Living with a passive aggressive husband is a very unnerving experience. You are fighting the shadows, and it may take you a long time to realize the true nature of the relationship. By “fighting the shadows”, we want to convey the meaning that you never have a concrete, real and constant obstacle. Because it’s based on an emotional resistance to intimacy, it gets the full range of denial, avoidance, silence, and every form of “not really being here with you” it can muster.
This style of communication is usually perceived by the victim as in this case:
“My husband never says my name; he doesn’t acknowledge my presence; he never gives me any compliments or volunteer help or information. He rarely asks me a question of any kind, or God forbid, inquires about my wants, needs, feelings.” , etc.”
The wife’s experience is one of emotional abandonment, including the rejection of any intimacy. Her safest moves are often related to the basics of shared life: food, household items, weather, car trouble.
What is missing here? the very heart of marriage, which is a level of openness and intimacy: the ability to connect with intangibles like feelings, perceptions, and dreams.
“He has severed almost all connections between us and is not involved in our marital relationship. He never drinks, smokes, yells or hits me, but I prefer that he does so I can know what’s inside him…”
WHAT IS PASSIVE AGGRESSION?
Passive aggression is caused by a person’s deeply learned fear of expressing their anger directly at the person (in this case, their spouse) who is wronging them, having to resort to covert abuse to express their frustration and anger.
The passive aggressive person is a master at covert abuse. Covert abuse is subtle and is veiled or disguised by actions that appear to be accidental. A passive-aggressive personality involves a set of “resistance” behaviors, from harmlessly dropping things or seeming to forget tasks, to overt task procrastination.
It can escalate to outright sabotage, in which case we recognize that there is a passive offender’s intent to get back at their partner without that person being able to acknowledge their underlying anger or do anything to resolve it.
Passive aggressive people have an ax to grind regarding past situations in which their right to anger was not allowed to surface. Probably in their family of origin there were threats of abandonment or any other punishment that prevented them from being honest with their feelings, so they never learned to express them in the most appropriate way.
Now, as adults, their goal is to resist work, a partner, and other social demands, because they identify them as coming from the hated enemy of their past: parents and authority figures. This unresolved anger issue, a holdover from his past, is now played out daily against unsuspecting associates: bosses, spouses, parents, teachers, or anyone with power or authority.
AP spouses enjoy frustrating their spouse in the here and now, seen as a “stand-in” or replacement for authority figures from their past. Either spouse can assume the role of absent parent, teacher, or teacher, unknowingly “invited” into this game while he thinks he is instead in a cooperative partnership of equals.
A passive-aggressive husband may drive his wife into a state of madness and confusion, but he seems sincerely shocked when confronted with her behavior. Due to her own lack of understanding of her feelings, the passive-aggressive person often feels that other people are misunderstanding her or holding her to unreasonable standards when confronting her about her behavior.
What are possible strategies for handling a passive aggressive spouse?
There are three types of strategy you can choose to deal with the Palestinian Authority:
a) You may decide to put severe limits on your behavior in an oppositional way, which risks all-out war (it will escalate into isolation, extreme silence, leaving the house, slamming doors, denying affection and sexual intimacy, and growing emotionally detached and resentful) and divorce;
b) You can support his need for his problem to be understood: you can see him as a person who is using old and outdated defense mechanisms (“playing dead with his own emotions; denying anger; accepting belonging”, etc.) a new different situation (marriage) that addresses him as an adult person, on a temporary basis. He needs to realize that he is now in a different situation.
In this case, it is good to have a clear deadline to review the situation and plan improvements periodically and incrementally.
c) Find a way to balance the need to protect yourself from his real aggression, with a compassionate attitude towards his immature feelings. You will have to accept the loneliness of a single parent who has to raise a family with little support and without company and without hoping for the best.
This acceptance has to be temporary or there is a very real risk: being in a long-term marriage sustained by unconscious treatment: she fears loneliness, so she stays, and he can be who he is forever, denying the passage of time. time and the fact that people (eventually) mature with age.
IN CONCLUSION:
The PA husband is fighting the wrong war: he is defending himself here and now against his father’s/mother’s perceived intrusion into his inner self and does not see you, his partner, as a different person in a different cooperative relationship;
He can’t distinguish between different types of humans and different types of relationships, so his reaction is always as if he were in the past, having to protect himself from that person who oppressed him. The tragedy is that now that person is the person who claims to love…
How do you make him understand that you are NOT that person from his past and that your marriage is NOT the concentration camp he imagines it to be? You need a lot of support from family and friends, a lot of learning about the different aspects of this behavior, and convincing yourself that you are worth a lot, regardless of their lack of appreciation or connection to you.
