Well,  that cat litter hasn't been there for about a month.  I sweep it up on a regular basis.  You were just looking for SOMETHING to bitch to me about and that came up.   God, you can such an ASS!!!  Your actions caused everyone (kids, animals) to SCATTER and run for cover from your ranting and raving.  If you are mad at someone else then take it out on them....you didn't have to bail your brother out.  No one has a "hold" on you.  You have to play the martyr {just like your mother-hello? do you see the connection?}  You are feeling bad so it is someone else's fault?  Then you have to throw up that YOU are the one that buys the food, puts the roof over my head, and all that blah, blah, blah.  It has been your ass that has been laying on the couch for the past 3 months now.  You haven't had a hard days work since October....... These experts make a distinction between passive-aggressive behavior, which most people display at times, and passive-aggressive personality, which is ingrained and habitual. In milder forms it can come across as a maddening blend of evasiveness and contrition, agreeableness and impudence, and in severe cases is often masked by more obvious mental illness, like depression. Yet whether pathological or not, they say, the pattern is often traceable to a distinct childhood experience. New research suggests that in many cases it stems from a positive, socially protective instinct - to keep peace at home, avoid costly mistakes at work, even preserve some self-respect. "Some of the people being demeaned as passive-aggressive are in fact being extremely careful not to commit mistakes, a strategy that has been successful for them," if not entirely conscious, said Dr. E. Tory Higgins, director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. They become difficult, he said, "when their cautious instincts are overwhelmed by demands that they perceive as unreasonable." The classic description of the behavior captures a stubborn malcontent, someone who passively resists fulfilling routine tasks, complains of being misunderstood and underappreciated, unreasonably scorns authority and voices exaggerated complaints of personal misfortune. A similar family dynamic accounts for early development of the behavior, some researchers argue. Dr. Lorna Benjamin, co-director of a clinic at the University of Utah's Neuropsychiatric Institute in Salt Lake City, said people with strong passive tendencies often grew up in loving but demanding families, which gave them responsibilities they perceived to be unmanageable.  That is the definition of passive aggresive.....it needs your photo in it These passive-aggressive people, Dr. Benjamin said, "are full of unacknowledged contradiction, of angry kindness, compliant defiance, covert assertiveness."