https://goo.gl/JJvzZS
I used to think that passive aggressiveness was simply some people’s way of being obnoxious. But while exercising for 40 minutes in my little, confined space, I experienced the cause of a lot of passive aggressiveness: the feeling of powerlessness that grows in the fertile ground between anger and silence.
Passive aggressiveness is an attempt to regain power and relieve the tension created by that gap between anger and silence. People complain to each other. They withdraw, use sarcasm, and resist the person in quiet, insidiously defensible ways.
Dealing with a passive-aggressive person is one thing. But what if it’s you who’s the passive aggressive person?
I ran through a number of ways to respond to Mary. Everything I considered fell into one of four categories.