7 Signs of Passive Aggressive Behavior in Relationships (and What’s Really Going On Underneath)
By Figs O’Sullivan, LMFT | April 2026
Here is the thing nobody tells you about passive aggressive behavior in relationships: the person doing it almost never knows they are doing it.
You sent a text that said okay fine, but nothing felt fine.
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That sarcastic comment about the dishes. The “I’m fine” that clearly means something else entirely. The cabinet that gets closed just a little too hard. The text message that says “okay, fine” when nothing about the situation is okay or fine. These are not signs that your partner is a bad person. They are signs that your partner’s nervous system is doing the only thing it knows how to do when it feels threatened.
I have been a licensed marriage and family therapist for over 17 years. I have sat with thousands of couples. And I can tell you with certainty that passive aggression is one of the most misunderstood dynamics in intimate relationships. Most of the advice you will find online treats it like a character defect, something you need to confront, expose, and stamp out. That advice is wrong. It misses the biology entirely. And it will make your relationship worse.
Let me show you what is actually happening.
What Passive Aggressive Behavior Actually Is (and What It Is Not)
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Passive aggression is indirect hostility. It is anger expressed sideways. Instead of saying “I am hurt that you did not prioritize me tonight,” your partner says “No, go ahead, have fun. I will just be here.” Instead of saying “I feel disconnected from you,” they give you the silent treatment for two days and then insist nothing is wrong.
But here is where the clinical understanding diverges from the pop psychology version. Passive aggressive behavior is not a personality trait. It is a survival strategy. It belongs to the same family of biological responses as fight, flight, freeze, and placate. In my clinical work, I categorize passive aggressive fighters as a specific variation of the fight response. Some people are overt fighters. Some people are what I call “good needlers,” people who have learned to express anger in ways that are technically deniable but emotionally devastating.
And here is the tragic irony: the intention behind passive aggressive behavior is almost never dirty. The intention is to get change. The intention is to improve the relationship. The person making the sarcastic comment genuinely believes, on some level, that they are drawing attention to a real problem. But the impact lands on their partner’s nervous system as a threat. It creates a hypersensitivity to what I call the bullshit way we try to manipulate and gain change in our relationships.
This gap between intention and impact is where couples get stuck. Sometimes for years.
From Empathi’s own research: in 58,221 completed relationship assessments, shut down and withdraw were the top two reactive behaviours for withdrawers (8,653 and 7,743) and the second and third for pursuers (8,007 and 7,700).
The 7 Signs You Need to Recognize
1. The Mislabeled Can
This is one of my favorite clinical analogies because it captures the self-deception at the heart of passive aggression perfectly. Your partner comes to a conflict believing they are carrying a can of water. They think they are being helpful. They think they are putting out the fire of disconnection. But that can was mislabeled. It is full of gasoline.
This looks like the partner who says, “I am just trying to help you understand why what you did was hurtful,” while their tone, their posture, and their energy are broadcasting contempt. They believe their own framing. That is what makes it so difficult. The passive aggressive partner is not lying when they say “I was not being hostile.” They genuinely do not see it.
2. Sarcasm as a Shield
Sarcasm is the socially acceptable cousin of contempt. And in relationships, it functions as a protective strategy. When I map this onto the Compass of Shame (a framework developed by Donald Nathanson), sarcasm falls squarely in the “Attack Other” quadrant alongside blame, criticism, sharpness, and moralizing.
My wife, Teale, has been brave enough to share her own experience with this on our podcast. Reflecting on an early relationship rupture, she said something that I think captures what many people feel: “I use it passive aggressively but I am really funny with how I use it. Because I use it passive aggressively and use it in these kind of light moments, it can feel like a hard place to just really heal.”
Read that again. She named the exact trap. The humor makes the behavior deniable. Which means the wound underneath it never gets treated. The sarcasm feels righteous. It feels protective. But the fire underneath it is fueled entirely by shame.
3. The Silent Treatment
The silent treatment is the withdrawal version of passive aggression, and it maps to the “Withdraw” quadrant of the Compass of Shame. Going quiet. Going numb. Becoming unreachable. It is one of the most painful experiences a partner can endure because it simultaneously communicates “you do not matter enough for me to engage” while the person delivering it is often silently screaming “please do not expose my not-enoughness. Please do not reject me.”
