I was scrolling through Twitter when I happened across a question proposed by Jackson Rathbone.
As a passive aggressive person, myself, I figured I would take on the question as my article for the week. Not all passive aggressive people are the same, we all have different, hidden reasons as to why we are the way that we are.
What is passive aggression?
Passive aggression is a type of behavior that uses indirect hostility or aggression and avoiding direct confrontation in order to get what a person wants. A form of manipulation, technically speaking. There is a lot of negative connotation flowing through these lines, the behavior isn't always voluntary. One thing to remember is that everyone can and will exhibit passive aggressive behavior from time to time; think of it this way, you use sarcasm every once in a while, do you not?
Why are people passive aggressive?
With me, personally, I am passive aggressive because I don't like to be outwardly rude to other people. A lot of the time, however, people piss me off. Again, I don't like to come right out and be aggressive towards people. I'm a bitch, I'll be upfront about that. The type of sarcasm I use often flies over the general radar as I tend to use a higher vocabulary and educated references that allow me to get my point across without it really damaging my peers. When someone does understand what I am saying, the argument usually subsides and we break out into a comical conversation about the appreciation of the references.
How to deal with it.
This really depends on why people are passive aggressive. I don't use that type of behavior unless I've deemed that someone deserves it. When people go on rants about how their seriously first-world-problems are just the end of the world of how a certain group of people shouldn't do 'x', that's when I'll use passive aggression. So my first piece of advice would be to take a step back and look at the argument or problem at hand. Now, I'm not saying that you're the problem, I'm just saying that if you inspect the problem you may find a solution easily. My second piece of advice would be to inspect the form of passive aggression being used. It's your call, call the person out counteract the method of passive aggression. My third piece of advice would be to be patient. Unless the person's relationship to you doesn't matter, I would suggest being patient.
We all cope with stress in different ways, some of us lash out in obvious ways. Some of us lash out in less obvious ways. As long as we are patient with each other, everything will be fine.
