Passive Agressive

What Does it Mean to be Passive Aggressive?


When a person demonstrates a pervasive pattern of negative attitudes and behaviours like procrastination, stubbornness, resentment, sullenness, and a deliberate failure to accomplish their share of tasks they can be exhibiting a Passive Aggressive personality disorder. Noncompliance does not necessarily indicate true passive aggressive behavior, which is the manifestation of emotions that have been repressed based on a self-imposed need for acceptance.

Signs include:
Being chronically late and forgetting things to exert control or to punish
Fear of dependency
Fear of intimacy and inability to trust.
Fear of competition and then nonperformance in work teams
Blaming others, victimization response, sullenness, depression, anger.

It may start in childhood in an environment where honest expression of feelings is forbidden so that children repress or deny their feelings and use other channels to express their frustration. Dealing with such a person in adulthood can be frustrating and make you doubt yourself. They are manipulative and they create a situation which induces self doubt.