In seeing clients for more than a decade, I’ve found that passive-aggressiveness is the number one way we communicate our feelings and needs. When people describe their passive-aggressive behavior, I say, “So you haven’t communicated your need, but you’ve acted it out?” The problem is that people can’t guess our needs based on our actions. They may not know what our behavior means or even notice that we’re trying to communicate something new. Our desires simply have to be verbalized.