No one is shutting down because they are not interested. They are shutting down to survive the pain of intimacy. When the withdrawing partner (what I call the “Reluctant Lover”) pulls away or goes silent, their body is not expressing coldness. It is expressing terror. This is a profound defense mechanism against the unbearable shame of feeling like a failure or a disappointment. If you want to understand how stonewalling and the silent treatment erode trust over time, I wrote about it in depth here.
4. “Okay, Fine”
I have caught myself doing this. My partner is late, and I text “okay, fine.” Was it okay? Is that what those two words meant? Or was I being passive aggressive? Of course I was. Those two words contained an entire unspoken monologue about feeling deprioritized, about my time not mattering, about a story I was telling myself regarding my partner’s intentions.
The “okay, fine” response is a hallmark of passive aggression because it gives the speaker total deniability. If confronted, they can say “I literally said it was fine.” And technically, they did. But everyone in the room, including the person who said it, knows what it actually meant.
5. The Carrier Pigeon
This is the partner who writes long texts, emails, or letters to express their grievances indirectly. They often genuinely believe they are being constructive. They think they are helping. But that letter is one of the actions that keeps the negative system going.
I sometimes describe it this way: the carrier pigeon can barely fly by the fifth day because it is so weighed down by criticism. Every “constructive” letter adds another layer of blame, another list of failures, another inventory of everything the partner has done wrong. The medium feels mature (who could object to a thoughtful letter?), but the content is pure attack.
6. The Cabinet Slam
This is the physical expression of unsaid anger. The door that gets shut a little too hard. The cabinets that get closed in loud ways. The dishes that get loaded into the dishwasher with unnecessary force. On the inside, the person slamming cabinets is often experiencing complicated feelings around loneliness. They feel disconnected from their partner and they do not have the words or the nervous system regulation to say so directly.
So the anger leaks out through their body. It fills the room without a single word being spoken. And the partner on the receiving end of it gets the message loud and clear: something is wrong, you are the cause, and I am not going to tell you what it is.
7. The Boomerang
Every passive aggressive behavior in a relationship is ultimately a boomerang. You throw it at your partner. It guts them. And then it comes back and guts you. Because passive aggression never gets you what you actually want. It never produces the closeness, the reassurance, the proof that you matter. It produces the exact opposite: more distance, more defensiveness, more shame.
This is the most important thing I want you to understand. Passive aggressive behavior in relationships is self-defeating by design. It is a strategy that your nervous system deploys to protect you, but it systematically destroys the very connection it is trying to preserve.
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The Compass of Shame: Why Your Partner Cannot Just “Stop”
To understand passive aggression at the deepest level, you need to understand shame. Not guilt (which says “I did something bad”), but shame (which says “I am bad”). When shame hits in a relationship, it hits fast, and the nervous system has four options. Donald Nathanson mapped these onto what he called the Compass of Shame, and in my clinical work, I have found it to be one of the most useful frameworks for helping couples understand why they do what they do.
The four quadrants are:
Attack Other: Blame. Criticism. Sharpness. Sarcasm. Contempt. Moralizing. This is the classic passive aggressive stance. It feels righteous. It feels protective. But it is driven entirely by shame. Attack Other says, “If I push you away, you cannot see how vulnerable I actually am.”
Withdraw: Going quiet. Going numb. Disappearing into work or a phone or a bottle. This is the silent treatment version of passive aggression. The message to the partner is “you cannot hurt what you cannot reach.”
Attack Self: The internal collapse. “I am the problem. I am too much. I am not enough.” This quadrant often looks like compliance on the surface, but underneath it, resentment builds. And resentment, when it finally surfaces, almost always comes out sideways.
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Avoidance: Minimizing, deflecting, changing the subject. “Ah sure, do we have to talk about that?” This is the quadrant that keeps couples stuck in surface-level conversations for years, never touching the wound, never healing, and slowly dying of a thousand paper cuts.
Most passive aggressive partners are bouncing between Attack Other and Withdraw. They take a shot (sarcasm, a cutting remark, a loaded question) and then they retreat (silence, emotional unavailability, the “I’m fine” wall). The partner on the receiving end is left disoriented, hurt, and unable to address something that was never explicitly stated.
The Relentless Lover and the Reluctant Lover: Two Flavors of Passive Aggression
In my framework, I describe the two primary relationship positions as the Relentless Lover (the emotional pursuer) and the Reluctant Lover (the emotional withdrawer). Both are capable of passive aggression, but they deploy it differently.
