Healing and Dealing with Passive-Aggression
Techniques for Treatment of Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder
Dec 2, 2008
The first step to healing is awareness. It is important to take responsibility for your actions, says therapist Jay Earley, Ph.D., who offers these further suggestions for creating a healthier attitude:
- Become aware of the underlying anger and resentment that is causing your behaviour.
- Become aware of your desire to defeat others, get back at them or annoy them.
- Become aware of your need to fail in order to get back at others.
- Work on allowing yourself to be just who you are, or feeling that you are okay as you are, that your sense of worth doesn’t depend on other people’s opinions
- Work on expressing your anger and standing up for yourself.
The American Institute for Preventative Medicine also recommends taking an assertiveness training course to help you express your feelings, needs and desires in an open, respectful way.
Treatment for Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder
Passive-aggressive behaviour is often difficult to change on one’s own and treatment with a therapist can help to resolve the underlying anger issues causing the behaviour. Therapy involves recognizing the repeated patterns of behaviour and discovering where they came from and why they continue, says Lorna Smith Benjamin, PhD in her video “Interpersonal Reconstructive Therapy for Passive–Aggressive Personality.”
Unfortunately, treating someone with passive-aggressive personality can be difficult as the patient is often more attached to their resentment than to their own happiness, say H.I. Kaplan and B.J. Saddock in Synopsis of Psychiatry. The patient inevitably continues their negative patterns with the therapist. He wants to depend on the therapist, but becomes resentful about this dependence and towards the therapist’s position of authority.
As a consequence, says Earley, the patient often feels pressured to perform, wanting to please but unable to succeed. He may even try to get the therapist to tell him what to do and then not do it, to get back at this person he sees as controlling. Failure in therapy becomes just another way for the passive-aggressive person to maintain their sense of autonomy.
How to Deal with a Passive-Aggressive Person
If you have a friend, relative or coworker who is passive-aggressive, Earley and the American Institute for Preventive Medicine suggest the following:
- Learn to recognize the signs of passive-aggressive personality disorder.
- Encourage the person to see their physician or counsellor.
- Encourage the person to take a course that teaches effective communication skills.
- Don’t make excuses for his behaviour or bail him out when he doesn’t take care of his responsibilies.
- Don’t be judgmental, angry or controlling.
- Accept the person for who they are.
- Don’t expect or want anything from them.
- When the person is assertive, respond positively.
Dr. Tony Fiore is a psychologist who writes about anger issues on his web site www.angercoach.com. Recognizing that someone has this condition, he says, can be difficult. But one way to identify a problem is to look for a pattern of behaviour, rather than a single incident. Once you know what you are dealing with, he offers this advice:
- Confront the behaviour directly and ask if the person is angry at you.
- Expect that the person will not keep their word and develop a backup plan.
- Teach by example and be assertive. Let the person know how you feel and what you need.
Sometimes, the best thing to do is just walk away from the relationship. To change their passive-aggessive behaviour, a person has to want to change and in some cases, they just don’t believe there is anything wrong.
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