Passive aggression

Some 20 years later, my offspring still bring up my solution to a DD's passive aggression.

On one occasion when, as a teenager, she slammed her bedroom door; I simply got my tools and removed the door.

the type of passive agressive I came across as an instructor and as a lecturer, is where someone may be doing something in a wrong way, you show them the way it should be done , they nod and then carry on doing it the old way - with the "I've always done it that way. Makes no attempt to try new method etc. When there is a change in procedure in a firm, this is often the case. Or they may attempt to do it the new way whilst you watch but the next day they are back at the old routine. So with international companies you were wasting your time working with usa in the morning, as they had not started work , but could clear your european work and then go on to american stuff, Most efficient and you could actually get immediate answers in areas, but the p/ag would revert to their way and look at you in a challenging way to see if you would notice or do anything (I always did!

Eloethan

People who try to undermine you by making comments or behaving in a way that they know will unsettle you, eg

Sulking, instead of telling you what is troubling/annoying them. Ditto long silences.

Paying you a back-handed compliment - my mum never forgot her sister-in-law saying "you look really nice when you've got your make up on even though you're quite ordinary"

Always making negative comments about you or trying to make you feel stupid.

When my children excitedly told a neighbour it was my 30th birthday she told me I looked very good - pause - for my age!

It actually made me laugh and much more aware that her sugary sweetness was a mask!

I have to admit, I had to look up the definition of passive- agressive. In my younger days, that was what we used to call a sulky-teenager, like 'Kevin' as played by that comedian. I think it was Harry Enfield.

I think a friend (?) was being p-a when she produced a very formal tea (home-made scones, cream and jam, china cup and saucer etc.) and said how disappointed she had been to be given a mug of tea and a biscuit at a neighbour's.
Actually, that's what I would have given her too, as she knew quite well. I just said, this is lovely, you are such a perfectionist. Which was p-a on my part, come to think of it.

Oh my ex husband had amazing skills..and absolute passive aggressive genius.
Door slams and thumping into things or banging stuff down loudy..I'd jump or twitch or say 'all ok?'and he would huff at me 'yew why wouldn't everything BE OK!'
If I didn't want to be intimate more than once a day, he would wait for me to be almost asleep then roll over huffing loudly then keep kicking until i had no duvet then say there was plenty of room... cut my veggie food with a knifethat had just had ham on for instance then say I was 'bizarrely over sensitive '
Passive aggressive to me is a cowardly way of trying to worry or manipulate someone whilst maintaining you're acting in an appropriate way.
Is that what you mean?

Hall-Flavin, M.D. Passive-aggressive behavior is a pattern of indirectly expressing negative feelings instead of openly addressing them. There's a disconnect between what a person who exhibits passive-aggressive behavior says and what he or she does.

We have a lovely lovely man at work who won't learn tech and has an air of despair when asked to do something, say with a spreadsheet. No matter how often you show him, because he doesn't like doing it,
he feins incompetence until you just do it for him as its quicker than keep trying to show him how. Colleagues who are sick of helping him call it weaponised incompetence. I'm not sure if that's the right expression to be fair but he does go round everyone at different times for different tasks so that he's not putting on the same person all the time.

It sounds 'needy' to me - a person who doesn't pull their weight and relies on your assistance - really annoying at work - and they seem to get away with it. Even more infuriating, they tend to be the ones who are made redundant, with a nice settlement!

Gabrielle56 Not daft labels but rising from a our much greater knowledge of people and their problems rising from development in psychology and psychiatry over the last 50 plus years.

People who try to undermine you by making comments or behaving in a way that they know will unsettle you, eg

Sulking, instead of telling you what is troubling/annoying them. Ditto long silences.

Paying you a back-handed compliment - my mum never forgot her sister-in-law saying "you look really nice when you've got your make up on even though you're quite ordinary"

Always making negative comments about you or trying to make you feel stupid.

i laugh at these daft labels put on everything nowadays, back in my youth we just called people like this SNIDEY!!!

Then there is acting paranoid on a social media site, claiming to be vicimised by another poster, until that poster (and often others too) has had enough and posts something personal - at which point the passive aggressor triumphantly says that people are always ganging up on them.

