I Live In a Sexless Marriage
Understanding Passive Aggressive Behavior
First we need a working definition for what passive aggressive behavior actually is. While it is no longer classified as a diagnosable condition by psychologists it still exists and creates many problems and much pain in day-to-day dealings with people that have these kinds of issues. The thinking is that passive aggressive behavior starts in childhood when a child is exposed to someone who is very dominant. The child learns quickly that they will never be able to win a confrontation so they begin classical guerrilla warfare, which is passive aggressive behavior. This kind of behavior is always undercover and is often disguised to misdirect the person that it is the object of their anger. Passive aggressive behavior is a form of covert abuse using actions that appear to be normal or even loving and caring. Some of the key indicators for unmasking a passive aggressive person are:
It seems that passive aggressive people are frozen emotionally into a rage that started somewhere in their early years. Being unable to challenge this dominance they have reverted to asymmetrical warfare tactics. They hit and run, ignore things that they don’t want to deal with and shift blame to everyone else but them. They use this pattern of behavior until it becomes an ingrained part of their personality. The severity of the problem can vary from someone that is chronically late for appointments that they don’t want to keep, to someone that is destructively angry and makes every effort to destroy the happiness and well being of everyone around them.
Classic passive aggressive behavior is usually an undercover operation. They try very hard not to show anger or exhibit malicious behavior. They often appear to be trying to help because they are very concerned with how others perceive them. Subtlety is their specialty and if you are dealing with someone that acts this way you will often end up feeling frustrated and confused because their actions aren’t in line with what their expressed intentions were. Guilt shifting by these people can often leave you wondering if you have done something wrong even though you aren’t quite sure what it might have been. This inconsistency can make you crazy because you never really know what’s going on with these people. Their behavior is designed to express anger and resentment in a way that disguises the intent.
An even more troubling aspect of their behavior is that they are usually unaware that they are being offensive; often they seem to think they are being helpful. When their so-called helpfulness angers or offends someone then it is always the offended person’s fault because a passive aggressive won’t accept responsibility, they see it as you rejecting their attempt at being helpful. Often they will sabotage the supposed effort to help by doing something after a deadline has passed or doing it in a way that negates any benefit from their help.
The evidence shows that this pattern of behavior is learned in childhood as a defense mechanism in response to feeling helpless to defend themselves against someone who is controlling. Since the child cannot express itself openly in this environment they adopt this strategy as a covert way to rebel against the controllers. Over time this pattern of behavior becomes the way that they deal with everything in their world.
The Passive Aggressive And Co-Dependency
Passive aggressive behavior is usually involved in co-dependency; this involves a relationship where the passive aggressive person has engaged another person who aids their seeking of control over their situation. Codependency with a passive aggressive person usually involves a triangular relationship that has three distinct phases.
1. The first segment of this three-sided nightmare would be the people-pleasing rescuer, this person tries to do it all and will go through endless pains to try and make other people happy mostly at their own expense. These people are often anxious, depressed, self sacrificing, and addicted to hope
2. The second segment is the resentful stage where the codependent person becomes angry, hurt, and resents that their passive aggressive partner will not change or accept their help. They repress feelings because they learn it’s no use expressing them because they will be ignored. Their self-esteem is bottomed out and their own emotions overwhelm them. There is a lack of coping skills, which causes difficulty in maintaining a positive sense of self.
3. The third segment would be when you start feeling like a victim and start doubting yourself. Questioning yourself with things like why does this always happen to me, or why can’t they appreciate all the sacrifices that I’ve made for them are typical responses for a codependent person. Co-dependents often become addicted to a relationship and will often choose a dysfunctional mate because it is a familiar relationship pattern. This can flow in either direction but it is a tool in the hands of the passive aggressive person used to control the codependent and to keep them from questioning the behavior of the controller who are masters of distributing guilt to everyone but themselves.
A codependent is in many ways an enabler for the passive aggressive person, they often end up functioning much like the “whipping boy” who takes the punishment for the prince, while the passive aggressive accepts this as the right and proper order of things. In the world of the passive aggressive person they are never the ones responsible for failures or negative outcomes. This responsibility is always passed off to someone else and a co-dependent person makes an ideal target for this kind of blame shifting.
