Mindful Living

Most of us have been on the receiving end of passive aggressive behavior, and it can be so frustrating to deal with- maddening in fact! What exactly is passive aggressiveness? It is a pattern of behavior where the person is not direct about feelings, wants and needs, and thoughts, but expresses them indirectly. They say yes, when they really want to say no, but then later cancel for some reason, not the real reason (because they don't want to) but some other reason they come up with (reasons they often believe). Passive aggressive people "forget" to do things (they never wanted to do them in the first place, but couldn't say that), they won't tell you where they want to eat or what they want to do, but later get upset that you didn't do what they wanted. A clue that you may be dealing with passive aggressive behavior is the feeling that you don't know where a person stands/what they want, and it confuses you. You have an inkling that they may not be up...

Anger can be a difficult emotion to experience and handle effectively. It is important to take care of our anger or it will come out in other ways- passive/aggressiveness, depression, irritability, self-medicating, etc. So often in my life I have had such difficulty expressing my anger, feeling like I didn't have a "right" to feel the way I do. I had a lot of passive aggressive behavior in my early years, such as agreeing to do something then backing out at the last minute, ignoring someone yet saying I everything was "fine", expressing my anger to others except the person I was angry with, among other ways. The good thing about getting older for me is that I do feel I have a right to my anger, and I take care of it better by listening to what it is saying, expressing it, and soothing myself when needed. Not all the time do I take care of my anger, but certainly much more often than I used to. There have been some times recently when I expressed my anger too...