Maybe I’m one and don’t realize it, but I see/hear so many people rant against passive/aggressive people. These same people never seem to rant against plain old “aggressive” people. Why is this? Is being passive aggressive perceived as something worse than “outright aggressive”? I just don’t get it.
Well, obviously, I can’t give you anyone’s take on it but mine, but this is IMHO, so. . .just plain flat out agressiveness doesn’t bother me unless it’s obnoxious. That’s because agression is honest. Someone is upfront about what they want, and is going for it. If one can manage to do that without being obnoxious, it’s an admirable thing. Passive/agressiveness, OTOH, is dishonest and manipulative. The P/A will tell you whatever you want to hear, and then do what they feel like doing. The poet Peter McWilliams once wrote: “People who are afraid of inflicting pain are awfully painful to be around”, and I agree. Passive/agressives don’t want to inflict pain, but they want their way all the time. You can’t have it both ways.
I think the confusion lies in the word aggressive. Aggression is usually recognizable - passive aggression is not something that you can point to a specific instance of something and say “He was acting passively aggressive towards me!”.
Medline link Although Medline says that it is no longer recognized as an official diagnosis, it does seem to give a good explanation of the behavior.
I think it’s the fact that the passive aggressive person is obstructing that causes the anger. If you’re not going to do something that you promised to do, tell me, so I can ask someone else. If you can’t do the job you were asked to do, maybe you should look for something else, and let the work that needs to be done get done.
But I disagree slightly with the poet. P/A people are not really afraid of inflicting pain. They are afraid of confrontation and, in my humble experiece, tend to be cowardly and outright deceitful about showing their true feelings/intentions.
To the OP: Do you have a different take on this? If so, just curious to hear your argument on it.
Fascinating. But to me the opposite would be “I want my way and I’ll inflict pain if needed to get it.” I would think such a person is more reprehensible.
After reading the medlink that susan_foster referenced I would have to say that I certainly have done passive/aggressive things in my life.
When I was 15 and worked in a McDonald’s I was asked to “learn grill”. To me grilling==cooking which I loathed and IMHO was the hardest task in the store. It also didn’t pay any extra. I couldn’t refuse (be openly aggressive) as I would have been shown the door. So I “tried” to be a grill-man, sucked at it, and was restored to my regular duties.
What would have been my option? Quit? Be fired? or “Mess up and stay employed?”
You’re probably right in that it was a fear of confrontation. But the caveat here was that I knew the inevitable outcome of the confrontation - being fired. So I took the “cowardly” P/A approach and let the manager decide I wasn’t fit for the tough task. As far as I was concerned, no one got hurt, I got to keep my cushier position, customers didn’t have to eat my horrible burgers (I do truly stink at cooking to this day), and the manager got to “try me out”, and move on to a more competent worker.
If I had to take a guess, I’d say that different people are P/A for different reasons. Undrlying it all is the desire to get their own way, of course, but while some may not give a damn who they hurt on the way, others don’t want to see anyone hurt. So they can pretend that if they don’t actually see the hurt, it doesn’t exist. For instance, in my P/A days, my major reason is that my mother (who was really, really screwed up) taught me that, no matter what, I shouldn’t make waves. So, the way to get what I wanted without making waves was passive aggression. I’m not defending my behavior: it was reprehensible. But it’s simply not true that I didn’t care if someone got hurt.
You seem to want to believe that a person who acted passive/aggressively would otherwise acting aggressively if you took away their ability to be P/A.
Why don’t you think that person would otherwise act passively?
Passive/aggressive indicates a degree of cowardice on the PA person. I think the defining characteristic is that the person is afraid of confrontation, and when they encouter a situation where they need to get something done, their instinct is to “avoid”. We only put the “aggressive” part of it onto it as a way to indicated that they’re actually atively trying to get something done in a passive manner.
It takes a certain quality to achieve the confrontation, a quality that the passive/aggressive person lacks. I think THAT would be their greatest hurdle to overcome.
P/A behavior is a way of getting one’s way without seeming pushy. Think of the stereotypical “Jewish mother” you hear jokes about:
**Q. How many stereotypical Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb?
A. None. “No no, don’t worry about me. I’ll just sit here… [deep sigh] …in the dark.”**
In other words, one gets one’s way not by making one’s wishes known (which is not always “inflicting pain,” btw), but by acting pathetic and helpless in order to arouse people’s sense of guilt to the point that they’ll “volunteer” to do what one wants. The P/A person (a) gets their way, and (b) still gets to seem non-threatening.
