MANUAL TO SURVIVE IN A PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE MARRIAGE, PART II
IV.- Please, explain again what is passive aggressive behavior?
Basically now, we understand this behavior as a childhood-learned defensive strategy. He has grown up under some kind of parental attitudes that prevented him from expressing his anger, and thus developed this shell to cover it up.
Instead of learning how to confront safely, explaining his needs and getting some agreement with other people, he decides it’s not worth it and proceeds to do his own thing. Of course, being oblivious to the fact that, because now he is married, he is pushing his partner away!
If you try to negotiate with him, thinking that he is a grown up man you are dealing with, sorry, but you are wrong….he is a kid (a resentful one) inside. So, let’s do the refresher course on how to deal with him:
Have a Plan B: review your life, recover your basic life mission and refresh your goals. Remember that one of your life purposes is to have a happy productive life, with him or without him. This will give you lots of good things to do and so it takes the pressure off him.
Now, you are not expecting him to be all the source of your happiness! Given that you have your own fun and interesting things to do, he will be forced to connect with you in a different way, not only using passive aggression only to reproduce the hurt his parents did to him…
By taking the pressure off, you give him some space between your projects and his automatic response of negativity and procrastination. In this space, the question: “do I have to frustrate her always or can I have some of the same fun she has?” probably will pop in his mind…Is vital to this strategy that you show how happy and interested you are in your projects…so he can’t imagine how could he destroy your joy.
The purpose is to leave him alone as soon as he is doing passive aggressive behaviors, while you continue with your own life, because this is what you need to do when living with the passive aggressive man.
Here, being left alone means being left behind, and he is not as silly as to appreciate being left alone. He wants company too!
So, be clear that he will be included as soon as he can be agreeable, kind and participative in common projects. Tell him: “as soon as you are ready to enjoy this activity, no grudges or silence or resentment included, you are in!” and be ready to slam the door.
OK, are you telling me that this is too harsh to do? well, let’s go back to AskNora, read the postings there and let me know what you want to do…Do you want to pick the role of the passive aggressive husband victim? Or do you want to try something different?
Anyhow, if you want to refresh the basic concepts about passive aggression, and learn how to spot a passive aggressive partner, help is near.
V.- How to Deal EMOTIONALLY With a Passive Aggressive Husband
There is a slow progression in the process of locating the main cause of some spousal behaviors. Usually, emotions are confused so much as to be described “a state of fog.”
First you feel that something is odd, because you have some feelings of hurt that don’t correspond with the objective situation…you are happily married, and then some response from your spouse makes the whole perception shake, and you are not so sure who you are.
As one woman at the end of her rope described this constant passive aggression as a situation where she would receive either punishment or love, in a sequence without any logic.
“Mental torture followed by a bit of love, then disappointment then promises and apologies then heartache again, in an endless roller coaster. She never was sure of his affection and began doubting herself.”
Was she the cause of this treatment?
Perhaps if she loved more, if she could be more patient…things would be more stable?
Eventually she figured out the pattern of interaction when there was less and less respect and more and more empty apologies and abuse. In this emotional emptiness, it’s easy to feel lost, bereft of personal goals and motivations and ready to detach from life.
What is this emptiness creeping In?
In passive aggressive relationships, there is a failure of the basic covenant of caring for each other in a very personal way. We all have needs, and those basic needs are to be solved by the people we love and share life with. Here, this flow of care and attention from one person to the others never gets completed: it goes, but there is no return. Then a basic human need, like the one for love and connection, goes basically frustrated, and this is not a functional marriage any longer.
What happens in this situation?
“I found that the more I asked him for what I needed from him (honesty, communication, stability), the more he would find a way not to give it to me. He would leave it dangling and hovering over me, but would never quite let me grab a hold of it. It is mental torture of the worst kind.”
The frustration of basic needs satisfaction, such as the need for love and connection, and the need for recognition, makes the situation intolerable:
“I would become almost hysterical with him. I would cry, yell, belittle, beg, ignore, baby, apologize, sleep in another bedroom, analyze, read, threaten, ANYTHING that I thought might make him “see the light…” but he remained emotionally unavailable to my needs.”
As long as she is showing her vulnerability and her unsolved needs to him, she is giving him control of the couple’s power, and it seals the deal.