The Relentless Lover uses passive aggression as a protest. They are wired for connection, and when they feel their partner pulling away, their nervous system sounds an alarm. The only thing they know how to do in that moment is criticize, make a passive aggressive comment, or deploy sarcasm. The underlying message is: “Come back to me. I need you. Why are you not here?” But it comes out as hostility, which pushes the partner further away.
The Reluctant Lover uses passive aggression differently. Their version looks more like withdrawal, but it is no less aggressive. The “I’m doing great” performance when they are actually crumbling inside. The emotional unavailability that communicates, without words, “you cannot reach me.” The avoidance of any conversation that might require vulnerability. This is, as I have described it, “kind of passive aggressive” because it masks true vulnerability and the desire to be seen behind a wall of apparent indifference.
Here is what most people miss: the hostility that the Relentless Lover perceives in the Reluctant Lover’s withdrawal is not actually hostility. It is anxiety. That kind of hostility feels less like rivalry and more like anxiety. The Reluctant Lover is not punishing their partner by withdrawing. They are surviving. They are protecting themselves from the unbearable exposure of intimacy.
But to the Relentless Lover’s nervous system, it feels exactly the same as an attack. And so the cycle continues.
Why Traditional Advice Fails
Most advice about passive aggressive behavior tells you to “call it out” or “set boundaries” or “refuse to engage.” This advice treats passive aggression as a behavioral problem that can be solved with better communication techniques. It cannot.
Passive aggression is a nervous system problem. It is what happens when the emotional brain detects a threat to the attachment bond and mobilizes a survival response before the rational brain has time to intervene. You cannot reason your way out of a survival response any more than you can talk yourself out of flinching when someone throws a ball at your face. You sent a text that said okay fine, but nothing felt fine. Talk it through with Figlet.
This is why couples can spend years in therapy learning communication skills and still fall into the same passive aggressive loops. The skills are not the problem. The nervous system flooding is the problem. When your nervous system is flooded, you lose access to the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for empathy, perspective-taking, and measured responses. You are left with the amygdala, which only knows how to fight, flee, freeze, or placate.
The answer is not better communication. The answer is better regulation.
The Path Out: Co-Regulation, Not Confrontation
The only way out of a passive aggressive cycle is mutual co-regulation. This means two things:
First, the passive aggressive partner needs to learn to recognize their own survival response as it is happening. Not after the sarcastic comment has landed. Not after two days of silent treatment. In the moment. This requires building what I call “autonomic awareness,” the capacity to notice when your nervous system is shifting from connection mode into protection mode. You can feel it in your body: the chest tightens, the jaw clenches, the eyes narrow, the breath shortens. Those are the first signs that your nervous system is reaching for a survival strategy.
Second, the receiving partner needs to learn to see through the behavior to the vulnerability underneath it. This is extraordinarily difficult when someone is being sarcastic or giving you the silent treatment. Every fiber of your being wants to either fight back or withdraw. But the moment you can pause and see your partner’s passive aggression for what it actually is (a frightened child in an adult body, desperately trying to protect themselves from shame), the entire dynamic shifts.
I say this to couples constantly: the only reason you are acting that way is because deep down inside you are hurting because your partner means so much to you. Nobody gets passive aggressive about someone they do not care about. The intensity of the indirect hostility is directly proportional to the depth of the attachment. If they did not matter to you, you would not bother.
Partners must transition from viewing each other’s protective strategies as hostile attacks to recognizing that they are, as I often describe it, two little field mice that are hurting. When you can see your partner’s passive aggression as pain rather than cruelty, you unlock the possibility of repair.
What Repair Actually Looks Like
Repair does not mean the passive aggressive behavior stops overnight. It means the cycle gets shorter. It means the recovery happens faster. It means the moments of recognition (“I just did that thing again, and I am sorry, what I was actually feeling was scared”) start to outnumber the moments of escalation.
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Here is a practical framework for moving from passive aggression to direct communication. I call it the Three-Part Turn:
Step 1: Name the survival response. “I notice I am getting sharp with you right now.” This is not an apology. It is an observation. It interrupts the automatic cycle and brings the prefrontal cortex back online.
