Slide 1: Childhood Pain Impacts Passive Aggressive Relationships
For more resources on stopping your passive aggression, visit: Passive Aggressive System Sometimes we hear about the challenges that passive aggression and other defensive behaviors have on marriages, but we fail to connect these present, adult behavior failures with the past conditioning produced in us by the family we grew up with. In present situations across the world, we have a wife who is totally confused and blindsided by the spouse’s behavior, and that frustrated wife is erroneously connecting her husband’s unhappiness and their current problem to something she either did or didn’t do. In short, the present spouse makes herself responsible for her husband’s behavior, and in taking this weight on, she tries to find the reason of the communication failure, so she can “heal it.” Nobody enters into a relationship with a disclaimer, or an instruction letter that would make it easier for the wife to know the territory she is entering. If such a letter did exist, the instructions on how to deal with a passive aggressive husband would begin with capital letters: “THIS IS A CONDITION YOU DID NOT CAUSE~
Slide 2: YOU CAN’T CURE OR CONTROL IT, NOW, CAN YOU STOP BLAMING YOURSELF?!” Wouldn’t that kind of disclaimer be a god-sent message? It would save so much pain, grief and time… which of course translates into lost happiness. Together in this blindness is the passive aggressive husband, who will support to his death the conviction that his behavior is normal and everybody else is “too demanding” or “needy” or whatever way he uses to describe a wife with emotional needs going unsolved. Wives in this kind of passive aggressive relationship should take a step back and frame everything under this mantra: “I did not cause his condition, I can’t cure him and the best I can do is not to take personally anything of the hurtful behaviors he is doing now.” When it is hard to say these things and say them with conviction, wives can remind themselves of some very important points. Whatever her passive aggressive husband is doing now: ● ● ● it is his only way of responding, he doesn’t know better; it is the response he learned with his primary care-taker or mother; her best way of protecting herself is letting the behavior go away without engaging on it.
Now that wives have this vital piece of information, what are their next options? Certainly not trying to change him! That role lies with him whose behavior it is! To encourage him to take his own behavior into his own hands, passive aggressive husbands should take an objective, computerized test. This way, he can receive a definitive answer to the looming question that the couple is constantly fighting about: “Am I passive aggressive?” Husbands can find such a test here, at Passive Aggressive Test. He will be guided to see for himself that these are his own behaviors (not the wife’s, or her responsibility). After that, he has many options for changing, healing and recovering, starting here at Passive Aggressive System.
