"Back off," however colorfully phrased, is the kind of message that healthy people can hear, and that with unhealthy people triggers a fight.I'd add that in some unhealthy people, it triggers a passive aggression that manifests itself in the form of ostensibly acknowledging the "back off" while proceeding to go on as if it were never expressed.
***
At a party over the weekend, a friend was talking about her passive-aggressive brother-in-law. Many facets of passive-aggressiveness are annoying; I'll focus on the one that came out in my friend's stories and reminded me of my roommate as well as my mother.
Interacting with other people involves compromises. Ideally, you all want the same thing, but sometimes, you want different things, so you yield or the other person does. In a healthy relationship, the yielding evens out: each person wants the other to be happy, and if you really want what you want, you appreciate that the other person adjusted his or her position, and if the other person really wants what he or she wants, you adjust yours. Over time, it evens out.
In relationships with the passive-aggressive, it doesn't even out. One person is determined to always get what they want and they manipulate the other person into finding that having one's own preferences isn't worth the trouble. For example, my friend's brother-in-law will say, 'do you want to go for a hike in the woods or by the river,' and his wife will try to guess what he wants her to say in order to avoid conflict, because she knows that he's already made a decision and is seeking rubber-stamp approval. My mom does this too: she'll ask whether I want to do this or that, go here or there, but she already knows what she wants to do, so if I forget myself and actually express a preference, she goes on to convince me why we should do the other thing. Look for that over the holidays: she'll ask, I'll usually say, "I don't CARE either way," she'll ask again, I'll get annoyed, she'll insist, I'll give her an answer, and she'll convince me that we should do whatever she had in mind in the first place.
Recall when my mother made the decision not to come down for Thanksgiving. I could understand that decision--it was her call. What pissed me off was when she kept calling me to try to get me to acknowledge that it was really my decision, too.
And that's the issue: passive-aggression is insult to injury. You're imposing a preference on someone, and at some level of consciousness, you're uncomfortable with that, so you feel the need to convince them that you really did have a say in the decision overall. You get what you want, and you delude yourself into thinking that the people on whom you've imposed your decisions see the light, but really you've just worn them down. In addition to getting your way, you're wasting their time and insulting their intelligence. And it's unsustainable: eventually, people get fed up and resent it. Which doesn't make for a healthy relationship.
***
RM's passive aggression was never quite that sophisticated. Sure, he pulled that kind of thing in a different way (when rent was late, he would try to imply that I was the one with the issue). Unlike mom, though, he didn't feel the need to overcompensate for getting his way--which usually entailed talking to me when I'd made it clear that I didn't feel like talking--most likely because he himself was in complete denial that there was imposition in his actions. It's like the person who won't stop talking to you on the plane: if they thought about it for a second, it would hit them that you don't want to talk, but they either won't take that extra step or they don't care.
Take this incident, which took place but a day after RM and I had our very first 'present does not mean available' conversation--after he nodded, said he understood, promised to respect my time and space--I was sitting downstairs, reading. He was sitting at the dining room table, writing a paper.
RM: I was just thinking, as I typed this last paragraph, 'it would be great if I could have this conversation with A., this conversation that I just had with the computer.'
Pause
RM: I was just thinking that. That it would be great to have this conversation with A.
Awkward silence.
A., resolved: [Sigh.] What conversation is that?
RM: Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah about some philosophical BS.
Five minutes or so into the 'blah, blah, blah' "conversation" (more of a monologue if you ask me):
RM: I'm talking too much.
A.: Yes.
RM: You're not really interested in this.
A.: No.
I'm interested in the intense and fascinating article by Philip Gourevitch about Rwanda after the Genocide. If you want me to care about what you're saying, meet me halfway, find an unintrusive time to say it. Is that social rocket science?
***
So it's not quite the same behavior as actively trying to convince me that I concurred with whatever decision was made (where to hike, where to go, whether to talk), but there's something similar about it: yes, you can get your way by wearing me down, but it's a Pyrrhic victory for you, even though you're too obtuse to realize it, because I still don't want to be talking to you (or, it hasn't been lost on me that you ask me what I want to do only to do whatever you wanted anyway), and I'm not going to want to deal with you. Maybe RM's aggression in this case is active: he bulldozes more than he hints and implies; and yet--there is something passive-aggressive about it, in the sense that he exploits other people's social skills. He counts on the person he's dealing with not to be as aggressive. And when I stopped playing the game, he didn't get it at first, and then accused me of having lost my social skills (to computers, of all things). But that's passive-aggressive, isn't it? He unilaterally set the rules of social interaction--set them according to his comfort level--and put me in a position of being or seeming rude if I didn't accept them.
It comes back to this: that kind of thing just doesn't make for a healthy relationship.
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