The covert-aggressive personality employs a potent one-two punch: the covert-aggressive conceals aggressive intent to ensure you never really see what’s coming; and he or she exploits your normal sensitivities, conscientiousness and other vulnerabilities to manipulate you into succumbing.

To help our server deliver a snappier response time for the thousands of readers of our threads on Dr Carver’s ‘Loser’ article — the most recent of which has attracted over 350 new comments, we’re going to open this new thread and close the previous one. Combined with around 175 questions on personality disorders submitted to the ‘Ask the Psychologist’ service, we’ve now had over 1000 questions and comments from readers affected by this topic.

Sadists love to build themselves up at the expense of others. It makes them feel powerful to wield almost tyrannical influence over those they perceive as weaker or inferior. They derive pleasure from watching others cower, grovel, or struggle in one-down positions.

The Channeled-Aggressives in our midst want everyone to know that they are a power to be reckoned with and have little regard for those whom they perceive to be less tenacious. They might even regard it as a perverted indication of respect if others cower in their presence. Do you know someone like this?

By far the most limiting aspect of traditional approaches to understanding the most character-disturbed individuals among us is that purely behavioral descriptions don’t capture the essence of what is unhealthy and problematic in them.

Aggressive personalities are fundamentally at war with anything that stands in the way of their unrestrained pursuit of their desires.

Often when someone says that another person is being “passive-aggressive,” they really mean something else. Let’s clarify just what passive-aggression is — and what it isn’t — with the help of a framework for understanding human aggression in general.