Passive aggression - Covert narcissists & codependents

Hi everyone, this is Athena from Courage Coaching. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you are new to my channel then please click on the subscribe button in order to receive notifications for any new videos that I upload. If you need anything at all and you want to get in touch then please feel free to send an email to courageisallyouneed at gmail.com. Now in today's video I wanted to talk about passive-aggressive behaviour. Those of you who are very much involved with narcissists, especially the covert type of narcissist, you will be familiar with passive-aggressive behaviour, right? Because passive-aggressive behaviour is something that covert narcissists use a lot. However, passive aggression is not exclusive to covert narcissists. Passive-aggressive behaviour can also be displayed by codependents or by those who have people-pleasing tendencies and who are very uncomfortable with confrontation, very uncomfortable with being assertive and very uncomfortable with being openly angry and voicing their concerns. So if you were not allowed to be angry growing up and you were not allowed to express your angry emotions, you may be passive-aggressive without realising it. Because in many instances when we are passive-aggressive we do not realise that we are doing this unless somebody else points this out. So don't despair. It is not just for covert narcissists. If you are a people-pleaser then you will also do this. But awareness is key and once you start realising why you do it, once you start noticing the patterns of behaviour or you have somebody close to you who points it out, just be mindful that you are doing this but you can actually change it, right? If you are willing to change something, you know, if you've picked up a nasty behaviour, if you've picked up a dysfunctional behaviour from your childhood, don't be too hard on yourself because you needed to survive back then, right? And if you were not allowed to express your emotions, your healthy emotions and you ended up becoming passive-aggressive because of this, then don't be too hard on yourself. This is something that you can address and you can fix. So let's start by talking a little bit about passive-aggressiveness. What is it? What does it look like? So passive-aggressive means that we are passive and we are showing others that we are okay with things but in reality we actually aren't okay with these things and we will say yes to certain requests but in actuality we don't really want to do them. So people that display passive-aggressive behaviours usually lack the strength to stand up for themselves and to say no assertively, right? So this is very much close to being a people pleaser or being a codependent. There is basically a disconnect between what a passive-aggressive person says and what they do, so with their actions. So passive-aggressive people, in a nutshell, express their anger or annoyance indirectly rather than directly. So the passive-aggressive individual usually withholds information about how they truly feel. Their ego is very fragile and their self-esteem is rather low and they take even the as deep attacks against them. This makes it very, very difficult to deal with a passive-aggressive person and this could be closer to a covert narcissist and how they use passive aggression in order to communicate with other people. Now let's look at some examples of passive-aggressiveness. One example of doing this is playing the victim, which is done to avoid responsibility and to make other people feel sorry for them. Blaming others is also a type of passive-aggressive behaviour because it's another way to avoid responsibility and to make sure that it is somebody else's fault and not the individual's. And covert narcissists, sadly, do this chronically because they do not want to be held accountable for anything that they have done that is negative. Passive-aggressive individuals, particularly covert narcissists, they will withhold ordinary rules or behaviours to reinforce to others that they are angry. And this is essentially what we know as the silent treatment and they do this on purpose in order to punish somebody by not speaking to them, by ignoring them, by withholding attention and by withholding love. There is also something known as stonewalling. It is another form of passive aggression which is very similar to the silent treatment and stonewalling occurs when one person essentially shuts down, withdraws, stops responding and this is essentially them turning into a stone wall, which is why it's called stonewalling. Learned helplessness can also be perceived as passive aggression because the person just can't help themselves, you know. If they do something really shitty, they can't help themselves, it's not their fault. If they burn the dinner, oh sorry, I didn't mean to do it, it's not my fault, so that's another type of passive aggression. Other types of passive-aggressive behaviour can look like avoiding responsibility for certain tasks, procrastinating and missing deadlines, withholding very, very important information and frequently underachieving relative to what somebody is actually able to do. And these sort of behaviours can cause a lot of problems within a family or within a workplace. It could look similar to somebody not achieving certain goals, doing things to sabotage any group projects or activities. Passive-aggressiveness can be seen in more subtle ways, such as not looking at somebody, not having eye contact when they should, persistently forgetting things, ignoring a certain individual in a group conversation again and again. So there are more subtle forms of passive-aggressive behaviour, and these ones obviously are not as noticeable. But if you do notice them, it can feel very, very uncomfortable. Now, are people actually aware that they're being passive-aggressive? Well, in my personal opinion, sometimes they are aware, but I would say that in most cases they're not always aware of this, because they may be so used to pushing their anger deep down that they don't even realise that it's there anymore. They don't even realise that what they are doing that is actually considered passive-aggressive is actually them showing anger, but concealed anger, right? Underhanded anger. Because they were never allowed to show angry emotions growing up in a family home, right? So they're so used to suppressing that anger, to holding it down, that they are passive-aggressive so often that they don't even realise that they are doing that. Now, would you say that passive-aggressive behaviour is actually controlling? I think that yes. I think passive-aggression can be a controlling behaviour, because people can use it in order to achieve something that they need, to avoid conflict. So yeah, passive-aggressive behaviour can actually be quite controlling. It just depends on the person who is using it. Now, have you had experience with passive-aggressiveness? Are you guilty of being passive-aggressive? Whatever your experience, if you would like to share, please do so in the comments below the video. That is the end of the video today. Thank you so much for listening and for watching, and I will see you very, very soon in my next video. Take care. Bye-bye.