Abuse

Passive Aggressive Comments

By  | 

If you make a lot of passive aggressive comments then what you’ve got to realize is that the person being abusive in these situations is you.

That’s a tough pill to swallow. None of us believe we’re the villains in our own stories, we believe we’re the heroes. This means that when our behavior is less than heroic we resort to all manner of rationalization and rely on the various defense mechanisms to smooth out the inner conflict that arises from the knowledge that it’s us doing something villainous.

In the case of passive aggressive comments you probably blame the people you’re being passive aggressive towards, you consider them to be abusive. You tell yourself it’s their words or behaviors that are reproachable. Those barbs you’re sending out are simply to even the playing field, to put them in their place.

But it’s you being hostile, you being aggressive, you being abusive. It’s just that you don’t feel safe floating your hostility and aggression in an unambiguous way, probably because you faced severe unwanted consequences in an abusive situation in childhood when you tried the unambiguous approach.

The thing to realize is that when you feel compelled to say something passive aggressive it means you’re unhappy with what your interlocutor is doing and you should definitely pay attention to that feeling. It’s just that there’s a much healthier way to approach the situation, which is of course having the courage to be direct, to say in no uncertain terms what it is you don’t like, without being hostile or mean or aggressive. Just have the courage to be clear and firm about what your needs are and how your feel they’re being trampled, and you’ll be able to leave the encounter knowing you took the healthy approach rather than resorting to a hidden but still very real form of abuse.

Related posts:

  1. Passive Aggressive We were waiting for a spot to open up in a busy parking lot at the beach when a car came around the corner from the other direction, spying what we had already seen, someone getting into their car and preparing to leave. Then came the inevitable confrontation, where the driver put on her right […]...
  2. Apathy In our view apathy is the fertile soil in which depression takes root and grows. But while the apathetic attitude  appears on the surface to be a passive state of basically haven given up on any active engagement with whatever the entity in question is, when we peel back the psychological layers what we see […]...
  3. Abusive Relationships For those who have never been caught up in an abusive relationship it seems insane that so many victims allow the abusive situation to continue on indefinitely, but what these perplexed people don’t understand is that many abusers are master manipulators, they’re skilled at instilling doubt, in turning the tables, in making their victims question […]...
  4. Helplessness It was Karen Horney who defined basic anxiety as helplessness in a world perceived as hostile. If you have been experiencing distress from feelings of helplessness in some aspect of your life, it’s worth looking at your early childhood to see whether you can make the connection between your anxiety now and having felt helpless […]...
  5. Abusers Try To Shift The Blame To Become The ‘Victims’ Being subjected to abusive behavior is a painful, confusing experience for many reasons. The reason we want to talk about here has to do with a psychological trick most abusers pull where they try to shift the blame for the abusive situation onto their victims and simultaneously paint themselves as the true victims who are […]...
  6. Judging Others Harshly If you find yourself constantly judging others harshly it probably means that you were judged harshly, most likely by one of your primary caregivers. You can think of your attitude as an unconscious protective mechanism, a way to insure that you never again have to experience that emotional pain. If you are the one doing […]...
  7. Negative Self-Talk Negative self-talk is the abusive running conversation you have going on with yourself about yourself. We call it abusive because you put yourself down, make yourself feel less, and characterize yourself as having negative traits, of being basically worthless. Sometimes you make these comments out loud but they are also a jumble of thoughts and […]...
  8. Conflict is Inevitable Unless environmental conditions are perfectly suited to your personality, motivations, desires, and behaviors the result will be conflict once in a while. Since no two people are exactly the same and no environment can be perfectly suited to your needs there is really no way to avoid conflict. The question is not whether there will […]...
  9. Working With Abusers The tendency is to villainize abusers but trying to get them to accept the role of villain is a terrible idea. They won’t play ball, even if they seem receptive. What they will do is actively or passively thwart every therapeutic attempt. This is because at the conscious level abusers don’t believe they’re villains, they […]...
  10. The Insanity Of War The insanity of war, and by war we mean violent words or deeds meant to settle conflict, can be most clearly seen and understood by examining interactions amongst members in the family constellation. One of the great gifts of psychoanalysis is showing us that when it comes to human relationships the scale may change but […]...
  11. Coping Mechanisms In Relationships What happens to a lot of couples is that partners keep using the coping mechanisms that they used in their families of origin to lower the anxiety caused by feeling helpless in a world perceived as hostile. This is a huge problem both because these coping mechanisms no longer make sense, assuming the relationship is […]...
  12. Always Running Late If you are always running late, there is a chance that your behavior is passive aggressive, basically a way to stick it to people without risking outright confrontation. But it’s probably less nefarious than that and just represents a symbolic attempt to push back against all the constrictive, limiting elements in your life. It’s likely […]...
  13. Detached Personality And The Inability To Express Feelings We all approach the way we express what we’re really feeling differently. Some of us wear our hearts on our sleeves, some of us are more reserved. But as long as we feel able to let what we’re authentically feeling be known there’s little cause to label any point on that continuum as dysfunctional. We […]...
  14. Emotional Detachment And Compartmentalization Most psychological disciplines agree that an integrated personality structure is indicative of mental health, meaning of course that a fragmented personality structure is indicative of dysfunction. Take for example the greedy businessman who spends his week low balling, manipulating, conning, glorying in doing anything and everything under the sun necessary for material gain, who then […]...
  15. Criticism And The Idealized Image Criticism Hurts But We Decide How Much Unless we’re masochists who have come to derive pleasure from being mistreated criticism hurts. But for those of us who are completely unable to accept criticism and use it productively, for those of us who instantly become humiliated, infuriated, defensive, and aggressive at the first whiff of a […]...
  16. Control And The Unexpected The more control you exercise over happenings the less room you leave for the unexpected, for the spontaneous. Those obsessed with control wish to eradicate the unexpected because they view it as a threat. This usually has to do with a childhood situation where helplessness in a world perceived as hostile was the norm. Those […]...
  17. Grief Is Supposed To Hurt When confronted by the loss of something or someone we’ve grown accustomed to we’ll experience painful feelings of grief unless the situation was highly aversive to us, in which case we might feel relieved or even ebullient. But especially in the case of relationships it’s usually a mixed bag. Even if we feel mostly positive […]...
  18. Abuse Is An Around The Clock Problem For Victims When laypeople conceptualize the detrimental effects of abuse they are likely to focus on the psychological, emotional, or physical pain caused by abusive actions in the immediate moment. But for victims of abuse it’s an around the clock problem, a constant specter hanging over everything they do. This is because of the expectation that abuse could […]...
  19. Subjectivity Of Abusers We have written about how most abusers are deeply narcissistic, meaning that their worldviews are riddled with subjectivity. All of our worldviews are riddled with subjectivity actually since we are all subjects filtering objective reality through our own sets of perceptions and experiences, but the difference is that people we would term psychologically healthy are […]...
  20. Warriors For Peace People who haven’t done the very exhausting work of emotional and intellectual development tend to consider peace to be a passive state. Peace is not a passive state, it is the most active of states. Where the warlike attitude is lazy, allowing for the quick release of stored up psychic energy in the form of […]...
Related Items