WE ARE STUCK IN THIS DANCE:

Nora Femenia is a well known coach, conflict solver and trainer, and CEO of Creative Conflict Resolutions, Inc. Visit her blog and signup free to be connected to her innovative conflict solutions, positive suggestions and life-changing coaching sessions, along with blog updates, news, and more! Go now to http://www.creativeconflicts.com.

The Passive Aggressive Dance is a post from: Passive Aggressive Husband

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Managing confrontations can be discovered in our previous book, How to Fight Fair in Your Marriage. Here, however, we want to discuss the basics of repairing a relationship and making it as healthy as it can be. This is especially important in a passive aggressive marriage – trying to keep the relationship alive and solid enough to move forward from requires being fully aware of how relationships should and must work.

To have a healthy relationship, basic human needs must be considered. You have to meet your spouse’s needs, and your spouse must meet yours. If we could meet our own needs, we wouldn’t need other humans! Of course, you must be familiar with and learn to recognize these basic needs, and then your “repair work” can be based on that need.

You can find out which of your spouse’s basic needs is being frustrated in the marriage by asking yourself what are the things he/she complains about you most frequently. Conversely, you can start to consider which of your needs are being frustrated by doing the same exercise.

For example: the need for recognition. You can identify this need if your spouse often says that you:

Don’t pay attention; (“You never listen to me”).
Don’t appreciate him/her; (“You don’t care about the things that are important to me”).
Don’t care about their dreams; (“You don’t even remember that I would love to ___”).

What would some basic repair ideas be?

First, you need to make it a task for yourself to respond to him/her in such a way that they feel listened to (“I hear you saying that you are tired of ___, where would you like to go instead?”).

Then, set out to address the unsatisfied need directly. To satisfy a need for recognition, find something each day to observe and appreciate. Ask, “Where do you see us in five years?” and “Is there something else that you would like to talk about?” You don’t need to draw out long explanations about whether or not the plans are feasible.

Just listen, and repeat back what the other person said in your own words, then ask for the other person’s confirmation: “Did I understand you well?”

Do you need more tips for repairing your relationship? Join us for free at “Relationship Repair,” where you’ll receive access to a 4 week plan for handling conflict and reconnecting with your spouse.

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.We can begin by you having a complimentary consultation with Conflict Coach, with a plan for action to change your life with new skills included. Just click this link and get started now!

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Are you coming short of your dreams? Still believing that with a bit of support and learning some good communication skills you would feel more gratified in your relationships?

We have been thinking along the same line here….

We wanted to challenge the “End of the Year Blues”, as we realized how many issues are still without improvement or resolution when it comes to our important relationships…

With this in mind, we are proud to announce that December will be

“National Relationships Repair Month”

This FREE program spans over 4 whole weeks for a good, meaty discussion and healing of the issues that form the base of our relationships, so hidden we usually do not take the time to reflect on them…

We provide here good reading materials for you to learn from, questions and answers and finally, a good plan to restore your relationships. Knowing that you read this blog frequently, we are sure you would be interested in this project.

Get a good look at our new offer, and hop on board! Here is the link, and remember that we are waiting for you!

Relationship Repair

Nora Femenia is a well known coach, conflict solver and trainer, and CEO of Creative Conflict Resolutions, Inc. Visit her blog and signup free to be connected to her innovative conflict solutions, positive suggestions and life-changing coaching sessions, along with blog updates, news, and more! Go now to http://www.creativeconflicts.com.

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80% of men prefer to “clam up” and not share their personal thoughts with loved ones, in order to avoid feeling vulnerable, rejected or criticized. This is according to a survey recently conducted by Creative Conflict Resolutions.

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 emotional issues in their relationship, and it is still available for free at their site, Passive Aggressive Test.

Their findings show that among passive aggressive men, and sometimes even with otherwise emotionally healthy men, there is an insistent urge to hide true feelings and opinions.

This leads to the confusing situation that many couples face during a passive aggressive relationship. The passive aggressive person makes promises, agrees, and otherwise goes along with his partner to avoid feeling vulnerable – but then doesn’t deliver, because they never really meant to. Their partners feel frustrated by this contradictory behavior, and confront the promise-breaker with this fateful message: “I think you might be passive aggressive.”

The result? A vicious cycle where the passive aggressive person retreats more, clams up more, trying to fly under their partner’s emotional needs radar. It turns into a situation of extreme isolation and growing lack of trust, which can end the marriage.

Another interesting statistic? 68% of the men tested said they found some satisfaction in being called out; they felt that had gotten “revenge” by breaking a promise to someone who deserved to be let down. Why the revenge? This is the core of the Creative Conflicts proposal: to find the heart of the passive aggressive person’s hurt, which prompts him to take revenge against people who are only looking for a deeper connection.

