After reading about the open aggression used by those afflicted with the bad spirit of viciousness, passive aggression might seem a far less harmful characteristic. That's not true. Passive aggression is still aggression. It is still a spirit that expresses itself through an unfair attack on an unsuspecting partner. It's just as obstructionistic; it's just that it is sneaky and underhanded. Those who are controlled by the passive-aggressive spirit are masters at what I call :sabotage with deniability." These toxic partners will work long and hard to obstruct that which they do not desire, but yet do so in such an indirect way as to escape accountability if they are confronted. They always have an excuse, they always have a justification, but yet they do in fact relentlessly obstruct.
If you turn to passive aggression in a relationship, you are not only a master of gutlessly avoiding accountability, you are also a master tactician at undercutting your partner and all that he or she seeks to achieve. As opposed to critical perfectionism, which engages in confrontational faultfinding, and as opposed to viciousness, which uses the tactics of rage and character assassination, if you are afflicted with this bad spirit, you try to thwart your partner by constantly doing that which you deny you are doing or the exact opposite of what you say you are doing.
Possessed by this spirit, you also conveniently forget to do what you promise you're going to do, or you purposefully screw up what you want your partner to think you are earnestly attempting to do. You don't outwardly reject what's been offered or is said by your partner. Rather, you just don't comply. You complain about it in subtle, whiny ways. You clearly do not want resolution with certain issues, and you seem to thrive on playing the role of a victim. You value that role far more than the peace and harmony that your partner might be seeking to generate.
If you are possessed of the bad spirit of passive aggression, you are as much of an overbearing controller as the most aggressive, in-your-face person you could imagine. The difference is, you do it insidiously and underhandedly.
Let's say you are a passive-aggressive and your partner suggests a vacation. But you don't want to go where your partner wants to go. Instead of saying that, you tell your partner, "That sounds great to me." Then you immediately start putting up barriers. You can't seem to work out the time to travel, you can't seem to get a fairly priced airline ticket, you come back and tell your partner that the hotel is going to cost five times more than you expected. "But I'm still fine with this trip," you say. "If it's okay with you, it's okay with me."
Ultimately, by openly agreeing to do something and then covertly sabotaging it, you are trying to get your partner to submit to your wishes---without having to stand up and tell your partner exactly what those wishes are. If you are passive-aggressive, your greatest moment in life is when your partner says, "Oh, forget I said anything," or "Why don't you go figure out what we should do?" You come out smelling like a rose.
Here are some other telltale symptoms that you can use to determine whether or not passive aggressiveness is undermining your relationship:
