What Is Passive Aggression in Psychology?

Understanding Passive Aggressive Behaviour

In psychology, passive aggression refers to the indirect expression of anger, hostility, resentment, or resistance rather than its open and direct communication. Although the term is widely used in everyday language, its psychological meaning is more specific than casual descriptions often suggest. Passive aggression does not simply refer to unfriendliness, occasional sulking, or ordinary irritability. Rather, it describes a pattern in which aggression is communicated covertly, often through obstruction, delay, silence, sarcasm, withdrawal, or disguised non-cooperation.

People often ask what passive aggression means, why people behave in passive aggressive ways, and whether passive aggression should be understood as a defence mechanism. These are important questions because passive aggression sits at the intersection of personality, communication, emotion, and defence. It can be approached not only as a behavioural pattern, but also as a psychologically meaningful way of managing anger that feels difficult to acknowledge or express directly.

This article explores passive aggression in psychology, its theoretical background, how it functions, why it occurs, how it differs from direct aggression and assertiveness, and how psychologists understand and work with it in clinical practice.

What is passive aggression in psychology?

If we begin with the central question, passive aggression in psychology refers to the indirect expression of negative feelings, especially anger, resistance, or resentment. Instead of saying what is wrong openly, the person communicates the hostility through behaviour that frustrates, resists, delays, undermines, or withholds.

In this sense, passive aggression is not the absence of aggression. It is aggression expressed in an indirect form. The aggression may not appear as shouting, threats, or open hostility. Instead, it may take the form of chronic lateness, repeated forgetfulness, procrastination, sarcasm, emotional withdrawal, stubborn inefficiency, or a pattern of agreeing verbally while resisting behaviourally.

This is why passive aggression is psychologically important. It reveals that emotional conflict may be communicated even when it is not openly named. The person may outwardly appear compliant, calm, or agreeable while inwardly remaining angry, defiant, or resentful.

Historical and theoretical background

A serious discussion of passive aggression in psychology should acknowledge that it is not usually treated as a single classic defence mechanism in the same way as repression or projection. It is more often understood as a defensive style or pattern of indirect hostility.

Its roots can still be meaningfully linked to psychodynamic thinking, especially to the broader psychoanalytic understanding of aggression, ambivalence, dependency, and conflict. Sigmund Freud’s work on aggression and unconscious conflict created the broader foundation for later thinking about how hostile or unacceptable feelings may be disguised rather than directly expressed. Later psychoanalytic writers, including Otto Fenichel and other ego psychologists, helped deepen the understanding of indirect and conflicted forms of aggressive expression.

Passive aggression became clinically and descriptively important because it captured something that straightforward categories often missed: the fact that people may resist, attack, or oppose not through direct confrontation, but through forms of disguised non-cooperation. In this sense, the person is not free of aggression. Rather, the aggression is expressed in a way that avoids full ownership.

Why passive aggression occurs

From a psychological point of view, passive aggression often occurs when direct anger feels unsafe, forbidden, shameful, or too conflictual to express openly. A person may feel resentment, frustration, or hostility, but may also fear the consequences of saying so directly.

Passive aggression may emerge in contexts involving:

• fear of confrontation

• fear of punishment or rejection

• dependency on the person one is angry with

• difficulty tolerating conflict

• guilt about anger

• a family or relational environment in which direct expression was discouraged

• internal conflict between compliance and resistance

• resentment that cannot be acknowledged openly

In this sense, passive aggression often develops where the person feels unable to say a direct no, express direct anger, or openly oppose another person. Indirect hostility then becomes a compromise. The person resists without fully confronting, attacks without openly attacking, and expresses anger without directly naming it.

How passive aggression functions psychologically

Passive aggression functions by allowing a person to express anger and resistance while avoiding full exposure to the risks of direct confrontation. It creates a psychological middle position between submission and open opposition.

This may help the person to:

• maintain an appearance of compliance

• avoid guilt about direct anger

• resist authority or expectation indirectly

• discharge resentment without fully owning it

• preserve attachment while still expressing hostility

• avoid the vulnerability of direct emotional honesty

This is why passive aggression can be understood as a defensive style. It solves a psychological problem, at least temporarily. The person feels, in effect, “I cannot safely oppose you openly, but I also cannot simply submit.” Indirect aggression becomes a way of expressing conflict without bearing the full burden of direct expression.

The difficulty is that what may protect the person in the short term often creates confusion, mistrust, and unresolved tension in relationships over time.

Passive aggression is not always fully deliberate

One of the most important psychological clarifications is that passive aggression is not always completely deliberate in the way calculated manipulation is deliberate. In some cases, the person is aware of their resentment and of the indirect nature of their behaviour. In other cases, the hostility is only partly recognised. The person may sincerely experience themselves as misunderstood, burdened, or mistreated without fully appreciating how their own indirect behaviour is communicating anger.

