent over time, rather than fluctuating based on temporary emotional states.
In simple terms, assertiveness without an SIVH is vulnerable to external pressures, while assertiveness within a structured, monotheistic value system becomes an unstoppable force for self-transcendence.Õ
Conclusion
Assertiveness is not merely about external expression but about internal clarity, psychological restructuring, and strategic self-direction. It thrives when past failures are reinterpreted as valuable feedback rather than immutable barriers, allowing the individual to transcend their suppression mechanisms and cognitive hesitations. However, without a stable internal framework, assertiveness risks becoming reactive, inconsistent, or dependent on external validation. By integrating Structured Internal Value Hierarchies (SIVHs) as a filtering and guiding system, one can ensure that assertiveness is not just a temporary surge of confidence, but a systematically reinforced tool for personal transformation and long-term success. In the final analysis, assertiveness is not just about standing firm in the present — it is about integrating the wisdom of the past to create an unshakable force for future achievement.
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