What do u understand the term "passive-aggressive"

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I am not sure I fully understand what's understood by the term "passive-aggressive." Is it like when you ask someone for advice, you receive their advice, and then you refute their advice and engage them in an argument? Or is more along the lines of purposely causing delays (ie: the wife wants you to go shopping so you purposely take a half an hour shower), indirectly embarrassing people (ie: you show off and throw a tantrum in front of your mother and her friends), covertly refusing to cooperate (ie: your boss sends you to clean up a mess and you purposely do a half-assed job), etc?

The second one is what most people are talking about when they say passive-aggressive.

*FEAR OF DEPENDENCY - Unsure of his autonomy & afraid of being alone, he fights his dependency needs - usually by trying to control you.


*FEAR OF INTIMACY - Guarded & often mistrusful, he is reluctant to show his emotional fragility. He's often out of touch with his feelings, reflexively denying feelings he thinks will "trap" or reveal him, like love. He picks fights to create distance.


*FEAR OF COMPETITION - Feeling inadequate, he is unable to compete with other men in work and love. He may operate either as a self-sabotaging wimp with a pattern of failure, or he'll be the tyrant, setting himself up as unassailable and perfect, needing to eliminate any threat to his power.


*OBSTRUCTIONISM - Just tell a p/a man what you want, no matter how small, and he may promise to get it for you. But he won't say when, and he"ll do it deliberately slowly just to frustrate you. Maybe he won't comply at all. He blocks any real progress he sees to your getting your way.


*FOSTERING CHAOS - The p/a man prefers to leave the puzzle incomplete, the job undone.


*FEELING VICTIMIZED - The p/a man protests that others unfairly accuse him rather than owning up to his own misdeeds. To remain above reporach, he sets himself up as the apparently hapless, innocent victim of your excessive demands and tirades.


*MAKING EXCUSES & LYING - The p/a man reaches as far as he can to fabricate excuses for not fulfilling promises. As a way of withholding information, affirmation or love - to have power over you - the p/a man may choose to make up a story rather than give you a straight answer.


*PROCRASTINATION - The p/a man has an odd sense of time - he believes that deadlines don't exist for him.


*CHRONIC LATENESS & FORGETFULNESS - One of the most infuriating & inconsiderate of all p/a traits is his inability to arrive on time. By keeping you waiting, he sets the ground rules of the relationship. And his selective forgetting - used only when he wants to avoid an obligation.


*AMBIGUITY - He is master of mixed messages and sitting on fences. When he tells you something, you may still walk away wondering if he actually said yes or no.


*SULKING - Feeling put upon when he is unable to live up to his promises or obligations, the p/a man retreats from pressures around him and sulks, pouts and withdraws.


A passive-aggressive man won't have every single one of these traits, but he'll have many of them. He may have other traits as well, which are not passive-aggressive.

I know you could have looked this up on wiki by now, but this is pretty dang thorough if I must say so. From the article, it looks as if both of those behaviors, and many more encompass the passive aggressive "disorder."

In my life, passive-aggression manifests as being non confrontational. I can't confront without having lots of anxiety and it feels like I have shortness of breath. Since I don't confront directly, it might come out in a more passive way. How this happens I cannot explain, I cannot give an example. I don't want to give an example. It's subconscious.

It's anything where someone's aggression is expressed, not by open aggression, but in all sorts of little covert ways all the time, where either it'd be impossible to tell if it's truly aggression or not, or where it's only obviously aggression to the target of the aggression.

(Although a person can believe they're being targeted by it, when they're not. I've had people decide I'm being passive-aggressive, for instance when I don't understand something, and they think I'm just pretending not to understand, to make life hard for them, or that kind of thing. It would only be passive-aggressive if I were truly "playing dumb" to force them to explain something I already knew, so that it'd take up their time and annoy them, or something.)

There was a great Saturday Night Live character called Passive-Aggressive Pam.

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/00/00mpam.phtml

There is a transcript of the sketch with her in it. She's a really good example.

