Anger
You don't yell at people, you make them pay quietly, and the people who live with you feel every receipt.
You don’t fight directly. You make people pay in ways they can’t quite name. You forget what they asked you to remember. You agree to plans and don’t quite show up. You give comments that aren’t quite insults. You comply with requests in formats that register your protest without your ever having to state one.
You see yourself doing this. You can’t bring yourself to be direct. You keep doing the passive-aggressive version because the direct version feels worse to you.
You take the indirect route at the moments the direct route feels impossible to you.
You took the next opportunity to do it again.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
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You very likely grew up in a household where direct conflict wasn’t safe. You may have had a parent who escalated when challenged, so you learned to register protest sideways. You may have grown up in a culture where the polite version was mandatory and the honest version was not. You may have absorbed that being direct meant being mean, or unfeminine, or unmasculine, or unprofessional. Whatever the original lesson, you came out of childhood with the indirect move as your default.
By the time you’re in a situation where you could be direct, you’ve already chosen the passive-aggressive option without consciously choosing it. You decided before you registered that you were in a moment where a decision was being made.
For the related anger pattern, see I have anger problems and I hold grudges forever if either applies.
You learned the indirect move as a child for reasons that made sense at the time. You’re using it now in situations where it’s costing you and everyone you love.
Strategic therapy interrupts the indirect move at the second you reach for it. You start catching the choice before it’s made for you. Once direct stops feeling like the more dangerous option, you use it.
You’ll either say it or let it go. The third option stops being available to you.
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