In dealing with a passive aggressive person you will often find that they try to manipulate others to get what they want. This controlling behavior is necessary for them because they feel that their needs won’t be met if they let their needs be known. It is almost impossible to penetrate the shield that a passive aggressive has thrown up around their emotions because they are terrified of becoming vulnerable. Passive aggressive people consider intimacy to be the ultimate abomination and will go to extraordinary lengths to make sure that they never become susceptible to being intimate with anyone. They often resort to a strategy where they want to trade something for something, a quid pro quo arrangement where they set the rules.
Strangely these people have a very difficult time with saying no to someone else’s requests. Yet they engage in a pattern of procrastination because in reality they are paying you back for daring to make a request of them. This turning of things back on the person that questions their behavior is an extremely harmful strategy to anyone that is attempting to have a relationship with this person. It erodes their confidence and self-esteem and puts them in a very vulnerable position for further manipulation.
Passive aggressive people are great actors, when you examine how they deal with the world everything they do is an act. They refuse to allow their real selves to be glimpsed by anyone. They are afraid that if that real self is ever seen that they will be rejected, so they bury it deep. Being consummate actors though allows them to be great pretenders of emotions that they are really not feeling and this seems to be a way that they lure people into becoming their partners. They seem to prefer people-pleasers that will make huge efforts to keep them fat and happy in the little world that they are creating. This often comes at the emotional expense of their partner. One of the passive aggressive person’s primary goals is to be considered as a nice person. They will make huge efforts to build the scenery that makes them look like a wonderful person to others. Often this fantasy comes at a high cost to their partner who is essentially abandoned as soon as the stage is set and everything seems to be in place.
These people can be smooth especially the ones that are highly intelligent, because they are master manipulators. They have learned which buttons to push to get the reactions that they want and they aren’t shy about it. It seems as though their victims are hypnotized and somehow they have been convinced that it’s all right that they are treated as puppets on the stage of the passive aggressive person’s world. When one of their puppets starts to wake up and realizes that they are being mistreated the passive aggressive will often go into overdrive to smooth things over and lull them back into the coma of their regular existence.
Passive aggressive people are often condescending to others and often make sarcastic comments designed to lessen the worth of other people. A common strategy is to make derogatory remarks about those close to them or family members. They often have a distorted self-concept that combined with low self-esteem, drives them to seek approval but when they get it then it has no value. These people have an underlying goal, which is to avoid all conflict or emotional intimacy and they will avoid confrontation at all costs. A favorite tactic when confronted with something that they will not deal with is to derail the conversation by changing the subject, or ignoring what’s been said, or to make a disparaging remark about it, which effectively ends the discussion.
The passive aggressive persons greatest weapon is time. The discomfort of being in a relationship with them usually takes quite a lot of time to reach a point where you know that something is wrong. By the time you begin to see the problem you have invested so much of yourself that you simply can’t admit that you can’t fix this problem. All of that time, energy, devotion and commitment that you have put into the relationship anchors you because like most people pleasers you just can’t give up and recognize that you have made a seriously bad investment. Being a pleaser (co-dependent) is a lot like an addiction to gambling; an addicted gambler will bet the last dollar they have because they fervently believe that the next hand will be a winner. A co-dependent will keep fighting a hopeless battle because they don’t have the courage to give up and start again. If they do finally break free they often end up with another version of what they had because they unconsciously choose a partner that is familiarly dysfunctional.
So if you are in a relationship and you keep seeing these behaviors then perhaps you need to evaluate how this is affecting you. This behavior mode is horribly difficult to change and this can only be done with the full cooperation of the passive aggressive person and they will likely never admit that there is anything wrong or will blame it on you. Sometimes you have to know when to fold your hand in this game because in this case there are no winners. But just knowing what you are up against can help you decide what to do for your own survival. As co-dependent people pleasers it’s terribly difficult for us to tear ourselves away from these projects that we somehow believe that we can fix. The reality is that it’s not our problem to fix and most passive aggressive people don’t feel that there is anything wrong.
Absolutely the only chance you have of changing this scenario is to get the passive aggressive person to know that they are passive aggressive and to get them to voluntarily seek help for this problem. It has to come from them, unless you can get them to recognize that they have a problem they will never do anything about it because they don’t believe a problem exists. Remember you are dealing with a master blame shifter and the passive aggressive behavior is the root of the problem but unless they have a real desire to change things then your relationship will never change.
