Passive Aggression as Indirect-Hostility Wrong Attractor: The Forbidden-Anger Architecture, Covert Retaliation Basin, and the Return to Direct Assertiveness

Passive aggression — the expression of hostility through indirect, deniable means including procrastination, sulking, backhanded compliments, and deliberate inefficiency, rather than direct confrontation — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_PA in the landscape of direct assertiveness. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as direct assertiveness: the capacity to express grievance, frustration, and need directly, proportionately, and in a manner that invites resolution.

W_PA arises when direct anger expression is forbidden — either by trauma, cultural context, or power differential — forcing aggression through covert channels. The wrong attractor sustains itself because covert hostility prevents the authentic confrontation that could resolve the underlying grievance, maintaining it and requiring continued covert expression in a self-reinforcing cycle.

Nine formal propositions characterize the forbidden anger architecture, the covert retaliation repertoire, basin deepening through childhood anger prohibition and power differentials, the resolution foreclosure mechanism, the distinction from appropriate indirectness and healthy tact, and return paths through anger permission, assertiveness training, and schema work on anger entitlement.