Passive Agressive - what is it?

[Hope4me]

Found this to help explain the personality of my BH. It applies to some of his traits but not all of them. Im not sure what some things really mean ...but I recognise some of these traits in threads I have read. The following is classed as a personality disorder apparently...Im going to google more about it:

The book Living with the Passive?Aggressive Man lists 11 responses that may help identify passive?aggressive behavior:[1]

• Ambiguity or speaking cryptically: a means of creating a feeling of insecurity in others.
  
• Chronically being late and forgetting things: another way to exert control or to punish.
  
• Fear of competition
  
• Fear of dependency
  
• Fear of intimacy as a means to act out anger: The passive?aggressive often cannot trust. Because of this, they guard themselves against becoming intimately attached to someone.
  
• Making chaotic situations
  
• Making excuses for non-performance in work teams
  
• Obstructionism
  
• Procrastination
  
• Sulking
  
• Victimization response: instead of recognizing one's own weaknesses, tendency to blame others for own failures.
  

NOTE
A passive?aggressive person may not display all of these behaviors, and may have other[clarification needed] non-passive?aggressive traits.

taken from Wiklopedia

[Underachieving]

Passive agression is a style of relating to people, in the extreme situations where someone is like this so much that they are actually too impaired to function then that might be a personality disorder. In addition you should also be American as while the personality disorder gets a mention in the British/European diagnostic manual, called the ICD-10, it isn't fleshed out with criteria. The criteria you cited are from the DSM-IV which is the Americans book (we don't use it). A major criticism of the DSM-IV is that it does not set out levels of behaviour, and so it often allows quite serious conditions to be diagnosed where only slight symptoms exist, so beware of that.

To have a personality disorder (any PD) you will be seriously unable to live a normal life in most ways. So it would be affecting your job/career, your relationships with people, your safety and wellbeing, your physical health, your driving... Basically a personality disorder means you're not just unusual, you're significantly impaired by being unusual.

Also personality disorders are lifelong, beginning in the teens. Some get worse/better with factors like age, if you are in a stable relationship and what kind of environment you are in.

To just be passive-agressive (which we all do sometimes) means making statements like "no, no, you do what you like", when you really mean "argh I hate you for changing the plans yet again". That's quite normal. So is a certain level of the features you quote above. Personality disorders are such that most people can tick a least one box for most personality disorders and still be normal people.

Internet diagnosing is flawed. That you say yourself that you do not actually understand what you read on Wiki is an even better reason to reconsider.

Your best bet (if this is your DH we're talking about) is to take him to Relate or similar and get an experienced outside take on what is going on.