Passive aggressive marriages are notorious happiness-drainers, because your energy and satisfaction keep going low and lower… Divorcing a passive aggressive husband can be even worse! During your marriage, he made sure to trash your self-esteem and dignity, while ensuring that you took care of him and his needs, no questions asked. When you want to divorce him, he makes you look cruel in front of friends and family, tries to manipulate you into staying and thinking that you’re giving up “happiness.”

Getting through a passive aggressive divorce may seem impossible, but you can achieve it. However, what happens afterward? It might feel like the post-divorce period is where things really start to get hard. You may be plagued with grief and guilt, or doubt that you did the right thing. He may be hounding you financially or emotionally, and your self-esteem will be in the gutter.

What can you do to recover after divorcing a passive aggressive husband? We’ve compiled some great tips to help you regain self-esteem after divorcing a passive aggressive man.

Plan To Reinvent Yourself

You must start by reinventing your concept of who you are and what you want from life. It’s important that you think about how to think of yourself as a VALID individual, worthy on her own and not only as part of a couple. What is your plan to reinvent yourself – do you need to completely rediscover yourself by going on a trip? School? A new city? Dance lessons? Think of the craziest thing you could do, something that makes your heart beat to try. Go do it!

What Were Your Life Purposes As A Child?

What did you want to be when you grew up?

What did you love the most, what were your hobbies?

Reinventing yourself into someone happy and connected rides on finding what you really love and value, and going back to your childhood could be a great place to start.

Look at your childhood pictures and connect with who you were, identify your childhood dreams and start from there. What excited you, made you happy?

Now make a list of the things you love (don’t censor yourself telling that it is impossible; list everything you love!).

You can then make several loved things coalesce into a new “discovering my new life” project. Here’s an example: If you love cats and animals, taking care of living things, gardening, child care, then you should pursue a life direction that focuses on creating and protecting living things. Don’t held yourself back by saying, “I have to find a real job.” You’ve wasted too many years on being “reasonable” and “realistic.” Seize the day!

Now that you know what you are good at, make a list of all things (jobs or otherwise), possible and impossible, that you would do to use those skills. Brainstorming can take different directions – you could design your own job, volunteer at different agencies that interest you, chat with friends and family, or just travel a bit. Give yourself a goal and plan once you find your most exciting life prospect, and don’t forget to write down the steps for tomorrow and beyond.

All the way keep telling Yourself:

• I KNOW I CAN
• I KNOW I’M WORTHY
• I KNOW I’M LOVABLE

Leave this plan/list in a place where you will not see it for two days… stop thinking consciously about it, because your unconscious soul is already working on it!

Finding Love After Divorcing A
Passive Aggressive Man

Discover what you want in a man by making a list like you just did for life prospects.

What excites you about a man? What are you looking for?

Think long and hard about what you husband didn’t give you, what you were hoping for all those years.
Don’t fixate on all the things he “could” have been – think about all the things you’re going to pursue in your future and find for yourself. You could make a visual list, with pictures that have something to do with your idea of “love,” or cut words from print and make a verbal collage that speaks, “This is what I’m looking for.” You can also explore what used to be important to you, but now isn’t as important as others (perhaps you value adventure more, or perhaps you value being good with children).

Put the collage in a drawer, and two days later edit, correct and end the official “ideal match.” Put that list in a visible site, and allow your subconscious mind to take over.
You will begin to look at your new relations from this point of view; from a stronger self-esteem and new view of yourself.

Is your journey of reinvention endangered by low self-esteem, guilt, or threats from your ex-husband?

Do you need a coach who can motivate you to grab the reigns of your own life? Register with us here at Passive Aggressive Husband to receive information about passive aggression, being independent, and leading a happy, healthy life. Talk to our coach, Dr. Nora, to get personal feedback on your situation and in-depth relationship coaching on how to recover after divorcing your passive aggressive husband.

Recovering After Divorcing a Passive Aggressive Husband is a post from: Passive Aggressive Husband

However, what if it wasn’t just the heart of your relationship that was damaged by your passive aggression? Passive aggressive husbands, listen up: your behavior might just be putting your own life at risk.

According to a new article published on Medical News Today by Catharine Paddock, PhD, men who resort to passive aggression because of a feeling of superiority, self-importance or an unwillingness to see the other person’s point of view (narcissism) may actually suffer physically for it, putting themselves at risk for heart problems.

In a study published in PLoS ONE, many men with these personality traits (explotativeness, entitlement, arrogance) have higher than average levels of cortisol in their systems – which puts them at a higher risk for heart problems. According to Sara Konrath, quoted in the article, these men “may be paying a high price in terms of their physical health, in addition to the psychological cost to their relationships.” What is interesting about this new study is that men with these personality traits have high levels of cortisol even when they are not under stress.

