"Don’t you realise who I am?"

Perhaps all human interaction necessarily involves overt or covert agendas. Agendas are the result of what we identify with, who we believe ourselves to be and the need to sell this image in a social and psychological context. Individuals just can’t help selling the conscious and the unconscious image they have of themselves. It’s an inevitable part of and prerequisite to any relationship.

The agenda may be dormant or active. A dormant agenda is always there, total deconstruction notwithstanding, and is dormant when an individual does not feel a need to sell her or his identity or those things s/he identifies with. While it is dormant s/he interferes with no one. However, the more active it is, the greater the endorsement needed.

Active agendas are also the result of self-assertion: I want something and to get that something, I need your participation and therefore your endorsement of my agenda. Without active agendas, things would not get done. There would be no roads, hospitals, government, money, getting out of bed in the morning/evening, etc.

Problems arise when people seek endorsement of their identity from me ("Don’t you realise who I am/I want you to believe or accept that ..... please sign on the dotted line") and, for whatever reason, I don’t want to give it.

There are probably a lot of reasons why a dormant agenda turns into an active one. An active agenda can arise from a desire to survive, or to belong or to be loved. It may be the result of a threat or perceived threat (for example, "It wasn’t me, honest it wasn’t!" or the need to floor the thesis or hypothesis, however ridiculous or unsubstantial, of another person and prove one’s own superiority).

They can also arise in power games when approval from a third party means monumental/ absolute support for the person’s active agenda (and consequent identity and right to exist). An example could be an argument in which Mummy, a judge/boss is required to pass indisputable judgement and this prove the rightness of an individual’s active agenda and their resulting superior right to exist! (Now you realise who I am you bastard!).

Fulfilment of an active agenda means getting other people to accept the agenda or to believe they have accepted it. Thereafter, comes temporary respite until a new situation arises in which there is a need to assert the agenda.

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Conflict of active agendas at some time is inevitable.

It's easy enough to get rid of door-to-door encyclopaedia salespeople or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Just set the real or imaginary Doberpeople on them.

For most people the real difficulty and challenge lies in close relationships (i.e. those people you sometimes want and sometimes don’t want in your face or who sometimes want and sometimes don’t want you in theirs) when agendas clash or the seller cannot accept failure in the sale. This leads to arguments, bickering, reproaches, manipulation, frustration, fresh and perhaps more desperate attempts to sell, pestering, irritation, charges against, defence, prosecution, persecution and violence.

In many conflictive personal or group relationships perhaps a lot of anguish could be avoided simply by accepting that the other rightly or wrongly feels grieved, rather than interpreting the expression of that anguish as a sign to trigger off one’s own personal defence system and to force an agenda on the other party. It is therefore how one reacts to the clash of agendas rather than to the fact that someone else's agenda is different that influences whether the situation ends in a solution or ends up becoming a lost cause.

But that requires concentration, meta-awareness of psychosocial dynamics and a willingness to accept that one’s survival may not be threatened by another’s expression of pain or anger (although in cases of domestic abuse, for example, it probably is).