Effective Communication Skills

The Passive Personality - Path of Least Resistance

Indeed, there are some times when you will decide it is not worth the hassle,
anguish, frustration, time or energy to deal assertively with a person or
situation. Instead, you choose to ignore or avoid the problem, often hoping it
will just go away. These are your passive times.

Passive personalities are intimidated when faced with manipulative anger and
feel guilty when faced with manipulative hurt. Passives may avoid a
confrontation, but in so doing they create a great deal of unhappiness for
themselves. Most stress is caused by avoiding problems and people rather than
dealing with them.

No more excuses, please.

People with passive personalities love to tell themselves that their input does
not matter. They even make excuses when someone is treating them badly. Rather
than place the blame on the manipulator, they often blame themselves saying,
"It must be me. Something I did caused this to happen." The passive
plays right into the hand of the aggressive personality.

It’s easy to see why aggressives love to work with, be friends with and marry
passive people. Aggressives like to push others to the limit to see just how
much they can get away with. Passives often fail to set any limits at all. They
would rather let others make the decisions so they do not have to be responsible
if things do not work out.



You must decide to take control.

We all have the power to make our own choices as adults and we have the
obligation to assume responsibility for those choices. No one will treat us any
better than we expect to be treated. You may have experienced things in your
life over which you had no control, but you can control how you allow those
experiences to define you as a person.

There are two main reasons passives have a hard time with confrontation. Many
simply hate the physiological changes that take place in their bodies when they
are in a tense situation. The fear of what might happen if you take a stand
combined with the anger and frustration of not speaking up is enough to make
anyone ill. Many more learned at a young age that in order to stay out of
trouble they needed to keep their heads down and their mouths shut.

Assertive is about taking control of your life. Passive is about letting go of
control and handing it to others. Setting boundaries means identifying healthy
and ethical principles upon which to base your life and making sure that how you
treat others and are treated by others is within the framework of those
principles.

How do passives get their way?

They seldom do. Passives generally have low esteem as a result of making
unhealthy, even self-destructive, choices. Passive people usually avoid saying
"no" in order to be nice. They think the only alternative to being
nice is to be mean or selfish. Aggressives enjoy being around passive people
because passives allow them to do their own thing, in their own time, in their
own way, even if it involves manipulation and/or abuse.

Passives are generally intuitive people who play a game called "let’s see
if you can guess what I want". The problem is that they expect others to do
the same for them. This "testing" usually leads to their
disappointment.

Surprisingly, the passive person values healthy, assertive principles for
everyone but themselves. They do not believe they deserve what they work so hard
to give to everyone else. In the passive person’s futile attempt to be all
things to all people, they often fail to live up to the very principles they
work so diligently to model.

When passivity becomes our default response, then we have a problem because not
only do we continue to "compromise" with nothing gained, but our
ethics and values are inevitably compromised as well. As a result, our
self-esteem is diminished. Compromising with another person is one thing.
Compromising ourselves is quite another. It is nearly impossible to maintain a
healthy sense of self-respect when passive is the communication style of choice.

Take Action!
 
Think about a time when you chose to be passive.

Why did you choose to be passive? Were you afraid of hurting someone’s feelings?
Were you afraid of making someone angry?