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 article 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

Robert Alberti and Michael Emmons, in Your Perfect Right (1970), described three forms of behavior: nonassertive, aggressive and assertive. The passive-aggressive style is a later addition in many popular models, which set it apart as a fourth category because it blends traits of the first two.

The term itself came from somewhere else: it was born as a psychiatric label in the U.S. War Department’s nomenclature in 1945 and later made its way into the first DSM. Today it isn’t considered a disorder in its own right; in everyday language it describes a way of communicating.

It 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 being named clearly.

It’s different from aggressive communication, which does name the disagreement, just without minding how it lands on the other person.

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 creates a frustrating dynamic for both sides: whoever practices it feels their signals keep getting ignored, and whoever receives them senses a constant discomfort without knowing 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.

The same complaint, said three ways

An everyday example: someone shows up late for the third time to a dinner that took effort to organize.

• Passive-aggressive: “Oh, don’t worry, we’re used to waiting for you by now.” Said with a smile, it leaves the reproach hanging in the air without owning it.
• Aggressive: “You’re a mess, always the same.” It names the discomfort, but turns it into an attack on the person.
• Assertive: “It bothered me to wait almost an hour; next time, let me know if you’re running late.” It describes what happened, says how it felt and asks for something concrete.

The third is what psychologist Thomas Gordon, in Parent Effectiveness Training (1970), called an I-message: talking about what’s happening to you instead of labeling the other person. “That didn’t sit well with me” says in six words what an hour of silence tries to communicate without quite getting there.

Why this is “masking,” not pure silence

Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler, in Crucial Conversations (2002), use the term “masking” for 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 what makes the passive-aggressive style feel different from both pure silence and open aggression: technically something gets said (a gesture, a phrase, a tone), but that something is designed so that the other person has to interpret it rather than receive it directly.

The authors note that this middle form tends to arise because saying the opinion openly felt risky at some point; 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.

Sources

• Alberti, R. E. and Emmons, M. L. (1970). Your Perfect Right. Impact Publishers.
• Gordon, T. (1970). Parent Effectiveness Training.
• Patterson, K., Grenny, J., McMillan, R. and Switzler, A. (2002). Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. McGraw-Hill.