Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder as a Valid Concept

Posted on the 06 July 2017 by Calvinthedog

This post deals with a concept called Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder that has risen, died and been resurrected a few times by the psychiatric community.

I read a recent article on Passive Aggressive PD that cheered on the fact that it was in the trash can now. The implication was that we are all passive aggressive sticks in the mud in one way or another.

Perhaps that is true, but I have met some people who are so passive-aggressive that they are frustrating, annoying, abrasive, exasperating and most of all infuriating.

You give the person a car to work on, and he says it will be done in  a week. It’s not done in a week, and he had all the time in the world. He is just being a stick in the mud as usual. You keep calling him. Three weeks later, you start to get angry. He completely blows up at you, as it’s you that are the problem, not him. The fact that it has been three weeks and he hasn’t even looked at the car yet is your problem, not his! He is outraged that you are such a terrible person that you bothered him about this. He is also self-righteous, as he thinks waiting three weeks for no damn reason was  completely reasonable!

You finally get the car back maybe six weeks later, and he “forgot” to fix a couple of things that he promised to fix. Whoops! He didn’t forget. He intentionally refused to fix them to get back at you for being reasonable and asking him to keep his end of the deal! We can’t have that! To this person, your concept of fairness is an outrage!

Now you look at the rest of the person’s life, and you see that passivity is the normal way of reacting with the world since a very early age. You go down the passive-aggressive checklist, and you check off at least five numbers.

This person is ill not because they are passive-aggressive. We all are, and if you ask some of my female ex’es and even current best friends, I am notorious, though I cannot see it. But the person above has become so passive aggressive that it is messing up their lives. In addition, it is starting to blow up a lot of their relationships, and as the anecdote above suggests, it’s probably getting in the way or making money. His passive aggression is turning him into a major asshole.

I would argue that this person is ill and that their personality is so disordered that we ought to diagnose it and call it Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder. I think we ought to bring back PAPD as a concept despite this dumb dimensional model that DSM-5 is forcing us to use.

Every met anyone like this?

Most of the other trashed PD’s are the same. I am certain that Depressive Personality Disorder exists. Someone very close to me is a textbook case. It’s quite rare, but it’s real. Sadistic Personality exists and so does Self-Defeating of Masochistic Personality Disorder. These two were thrown out by idiot feminist clinicians who thought that woman batterers would be labeled as ill with SPD and they would use it to try to get out of punishment.

They also thought that battered women would be prejudiciously labeled as SDPD or MPD, and this would be a blame the victim thing. Well, sometimes you need to blame the victim in sense. It takes two to tango. And many battered women would indeed qualify as SDPD.

I think you all know what Sadistic Personality Disorder looks like as most of you have probably had the misfortune of meeting one.