“GETTING PAST OUR PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE TENDENCIES,” By Tony Gulledge
Before we had reached the city limits, I could already feel a tension building in my neck and shoulders. What was it about going home for family gatherings that seemed to always bring out the worst in me? I knew that just seeing my brothers would bring up a simmering anger that otherwise remained carefully concealed below the surface. From the time we were little kids in Sunday School, my brothers and I had been taught that harboring anger was wrong. Anger should only be displayed for a righteous cause such as in Matthew 21:12 where Jesus was cleansing the temple of money changers. Still this twinge of pain usually left me on edge for
most of the visit.
My anger had never been manifested in big blow ups or verbal altercations. Instead
well placed one liners or callous jokes proved to be my personal weapons of choice. “Just Teasing,” had become our family’s way of dealing with each other’s petty annoyances and pointless irritations. Even though I have been a Christian now for well over thirty years the mean spirited joking had become my habitual sin. If we are all adults now, then where had the provocations come from?
Matthew McKay, Peter Rogers, and Judith McKay in their book WHEN ANGER HURTS, Quieting The Storm Within, gave me one good answer. “People fight to maintain their boundaries and limits. Losing the capacity to say no, to have choice, and to make independent decisions is a kind of psychological death. You feel as if you were being engulfed or suffocated… No matter how frightening or coercive anger becomes it can never be as scary as the loss of self.”
Psychological death was what I felt inside. In my own mind going home represented a struggle to re-establish my sense of self. Hadn’t I resolved this issue during my teenage years? Is it possible that I might not have fully completed this developmental step? I remembered from college Psychology that my type of coerce or manipulative anger was termed Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder, PAPD. According to Kaplan, H.I. & Saddock, B.J. (1997) SYNOPSIS OF PSYCHIATRY, 8th ed. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins:“People with PAPD are characterized by covert obstructionism, procrastination, stubbornness,and inefficiency. Such behavior is a manifestation of passively expressed underlying aggression.”
Bingo! That was me. But what was I so angry about that would cause me to make snide or sarcastic comments to my brothers every time we got together? It wasn’t like I was purposefully trying to be hard to get along with. Or was I? But none the less, my backhanded jokes had definitely become a habit. If Jesus had commanded us in Matthew 19:19 to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, wasn’t this defiant stance of clinging to passive aggressive tendencies causing me to miss the mark? At this point most Christians would fall into the trap of thinking that all anger is sin. Simply ignoring the anger will not make it go away. Instead it can take root inside of us and wait for a more opportune time to express itself.
While expressing the anger as an indirect joke might have made me feel better for a few brief moments it did little to resolve the deep-seated anger issue within me. The joking might have initially released some of the pressure but had never touched the legitimate hurt. I asked myself if it wasn’t time to get past my feelings of jealousy and embarrassment and learn how to directly confront these deeper issues in a God honoring way.
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