Passive Aggressive
Passive aggressive is to when you do whatever you can to hurt and undermine your enemy without outwardly doing anything aggressive. Passive aggressive style is one way of expressing anger and it get’s us into lots of trouble, every time. The modus operandi is to wage warfare but in a way that you can’t be accused or nailed down for your aggressive behavior.
Passive aggressive is often so subtle that we don’t even know we’re doing it; we don’t acknowledge to ourselves that we are being aggressive. We may have a self righteous feeling of “I’m not doing anything wrong here. This is normal and I’m just going about my own business.”
For example we may be fighting with our spouse or be embroiled with them in a power struggle. We manifest passive aggressive behavior by doing simple things to irritate them like leave the toilet seat up, neglect to do our dishes, or forget to call them to let them know we’ll be late. None of these are outwardly aggressive, but we know it will piss them off, which is exactly what we want. Yet we may or may not even be aware of our passive aggressive intentions ourself.
Passive Aggressive is Subtle
Passive aggressive is particularly insidious because of this quiet and potentially blind quality. It’s harder to see in ourselves, and harder to point out to someone else, because it’s easy to deny any bad intention in our actions.
We can be passive aggressive in the way we look at people as we walk down the street, the way we don’t look at them, or in how we carry our shoulder bag and accidentally bump it into a stranger because we don’t like them. These are all behaviors that express this form of subtle aggression known as passive aggressive.
Another way passive aggressive commonly manifests is through our speech. We say things we know will put the other person off and upset them. We know we’re going to get a negative response and yet we say it anyway because our subtle and perhaps unconscious goal is to cause harm.
Since anger is generally not accepted in society passive aggressive behavior is all too common. It allows us to act out our angry feelings without ever acknowledging we’re angry, and without ever having to confront our enemy face to face.
Passive aggressive isn’t some ‘big baddie’ behavior. We all do this. So, how can we deal with passive aggressive behavior in ourselves or others? That’s a longer story, but a good first step is to recognize that under the aggressive behavior is vulnerability and fear. From there you can discover a clarity of mind about how to respond to the situation.
I’m having difficulty determining whether certain behaviors of mine are technically passive aggressive. As the article notes, I feel like what I’m doing is fine.
For example, the apparent social contract of returning an email or phone call: Just because it’s important to a sender to get in touch with me doesn’t mean I necessarily want to correspond with them, or at least on their schedule. People have gotten frustrated and irritated with me about this, and consider this behavior passive-aggressive on my part.
I feel like it is controlling of others (a form of aggression to me) to decide that I am beholden to them in this way, as it attaches consequences for me making the choice to reply on my own terms.
If I fail to respond, I don’t do it to make them angry. I prefer that they do what I do: assume that the recipient will do what they need to do when they need to do it.
It could be said that I am trying to communicate something with my actions: If you contact me, I may or may not get back to you, and when it’s right for me. If I know the person well enough, I will explain this to them, but generally it isn’t people I know well that are the issue.
Four things to note:
1) I don’t do this with my wife or closest friends, or at work, where it is understood that we connect–more with acquaintances or semi-collegial relationships (the chair of a committee at church asking me to volunteer, etc.).
2) I am consistent with this (I don’t target people to “teach them a lesson).”
3) I live by my own approach: If I contact someone, they can get back to me or not as they please.
4) I’m not oblivious to a person wanting me to, or hoping I will, get back to them, but that’s different from an expectation, as if they have a right to it.
I’ll keep exploring this on my own, but I’m curious whether I’m missing something and if this does qualify technically as “passive aggressive.”
@ w1111e,
A very refined sensitivity to your intentions. I don’t hear any passive aggressive in your presentation at all. It sounds more like this is how you manage your time and information load. On the other hand if it’s consistently making people angry at you, then there is probably something unbalanced in the communication there.
I struggle with a similar question in my communications with people also. For me it’s one of being inconsistent with friends. I always get back to them when they contact me, but from my end I sometimes won’t contact them for weeks on end, even though I am aware that they would like more contact.
I’ve worked with this a lot, and where I’m at with it now is that, I can only do what feels good for me, otherwise I’m contacting someone out of obligation, which isn’t helpful to anyone.
I love my friends, but it’s a timing thing, and we just have different rhythms. We’ve talked about it so that’s the best I have come up with, and it feels right.