Cortisol is the hormone that is released when your body goes into “fight or flight” mode. As a passive aggressive man, you may have high levels of cortisol/a “fight or flight” hormone in your system – does that sound about right? In your daily life, is your brain telling you “I can’t deal with this, let’s run”? Perhaps it’s saying “How dare my wife say that, I’m going to get her back”? When you feel threatened, it’s definitely telling you those things, isn’t it?

Why does your body release cortisol, even when you’re not in a stressful situation? One of the study’s authors, also quoted in the article, stated that this was perhaps due to the fact that ”[e]ven though narcissists have grandiose self-perceptions, they also have fragile views of themselves, and often resort to defensive strategies like aggression when their sense of superiority is threatened.”

This creates, in a sense, a feeling that the body is constantly under stress – it doesn’t matter if it is real or imagined, because the consequences are the same on the body. They lead to higher blood pressure and greater heart problems – we all know this!

Read the entire article at Medical News Today

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to suffer alone in an unhealthy relationship for one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.You can begin with our passive aggressive system created just for men, at  Stop Your Passive Aggression, with a plan for action to change your life with new skills included. Just click this link and get started now!

 

What is Passive Aggression Doing to Your Heart? is a post from: Passive Aggressive Husband

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.

68% of Men Prefer to Retreat and Say “Yes” To Avoid Fighting is a post from: Passive Aggressive Husband

But now, we have created a system that does exactly that. Want a peek?

If you think that this approach can help your marriage, would you suggest to your husband that he start this process? Taking the Passive Aggressive Test is easy and free! After he takes the test, there will be no more confusions: you will know what the next steps are!

Teaching Your Husband to Stop: Is This the Cure for Your Unhappiness? is a post from: Passive Aggressive Husband

Many researchers (whether of the brain, psychology or communication and conflict) will agree that when we communicate with others, we are attempting to connect with those people on some deeper emotional level.

This is true of a hurled insult as well as a warm hug.

That means that when you are fighting, say, over which way is best to punish your children for misbehavior, you are not just fighting to establish house rules. As hard as it may be to wrap your head around, your brain is also trying to renew some feeling of being connected – essentially, you are able to fight with each other because you are emotionally close enough to do so.

In that case, wouldn’t you say that an angry connection is better than the indifference and lack of connection between strangers? Which association would you rather have with your partner?

We know – you’re thinking to yourself, “What about the really serious fights?” Thinking about fighting as a means of connecting can help you here, as well. Usually, after a serious fight, you fall into despair about the future of the relationship, right? Everybody does. However, thinking of a serious fight as our brains searching for intimate connection can help us override that sense that “fighting equals division.” If you begin to think about fighting in this negative way, the relationship can suffer even more – each of you avoid raising issues that will cause conflict, inhibiting any possible growth.

Thus, a healthy relationship can sometimes be linked by anger as well as love – both are normal ways the brain seeks connection. It’s the way we’re designed to work and interact with one another.

In Hold Me Tight, Dr. Susan Johnson (a research expert on intimacy) states that it makes sense scientifically that couples fight over silly things. Beneath the content of what partners say to one another in fights, each wants to be assured of their value in relation to the other, essentially asking basic questions like, “Will you be there for me?”

What happens when one of the partners has learned to do passive aggression since childhood? It becomes a weapon of sabotage – by “defending” against and “avoiding” both anger and love, the passive aggressive person refuses to answer those questions his partner is asking. Given his inability to feel a deep connection with anyone, because of his childhood trauma, he can’t connect with others or feel others’ need for connection.

His partner can escalate the search for a positive response by continuing the fight, but the passive aggressive husband will retreat more and more until finally abandoning the interaction. He will say his partner is “full of anger” or “making all this drama,”  or whatever reasons he can give himself to cover up the fact that he can’t feel any compassion for her distress; he can’t offer any assurance that he is there, and that he is connected. He will do the opposite behavior: either leave, clam up or express disgust for the other person’s needs.

Sadly there is no way to nurture the abandoned partner when this passive aggression happens. Some wives call it “the wall of silence,” referring their communal sensation of knocking at a wall without any emotional response. The perception of being let down and ignored in their need for reassurance is difficult to avoid.

Because we can see fighting as the intent to make the other person pay attention to us, and to make them answer the question, “Are you connected with me?” we can also see passive aggression as making a mockery of this intent. The husband will retreat and he will never confirm that he understands the deep need for connection motivating the confrontation; he  will end up blaming the other side in her desperation as “aggressive” and “out of control.” The need of the brain to experience the security of connection will be frustrated.