There is no way of changing a passive aggressive person when he can manipulate his marriage to fit his own style of communication, regardless of her needs.
VI.- How to Deal With a Passive Aggressive Husband?
What we need to understand is that a passive aggressive personality has been many years in the making, and is part of the very core of this person’s ability to relate. It is NOT a response to her behavior; it’s his “normal response” to everything that happens in his world, his marriage included…It is the mindset or lenses through which he experiences life....
Without entering into the psychological elements of what makes this person behave in such a defensive way, what is important to see is that this is a way of being, structurally organized, and nobody can change it from the outside.
Only the person with a passive aggressive personality disorder, who has learned to react in this way can realize the damage it causes to any relationship and make a plan to modify his own responses.
The only role a wife can have is to be a witness, and let him know what is the impact of his behavior on people around him, and on the relationships he says he needs. By denouncing as hurtful some of his responses, she is helping him recognize how inappropriate his answers are…and then hope that her words will motivate him to do otherwise.
In the words of the same wife:
“If there’s one thing that I’ve really learned, it is that a passive-aggressive person must find his own truth. We can talk to them about it, give them pamphlets on it, download articles off of the Internet, suggest counseling, etc., but until they choose to look at themselves without their rose-filtered glasses on and see the hurt inside of them, they have no reason to change. In my opinion, passive-aggressive behavior is not something that can be cured, but managed.”
You can continue the conversation with a comment; leave your question at “AskNora” or get more information from the book “Living with a PA Husband”
VII.- Using respect to manage your passive aggressive husband/
We women think that we know exactly what men want…and that begins with sex, right? If I ask you: what is beyond sex that men want, and it is not good food? you will be at a challenge to answer…
Well, here we want to share something else, perhaps disregarded in the daily quest to manage your passive aggressive husband. Or ignored by the roles women assume in daily life, as mothers of boys. We want to share here some conclusions of our survey on men needs.
As a first conclusion, a man’s sense of his own identity is almost completely linked to the image reflected back to him by his relationships.How you see him is a powerful tool for him to feel accepted and valued, or ignored and rejected….
When he feels appreciated in his daily efforts, his battle to conquer the world is justified; when he is ignored and taken for granted, he is sapped of his confidence and sense of manhood. At the same time we women need to feel loved and connected, they want to feel respected.
Respect? where is that coming from, you can say? we didn’t talk about respect here before….but in my role as a spouse and later a mother, I can remember when those roles mixed, and I ended up seeing all men as children to be guided, told what is best, admonished and sometimes controlled for their own good. I began to lose respect for men as a group that knew what to do….always. Let me share some of my then conclusions:
- Wife assumes that he needs to be told what to do or to be reminded of basic things, like how to dress for a party;
- Wife assumes that if he doesn’t do something, it is because he doesn’t care to make her, the wife happy
- Wife assumes that all relationship problems are caused by him and need fixing…if only she can teach him!
From here, you would be sending him a message that he receives as:
“My wife feels she is in charge and that I am not an adult. She feels she needs to raise me the way she might raise a child.”
Do you remember this happening to you? believing that you can reduce all his motivations to be satisfied in bed and well fed? The core aspect of your partner’s soul, his individual personality gets forgotten and we think we can manage them in a very simple way. I had to relearn my own perspective years ago…Now, in our survey, men expressed that situation as feeling isolated and rejected, not respected in who they are…
I hear you immediately asking: How can I respect a passive aggressive man?
First, abandon the idea of fixing him. We call it here “detach,” in several old posts.
It means that you are not supposed to “help him cure his passive aggression” by dragging him to a therapist, or a counselor….We know that it produces nothing: he will resist, abandon and make fun of your attempt to fix him.
Second, and in good faith, try to find some aspect of his presence in your life that you can appreciate. There must be something: is he providing? is he taking care of some of the children’s care? Is he good at repairing things in the house?
Now, if you take care of appreciating those good aspects of your spouse, you will be solving some of his hidden needs, such as:
“I need to feel accepted and not be put down constantly”
“I need to hear words of appreciation, when I’m doing my best”
Of course, this is not a magic remedy…but a behavior that can take you somewhere different from the stuck place you are in now….It’s worth an honest try!
VIII.- Healing after passive aggressive relationships?
