Those who lack good negotiation skills and the boldness to bear the consequences of open debate, always depend on passive aggressive strategies for bail out; they lack the courage and force of personality to take them on directly.
The strategies become habitual forms of behavior with which they defend themselves since they lack the will to openly make known what is in their mind or to be honest – they just want their way out.
“Passive aggressive” is about being passive, appearing to be “ok” with things, and saying “yes.” The passive aggressive will say “yes” to requests even if they don’t want to do them. They don’t have the strength to stand up for themselves and just say no aggressively.
The problem with people having passive aggressive behavior is that anger always takes the better part of them. It isn’t much of their faults anyways, as some do try to cope with their challenges but overreact when situations get too big for them to manage.
A passive aggressive person may try rationalizing and dominating nine things that annoy logically, but bursts into anger when the tenth things he can’t emotionally subdue arrives. Following are more core causes of passive aggressive behavior:
Act of Cowardice.
Not in the sense of refraining from picking fights, but, in their inability to take responsibility for their actions. Passive aggressive people are not willing to deal with matter in a convert manner, confront their victims or to see their victims reacting to whatever pain they inflicted on them. They will rather put the blames on the victims, or make them belief they are the cause of whatever that might have happened.
Unmanageable Responsibilities.
Those who grew up under parents that are too demanding that they can’t easily object against, often device other ways with which they resist their unreasonable requests; they resist through subtle ways others might be quick to judge as passive aggressive behaviors.
Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and the author of Paradoxical Strategies in Psychotherapy, said:
If we grew up, however, in a family that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, attach much value to our basic needs and wants, our natural impulse to assert ourselves became suppressed.
This is common among the first-born children; the oldest is expected by the parents to take on more extra work than he or she can handle. Overtime, the oldest begins to resolve to the use of coping strategies without having to defy parents’ demands. These strategies pave way to core passive aggressive behavior that are later in life directed to anyone, whether a spouse, boss or teacher.
If, for example, a child openly disagrees with their parent(s) and they are punished for doing so; the child would learn to substitute passive resistance for active resistance. Given a consistent pattern of punishment or rejection when asserting onself, an individual can learn to become highly adept at passively rebelling.