Perfectly illustrated and articulated and witnessed all too often by one particular poster. No matter how many times it's pointed out to them that they're behaving in a passive aggressive manner, they vehemently deny it and gaslight others by accusing them of bullying and being piled up on. Possibly their self declared long term mental frailty is the root cause.

"... aura of limpness..." Love this expression, which has now entered my vocabulary

It's indirect aggression. That's something else.

Passive-aggressive behavior is a pattern of indirectly expressing negative feelings instead of openly addressing them. There's a disconnect between what a person who exhibits passive-aggressive behavior says and what he or she does
This is what you get if you Google passive aggressive behaviour

I think this means someone appears to be perfectly pleasant with you- no shouting, no insults, no overt aggression, BUT they make their feelings know in other ways so that you become increasingly uncomfortable. EG. A friend and I once went to a stately home where there was a fair in progress. I had suggested it. It was not long before she started making subtle suggestions that the event wasn't very interesting, the weather wasn't good enough, the grounds weren't worth seeing the coffee shop was too crowded etc etc. Afterwards I wished that she'd said directly she didn't want to go in the first place, rather than making me feel increasingly undermined while we were there.

Sounds like a mix of laziness and maybe lack of competence to do her job. If you cover her work you might be hiding this from managers. It’s a performance management issue that has to be formally handled. If she has been given the training/support/time to do her job and still can’t do she has to be got rid of or moved to a job that she can do.

Do you think that some forms. Of passive aggressive behavior in some relationships stem.from.either powerlessness, or being in some type.of abusive relationship, which could be a child, a woman in an abusive relationship, or someone in a job that basically they are trapped in for whatever reason when it is dangerous to be honest about their feelings. So understandable I guess
So in a situation where this is not so and the person does it for another reason this is where it is harder for the recipient to deal with. Maybe the person had to be like that but now the situation is different and they should now learn better ways. Some like the above person may just be basically lazy and their rrsenent is that they are having to actually work.

How about when you have been trying to get an answer for someone and after numerous emails and phone calls you to thenpm that you are very aware of how busy they are and you really don’t want to keep bothering them and wasting their time so if they could just answer your question please?

A bit I don’t want to waste your time I do don’t want to waste my time so answer the bl@@dy question

I think of that as passive aggressive

I've encountered passive-aggression as resistance to change, as in the introduction of new ways of working. The person who thought things perfectly OK as they were and shows no initiative in helping new methods work - pointing out minor glitches without making any attempt to resolve them.

I have always thought that passive aggression is the use of things like guilt trips to be aggressive to someone, or claiming that they have attacked you so that you are then justified in defending yourself - that includes inventing mental and emotional attacks. It is essentially tricking someone else into a fight by appearing publicly to be innocent, and starting a conflict which appears to have been started by the other party.

Cowering and saying "Don't hit me", when the other person offers no threat at all, but eventually they get fed up and snap back is another - so that then the passive aggressor can legitimately say "See, I told you so!"

Then there is acting paranoid on a social media site, claiming to be vicimised by another poster, until that poster (and often others too) has had enough and posts something personal - at which point the passive aggressor triumphantly says that people are always ganging up on them.

Passive aggression is really any form of behaviour that conveys an 'aggressive' message in a non-direct, 'passive' way. A colleague underperforming could be passive-aggressive (i.e. conveying anger, disapproval or other negative emotion by not doing something properly) or simply laziness, or ineptness. More common passive-aggression is going into a mood, giving the silent treatment, playing the victim etc. Some people can be very passive, but that does not mean they are passive-aggressive, they may simply be laid-back and/or lazy. I'm a psychodynamic counsellor and I can say that passive aggression is definitely a form of behaviour, and it's very toxic in relationships. Likewise narcissism. But such terms are now bandied about quite casually, sometimes inaccurately, and even used as a weapon by those to whom they apply. Suffice to say that a great deal of what we do/say as human beings has a hidden agenda.

My latest encounter of what I would describe as passive aggressive was with the receptionist at a dentists. She had very curt and cold body language but on the outside presented a very sweet and helpful persona.... actually she was very unhelpful to the point of being obstructive whilst smiling sweetly.
For me it's often a persons body language doing one thing( cold, angry, aggressive) but the words seeming to be sweet, kind, caring. Body language tells more that words.

I think it is used in coercive relationships (one of the weapons) to undermine confidence in the other

I don’t think doing a job badly counts.