The Truth About Passive Aggression

"Acting like you don’t care is not letting it go." -Penelope Douglas

Feigning indifference is one of the tools in the passive aggressor’s toolkit. It's a way of showing disrespect with the intent of making the other person feel unimportant. This is so common in adult relationships that is has become normalized. It's one of the patterns that paralyzes couples and undermines resolution. One partner may inflict shame on the other, eliciting an outburst of anger or frustration, leading to a passive aggressive response. The cycle continues and the intimacy erodes. 

I'm sure there are few who have not experienced this dynamic or responded in a passive aggressive manner at some point, if not often. So, how do we respond differently? How do we break patterns that create strife and unhappiness, and rarely resolve the issue at the core? 

The answer is simple really. We need to step back and ask ourselves what we want as an outcome. What is our goal? I'm pretty confident few would say their true intention is to hurt the other person. In the moment, hurting our partner’s feelings may seem necessary to protect our own. The impulse to protect our ego, to avoid being vulnerable, is the force behind many hurtful actions. We lash out in an effort to conceal our shame. It's less a desire to cause pain than it is a fear of our shortcomings being seen. Its an ego driven mechanism. 

If we take that moment of reflection, we may realize that our real objective is about developing understanding. However, many of us have never felt safe sharing our emotions. We were taught to conceal them or risk embarrassment, or worse. So, we developed intricate methods of hiding our feelings, sometimes behind barbed wire other times behind a wall of silence and the distance of retreat. 

Rewiring our conditioned reactions is hard. Those neural pathways are well -traveled. But everytime one partner responds in a new way a doorway opens, maybe only by a crack at first but enough for a sliver of light to pass through. In time, with patience and determined commitment to change, the relational patterns will evolve. I have witnessed this in many couples. On the other side of misunderstandings, anger, withdrawal, and disconnection, you can find deepened empathy, greater compassion, and revitalized love.

Take a breath, or ten, and ask yourself why you are really fighting and what you would actually want as an outcome. If your next words or actions won't bring you closer to the place you want to be, try ones that might. It always starts with one person holding steady in their desire to right the relationship and choosing a different response, not their habitual one.