I know quite a few people who fall into this category, including one who has made it her entire mode of communication. A mutual acquaintance refers to this person as “passive-ferocious.”
*BwanaBob, most posters have approached this from almost a clinical perspective. Let me give you a real life example of passive agressive behavior. Before I tell you this story, your experiences on the grill was not really passive agressive. This is passive agressive:
I was dating a girl for three years. She moved in with me. We lived together for awhile, but things weren’t going so well. She grew up in England, but we were living in Alabama. Before Christmas, she told me that she was going to spend the Holidays with her parents. That was fine. The previous year we both spent the holidays with her parents and the year before that we spent them with mine. Transatlantic plane tickets ain’t cheap so I said “I’ll see you after New Years”.
All this time I had been saving for a ring to ask her to marry me, but holding off buying it, because, well, things weren’t going too well. Anywho, she was supposed to call me in early January about her flight back.
I never got the call.
I waited a few days thinking there was some snafu.,
Nothing.
So I looked through the drawers in our bedroom and realized that she had taken all her summer clothes. “Why does she need her swimsuits for Christmas in Stratford upon Avon?”, I thought. I called her parents, but they seemed awfull cagey. Eventually, I got in touch with her through some of her friends, and you know what? She never planned to come back.
She avoided all confrontation with me and just left. She masked her departure in a very believable lie. She had no intention of even giving me a phone call or even a “Dear John” letter. Nothing. Nada. That hurt.
I felt like she didn’t respect me, and that she never had respected me. I know now that she did, and that she truly loved me once. Relationships, and love, can die, but I would have far prefered a “Fuck you, Monkey, I’m leaving” than a disingenuous “Love you, see you when I get back”.
That’s why people can’t stand passive aggresives.
I should have seen it coming. I’d ask her, “what’s wrong, baby” and she’d reply “nothing”, or… even worse “if you don’t know, I won’t tell you”. That type of comment put the ball in my court, but I didn’t know what to do with it because I didn’t know what’s wrong in the first place.
The passive agressive inflicts pain by being too passive and heaping all the problems on the other.
I guess it worked out well for you and in the end you got what you really wanted.
However, I suggest that had you been up front with the manager and expressed to him that you felt you would be more effective in your current (or some other) roll but in the interest of being a team player, you’d try the grill gig for an agreed period of time, then that would have been a more direct and honest way to go. It would have yielded similar results for you and probably gained you some personal integrity and respect points (with the right manager, of course). But those are just my thoughts on it. YMMV.
Oh, this is the worst! My mom was famous for this kind of thing. Whatever she was saying, we were supposed to divine (through our psychic powers, I guess :rolleyes: ) what she meant by it. For instance, I might say “Mom, can I spend the night at Dianne’s house?” and she’d say “Fine”, leaving me to figure out whether she meant “Fine” or “Go ahead, but I don’t really want you to, and will pout for three days after you come back”.
Some people, upon getting to know my husband, think he’s an asshole. But you know what? He’s not. It’s just that he doesn’t have a passive/aggressive bone ini his body, plus he lacks tact. So, if I say to him, “Do you mind fixing dinner for the kids? I’m going to be gone longer than I thought”, he’ll either say “I’d rather not, why don’t we order pizza”, or he’ll say “Fine”, which, coming from him, always means “Fine”. I like it that way.
I’m not calling you out on the carpet… it seems clear to me that you’ve learned from your experiences and moved on.
BUT… It seems to me that intellectually you were very aware that you were hurting people with your P/A behaviour because you recognize it as being “reprehensible”. So although I can’t accuse you of being indifferent to people’s feelings, I think it’s fair to say that your feelings/approach/goal was more important to you than their feelings of hurt. Again, not requiring you to put other people’s feelings before your own, just suggeting that there is a better way to manage the process without being P/A.
I probably should have been more clear in this post. I certainly didn’t recognize the behavior as reprehensible at the time. At the time I actually looked at it as a survival skill, if you will. It is only in retrospect that I think of it as reprehensible.
Children do, indeed, learn what they live and I was playing the games my mother taught me. However, as I became more mature and more cognizant of the world around me, I learned a more honorable way of doing things.
Why, yes, yes he does. However, she’s fifty-one, been married for 25 years and has two grown kids. However, she’s very nice, and attractive, too. If you’re still interested, I’ll let her know.
Another aspect of Passive Aggression is that it can easily morph into Emotional Abuse. There’s a certain kind of abuse called “gaslighting” where the abuser can make the victim doubt their memory and sanity. If you call someone out on passive aggressive behavior, you usually get “What are you talking about? I only said X.” If this happens over and over, it gets to you.