Creative Conflicts wants to share this information with both the passive aggressive man and his partner, addressing both the causes and the effects of passive aggressive behavior. “The partner of a passive aggressive person can spend the best 20-30 years of their life trying to decode this maddening double message, all while being accused of thinking crazy thoughts and be overly needy when the subject is brought up.

After analyzing the results and the implications thereof, Creative Conflicts created a new set of tools for the passive aggressive husband, to complement the tools they already offer for his unsuspecting partner. With their survey, Creative Conflicts gained greater perspective on the mindset of the passive aggressive man and where his emotional needs lie. Their tools outline the path and steps a passive aggressive man needs to take in order to heal his emotional disconnection and his sending double messages. Creative Conflicts’ new system is ready for their clients, and has already met with success. It can be found at Passive Aggressive System.

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.We can begin by you having a complimentary consultation with Conflict Coach, with a plan for action to change your life with new skills included. Just click this link and get started now!

 

80% of Men Feel They Have No Responsibility to Be Open With Loved Ones is a post from: Passive Aggressive Husband

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More than 68% of men prefer to say “yes” and back down to avoid confrontation, according to a survey recently conducted by Creative Conflict Resolutions.

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 at their site, Passive Aggressive Test.

Using their findings, Creative Conflicts 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.

Creative Conflicts wants 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.

This reveals why Creative Conflicts used their results in the way that they did: they created a new set of tools for the passive aggressive husband. With their survey, Creative Conflicts gained greater perspective on the mindset of the passive aggressive man and where his emotional needs lie. To change this situation, the system Creative Conflicts has created offers a road map that helps the passive aggressive person own his lack of empathy and the need to fake commitment, exchanging them for real emotional bonding. Creative Conflicts’ new system is ready for their clients, and has already met with success. It can be found at Passive Aggressive System.

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People have different times to process emotional contents…when one person is fast to acknowledge that for them there is a need to stop interactions and protect themselves, other person could still go on and deny their personal hurt a bit longer.

There is also a gender difference; where women are trained to use self-examination as a daily tool (“am I adequate? did I do right here?”) men thend to fix their views on external factors and therefore are not so used to self-examinations.

All this talk leads to a tentative answer to the question:

What is the point of no return in a passive aggressive relationship? When one side finds out that “meta talk” (that kind of conversation that reflects on serious questions such as: how are we doing together? are we making each other happy? what could we improve?)  communicating about the relationship is impossible with the other person.

And why is it so hard to talk with a husband about his PA reactions? Well, the answer is here:

In “ASK NORA” (http://passiveaggressivehusband.com/asknora)  we have a person telling:

“Because admitting to a problem is equivalent to an immediate negative judgement against him and being told “you’re a failure”.

This is the reason men can’t get involved in a conversation about how they could improve: they are always positioning themselves in the very demanding situation of:

examining yourself=failing=rejection risk

Why is this attitude of ONLY focusing the self-examination on their own failures? What about their good behaviors that deserve recognition? Is there no self-esteem that can balance the automatic negative evaluation and include the positive aspects that each of us has? Whatever the hidden cause, men block self-examination and thus they lack opportunities to learn how to improve their wrong actions. This is a tragic result because puts people in a direct way to failure, as you can see reading this woman’s story:

“I truly believe, based on my own personal experience, that my PA husband never gave it a thought that his anger, stonewalling, sarcasm and long weeks of pure silence etc. etc. would cause him to eventually lose his marriage/family.

Never being one to threaten divorce unless I really meant it, I mentioned the “word” 3x over our 30+ yr. marriage.  I wanted it to be taken serious as in “last chance”.

The first 2 times he did not answer; walked out of the room and that was enough….I followed through on 3rd time & have never looked back. Personally at 56 years, divorce is not what I wanted; I just could no longer “continue my slow death” from loneliness, lack of physical or emotional love & his continued  ”under current” of anger & blame waiting to go off at any moment!  Why his anger? I never understood it before & now I no longer care! “

Tragically, we can see that is this falsely protective behavior of the passive aggressive person which leads to rejection. It produces (in a magnificent example of a self-fulfilling prophecy) the same results it tries to avoid. He ends up rejected! This time, because he is not man enough to own his 50% responsibility in making the marriage relationship happen with full involvement, disclosure and communication.

There is no other way: if you want to stop the falling out of love, the destruction of trust and the loneliness of both of you in a marriage, you need to know how to identify toxic behaviors, signal to your spouse that you respect and value her as much as to examine and change what needs to be changed and get on in the program.

Isn’t facing now some fear about being rejected better than ACTUALLY being rejected when you can’t face up to hurting your family?

Every journey starts with a single step. Our “Six-Step System to Stop Your Passive Aggression” is ready for you at Passive Aggressive System, but even if you’re not ready to commit to such an undertaking, you can talk to one of our conflict coaches to see if the system is right for you and your family.