Step 2: Name the feeling underneath. “What is actually happening is that I feel disconnected from you, and that scares me.” This is the hardest step because it requires dropping from the protected position (sarcasm, silence, the “I’m fine” wall) into the vulnerable truth.
Step 3: Name the need. “What I actually need right now is to know that we are okay.” This is the direct expression of the attachment need that the passive aggressive behavior was trying (and failing) to communicate.
This framework works because it addresses the biology, not just the behavior. It does not ask the passive aggressive partner to suppress their survival response (which is impossible). It gives them a different channel to express what their nervous system is reacting to. Over time, with practice, the nervous system learns that direct vulnerability is safer than indirect hostility. But this learning takes time, repetition, and a partner who is willing to meet the vulnerability with warmth rather than weaponize it.
When Passive Aggression Becomes Something More
I want to be direct about something. There is a meaningful difference between the passive aggressive behavior I have described in this article (attachment-driven protest from a dysregulated nervous system) and patterns of emotional abuse. In an abusive dynamic, the indirect hostility is not a desperate bid for connection. It is a tool of control.
How do you tell the difference? In attachment-driven passive aggression, the person feels remorse when they see the impact of their behavior. They may not show it immediately (shame often prevents that), but there is a deep recognition that they have hurt someone they love. In an abusive pattern, the passive aggression is followed by blame-shifting, gaslighting, and a systematic denial that the behavior occurred at all.
If you recognize your relationship in the latter description, the answer is not co-regulation. The answer is safety. Please reach out to the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.
The Bottom Line
Passive aggressive behavior in relationships is not a character flaw. It is a biological survival strategy, a protest mechanism deployed by a nervous system that has detected a threat to the most important bond in its life. The sarcasm, the silent treatment, the “I’m fine,” the cabinet slam, the carrier pigeon letter, the “okay, fine” text: all of these are different dialects of the same language. And that language is saying, “I am in pain, you matter to me, and I do not know how to tell you directly.”
Repair does not come from confrontation. It does not come from calling out the behavior or demanding that your partner “just communicate.” It comes from building the capacity for co-regulation, the mutual ability to be present with each other’s vulnerability without attacking, withdrawing, or collapsing.
If you are reading this and seeing yourself or your partner in these patterns, that recognition is itself the first step. The fact that you are looking for answers means your nervous system is ready for something different. It means you are ready to stop throwing boomerangs and start turning toward each other.
That is where everything changes.
Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
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Related reading: Kids’ Behavior Worse After Dad Visits · The Passive-Aggressive Husband: What’s Underneath the Indirect Anger · How to Stop Protest Behavior in Anxious Attachment: The Vulnerable Move Underneath the Reach
This is not a you problem or a them problem
“Relationship distress is a feature, not a bug, of loving someone so much that their emotional distance feels terrifying. It is the predictable dance of two nervous systems desperately trying to survive the perceived loss of one another.”
“The fight is never about the content. It is always about the bond.”
Figs O’Sullivan, LMFT
Frequently asked questions
Why does my partner not realize they are being passive aggressive?
Because passive aggression involves genuine self-deception. I use the analogy of a mislabeled can: your partner thinks they are carrying water to put out a fire, but the can is full of gasoline. They believe their own framing of being helpful, which is what makes it so difficult to address.
Is the silent treatment really about punishing me?
No. When your partner shuts down, their body is not expressing coldness, it is expressing terror. They are silently screaming please do not expose my not-enoughness. It is a defense against the unbearable shame of feeling like a failure or disappointment, not a punishment aimed at you.
Why does calling out passive aggression not fix it?
Because passive aggression is a nervous system problem, not a behavioral one. It is a survival response mobilized by the emotional brain before the rational brain can intervene. You cannot reason your way out of it any more than you can talk yourself out of flinching when a ball is thrown at your face.
What is the difference between how pursuers and withdrawers act passive aggressively?
The Relentless Lover uses passive aggression as protest, criticizing or deploying sarcasm to say come back to me. The Reluctant Lover uses withdrawal, the I am doing great performance, emotional unavailability, masking vulnerability behind apparent indifference. What looks like hostility in the withdrawer is actually anxiety, not attack.
Why does passive aggressive behavior always backfire?
Because every passive aggressive behavior is a boomerang. You throw it at your partner, it guts them, and it comes back and guts you. It never produces the closeness or reassurance you actually want. Instead it produces more distance, more defensiveness, and more shame. It is self-defeating by design.
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