This mixed level of awareness is one reason passive aggression can be so difficult to address. The person may not consciously think, “I am going to resist you indirectly.” Rather, the hostility emerges through patterns of delay, obstruction, sarcasm, silence, or withdrawal that are psychologically meaningful even if not fully owned.

This does not mean the behaviour is harmless. It means the most clinically useful question is not only whether the person is being difficult, but what conflict, anger, or dependency is being managed through the indirect expression.

Examples of passive aggressive behaviour

To make the concept more concrete, it is useful to consider some examples.

A person may agree to complete an important task, but repeatedly “forget” to do so in a context where resentment is already present. Someone may say they are not upset, yet respond with coldness, sarcasm, silence, or deliberate unavailability. Another person may comply outwardly with a request while doing so in a way that is intentionally slow, careless, or obstructive. In relationships, a person may avoid direct disagreement but communicate displeasure through emotional withdrawal, ironic remarks, withholding affection, or covert non-cooperation.

These examples are useful because they show that passive aggression is not the absence of anger. It is anger expressed through behaviour that avoids open ownership.

Passive aggression, direct aggression, and assertiveness: not the same thing

An academically strong discussion of passive aggression should distinguish it from other ways of expressing conflict.

Passive aggression

Passive aggression communicates hostility indirectly. The person does not openly name the anger, but expresses it through behaviour that frustrates, resists, or withholds.

Direct aggression

Direct aggression expresses anger openly, whether appropriately or inappropriately. It may involve open criticism, shouting, threats, intimidation, or overt attack.

Assertiveness

Assertiveness differs from both. It involves the direct and respectful communication of needs, disagreement, limits, or frustration without covert hostility and without unnecessary attack.

In simplified form:

• passive aggression says: I will resist you indirectly

• direct aggression says: I am angry, and I will express it openly

• assertiveness says: I will communicate my position clearly and directly without disguising it

These distinctions are crucial because passive aggression is often misread either as harmless politeness or as equivalent to assertiveness. It is neither.

Is passive aggression ever adaptive?

An important psychological question is whether passive aggression is ever adaptive. The answer is nuanced. In some situations, especially in unequal or unsafe environments, indirect resistance may represent the person’s attempt to preserve dignity or self-protection where direct opposition feels dangerous. In this limited sense, passive aggression may be understandable.

However, when it becomes a repeated relational pattern, passive aggression usually carries significant interpersonal costs. It undermines clarity, damages trust, increases resentment, and makes genuine communication more difficult. It may temporarily protect the person from the anxiety of direct confrontation, but it often prolongs the very conflict it avoids.

Thus, passive aggression may be psychologically understandable while still being relationally unhelpful. The more it becomes a settled style of communication, the more it interferes with mature emotional ownership.

Signs that passive aggression may be operating

People sometimes search for signs of passive aggression when trying to make sense of relational tension that is not openly named. While no brief list can capture the full complexity of the pattern, certain signs may suggest that it is operating.

These may include:

• indirect resistance instead of direct disagreement

• repeated delay or procrastination in emotionally charged situations

• chronic “forgetfulness” around unwanted tasks or expectations

• sarcasm used in place of direct expression

• saying yes behaviourally while meaning no emotionally

• silence or withdrawal used as punishment

• outward compliance paired with covert obstruction

These signs do not automatically establish a formal pattern, but they may indicate that anger is being communicated indirectly rather than directly acknowledged.

How psychologists understand and work with passive aggression

Psychologists do not usually approach passive aggression simply as bad manners or poor character. A more useful clinical approach is to ask what anger, fear, dependency, or conflict the person cannot yet own directly.

Therapeutic work may involve:

• identifying the underlying resentment or hostility

• exploring fear of confrontation or punishment

• understanding early relational patterns around anger

• examining the conflict between compliance and resistance

• helping the person move from indirect expression to direct communication

• strengthening assertiveness and emotional ownership

From a psychodynamic perspective, the aim is not merely to stop the behaviour, but to help the person develop a more direct, integrated, and psychologically responsible way of relating to anger and conflict.

For individuals who feel they may be struggling with passive aggressive patterns, indirect anger, or chronic resentment in relationships, P Kose Psychologist offers professional psychological support in person in Katlehong and virtually for clients within Johannesburg.

Final reflections

Passive aggression in psychology is best understood as the indirect expression of anger, hostility, or resistance when direct expression feels too difficult, unsafe, or conflictual. It reveals that the problem is often not only the presence of anger, but the person’s difficulty in owning and communicating anger openly.

Within psychological understanding, passive aggression matters because it shows how hidden conflict can shape behaviour, relationships, and emotional life even when it is not directly spoken. The hostility is real, but it is expressed through delay, obstruction, sarcasm, silence, or covert resistance rather than open confrontation.

A mature psychological understanding of passive aggression therefore requires both conceptual clarity and clinical sensitivity: clarity in identifying the indirect nature of the hostility, and sensitivity to the fear, dependence, guilt, or unresolved conflict that makes direct expression so difficult.