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.We can begin by you having a Conflict Coaching Session, with a plan for action to change your life with new skills included. Just click this link and get started now!

 

A Passive Aggressive Marriage Breaking Point is a post from: Passive Aggressive Husband

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Sometimes we hear about the challenges that passive aggression and other defensive behaviors have on marriages, but we fail to connect these present, adult behavior failures with the past conditioning produced in us by the family we grew up with.

So now we have a wife who is totally confused and blindsided by the spouse’s behavior, and that frustrated wife erroneously connects her husband’s unhappiness and their current problem to something she either did or didn’t do.

In short, the present spouse makes herself responsible for her husband’s behavior, and in taking this weight on, she tries to find the reason of the communication failure, so she can “heal it.”

Nobody enters into a relationship with a disclaimer, or an instruction letter that would make it easier for the wife to know the territory she is entering. If such a letter did exist, the instructions on how to deal with a passive aggressive husband would begin with capital letters:

“THIS IS A CONDITION YOU DID NOT CAUSE~

YOU CAN’T NEITHER CURE OR CONTROL IT,”

NOW, can you  stop blaming yourself!”

Wouldn’t that kind of disclaimer be a god-sent message? It would save so much pain, grief and time… which of course translates into lost happiness. Together in this blindness is the passive aggressive spouse, who will support to his death the conviction that his behavior is normal and everybody else is “too demanding” or “needy” or whatever way he uses to describe a wife with emotional needs going unsolved.

Let me recap: if you are in a passive aggressive relationship, take a step back and frame everything under this mantra: I did not cause his condition, I can’t cure him and the best I can do is not to take personally anything of the hurtful behaviors he is doing now.

When it gets hard, remind yourself:

Whatever he is doing now,

• it is his only way of responding; he doesn’t know better;
• it is the response he learned with his primary care-taker or mother;
• your best way of protecting yourself is letting the behavior go away without engaging on it. Just ignore it.

Now that you have this vital piece of information, what are you going to do?

Certainly not try to change him yourself. That role lies with him whose behavior it is! To encourage him to take his own behavior into his own hands, we encourage passive aggressive husbands to take our Passive Aggressive Test. He will be guided to see for himself that these are his own behaviors (not yours or your responsibility). And YES, WE can help him change himself with the “6 Steps System to Stop Passive Aggression and Save your Marriage!”

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We need to remember that each dispute is a request for understanding; each confrontation a hidden search for recognition from the other side. When the other side is yelling at you, don’t follow your first impulse to escape or shout back. Listen and own every word that comes out of her mouth. Validate what she says; repeat what she says back to her, and ask if you got the whole version or if there is something that escaped your understanding.

Then go into apology mode, by saying things like, “I’ve been such a selfish person. Please, forgive me; I don’t want to be that person anymore, because I don’t want to hurt you anymore.” And mean it.

If the other person i’s repeating the same rant over and over again, it means that you haven’t responded to her complaint in a way that makes her feel you HAVE heard her.

You’re probably responding in a defensive way, explaining again to her whatever she already knows that can improve your situation. This is not what she needs. She doesn’t care at all about your excuses, real or imaginary. Can’t you see the pain below the surface?

She needs you to hear exactly what she’s saying to you,  and to grieve, as she is grieving, the insensitive, selfish, out of control human being you have been with her for as long as you have. And she is grieving for the lost opportunities for love, for understanding and mutual support that are all in front of you two now.

If you want to do real relationship repair, begin for taking care of her needs. Accept her anger, as a fact of your life; hear her words of pain, validate her feelings as true and legitimate, and never forget that this marital strife is originated in the years and years of insensitivity towards her.

But, if you want to be really married to her, as a grown up and not as a child, you need to understand that this is what a woman wants in a relationship with a significant other. She needs and deserves your honesty. This means that you have to take a good look at yourself and discover, accept and heal those parts of you that are not matching her reality; those aspects of your life that don’t reflect adult commitment yet.

Relationship repair: The anger you hear is her pain is a post from: Passive Aggressive Husband

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It is a pattern learned from the interaction with the mother or caretaker, who taught him in his first year of life either that he should not depend on her (and thus you should not depend on him) or instilled in him a fear of rejection or ambiguous security (thus, he will not open up to you or doing anything to make himself look bad).

What are the three most common attachment styles?

