When it is about power and powerplays, many people imagine a strong, powerful person doing such things. It might confuse them that the opposite is true. It is the weak who mostly are in need of and are playing those games.
You'd better beware of the weak. As they will rip you off without you even recognizing what's going on.
Strong individuals can stand in for what they do and think, and also have a healthy sense for self-assessment. When you are strong you can face your weaknesses, look at them without having to fear this will cost your existence, and you can work on them. When you are weak, this gets some kind of impossible. These individuals flee into manifold weird behaviours to keep alive a picture of themselves which allows them to dwell in the illusion of strength. While they use undercover strategies of controlling their environment, they assume they have power. But as mentioned, the only power we can achieve is the power over our selves.
These individuals though seek the power of others to back them up and shelter them and act instead of them. The mask of the weak who abuses power over others (and use the power and energies
of others to achieve their very own personal goals) in their environment is difficult to look through and even more difficult to take it off so that also others who are played with, might realize which games are played with them and on them. Their strategies are manifold and they can change easily from one tactic to the other when they sense their masquerade is near to becoming reveiled.
To my sincere regret, even though there are many males these days who play such games, the field of power and control in disguise is the dominion of mostly females.
We may ponder about the factors and influences that lead to the development of underhanded strategies especially in women, and we can and might think about creating another, better environment which clearly must be a joint social effort and can not be done by just some few. Women these days, especially the younger generation, severely suffer a grandiosity complex as an earlier generation has prepared the ways directing into better life conditions for females. But the path is not finished, and with the perception that it is done we all drift backwards.
I really like that quote from a Batman movie, expressing it well to the point (and marvellously played by Uma Thurman):
"Using feminine wiles to get what you want, trading on your looks? Read a book sister, that passive agressive number went out long ago. Chicks like you give women a bad name!"
Passive-aggressive behaviour is therefore such a problem as it is so difficult to be reveiled.
And it is a problem because it often is perceived as common female behaviour. As soon as a female is openly straight and does not play the common games, she is put down by a not matured society which refuses to grow up. Unhealthy little boys and girls - not even to become men and women - who are easily steerable are wanted and produced by an unhealthy social environment in an unmature state.
'Passive Aggressive Behavior Defined:
Passive Aggressive behavior is a form of covert abuse. When someone hits you or yells at you, you know that you've been abused. It is obvious and easily identified. Covert abuse is subtle and veiled or disguised by actions that appear to be normal, at times loving and caring. The passive aggressive person is a master at covert abuse.'
[Passive Aggressive Behavior: A Form of Covert Abuse,
By Cathy Meyer]
The actors do not run around in a Poison Ivy costume (unfortunately); they are the neat little girls at your work place, they are the mothers and daughters, they run around as sisters and assumed friends. If you are really unfortunate, they are your lovers or partners. They can look at you as innocent as anyone can be, with tears in their eyes when you confront them, they can fall and hurt themselves and they even develop the ability to fall sick in time, to make you act as they want you to, to bind you and strengthen the dependency
[note that some dictionaries here offer as synonym also 'slavery']. In fact, they look very, very unblameable while keeping their toxine sources well hidden.
A real bad outcome for others who are not involved in these kind of games: not seldomly physicians trying out diagnoses on females (of what the rules up to today are mainly male-made) misinterpret real overload of an organism psychologically as a secondary gain from illness (attention, empathy and so on). Such, some benefit from self-induced illness to manipulate others, while some others may not get even retreat because their symptoms resemble the ones of fakery - this is not invented by me but this happens in real. With the loss of time for a closer look at whom we deal with, society turns more and more into a system where perfectly simulating is rewarded the most. And as this fakery is not conscious but the organism itself has learnt how it works from early childhood stage on, it is so difficult to find out and then to address at all.
The behaviour may start somewhere in early youth and as soon as the upgrowing kids find out these tactics work, they respectively their organisms make them part of the strategy plan in their lifes. Bear in mind: children most often fill in gaps in families and become just symptom-carriers, trying to smoothen their parents and inter-relationships for the sake of stability and shelter which is certainly necessary at a certain stage in life. To achieve such, they can form out bonds which can sprawl into something like a kind of awkward stranglehold of a climbing plant.
Supporting such behaviours does not strengthen the children at all - it prevents them from using their own two feet to sturdily stand on the ground, and increases the forces of dependency for all involved parties as well as for future relations - no matter if personal, intimate or work relations.
Additionally, it amplifies the actors' confidence that the tactics work out fine and prevent them from growing themselves. To nurture from a host is just too convenient - is the wisdom of the basic individual economics program.
Most people, uncritical mothers and fathers often, but especially here also men who grew up with openly powerless but passive-aggressive females, will fall into that trap and pity their '
princesses' terribly. So the passive-aggressives will achieve their goals - usually empowered by men, who in this world still have the most power and therefore make good hosts for this kind of Daddy's girls.
(No worry, there are also 'Daddy's/Mummy's boys around though men are socialized differently and are much more allowed to openly address challenges and conflicts, even if I recently read that more men are considered as 'passive-aggressive' - well, then maybe by a society which does not allow healthy male initiation as well. This all together forms a vicious circle of unmatured, unhealthy adults, passing on their weaknesses to next generations. Fascinating then is that when females
do go into conflicts to solve instead of avoiding them and manipulating around, this form is immediately called 'aggression' already at a stage where a male would be considered as just reasonable und firm.)
A weak mother will support such behaviour in young girls (breeding another generation of her-self - why should the kids become more healthy than she herself is and ever will be? Weaks would loose control if they empower others in their own environment, so it is logical they do not want the situation to change at all).
A helpless father will be totally defenseless - men usually anyway have problems understanding what is going on in females. The topic is most complex because the interconnections and causalities are so difficult to detect and to unveil - which is part of the game. It is a quite common, wrong assumption that children are generally 'innocent'. At first, they are. But they quickly learn to play the game.
The only way out would be confrontation with persons who do not allow being bound into such system, individuals who do not play that game and teach constructive, other, more healthy ways of dealing with (inner and outer) conflicts. But these might look behind the games that are played and such take away the power - remember: things should of course not change. And so these persons will be kicked out of the system. Underhandedly - that's the one thing you can be very sure of.
With just straight wishes, undiplomatically but prefferedly to the point.
Yours,
Lyn
