Passive-Aggression (or, how I realized I should use my voice)

When I was thirteen, I threw a cantaloupe off my roof.

My mom had recently tried the fruit for the first time, and she really liked it. She bought one from Fry’s, and there it was. Sitting on the counter. She was really excited about it. But I was angry at her, so I chucked it off the roof and smashed it.

The point here isn't that The Great Cantaloupe Toss was immature, rather, that it was passive-aggressive.

I recently read Amanda Chan's article on how to deal with passive aggressive people, in which she talks about passive-aggression in ways I hadn't considered before.

When I think about PA behavior, I think of snide notes or being kinda weirdly sarcastic in a trying-to-play-it-off way when it's really obvious you're bothered. I don't think of the silent treatment. I don't think of spitefully chucking fruit off the roof.

At its core, passive-aggressiveness is a power struggle. In her article, Chan says that "passive-aggressive behavior, while expressed in many different ways, has the same roots: There is an underlying fear and avoidance of direct conflict, yet a feeling of powerlessness and helplessness. The result? An unspoken power struggle, that can appear in several different ways."

I was angry because my mother wouldn't let me sit in the passenger seat of our car ("you had to be 16," she said, when "you had to be 13" last year.) My mother's rules were inconsistent and arbitrary. Or, so I thought. I later discovered that she didn’t make an arbitrary rule... she was trying to punish me. She had read a text when she was snooping around on my phone, and saw that I had said some mean things about her to a friend. She said that she didn't let me sit in the front out of spite.

What's your first impulse when someone cuts you off in traffic? You want to speed up and cut them off, right? PA works the same way.

Let me tell you about The Great Bedroom Tornado of 2013.

Mr. shoved some of my stuff near the door, with an unspoken "get rid of your stuff it's taking up too much space." I became so angry that I threw everything off every shelf in the bedroom. Same cycle. No talking, just acting out.

Stacking my stuff near the front door is super PA, but what I didn't realize was this--if someone is resorting to PA behavior, they don't feel comfortable talking to you about how they feel. And I don't want anybody to feel like I won't listen when they share their feelings. I don't want anyone to think that talking about things is futile.

If I recognized what Mr.'s PA behavior meant, I'd have just talked about it. But I didn't. I focused on how insulting it was, and, instead of talking to him about how it made me feel, I engaged in some PA behavior myself.

It's a gross cycle. And it's much harder to recognize when you're the instigator. But knowing that it's cyclical (and, I guess, that you don't like it) is a good place to start. Because the sooner you break the cycle, the better--the kinder--it is for everyone.