More Passive-Aggressive Person.. Who are They?

Passive Aggressive Behavior

Are you having difficulty coping with someone else’s passive aggressive behavior? People with passive aggressive personality disorder seem very pleasant and helpful on the surface, but they aren’t. Passive aggressive people have difficulty expressing anger and hostility directly. Hence they find cunning ways in which to express their aggression. For instance, a passive aggressive person may deliberately shirk a responsibility with the intention of upsetting someone else. What are the symptoms of passive aggressive personality disorder? What causes passive aggressive behavior? If someone is being passive aggressive towards you, how should you handle it?

The Symptoms

Passive aggressive individuals can be difficult to spot because their hostility is never obvious. However, there are certain patterns to passive aggressive behavior. For instance, a passive aggressive person might be consistently late for appointments you make with her, deliberately forget to do certain tasks, or ‘accidently’ misplace important things. A passive aggressive individual could say things that can be interpreted in more than one way. This obscure way of speaking is used to make other people doubt themselves. Passive aggressive people often avoid any kind of intimacy or dependency. That’s because they usually find it difficult to trust other people. A passive aggressive person may well cause chaotic or dramatic situations to occur on purpose. They also tend to sulk, blame other people for their own failures, gossip maliciously, procrastinate, harbor resentments, and make excuses for not performing as expected.

The Causes

Why do some people have passive aggressive personality disorder, while others do not? Passive aggressive personality disorder is thought to begin in childhood. Children who live in a household where direct and honest expression of anger is prohibited often learn to use passive aggressive behaviors in order to express themselves. Unfortunately, children who learn to use passive aggressive methods of communicating hostility don’t usually develop adequate self-expression skills. Hence they often become rather spiteful adults

How to Respond

What should you do if you think someone’s behavior towards you is passive aggressive? Passive aggressive behavior can be rather difficult to cope with. That’s because passive aggressive people seem agreeable and charming on the surface. Hence when someone is passive aggressive towards you, it’s easy to doubt your own suspicions concerning them.

When dealing with a passive aggressive individual, it’s very important to keep your patience and remain composed. Any show of anger or frustration on your part will only reinforce the passive aggressive behavior. Don’t let the passive aggressive person’s words or behavior make you feel

FROM CITY WEEKLY…

If we really want to understand what passive aggression is, we should call it passive contempt, or passive hostility. When you try to avoid conflict, it’s really contempt for the other party. You have no desire to work with them. And sometimes it’s contempt for yourself. You’re not going to assert your needs, your wants, your interest. What happens if we subordinate our concerns, our hopes, our fears, our aspirations? In the long run, it’s disastrous for us, in terms of our emotional and psychological well-being. It destroys any kind of authentic, honest relationship we have with others, because we grow to resent it.

here’s very clear empirical research that shows that the right kind of conflict, managed in the right way, is very healthy. And to stifle all conflict, regardless of the motive, is usually a very unhealthy thing to do. So the idea of contention, I would say, is conflict that’s hostile and dysfunctional, where you try to impose a solution that they disagree with. Contention is when you deal with conflict in an ugly, nasty, hostile, overbearing and contemptuous way.

What is the ideal conflict-resolution style?Collaboration would be ideal, but it’s beyond the skill sets that most people have. So compromise is a healthy alternative. Compromise is a more equitable form of competition. Competition is “I don’t care what happens to you. I’m just out for myself, and I’m going to assume you’re doing the same.” Compromise is when two people who are competing realize that beating each other up increases the risk that both end up dead. Compromise is the more likely strategy that people use when they feel that the alternative, open hostility and winning everything at all costs, isn’t worth it. Compromise is giving a little. At least we can feel like we’ve got some measure of fairness. Most people in most social situations, if they believe that they have been dealt with with an appropriate level of fairness, can live with that.

Is knowledge the first step to recovery from passive-aggressive behavior?You have to develop emotional self-regulation, empathy, good communication skills—which is a broad sweeping label, but when it comes to conflict resolution, the best problem solvers do the least talking. They create an environment where the other party to the conflict feels like they can open up and share what they are frustrated about. [They have] the ability to give people the benefit of the doubt, that they really aren’t idiots and morons; they have perfectly sensible reasons why they think what they do and why they are operating the way they are operating.

Those kinds of skill sets—self-awareness of your behavior on others, understanding and sizing up your behavior for what it is, understanding that if you are submissive and a Dora the Doormat, self-awareness recognizes that’s not healthy submission, that’s not Christlike submission, and then moves on to self-regulation. Emotional self-regulation is the hardest when you’re in the middle of conflict, in the heat of the battle. That’s when you need self-regulation the most, and that’s when it turns out to be the most elusive and the hardest to find for people. That’s what makes it hard for people to be good at conflict resolution in that moment, when they need to step back and say, “OK, let’s do this constructively,” instead of responding emotionally out of anger or fear or anxiety.