Is it okay: to be passive aggressive?
In past times of discontent I have been guilty of the occasional door slam, walking louder than necessary, making oblique comments with thinly veiled double meanings, and aggressively playing songs that I know get on the nerves of my at-that-moment-enemy. It doesn’t matter that they are in their own house many kilometres away, and I don’t care that they are blissfully unaware of the mild musical vengeance being inflicted upon them. Frankly, they probably don’t even know that I’m irritated, something which will later feed back into the whole cycle, and result in heightened anger, heightened self-righteousness, and heightened stereo volume.
Ultimately, the people who will suffer most from this will be those around me. They will most likely develop rage cycles of their own, and retreat to their iPods playing songs they know that I hate. None of us will ever really know what’s going on or why it is happening. Eventually it will probably all fade, leaving behind a vague memory of a faintly uncomfortable time.
Therein lies the beauty, frustration and futility that forms the backbone of passive aggression.
Really, passive aggression is not ok. The only thing it achieves is breeding more anger and increasing your future odds of having a stroke or an aneurysm which is not really ideal.
I think the trap that passive aggression sucks you into is the fact that it can be seen as the path of least resistance, but which still allows you to vent some of your feelings. On the whole (by which I mean, based on a sample size of me), people do not like confrontation.
Unfortunately, confrontation is a catalyst for change, which, while in the big picture is good if you are trying to work out a personal issue with someone, is bad because change undermines our sense of stability. When it comes down to a fight between maintaining stability or using confrontation to bring about change, stability usually wins. Change means risk, and the possibility that things will get worse. Stability means continuing with what you can see right now and can decide to tolerate…so long as you can do so with a pinch of passive aggression and complaining.
You can live like this for a long time. Newer issues push the older ones out of mind, out of sight. Slowly, that one room of your mind turns into the pantry where you store cans of all your unresolved problems. You accumulate can after can after can, each passing their use by date with the contents going rotten. Most of the time you are able to forget that they are there, but when you collect too many cans of the same type, they get pushed off the shelf and you have the wrong kind of confrontation. No-one likes a rotten can of tomatoes (or an analogy being pushed too far). Confrontations don’t really work when an old friend calls you a nickname you hate one time too many, and you instead go off your nut about that time when you were both five and she spilt her fruit-box all over your school bag.
The word ‘passive’ is a wily manipulative fiend in this case as choosing not to speak and being passive-aggressive are not the same thing. Taking the passive aggressive approach is actually just a mild form of confrontation which has 100% no chance of bringing about a positive outcome, so really all you will get is a losing spiral of terrible for all parties involved.
While I understand full well that not all situations can be solved with a chat and a hug, I really think that it is best for you, me, the cat and the neighbours, that you turn down ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, and decide to either speak up or just let it go before everything gets too ‘A Poison Tree’.
(Image credit: 1.)