Fighting is a way of making the other person pay attention to us; it is a weird form of re-connecting. If your ability to re-connect with your partner, via fighting or loving, is being thwarted by passive aggression, the very life of the relationship is being threatened. That is why, if your relationship is important and something you want to strive to keep alive, it is important that you work toward stopping passive aggression in the marriage NOW.

If you are not clear where this healing of the relationship would start, we have many resources for you to begin with:

• A Passive Aggressive System specifically designed for the passive aggressive husband himself.
• A coaching session with Coach Nora to assess your options.
• “Recovering From Passive Aggression,” and “The Art of Living with a Passive Aggressive Husband,” two books specifically for women married to passive aggressive men.
• A Passive Aggressive Test for men to determine if they are using passive aggression in their interactions.

Don’t wait a minute longer for things to “just get better.” All relationships require effort, both on your side and his. That is why we often suggest that you take advantage of both the resources for you, and the resources for your husband.

Passive Aggression Means We Can’t Fight to Connect is a post from: Passive Aggressive Husband

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

By now, if your wife has shared with you what’s on this blog, if you’ve taken our Passive Aggressive Test, or if you’ve just been doing research on your own, you may be beginning to see the truth about your own behavior. You may not want to admit that you have passive aggressive behaviors, but you can still admit that something is not right between you and your partner. No matter what, your marriage is at stake at the moment you’re reading this.

If you still haven’t acted, try to think about what you are facing now. Something is wrong in your relationship: what happens if you don’t fix it? It is easy for us to think that problems go away if we let them drift under the rug, but that can’t happen if we are the ones causing a recurring, troublesome situation.

What is preventing you from opening up to yourself and your wife about your situation? If you had a condition passed down to you from your parents (such as hair loss), would you have problems admitting that? We’ve been talking a lot about how passive aggression is taught to people by their parents. In terms of origin, admitting to your (learned) behavior is not so very different from admitting to hereditary hair loss.

However, we understand that the hardest thing to admit to yourself is that you’ve been hurting your family. If you acted in the way you’ve always acted, it has  to be normal, right? If you didn’t mean to hurt someone, do you still have to take responsibility?

Unfortunately, being an adult means that you DO.

Is it painful, difficult? Yes. It’s always hard to admit that we’re doing something damaging to someone else, even unwittingly. It makes us feel less than worthy. But think: your wife hasn’t rejected you now. And she’s telling you that she’s willing to work it out if you’ll only open up to healing your behavior.

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

We know it may take you a while. But 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 if you’re not ready to commit to such an undertaking, you can talk to one of our coaches at Conflict Coach 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 inviting you to take the passive aggressive test, for free , with a plan for action to change your life with new skills included. Just click this link and get started now!

 

Husbands: What Will You Lose If You Don’t Stop Your Passive Aggression? is a post from: Passive Aggressive Husband

Why does a passive aggressive husband behave the way that he does? What brings him to cause you and your family pain, yet still claim he loves you?

Even when there is proof that says otherwise, we tend to assume that people who hurt us do it on purpose. This is especially true in a passive aggressive relationship, where it can be hard to listen to the experts who say “Don’t take it personally.” However, research into the ties between childhood and adulthood are helping us understand the complex emotions at play within the passive aggressive person’s mind.

More often than not, a passive aggressive person behaves as he does simply because it is the only response he has available. But, contrary to what you might think, he’s not weighing the options and thinking, “Yes, this is the only thing I can do.” His unconscious brain is the one doing that for him, taking cues from lessons in childhood.

What kind of lessons are we talking about? They’re usually lessons learned by force. A look into your husband’s past would reveal some deep emotional wound (abuse, neglect, humiliation). The wound went unresolved (and perhaps festered) until it ended in a traumatic separation from some essential attachment (to a father, mother or both).

After that major trauma and detachment from love/connection, your husband’s emotional growth all but stopped. He is now frozen in time, dealing with you and every other person in the same way he did as a child, because emotionally, he is still a child.

The child inside your husband creates protective barriers to insulate himself from the people who he can’t trust. The problem is, as a child, he cannot discern what is a threat and what isn’t. That is why you are often shut out along with everyone else. The ironic twist is that this child also craves attention – thus the “dual personality” that wives often notice, where the husband seems to be both charming and attractive, uncaring and abrasive, needing love and rejecting it at the same time…

But now that you realize the strange duality in your husband, what can you do with that information? Often, frustrated families will tell each other (through their tears) that you should just run, get away from this person. If it’s true that if the roots of this behavior are largely misunderstood even by the PA himself, couldn’t they be misunderstood by those fleeing families, as well? The most beneficial thing for the family could be to stay together and avoid severing ties with each other, which can emotionally hurt all involved. In order to stay together, families need to both learn more about the causes of PA, as well as the defenses against it and ways of disengaging (rather than reinforcing).

