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Procrastination and Anxiety—Part III

     Procrastination also has a dark side.   While procrastination can cause considerable irritation within you, it can cause even more aggravation to others.   It is particularly useful in getting even, as in passive aggressiveness.   Passive-aggressiveness is what happens when I’m mad at you (it doesn’t matter why) but don’t want to own up to how I express that anger in my behavior.   For example, I have an appointment with you, knowing you have another commitment right behind our appointment.   I arrive fifteen or twenty minutes late, stating I had to stop for gas.   Cars need gas, and besides, I’m only twenty minutes late.   I expect you to give me the full time of our meeting, running over into your next appointment.   None of this was my fault, because my conscious intentions were good, to make the meeting on time.   “Things got in the way,” which of course were “out of my control.”
     Wrong.   I was mad at you and wanted to frustrate you and make you feel the same way I feel.   I “forgot” the car needed gas, so of course when I filled the tank at the gas station, I was just performing routine maintenance, which couldn’t possibly be connected to my anger at you.   Then, having arrived late, I expected that you would give me my full allotted time anyway, implying that you are a creep if you didnt.   Never mind that I fully well knew of your previous commitment behind my appointment.   I’m implying your are a crummy person because you might not give me all the time we had planned, despite my tardiness.   This is another way I can malign your character and, again, not have it be my fault.  
     The ambivalence behind this gambit stems from my out-or-awareness anger at you.   I don’t want consciously to deal with whatever you did to make me mad, so I also ignore (bury) the conflict and the resulting anxiety, instead expressing it by my “normal” behavior, which is really designed to express the conflict at you, thus, “innocently,” making you the bad guy.   And how is all this set up by procrastination?   I didn’t think to put gas in the car earlier.   All I experienced was some basic indecision but the underlying choice was to put it off.   Do I put gas in the car now and be late, or risk running out of gas and being on time?   I was unconsciously motivated to not think of getting gas, which on the surface looks like procrastination.   Pretty slick, but sinister.

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