How to recover your life after a passive aggressive marriage?

November 4, 2011 By
When readers of this blog accept our standing invitation to have a free coaching session, they bring their own stories. Some of them are easier to hear and offer support to; others are heart wrenching.
Which stories are the saddest? The ones that present a woman past her fifties, who has spent most of her married life waiting for the husband to finally change and connect with her in a significant way. Only now are these women discovering certain basic ideas offered here:
  • Passive aggression is learned in childhood;
  • Is a defensive style focusing on how to keep other people away;
  • There is little they can do to change the man they are living with, he must change himself.

After learning these concepts, the perspective of getting old in an empty marriage sets in. It is a moment of truth, where they see their past as gone, their present as painful, and the prospect of their future as filled with the same loneliness.

What can we offer in that situation? What is there to be done? Detach and take care of yourself. This time, the lesson is even more urgent.

Because they have serious deficits, because living your whole life in emotional misery leaves you empty and sad, and angry, the first task is to detach completely of the relationship. Begin to see yourself as worthy of attention, come up with a list of your own unattended needs and do for yourself what you have been waiting him to do all these years. Only then will you be strong enough to work on saving the marriage (if that’s what you still really want).

Fortunately, once you look at your emotional needs, you can see that there are multiple ways of fulfilling the voids. We can begin to offer some ideas, which you can pick from to begin.

Strategies for Self-Care and Recovery:

Make a plan to recover your self-esteem:
Appreciate your resilience up until this time, celebrate yourself and your strength.
Visit and/or work with people and places where you feel appreciated and well received.
Respect your life routine and add extra pleasurable tasks.
Take care of yourself: eat well, do your exercise routine and sleep well.
Have a plan to restore calm and stay self-centered with meditation, yoga or t’ai chi.
Afford yourself meditative walks in nature (or extra time in the garden).
Accept all your feelings and find confidants to share them with.
Place around the house positive images to see when you are feeling lost or sad.
Avoid self-judgements about your “guilt.”
Approve yourself and your decisions every day.
Do something special for yourself every day.
Acknowledge your own accomplishments.
Connect with others using reflective listening.
Learn the meaning of your marital experience lessons, and move on.

For more tips about detachment and what it means, see our other posts:
Detach from Passive Aggression, Kindly!
How do I detach from a passive aggressive husband?

You can also contact one of our coaches for a free coaching session, where you’ll receive private, one on one advice about your personal situation and the struggles you’re having with detachment and positivity. Call us today!

Neil Warner

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!

 

Filed Under: assertiveness, passive aggressive behavior, Passive Aggressive Husband, passive aggressive marriage Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Passive Aggressive Attachment

June 7, 2011 By

Passive aggressive behavior from a husband is not a reaction to the present wife or the present relationship; rather, it is a learned model of interpersonal attachment, wired in a person’s brain early in life.

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!

 

Neil Warner
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!

Filed Under: passive aggressive behavior, passive aggressive definition, Passive Aggressive Husband, passive aggressive marriage, passive aggressive personality Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Is Your Passive Aggressive Husband in Denial?

April 29, 2011 By

Some of the hardest tasks in healing the passive aggressive man are dealing with his various ways of denying his own behavior.

What are the ways a passive aggressive may deny his toxic behavior?

There are four main kinds to discuss here:

• Denial of Facts
• Denial of Awareness
• Denial of Responsibility
• Denial of Impact

Denial of facts: many passive aggressive people will try to rearrange or fabricate past events to suit their present situation. They may (when the two of you recount it later on) change what was said in a fight last week, so that you are now the one who comes out looking bad this time. Sometimes, a denial of facts will mean you hear this go-to response: “I didn’t say that. I didn’t do that. That never happened. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Denial of awareness: this is the “poor me” or victim card. When confronted about their behavior, a passive aggressive may say, “Yes, I see that I did x, but it was because I care about you and want to make you happy… how come you aren’t happy with me buying a new TV for you?” In this way, he makes himself out to be the misunderstood victim, full of good intentions but with a demanding spouse like you.

Denial of responsibility: a passive aggressive person may deny he has any responsibility or obligation to watch what he says or does (much like a child). He refuses to believe seriously that there are grown up responsibilities of his role as husband and father…It’s exhausting for you to remind him over and over that he has 50% of responsibility for the marriage moral, emotional and financial upkeep.  This is also part of the power games that passive aggressive people play; denial of responsibility involves maintaining a facade of power and control while doing the less he can, so he has time and resources for his playful interests.

Denial of impact: a little similar to denial of facts, a denial of impact occurs when the passive aggressive insists that his behavior is not really harming any one. In this type of denial, it is the wife, the children, and the friends who are wrong/controlling/demanding/over-reacting. He will say that the wife is the one who is going crazy, that her depression is from some other source, (surely organic, genetic, etc)  and that perhaps she should be the one to see a therapist, not him.

Which leads us to one last point: even with these stages of denial revealed, what else is at work when a passive aggressive man denies having a serious problem and is in need of some deep changes in order to stay married? Why does he deny in the first place?

What we learn when we study passive aggressive behavior is that there is often a fear of shame involved when he thinks about admitting any kind of fault. As a child, the passive aggressive man would have been exposed to large doses of shame – either shame for his own mistakes, or seeing others shamed for theirs. The end result may have been public humiliation from peers, private abuse in the home, or other events that instilled in him a fear of making mistakes or looking “bad.”

