Hi Vineeto,
Thank you for your reply, I very much appreciate you wading through this territory with me.
I sat for about 20min just now and I don’t know if I can provide an accurate answer here. I have certainly observed how competitiveness can segue into aggression during hard sparring. It’s a little like when one plays with a dog and as the intensity builds there can be this ‘switch’ that happens when all of a sudden it’s no longer play. But it get’s pretty difficult to distinguish these shifts during competitive sparring rounds. What I can say that there was certainly a sense of intense competitiveness which means it is likely there was aggression underlying it, although I don’t even know if at this level competitiveness can be distinguished from aggression. As in as soon as I enter that competitive mindset - of winning at all cost - then likely I am already ‘being’ aggression.
Well this is exactly where I have been somewhat all over the place. It’s like do I continue training at the kind of intensity where these things can happen, where it is all part and parcel of high level competition. I was talking with Sonya about this the other day and indeed it is a rather rough sport, that the goal is to make the other quit and allow themselves to be caught in a submission, which often means forcing your opponent into exhaustion, inflicting pain to elicit reactions and in general doing all that is possible to break them down. That in a competitive round there is no space to think about the fact that their arm is trapped, there is a tiny window to pull the trigger in order to score any kind of advantage. When I am sparring with guys not as skilled as me then that skill discrepancy allows for something more like play but when it comes to competing with an equally skilled opponent this window of play seems to very quickly close.
But anyways this does not seem like something you can answer for me.
I will reply to the second bits soon also.