People rant

[anonemouse 1]

I'm an RN, worked in psych for 16 years and I really don't think you are talking about true passive aggressive people. It sounds like you are talking about two faced people........those who say one thing to your face and something else behind your back. The passive aggressive person will hurt people by doing nothing. For instance, If you ask your husband if he would like to accept an invition somewhere and he says "I don't know yet" and just keeps you on edge all the time because he won't committ.......That's passive aggressive. He's being mean by doing nothing..... If your teenage daughter is sexually active and doesn't use birth control and knows you would be hurt if she got preg, that's passive aggresive. If your neighbor lets his lawn go to hell and spoils the look of the neighbor hood, that's passive agressive. I guess it kinda bugs me to see people throw around psych terms loosely. If I stood by and let someone use terms inappropiately and knew knew they sounded foolish, I would be passive aggressive in a mild way.....but if it's something that doesn't really matter as in this thread and I correct you, I could just be anal :biggrin: :eek: Hope no one is offended.

No offense taken! I was kinda thinking while typing when I made the OP, so I know there were some contradictory statements in it. The term was just all I could come up with at the time, though. Actually, I was talking about both passive-aggressive people and two-faced people, I guess. The ones that can't make a comment or a post without using passive-aggressive language or behavior (like the example Wheetsin gave of members that post and run, people that just use language that hints at how irritated they are instead of openly saying that they're irritated, people that blame others for confrontations in threads when they're the ones that made an objectional post [i.e., saying that it's everyone else's fault, not theirs]), and the ones that actually are actively two-faced (e.g., pretending to be friends and then badmouthing you to other people). Of course, in some cases, the two types of people are combined into one person, and you get a passive-aggressive two-faced person.

Truly, I can understand passive-aggressive behavior IRL (to a certain extent, anyway), since I doubt there are really that many people out there that like confrontation. I just don't get the online behavior, though. Online interaction is about as far from face-to-face as you can get. What's the point of it, online? Makes me wonder how passive-aggressive people are in real life, if they're that passive-aggressive in cyber-land.

And again, I know that every person out there exhibits passive-aggressive behavior to some extent. Like someone else said, it's just a behavior. What I'm referring to, though, is when a person behaves like that a majority (or seeming majority) of the time.

And like Wheetsin said, I'm using the term in the colloquial sense, not the professional psych sense.