http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_us1275957#m_en_us1275957

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive%E2%80%93aggressive_behavior**

The buzz-word (phrase) du jour in communicating seems to be passive-aggressive. It seems to me to have been on the menu for quite a while now; since beginning my journey towards becoming a self-aware psycho, I have become much more aware of the phenomenon.

My grandmother, and subsequently my mother, are Olympic champions of aggressive passivity. They are manipulators of the first water, and they know all the tricks. As a result, I have been aware that such behavior exists for much longer than it’s been mainstream. We just didn’t have a fancy name for it. My therapist and I discuss this sort of thing quite often. I will go out on a limb here and estimate that the term or the concept comes up about two sessions out of three, in some degree or another. Sometimes it’s just me saying “yeah, you should have heard this comment.” Sometimes it’s me complaining about the behavior in others. Most of the time, however, it’s me obsessing about whether or not I do it, too.

See, having been manipulated in this way since my infancy, and having suffered because of it, I am terrified of being passive-aggressive. I write an email, then spend hours afterwards parsing every sentence trying to figure out if I had been trying to manipulate the recipient into doing something, or responding in a certain way, or feeling this or that. Not every email, not every day, but lots of emails…. lots of days…. When someone asks me to do something, and I can’t get to it right away, I examine every aspect of my time, how it was spent, was I being passive-aggressive without realizing? Was I? WAS I?

Recently my life has taken some bizarre and frightening twists and turns. Things have been, well, “odd,” and one of the oddest things is having suddenly acquired a lover who wants to communicate. <gasp> Yes, such creatures do exist, my friends, and I’ve seen them with my very own eyes…. Easier to find dragons and elves and pink fluffy unicorns (dancing… on.. um… yeah), but they do exist. People who want to communicate effectively and lovingly with other people.

By “communicate” I don’t just mean chat about his day; he actually wants to verbally puzzle out things that are wrong between us, and solve them. We had a long talk early on in our burgeoning relationship wherein I explained my family history of manipulation through the precise application of guilt and pain; I asked him to confront me when he thought I was being passive-aggressive.

OK, in retrospect, that was kind of ridiculous of me. Seriously, asking someone to call me on that sort of thing? What am I doing? What kind of psycho does that?

But that’s how obsessive I am about not being that way.

I slip; I slip a lot more than I would like. I’ve discovered, however, something very, very interesting:

People assume I am being passive-aggressive far more often than I am actually being passive-aggressive.

Yup. I was shocked, too. I was really shocked. How many times have I walked away from a conversation, especially one that began or ended as an argument, feeling like I got hit by a train when I wasn’t looking, all because someone assumed they knew what I meant, and that I was manipulating them?? Arguments with friends, lovers, relatives… I suddenly have been looking back on them with this revelatory perspective, and I am appalled.

What I’m now wondering is this:  Are people so jaded that they just automatically assume that the person they’re talking to is being manipulative? Do they automatically assume a defensive position or take the offensive because everyone in our culture is passive-aggressive? Has the emergence of this behavior into popular culture just made people in general afraid that everyone is doing it?

When did people stop saying what they mean? When did they start implying things instead of actually saying them? When did every phrase, every utterance, come to mean something different from the actual definitions of the words and construction of the sentence?

For most of my life I’ve been fascinated with language. I am enchanted by the idea that symbols form words, and words represent thoughts, and the act of writing or speaking them performs some alchemy that conveys what’s in my head to someone else’s. I love that whole concept.

Because I do, and because I think about communicating in general, and becoming a better, more effective communicator in particular, I have a theory. (Don’t I always? <grin>)

It seems to me that at some point the filters we use to soften things, to save the feelings of others and to survive and thrive in the world outside our own heads, end up hurting us. We know how much we change what we think betwixt brain and tongue, so we use “logic” and conclude that everyone else must be doing it, too. We then spend a lot of time and effort analyzing what the other person said, trying to figure out what they “really” meant, because we know how much we edited our own thoughts.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t use filters, or that we should throw caution and social nicety to the wind and just blurt out every single thing we think, because not everything we think is appropriate, or worth saying. But I do think we should try harder to say what we mean. Communication needs to be slowed down a bit.

In a world where texting, chatting, and emailing is instantaneous, it’s easy to just fire off words without really considering how they’ll be interpreted by the receiver. Because we’ve become used to lightning fast communicating, we have begun talking that way as well. Instead of trying to be a good listener, we’re Tweeting or texting or reading the next blog entry and we aren’t paying attention to what the speaker is saying; then we go right on with the monologue we’ve prepared in our own heads and pay no attention to whether or not it has anything to do with what the other person had just been talking about.

I’m trying to slow it down. I’m trying to think about the actual meaning that I want to convey rather than just getting out my quota of words so that I can keep up with the next guy. And I’m going to use all my words to do it. <grin>

-Cat

**yes, yes, I used Wikipedia. I finally drank the kool-aid.