Ultimately, it is this fear that leads the passive aggressive man to deny that he has done anything wrong. It is this fear that leads him to say, “I don’t need therapy, you do.” The best way for him to avoid admitting a mistake (and thus, feeling shame) is to not only take attention off himself, but direct it at someone else.

This is the passive aggressive’s tragic state of affairs – he is the person who most needs an affirmation of self-worth, but he is also the person who continually rids himself of the best chances of having help by persisting in behaviors so toxic as to risk losing the spouse’s love.

Neil Warner

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, by getting the ebook “The Art of Living with a Passive Aggressive Husband” .

 

Filed Under: impact of passive aggression, passive aggressive behavior, passive aggressive definition, Passive Aggressive Husband, passive aggressive marriage, passive aggressive personality, toxic relationship Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Repair work in a marriage is easy!

April 1, 2011 By

In some situations, when coaching is really the necessary tool to overcome being stuck in marital conflict, we can see that even passive aggressive husbands appreciate having an opportunity to play in a new, honest way.

Having the opportunity to learn new behaviors, -and the constant support of a conflict coach-, some husbands discover that abandoning passive aggression is the right thing to do, and share a sense of satisfaction with their change.

What is the exact moment when they discover that they can change? Perhaps after spending too much time in confrontational positions, something extra clicks….it is the “repair work talk” that gets the job done.

After reviewing the obstacles for accepting their equal share of responsibility for the maintenance of the marriage, the conversation gets to the fact that so many years spent fighting leaves people with little hope. The light comes when we talk about doing some relationship repair work…

What is that work? a silent commitment to do little things for the other; things that nobody is asking for, but make life sweeter…Someone is filling your gas tank when you forgot to do it, and it’s getting late; doing some household chores without being asked to; leaving small gifts around…They are easy behaviors because you are not forced to do anything; because it shows that you, (yes, you!) were looking around and thinking: how can I make this situation more pleasurable? how can I bring joy to this house?

No need to apologize, to accept defeat, to submit, but a quiet acceptance of the fact that you live there too, and that you accept that the happiness of this marriage is also your responsibility. Being generous not only confuses your “enemy” and throws the marital battle plan to the waste dump, it also allows a truce in the emotional battle so both can see each other in a new light.

Neil Warner
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, by offering you a conflict coaching session.

Filed Under: assertiveness, impact of passive aggression, passive aggressive behavior, passive aggressive definition, Passive Aggressive Husband, passive aggressive marriage Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Avoid Teaching Passive Aggression to Your Child

March 11, 2011 By

Have you always wondered where your husband learned to be passive aggressive? The truth is, these behaviors are learned very early, in the first moments of childhood.

Passive aggression is just that – aggression (or anger) that is passive (or hidden). The passive aggressive person learned to hide their anger from the very start, in a home where it was not safe to express such frustration. This home could have been unsafe for many reasons. There could have been drug or alcohol addicted parents, or parents whose gender roles were heavily enforced (for example, the wife was not allowed to express her frustration against the husband).

As the child (later passive aggressive) was taught to suppress and deny their feelings, they sought out ways of getting around that. They found other channels to express themselves, ways that were passively resistant. This is how sabotage (covert behavior, forgetting, ambiguity, chaos creation) and retaliation (overt punishment, eye for an eye, “justified” abandonment or abuse) are learned.

Children that grow up in this environment are never taught to find healthy ways of expressing anger. To the people who are in charge of these children, anger is not supposed to exist in the first place. Thus, the child continues to adulthood, still suppressing anger and venting it in vindictive ways.

So, what are the ways of healthily expressing anger? How do we teach our children to identify feelings and accept them as part of themselves? How do we show them that there is no need to run away?

The child needs to know they can say “I am angry.” They need to be taught the vocabulary for this.

When they do, appreciate their voicing it. “I’m glad you shared this with me.”

Ask them to stay in that feeling. “Why don’t we sit down and talk about why you’re angry?”

Why are they angry? What do they need that they don’t get? “I’m angry because they left me alone in the house.”

Validate those feelings, let the child know those feelings are theirs, they are human, they are OK. “Well, it’s normal to feel sad when you are alone.”

But now – follow that up with teaching the child that there is no need to become distraught. Instead of jumping to demand an immediate solution (“Don’t ever leave me alone again!”) the child needs to learn the value of owning their feelings, and finding ways of helping themselves feel better (“Playing with my toys makes me feel happy when I’m lonely”).

This manner of handling emotion is an extremely important part of human development. If we make others do things so we feel better (“if you never leave me alone, then I won’t feel sad”), we create this idea that feeling sad is bad and that we should do everything we can to block and prevent feeling exactly that…

Instead, as a healthy human being, the child should learn that emotions are healthy and valid, and that they just need to listen to themselves and take care of themselves when they are upset. Instead of demanding you stay (using other people making the feeling stop), they can learn what to do and what to say to themselves to reframe being lonely as a normal and not a catastrophic situation,  helping themselves accept sad or angry feelings as normal and transitory stages. This is the most basic lesson in self-sufficiency.

Neil Warner

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. Get emotional management skills from our conflict coaching sessions!

Filed Under: impact of passive aggression, passive aggressive behavior, passive aggressive definition, Passive Aggressive Husband, passive aggressive marriage, passive aggressive personality Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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