Metamessaging is one way of being really critical of someone without having to take responsibility for being mean. Done properly, it can turn into metafighting, which is like fighting, but without actually admitting that you're angry.
It can be done in reverse, too, like when someone reads unintended metamessages into other communications. This happens sometimes because someone is used to metacritics and therefore thinks every communication is a criticism. Which can be painful and tricky when you're just getting to know someone. The thing that totally sucks about this is that metafighters often don't even understand what they're doing or why.
At its worst, metacommunicating can be really damaging and awful like when it breaks down the possible paths of communication, leaving one person feeling picked to shreds and the other one still dissatisfied because they've now unintentionally angered a loved one. And let's face it, criticizing a loved one is sometime necessary for everyone's health, mental and otherwise.
This whole mess is kind of like the luge run at the winter olympics of passive agression...pretty easy to start, impossible to slow down, and heaven help you if you hang into the track at the wrong moment.
One of my friends from when I was in high school got kicked in the head when he looked into the track during a practice luge run at the Lake Placid Olympics in the 1980's. I met him afterward, so I'm not sure what the long-term effects were, but he said it hurt a lot at the time. I think about him getting whacked in the head by a luge runner every time I wander into passive aggressive olympic behaviors at work or home.
I ask myself, "Why can't we just fight like normal people?" Of course, I then realize that this is what normal people do. Particularly bourgeois normal people.
Maybe I should just give up and go shopping.
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