In the end, a PA husband’s behavior will not change unless he unlearns the subconscious lessons that are controlling him now. He has to help his inner child grow up and feel safe doing so. Families can help by knowing what to expect from a PA and why to expect it, but their greatest task will be leading the PA to help and heal himself.

Is your family in danger of separating because of your husband’s passive aggression? You can avoid the emotional scars of severance by helping your PA find solutions to his dysfunctional behavior. Choose a resource that speaks to him directly and encourages him to analyze his own behavior and past. Such a resource can be found here, 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 (by clicking here), with a plan for action to change your life with new skills included. Just click this link and get started now!

Divorce the Child, Marry the Husband is a post from: Passive Aggressive Husband

Now, we have an answer to that difficult question. We’ve listened to you, researched literature and the last published studies, and have compiled our findings. The results? The “Six-Step System to Stop Your Passive Aggression and Save Your Marriage!”

This system offers you the life-changing results you and your family need. The first step is taking a Passive Aggressive Test, where your husband sits down alone and tests himself to get a definitive answer. He controls his answers; thus, he comes to realize the “passive aggressive” situation on his own. No more fights about who is right or who has the stronger argument! Your home is not a court of law, right?

However, that’s not the end. We want to make sure he changes his behavior, so your marriage and family can recover without a chance of regression! The system includes a ground-breaking electronic book called “Stop Your Passive Aggressive Behavior and Save Your Marriage.”

This book helps husbands understand what passive aggression behaviors are and why you’ve been calling them that this whole time. We take it further, including “The Essential Workbook to Defeat Passive Aggression” so that your husband can do the exercises necessary to analyze his past and see where his behaviors come from. These two products can give your husband the push he needs to change, NOW.

After your husband uses these materials, he can use the system’s included two coaching sessions and online forum to complete his healing process. Coaching is often the place where his actions hit home and he really realizes what he’s done to you and his family in his “defense” mode.

The beauty of this whole process is that it is carried out mainly by him, in a way that leads him to his own discoveries. You have no burden to convince him with online printouts and official statements from experts. However, you do have the option to join him in his quest – there’s an entire chapter in the book dedicated to what you can do to help him recover!

This system offers men a new way to look at their behavior, one that doesn’t include him trying to decide whether he believes what others tell him about himself. Our system suits his desire to heal only because HE sees the problem, not because YOU say there is one, so you don’t have to fight any longer! Don’t keep putting the burden on yourself to change him. That is no one’s job but HIS, and this system not only teaches him that… it teaches him how to do it!

Are you ready to get started with helping your husband help himself? Tell him to visit our Passive Aggressive Test to get started. Tell him that he can finally see for himself whether he’s passive aggressive or not! He can also order the Six-Step System here and get started immediately!

Be the first to visit our new solution here: http://passiveaggressivetest.com/StopPANow/

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 (by clicking here), with a plan for action to change your life with new skills included. Just click this link and get started now!

New System to End Your Husband’s Passive Aggression! is a post from: Passive Aggressive Husband

They go from saying things like, “There is no way I can accept all this mumbo jumbo of PA… time heals everything. I can’t deal with her suffering, and I guess I have little to do with it. Why can’t she shut up, appreciate what I give to her and live normally like other women do?”

To: “I have been married for 17 years and apparently slowly torturing my wife for all of them.”

It can be shocking, depressing, frightening for the husband to see his actions and their consequences there in front of him. However, we don’t want his healing process to stop with “You’re passive aggressive” and then leave him hanging. Nothing will ever change that way, and it may get even worse! Our goal with the “Six-Step System to Stop Your Passive Aggression and Save Your Marriage” is to help him to see his behaviors, then look beyond them to the solutions that can help his relationships recover.

Although he may see his problem and want to solve it, he may also think, “I can’t afford to help myself!” We’re not offering expensive therapy as a solution. We’re offering him a chance to sit down with himself and think about the solutions he can handle and implement with little room for failure. This isn’t a therapy session, it’s a boot camp!

Be the first to visit our new solution here: http://passiveaggressivetest.com/StopPANow/

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 (by clicking here), with a plan for action to change your life with new skills included. Just click this link and get started now!

Stop Passive Aggression From Hurting Your Life! is a post from: Passive Aggressive Husband