How can you plan your healing after passive aggressive relationships?
If you have been living for some time within the passive aggressive cycle of abuse, there is some healing to be done!
First, let’s use a bit of time to go over what are the possible impacts on you. Even if you don’t see them clearly, it is possible that you have been affected in several aspects of your personality.
Let’s list some of the possible effects, estimating that you have been in this relationship around 2-3 years?
After a consistent passive aggressive cycle of abuse, you can expect to define yourself as having or being:
- poor self-esteem;
- confused about what you aspire to do with your life;
- insecure about your intellectual capacity;
- waiting to receive permission to say what you want;
- intimidated and forced to squash your creativity in order not to receive his angry critiques.
This is a self-destructive situation that will not improve by itself. You will become more and more poor in enthusiasm, energy and motivation to achieve your dreams. After getting to be for more time in this relationship, it will be difficult to remember the vital, healthy person you were at the beginning…
And you don’t want to realize after twenty years, that the progressive devastation of your dreams has continued, right?
IX.- Self Help with passive aggressive husband?
Wondering what can you do by yourself, if you happen to have not immediate help around?
Here are the Steps:
- Recognize that you are participant in his crooked and sad vision of what a marriage is; now, tell yourself this is not the marriage you deserved
- Hear you deep voice saying that you can’t taker loneliness and abandonment any longer, and make it real this time
- Walk around your house and say goodbye to the lack of love, attention, sex and recognition you experience just here…
- If you need to cry, do it while saying : I cry because I’m saying goodbye to all this misery….”
- Now, with tears or not, go to your desk and write down your own plan to recover yourself:
X.- Think about taking back power from a passive aggressive man
Here are the Steps:
- Get to accept that all his shenanigans are only coming from a poor, deficient and insecure attachment with his mother/caretaker;
- Give up the pretense that you are responsible for his behavior; it was learned way before he met you!
- Look around and finally see the poor environment you are developing with him, and detach: this is NOT what your dreams promised you;
- And tell yourself not to fear change any minute longer, in order to go/have/be where you want to be…
- Do some deep breathing inhalations and feel the negative and love-starved context he put you in, and imagine yourself walking out to a sunny, warm space.
- Now, write down your vision of who you want to be, and what you want to be doing….
XI.- What else can we share with you about passive aggression?
NOW, would you like more? more information, more support?
You can start by reading this interesting text:
Or this other: “Recovering from Passive Aggression”
Let us know what else can you need, and we will do our best to give you our suggestions and creative ideas to improve your situation and make you happier.
About Creative Conflict Resolutions:
How did we start writing about relationships? And about passive aggressive men? Watching the present state of marital relationships in the US, we began testing some of the conclusions of academic research, as applied to our readers:
Creative Conflict Resolutions tested more than 900 men by using an online questionnaire, in order to determine the presence of passive aggressive behavior in each test-taker. This test has twenty-one questions about the way people approach communication and conflict in their relationship, and it is still available for free.
Using our findings, we began to construct a map of the game of life, according to the passive aggressive mindset. The mindset demands “going along” with others by pretending to accept their requests and needs. In this way, the basic incompetence of the passive aggressive person to feel empathy is successfully masked.
Essentially, what is produced is a “make believe role play,” where the passive aggressive person feels they are required to mask their own feelings and play a part in order to receive any sort of love. Which of course, never arrives, because they do a pretend connection...With this research, we gained greater perspective on the mindset of the passive aggressive man and where his emotional needs lie.
At Creative Conflicts we want those findings to be shared with the thousands of couples struggling with passive aggression. The partner of a passive aggressive person can spend the best 20-30 years of their life trying to decode this maddening double message. Meanwhile, in trying to decode it, the innocent partner can be accused of being crazy, aggressive and overly demanding.
Finally we at Creative Conflicts designed a new set of tools for the passive aggressive husband that helps him own his lack of empathy and the need to fake commitment, exchanging them for real emotional bonding. Creative Conflicts’ healing system is ready for new clients, and has already met with success. It can be found at Passive Aggressive System.
Thanks for reading this report, and waiting to be able to serve you in all your needs!
Neil Warner
Creative Conflict Resolutions
2805 E. Oakland Park Blvd., # 430
Fort Lauderdale, FL, 33306
(1) 954 607 2183
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