Excerpt from the book Sexless Marriages and Other Relationship Disasters by Warrior Poet Copyright 10-30-2010
Which is available in soft cover at:
www.createspace.com/3495519
The Kindle version of the book is available at:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004NIFGJ0
Amazon will give you a free reader for Kindle books that you can use to read them on your PC or laptop. It is called Kindle for PC and is available as a free software download from Amazon.
First we need a working definition for what passive aggressive behavior actually is. While it is no longer classified as a diagnosable condition by psychologists it still exists and creates many problems and much pain in day-to-day dealings with people that have these kinds of issues. The thinking is that passive aggressive behavior starts in childhood when a child is exposed to someone who is very dominant. The child learns quickly that they will never be able to win a confrontation so they begin classical guerrilla warfare, which is passive aggressive behavior. This kind of behavior is always undercover and is often disguised to misdirect the person that it is the ob
- Procrastination: The passive aggressive person often makes promises to do things but seldom keeps the promises or they may delay keeping the promise until it’s too late to do any good. One example I came across was a passive aggressive male who failed to pick his wife up after work on time, often making her wait for a half hour or more. He had no other responsibilities because he had no job, but he was consistently late. He would never answer the phone so she had no way of knowing if he was coming to pick her up or not.
- Ambiguity: Passive aggressive people seldom mean what they say so the best way to tell what they are really thinking is to watch what they do. They usually won’t do anything until they have caused some kind of problem and then it’s often too little too late.
- Forgetfulness: Passive aggressive people constantly forget to do things that were promised or that are part of assigned responsibilities: This can be maddening especially in the work place. Often these people can be relied upon to be unreliable. We have all encountered people like this. These people can make life miserable if you are assigned to work in a team with them because they will often sabotage everyone else.
- Negative attitude: Passive aggressive people resent authority and often voice negative opinions about coworkers, bosses and other people that are involved with them. They often make negative comments about people and events that are going on around them. Passive aggressive people are often very subtle getting in their punches and disappearing before you know what hit you.
- Lack Of Anger: Passive aggressive people will seldom display anger; they often pretend to be happy with whatever you want. This is merely hiding their anger; often they have been taught as a child that anger is never to be displayed. So they hide the anger and stick it to you at some future time in a sneaky sort of way.
- Avoiding All Conflict: These people want to avoid conflict at all costs: In order to do this they often shut down a large part of their own emotions. They will stifle their own emotions rather than let someone else know what they are feeling which often results in a huge build up of inner anguish. When confronted with something that they don’t want to deal with they often go silent or just walk away.
- Obstructiveness: Passive aggressive persons are masters at coming up with reasons for not doing something that they don’t want to. But most of the time the reasons are designed to direct your attention at something other than the fact that they don’t want to do it. It is important to them that you do not get your way they will promise the moon but the delivery date never comes. Changing the subject in mid-conversation is one of their favorite ways of misdirecting our attention away from requiring their participation in anything that they don’t want to do.
- Diminishing Others: Passive aggressive people often try to diminish others around them to hide their own feelings of inferiority. They often make remarks that make people start questioning themselves about what they might have done to be treated in this manner. What they have done is nothing wrong the passive aggressive person simply feels the need to knock everyone else down so that he can feel normal.
- Always The Victim: A passive aggressive person always has an excuse; they consistently deny responsibility for failures. Nothing is ever their fault. Master blame shifters they cannot accept the responsibility for failure it always has to be something or someone else that is responsible.
- Internalized Anger: Passive aggressive people have a huge reservoir of anger inside them that they often don’t recognize and it affects everything that they do. It seems that most of them are frozen into an emotional state of childhood. They exhaust their partners by nonparticipation in life. It has been said that living with a passive aggressive is like being a frog in a pan of water that is slowly heated the frog doesn’t notice the temperature change and eventually is boiled to death. That seems to be a pretty good analogy for what happens to the partner of someone that is very passive aggressive.
- No Intimacy: These people can never trust anyone else and they are always avoiding becoming intimate with anyone else. They might have sex with you but it’s not making love because to them intimacy is to be avoided at all costs. If they think they are becoming vulnerable to intimacy they will punish you by withholding sex.
