NOTICE
Excessively Passive Aggressive
Beyond sticky notes
Contributed photo
Passive aggressive users are being more and
more by frustrated roommates and even upset businesses.
There was something bitter about The Cheese & Salami Shoppe in Lawrence, and it wasn't the cheese. When the store went out of business on July 8, 2009, management decided to guilt trip former patrons in an all-too-common medium: the passive-aggressive note, now hanging in a window. "The Cheese Shoppe is now over. Closed for good," the note read. "Remember that the cheese loved you more than you loved it."
al
A passerby was so amused by the parting lab that he snapped a photo of the note and submitted it to the website PassiveAggressiveNotes.com. The website ran the submission and the photo and received 86 likes, 156 comments and digital infamy.
PHOTO e, Pa. ing. esse lesting
The note was a classic example of passive-aggressiveness, according to Signe Wilson, author of The Angry Smile: The Psychology of Passive Aggressive Behavior in Families, Schools, and Workplaces. Wilson, who is the COO of the Life Space Crisis Intervention Institute, says she defines passive-aggressive as a deliberate yet masked way of showing feelings of anger. "Passive-aggressive behavior is motivated by a person's fear of expressing anger directly," she says. "If someone is upset about something, and for whatever reason they feel they can't openly tell someone, they use passive-aggressive behaviors to get back at someone."
According to Wilson's book, there are five tiers to passive-aggressive, each with increasing levels of pathological tendencies.
TIER ONE: TEMPORARY COMPLIANCE
The most innocent of the five tiers, temporary compliance is most common in parent-child relationships. It starts with a parent asking their child to do the dishes or perform some other mundane chore, and the often electronically-entrenched child agrees.
After a few minutes, the parent asks again. And the child again agrees. "The parent has to remind them a second time, a third time, then fifteen times," Wilson says. "Now the parent is screaming and yelling and can't believe they're getting so angry, and the kid is calm as can be because they didn't do anything."
TIER TWO: INTENTIONAL INEFFICIENCY
This tier can be described as doing something halfway. Intentional inefficiency is a trademark of the disenchanted employee, different from temporary compliance in that the subject actually does the requested task. But it is done at the bare minimum, unsatisfactory to the target of the passive-aggression. In this example, the child asked to clean their room would simply push everything under the bed or into a closet as quickly as possible.
When passive-aggressive behavior reaches the fourth level, Wilson says the person should begin considering seeking help for their problem. She calls the fourth level as hidden but conscious revenge, and it's often deliberate.
TIER FOUR: REVENGE
TIER THREE: AN ESCALATING PROBLEM
When given the opportunity to nip a potential crisis in the bud before it begins, the passive-aggressive person in tier three instead chooses to sit back. It could be as simple as one roommate seeing another drop their keys, choosing not to tell them, and secretly enjoying them spend the next 30 minutes frantically looking for them.
Brandon Melton, a sophomore from Topeka, said electronic communication has made it easier to send passive-aggressive notes. In fact, he says he saw it just last week when a co-worker sent one to his boss over Facebook, telling his supervisor he was quitting. "I generally just tell people to talk to the person," Melton says. "I prefer handling issues face-to-face."
Fixing passive-aggressive behavior appears simple, but Wilson says it's much easier said than done. Mustering up the nerve to express your anger directly is the biggest step in overcoming passive-aggressive. "People need to make friends with their anger," she says.
"It's a way of expressing anger toward another person by choosing not to share some kind of knowledge." Wilson says.
Laura Moll, a junior from Gardner, let her best friend vent to her about lazy roommates last year. She says her friend would leave notes around but never confront anyone directly, allowing the problem to escalate. "I think a lot of people have a problem with that, but anger is a natural emotion everyone feels." Moll says. "I think it's more of a fear of confrontation.
People in this tier go out of their way to make their target's lives more difficult, like a roommate hiding a remote because they're angry the target has been hogging the television.
Wilson says she does not think there is more passive-aggressive behavior in society today than in past generations; it's just more identifiable. However, she says part of the reason why it's prevalent today is a cultural fear of expressing anger directly." Part of it is society being more politically correct," Wilson says.
Jp
THE SOLUTION
MATT GALLOWAY
The most dangerous of the five tiers, self-depreciation is again common in parent-child relationships. The person is willing to go to self-destructive lengths to express their anger or get revenge.
Often in this stage, it's all about getting revenge and making the target as angry as the passive-aggressive person feels. "Sometimes its things people might take to a criminal level, but often times it's petty things," Wilson says.
Wilson says teenagers getting tattoos or drinking alcohol against their parent's wishes could be classified in this tier, but a careful distinction should be made. "There are a lot of things we talk about that might be written off as typical adolescent behavior, so you have to decide whether it's something they would do on their own or if they're only doing it to get back at their parents." she says.
TIER FIVE: SELF-DEPRECIATION
11
P