When you are being hostile or oppositional to someone, instead of dealing with the issue head on, you act out in other ways. When a professor took away work I was doing because he was screwing another woman on the project and she didn't understand my assignments and she had a PhD and should have understood the grad-level topic, I didn't confront him over that. He started dictating simple work for me to do, which "demoted" me to being a stupid object and reduced my research experience to a zero. Instead of confronting him over his taking the meaningful work away from me to please his egotistical girlfriend, I just ignored his assignments and did what I wanted to do. About a day before our meetings I'd start trying to throw work together, but it was clear to him that I wasn't listening to him or doing what he wanted me to do. I quit several months later, after billing to the project all Summer trying to do the research on my own and ignoring him, telling him he was treating me like a "coding monkey".

That was passive-aggressive, because instead of confronting him on why he demoted the research quality, I acted out in other ways.

But in that situation, there was no way to talk to the professor about his professional compromises to please his incompetent, jealous, narcissistic girlfriend. A normal person would have their hands tied in that situation. So I was in an impossible situation, really. I should have quit immediately, and not tried to do the work on my own, tho.

I've found that I'm not being passive agressive, but rather some trait of Asperger's is manifesting itself due to something such as:
1. crowds in malls and the subsequent panic attacks
2. crowds in Wal-Mart and subsequent panic attacks
3. a generally bad day and how I react to it
4. a completely bad week and how I react to it
5. running out of my meds
6. I could go on, but I believe stuff like this with a big ETC. covers 99% of what Aspies go through and react to in what appears to be passive agressive manner.
That said, passive agressive is a myth. Nobody is passive agressive. Nobody can be. Your subconcious does not control your actions! You control your actions and whoever feeds you this bull should be shot for feeding us all a grand lie!

Skywatcher
The only truth is not the one you verify with your eyes, but the one your verify with your heart.

I heard this term. It's when someone is real nice and then the next thing you know, they are nasty.

I wonder if I am this, I am usually nice and then I can be mean because I say rude things or hurtful things when I am mad, I snap sometimes. Maybe this is everyone because my mother is nice but yet she gets real cranky when she is tired so probably not.

Bump!

I've recently noticed this term for the first time, and am trying to decide whether it's useful or not. In the book "Loving Mr. Spock" the author mentions her survey in which she asked "is your partner passive, passiv-aggressive, or controlling?" and they ALL answered "all three." Yet I find it hard to believe that all participants knew what PA was, so I smell a rat. Is PA controversial, or am I the only one who's supicious of it?

One reason for my suspicion:

I think it's more than that. It's like when they're upset with you over something and you know they are so you ask what you've done wrong. They reply 'nothing' and then continue to punish you but you cannot deal with the situation because you've no idea what the issue is. So you end up walking on eggshells all the time.

^
Hmmm....that's more like it.

I saw that exact behaviour in my mother, and some guys used to complain that it was very common in women.......I haven't noticed it in my partners and I thought it was a thing of the past. An extended form of this - er - style is that the woman challenges the man to tell her what he's done wrong (even though he's only just asked)......I'm loathe to condemn even the most crazy talk as necessarily hostile, and I thought the motives might be more reasonable - some guys, if simply told that such-and-such a thing has hurt their wives, would counter by ridiculing her for having such silly, sentimental feelings, thus invalidating her challenge to his behaviour. But if she can force him in this way to declare his understanding of how he's caused her pain, he can't easily invalidate her assertion, as he's the one who made it. I'd have to know more about the man's usual reaction to being challenged the "straight" way before I could judge any particular case with any confidence. My father did tend to rubbish Mum's complaints rather glibly. And sometimes I felt that Mum was just being sarcastic, as it was quite clear from her body language that something was wrong, so when she sniffed "nothing - why should anything be wrong" it did look like sarcasm.

Passive aggression was very common in my family. I can't remember exactly how I dealt with it. I know we see the other person as having the problem, but if we are really prepared to help them with it, then that can do it. I think if you show you are open and prepared to listen to criticisms, that can help the passive aggressor feel more able to actually spit out what the devil their problem is.

I can't think of the last time I got into a passive aggression situation and I am happy about that. Not working probably helps.

^^
Yes I agree that most aggressive behaviour can be converted into something better by remaining calm and reassuring, and by being open to teasing out the real problem behind the aggression.

Can you remember any examples from your family that you felt were definitely passive-aggressive?

Ah, you posted again while I was replying......

Yes I think there might be something in your notion. People often seem to assume malevolence when they can't understand behaviour that hurts them.