It seems that passive aggressive people are frozen emotionally into a rage that started somewhere in their early years. Being unable to challenge this dominance they have reverted to asymmetrical warfare tactics. They hit and run, ignore things that they don’t want to deal with and shift blame to everyone else but them. They use this pattern of behavior until it becomes an ingrained part of their personality. The severity of the problem can vary from someone that is chronically late for appointments that they don’t want to keep, to someone that is destructively angry and makes every effort to destroy the happiness and well being of everyone around them.
Classic passive aggressive behavior is usually an undercover operation. They try very hard not to show anger or exhibit malicious behavior. They often appear to be trying to help because they are very concerned with how others perceive them. Subtlety is their specialty and if you are dealing with someone that acts this way you will often end up feeling frustrated and confused because their actions aren’t in line with what their expressed intentions were. Guilt shifting by these people can often leave you wondering if you have done something wrong even though you aren’t quite sure what it might have been. This inconsistency can make you crazy because you never really know what’s going on with these people. Their behavior is designed to express anger and resentment in a way that disguises the intent.
An even more troubling aspect of their behavior is that they are usually unaware that they are being offensive; often they seem to think they are being helpful. When their so-called helpfulness angers or offends someone then it is always the offended person’s fault because a passive aggressive won’t accept responsibility, they see it as you rejecting their attempt at being helpful. Often they will sabotage the supposed effort to help by doing something after a deadline has passed or doing it in a way that negates any benefit from their help.
The evidence shows that this pattern of behavior is learned in childhood as a defense mechanism in response to feeling helpless to defend themselves against someone who is controlling. Since the child cannot express itself openly in this environment they adopt this strategy as a covert way to rebel against the controllers. Over time this pattern of behavior becomes the way that they deal with everything in their world.
The Passive Aggressive And Co-Dependency
Passive aggressive behavior is usually involved in co-dependency; this involves a relationship where the passive aggressive person has engaged another person who aids their seeking of control over their situation. Codependency with a passive aggressive person usually involves a triangular relationship that has three distinct phases.
1. The first segment of this three-sided nightmare would be the people-pleasing rescuer, this person tries to do it all and will go through endless pains to try and make other people happy mostly at their own expense. These people are often anxious, depressed, self sacrificing, and addicted to hope
2. The second segment is the resentful stage where the codependent person becomes angry, hurt, and resents that their passive aggressive partner will not change or accept their help. They repress feelings because they learn it’s no use expressing them because they will be ignored. Their self-esteem is bottomed out and their own emotions overwhelm them. There is a lack of coping skills, which causes difficulty in maintaining a positive sense of self.
3. The third segment would be when you start feeling like a victim and start doubting yourself. Questioning yourself with things like why does this always happen to me, or why can’t they appreciate all the sacrifices that I’ve made for them are typical responses for a codependent person. Co-dependents often become addicted to a relationship and will often choose a dysfunctional mate because it is a familiar relationship pattern. This can flow in either direction but it is a tool in the hands of the passive aggressive person used to control the codependent and to keep them from questioning the behavior of the controller who are masters of distributing guilt to everyone but themselves.
A codependent is in many ways an enabler for the passive aggressive person, they often end up functioning much like the “whipping boy” who takes the punishment for the prince, while the passive aggressive accepts this as the right and proper order of things. In the world of the passive aggressive person they are never the ones responsible for failures or negative outcomes. This responsibility is always passed off to someone else and a co-dependent person makes an ideal target for this kind of blame shifting.
In dealing with a passive aggressive person you will often find that they try to manipulate others to get what they want. This controlling behavior is necessary for them because they feel that their needs won’t be met if they let their needs be known. It is almost impossible to penetrate the shield that a passive aggressive has thrown up around their emotions because they are terrified of becoming vulnerable. Passive aggressive people consider intimacy to be the ultimate abomination and will go to extraordinary lengths to make sure that they never become susceptible to being intimate with anyone. They often resort to a strategy where they want to trade something for something, a quid pro quo arrangement where they set the rules.
