If You Don’t Stop Your Passive Aggression....what are the consequences?
This is a message for the passive aggressive husbands who are reading this blog (or whose wives are). Perhaps you haven’t really been following our blog; you’ve just been sneaking peeks at this “weird site” your wife has been reading and getting “crazy ideas” from.
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 “4 Steps to FREE Your Marriage of Passive Aggression” is ready for you, but if you’re not ready to commit yet to such transformation and have questions, you can talk to one of our coaches at Conflict Coach to see if the program is right for you and your family.
Such sage advice! Unfortunately with the PA man in particular; admitting to a problem is like being told “your a failure”. While I, a women, can’t even begin to think along that line of thought; we now understand men think entirely different than women. I truly believe, based on my own personal experience, my PA husband never gave it a thought his anger, stonewalling, sarcasm etc. etc. would cause him to eventually loose 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”. In fact, I did file for divorce after 4 yrs. of marriage; giving it one more chance prior to the signing of the final papers all property had been divided & sold. He promised me he would “change”; lasted all of the lst 6 mo. 2nd time was daughter’s high school graduation of which he said to me “What are you going to do w/o insurance?” & he proceeded to walk out of room, never to be discussed again until the day after my daughter graduated from College. I followed through on 3rd time & have never looked back. Personally at 56 yr., this 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? I never understood & no longer care too!