• Secure: Secure attachment is a healthy attachment. It is confidence and security in both the permanence of the relationship, and the honesty of the significant other. Secure attachment people tend to trust that their partners love them and find them attractive. This was learned from a secure mother, who was there for the child when it needed her, and provided love and attention on a continual (rather than spotty or random) basis.
• Anxious: Anxious attachment deals with fear of rejection and relationship stability. An anxious attachment pattern in a mother is one where she alternately smothered and ignored the child, bouncing between thinking she didn’t love it enough and thinking she loved it too much. This undependable and erratic behavior translates to the adult relationship, making the terrain of any relationship unreliable and fickle for the child.
• Avoidant: Avoidant attachment deals with a lack of desire to depend on others, as well as an abhorrence of opening up or being vulnerable. This is learned in childhood when a mother is avoidant – she will deny the child attention, avoiding giving him what he needs if he asks for it. A caregiver figure may not have been emotionally present at all. Often, avoidant partners will call their significant others “needy” and “overemotional.”

Avoidant and anxious attachment styles often appear together and reinforcing each other in a passive aggressive person. At his core, his inner child still worries about rejection from others, especially you as his wife (anxious attachment). To isolate himself from this inner child’s fear and resentment, the passive aggressive man uses avoidant attachment to prevent you (and perhaps himself) from seeing the scared, anxious child inside.

Often, what we learn is that your own attachment style can affect how your passive aggressive husband’s style manifests. Your own style can determine whether or not he reacts anxiously or avoidantly – for example, if you are anxious or insecure yourself, he may be more avoidant. If you are avoidant, he may be more anxious, his actions driven largely out of fear of/perceived rejection by you. If you have a secure attachment, and know what happens with him, perhaps living with you and acting as a secure, supportive spouse will help transform his primal attachment style into one more mature.

How are attachment patterns influencing the outcome of your passive aggressive marriage? If you have learned a little more about both of you by reading this post, but are unsure how you can apply that knowledge, we have many resources for you.

The best place to start would be a free consultation with our conflict coach. Coach Nora can guide you through the process by which you can learn to reach a compromise between your attachment styles, and even learn to rewire old patterns into new, secure ones!

Passive Aggressive Attachment is a post from: Passive Aggressive Husband

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It goes more or less like this:

• She complains; he denies all responsibility;
• She suffers; he ignores her suffering and walks away;
• She gets educated or a therapist; he laughs at them;

And this can go on for years! Most of the women writing to this site begin their letters saying: “I have been married to this guy 20 years…or 15, or 25…”

This is because only recently have they put a name to this situation, and having a name situates them into a new category: “I’m married to a PA person! That is the reason for all those indicators I didn’t knew how to understand before…!”

How can she really know? Well, as with some psychological disorders, the victims are the telltale indicators that something is not right. By compiling the victims’ narratives, we get the picture of a behavior that is real because we can now observe its impact on its victims.

Because victims have this pain of the gap between expected behaviors and their own reality, they observe, compare, and get educated about the differences between loving, healthy relationships and the toxic ones.

There is now a lot of information coming out, and we know more and more about how passive aggressive behaviors work and what is their impact on marriages. In fact: we know that it surely kills trust-based relationships such as marriages!

As a result, for him it is becoming more difficult to deny that those separated and isolated incidents now fit into a large, ominous picture where he is now seen as the culprit of her unhappiness.

So, is there no good place left to hide, husbands? Well, there is still your well-used resource: deny and deny that you have these tendencies… and attribute the situations your wife complains about to “bad luck,” misinterpretation or any other accidental cause… the purpose here is to divert, confuse and obfuscate your wife; never taking personal responsibility for anything.

How long can this work? That is the main problem with this strategy… it can work in the short term; in the long term, people tire of your endless “It wasn’t me….” answer and withdraw from the emotional connection with you.

So, what’s going on?

Basically, the lesson life is teaching you is “Grow up! Review those strategies coming from the times when you were a defenseless boy, and learn how to really, really have a deep connection with the people you say you love.”

Because is not how many times you say that you love them, is how much sensitive you are to their inner wishes and needs. Is not how good a provider you are (that’s not enough now…) but how deeply you get to know and support the growth of the people around you.

Helping them grow will help you grow and mature at the same time… which you can’t do when you withdraw into your silence.

So, next time you are tempted to go into your cave, clam up, keep the silence and individual “business” for two weeks and wait for the storm to pass giving everybody the cold shoulder, remember:

Perhaps this is the last time life is giving you an opportunity to look around, see the wounds of the people who (still) love you, and take a deep breath: this is your life.

Isn’t there something more courageous you could be doing with it? Like asking around to your wife the magical question: “Please, can you tell me what hurt you? This time, I’m ready to listen…?”

Nora Femenia is a well known coach, conflict solver and trainer, and CEO of Creative Conflict Resolutions, Inc. Visit her blog and signup free to be connected to her innovative conflict solutions, positive suggestions and life-changing coaching sessions, along with blog updates, news, and more! You can even begin a conversation about your possible passive aggression with her!.

How passive aggressive can you be? is a post from: Passive Aggressive Husband

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