Strangely these people have a very difficult time with saying no to someone else’s requests. Yet they engage in a pattern of procrastination because in reality they are paying you back for daring to make a request of them. This turning of things back on the person that questions their behavior is an extremely harmful strategy to anyone that is attempting to have a relationship with this person. It erodes their confidence and self-esteem and puts them in a very vulnerable position for further manipulation.
Passive aggressive people are great actors, when you examine how they deal with the world everything they do is an act. They refuse to allow their real selves to be glimpsed by anyone. They are afraid that if that real self is ever seen that they will be rejected, so they bury it deep. Being consummate actors though allows them to be great pretenders of emotions that they are really not feeling and this seems to be a way that they lure people into becoming their partners. They seem to prefer people-pleasers that will make huge efforts to keep them fat and happy in the little world that they are creating. This often comes at the emotional expense of their partner. One of the passive aggressive person’s primary goals is to be considered as a nice person. They will make huge efforts to build the scenery that makes them look like a wonderful person to others. Often this fantasy comes at a high cost to their partner who is essentially abandoned as soon as the stage is set and everything seems to be in place.
These people can be smooth especially the ones that are highly intelligent, because they are master manipulators. They have learned which buttons to push to get the reactions that they want and they aren’t shy about it. It seems as though their victims are hypnotized and somehow they have been convinced that it’s all right that they are treated as puppets on the stage of the passive aggressive person’s world. When one of their puppets starts to wake up and realizes that they are being mistreated the passive aggressive will often go into overdrive to smooth things over and lull them back into the coma of their regular existence.
Passive aggressive people are often condescending to others and often make sarcastic comments designed to lessen the worth of other people. A common strategy is to make derogatory remarks about those close to them or family members. They often have a distorted self-concept that combined with low self-esteem, drives them to seek approval but when they get it then it has no value. These people have an underlying goal, which is to avoid all conflict or emotional intimacy and they will avoid confrontation at all costs. A favorite tactic when confronted with something that they will not deal with is to derail the conversation by changing the subject, or ignoring what’s been said, or to make a disparaging remark about it, which effectively ends the discussion.
The passive aggressive persons greatest weapon is time. The discomfort of being in a relationship with them usually takes quite a lot of time to reach a point where you know that something is wrong. By the time you begin to see the problem you have invested so much of yourself that you simply can’t admit that you can’t fix this problem. All of that time, energy, devotion and commitment that you have put into the relationship anchors you because like most people pleasers you just can’t give up and recognize that you have made a seriously bad investment. Being a pleaser (co-dependent) is a lot like an addiction to gambling; an addicted gambler will bet the last dollar they have because they fervently believe that the next hand will be a winner. A co-dependent will keep fighting a hopeless battle because they don’t have the courage to give up and start again. If they do finally break free they often end up with another version of what they had because they unconsciously choose a partner that is familiarly dysfunctional.
So if you are in a relationship and you keep seeing these behaviors then perhaps you need to evaluate how this is affecting you. This behavior mode is horribly difficult to change and this can only be done with the full cooperation of the passive aggressive person and they will likely never admit that there is anything wrong or will blame it on you. Sometimes you have to know when to fold your hand in this game because in this case there are no winners. But just knowing what you are up against can help you decide what to do for your own survival. As co-dependent people pleasers it’s terribly difficult for us to tear ourselves away from these projects that we somehow believe that we can fix. The reality is that it’s not our problem to fix and most passive aggressive people don’t feel that there is anything wrong.
Absolutely the only chance you have of changing this scenario is to get the passive aggressive person to know that they are passive aggressive and to get them to voluntarily seek help for this problem. It has to come from them, unless you can get them to recognize that they have a problem they will never do anything about it because they don’t believe a problem exists. Remember you are dealing with a master blame shifter and the passive aggressive behavior is the root of the problem but unless they have a real desire to change things then your relationship will never change.
Excerpt from the book Sexless Marriages and Other Relationship Disasters by Warrior Poet Copyright 10-30-2010
Which is available in soft cover at:
www.createspace.com/3495519
The Kindle version of the book is available at:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004NIFGJ0
Amazon will give you a free reader for Kindle books that you can use to read them on your PC or laptop. It is called Kindle for PC and is available as a free software download from Amazon.
By:
Warriorpoett
Age:
56-60
,
Male
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