Passive-Aggressive Communication: Discomfort Said Without Saying It

Passive-aggressive communication says what passive communication doesn’t dare to, but indirectly instead of openly.

This quiz is part of an informational series on communication style, based on classic assertiveness theory. It’s meant for informational purposes and doesn’t replace guidance from a psychology professional.

An uncomfortable middle ground

Among the four classic assertiveness styles, passive-aggressive occupies a particular spot: not as silent as pure passive, but not as direct as aggressive either. It tends to emerge when expressing disagreement openly hasn’t felt safe in the past, but staying fully quiet about it isn’t bearable either. The result is a middle ground: the discomfort gets communicated, but indirectly, a loaded silence, an ironic comment, a gesture, instead of naming it clearly.

How it shows up

• You show frustration through gestures or silences before words.
• You agree to something you don’t actually want to do, then let it show indirectly afterward.
• You use irony or sarcasm to point out something that bothered you, instead of saying it directly.
• You expect the other person to “figure it out” without you having to explain it.

Why hints usually don’t work

The core problem with this style is that it relies on the other person correctly reading signals that, from the outside, are almost never as clear as they seem from the inside. What feels to you like an obviously loaded silence can go completely unnoticed by the other person, or get misread as tiredness, distraction, or anything else. The message you wanted to send, “this bothered me,” often just doesn’t land.

The long-term cost

When this pattern repeats, it can create a frustrating dynamic for both sides: whoever practices it feels their signals keep getting ignored, and whoever receives them feels a constant discomfort without knowing exactly where it’s coming from or how to address it. Over time, this can wear down trust more than a disagreement handled directly and resolved in the moment.

Your path toward assertiveness

The other person rarely “figures it out on their own,” no matter how many indirect clues get left. According to this approach, naming the discomfort as it comes up, even with a single short, direct sentence (“that didn’t sit well with me” says in five words what an hour of silence tries and fails to communicate), could reduce the need for detours and help resolve the problem faster in some cases, though every situation and every relationship is different.

Why this is “masking,” not pure silence

Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, in Crucial Conversations (2002), call “masking” the form of silence that consists of hinting at your real opinion without fully saying it: the irony, the comment that artificially softens the discomfort, the detour that registers that something’s wrong without naming it clearly. That quality is exactly what makes the passive-aggressive style feel different from both pure silence and open aggression: technically something gets said, there’s a gesture, a phrase, a tone, but that something is designed for the other person to have to interpret it rather than receive it directly. The authors note that this middle form tends to arise precisely because saying the opinion openly felt risky at some point, but staying fully quiet about it wasn’t bearable either; masking is the way out of that internal conflict, though it almost never resolves the underlying problem that caused it.

Do you recognize yourself in this style? Find out with the communication style quiz.