Dealing with Passive-Aggressive Men

Find based information on situations that arise in any relationship between husband and wife. He agrees to do it, but then he forgets about it until after the date has passed, and you have to suffer the consequences.

Cheating, is a very common trait of such men. You have to be kept at arm's length and if there is an emotional attachment it is tenuous at best. It takes a special kind of woman to choose and marry a man. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV.

Dealing with Passive-Aggressive Men - But I could take it to new heights. This way they retain control and blame you for being controlling.

Gentleman: Ever wonder why you're driving people crazy? These are some of the things that a passive-aggressive man can find tough: — Meeting deadlines — Firing people — Getting angry — Saying no. This is what a passive-aggressive man fears: — Himself So let's talk about my friend Moe. Yes, the choice of the pseudonym for the composite character of Moe, no less than for those of Larry, Curly, Stan and Ollie, which follow, can undoubtedly be construed as a passive-aggressive act. Moe is utterly charming, but Moe is never in one place for long. He moves through his life like a knight on a chessboard-two steps forward and one step to the side, the one step to the side always the tricky one, to avoid the closeness. Closeness is very hard for Moe. He's got a lot to hide. Moe is forty and single. Sex has never been a problem for him, but talking to women always has. Moe has slept with every kind of woman they make, but his elusiveness tends to have a leveling effect on them. They feel as if they've failed. Moe is a good friend, but he is a classic passive-aggressive. There was a table of maybe eight people, all men except his girlfriend and me. Women are always asking whether Lenny Dystra's married. But I saw the look on his girlfriend's face. In the incredibly short space between two sips of his bloody mary, Moe had managed to: 1 Make himself a victim. Aggressive Response: You carve your initials into his new credenza and quit. At times it will seem as if I'm picking on Moe, because a passive-aggressive caught in the act is not such a handsome sight. But passive-aggression is better than Moe. It's at least as big as Moe and Larry. He was born to be used in a piece like this. It is hard to believe that Larry didn't know what he was doing. She thought it meant him falling backward, trusting that she'd be there. For a week he tried to steel himself and have The Big Talk. But he didn't want to hurt her, and he didn't want her to hate him. Then she got the flu-a bad stomach flu-and didn't want to see him until she was feeling better. Three days later, Larry had mellowed a bit, and he was wondering whether maybe they could work it out somehow. The plan was that he would cook dinner for her-something bland, like pasta. So Lucy sat in the living room while Larry puttered in her kitchen. He hummed and buzzed merrily, dumping, oh a little cayenne pepper, and hmm, a little garlic salt, a few onions, and virtually her whole spice rack into the sauce. The sauce was so hot that it could have been used to kill large pests. She took a bite of the pasta. Aggressive Response: You tell her that unlike the other men she's slept with, you're not some guy who can be turned off and on like a windup toy. Passive-Aggressive Response: You do it, but you're thinking about someone else, and then you fall asleep. As a popular epithet, passive-aggressive as become a male chauvinist pig of the Eighties, and sometimes it's simply used as a synonym for schmuck. Consider: A woman gets into bed wanting to make love to her husband. He's out for the count, he's snoring. In the morning, she accuses him of using sleep as a means of escape. She calls him a passive-aggressive. He may be a passive-aggressive. He may also have needed a nap. Passive-aggressive sounds a lot like manic-depressive, so it's logical to think that it describes behavior that alternates between extremes. That's not what it is. Passive-aggressive behavior is both extremes at once: aggressive behavior that hides behind a curtain of passivity. Like a lot of the terms that have gotten borrowed from shrinks-paranoid, schizo, manic, psycho-passive-aggressive can take on a sort of one-size-fits-all-frustrations shape. The textbook passive-aggression is a personality disorder. So it's not a disease, like schizophrenia, with rigorous boundaries and understood with treatment. Among the official symptoms there are plenty of traits-forgetfulness, tardiness, stubbornness, to name a few-that appear in nonneurotics too. Doctors seem to agree that it is rare to find someone who's passive-aggressive in every aspect of his life. So like greed and bad cholesterol and other signs of the times, a passive-aggression problem is a matter of degree. On the tamest end of the spectrum, passive-aggression can really be thought of as politics: you say one thing and mean another. When George Bush turned to Michael Dukakis during the second debate and told him how much he admired his family's closeness and how it had led him to want to use the Bush family in his own campaign, the outward effect was magnanimous. I'm killing you in the polls. To acknowledge every frustration at work would not just be dumb but obnoxious-and arguably far more damaging that some quiet sedition and well-placed quips. There is that old adage about attracting more flies with honey. A passive demeanor, consciously chosen, can be a ruthless weapon, and it would be ludicrous to suggest that it's always a sign of some hidden problem. It's the unconscious use of passivity to mask a hidden aggression that gets men into trouble. That's what passive-aggression is, and that's what wreaks all the havoc. Employees who work for passive-aggressive bosses, women who fall in love with passive-aggressive men, children of passive-aggressive parents, student of passive-aggressive teachers: there is an entire subset of the population that walks around feeling like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight. A friend of mine says she knows she's with a passive-aggressive man when she feels that the seams in her stockings are crooked. That can be seriously detrimental to your mental health. The passive-aggressive gets in his jab and then, like the squid, he disappears in a cloud of black ink. Not only has he given seminars at the Jung Society on the passive-aggressive male, but he's a self confessed out-of-the-closet former passive-aggressive himself. Usually they come in because they're so bollixed up at work that it is causing a problem with the boss, or because their wives or girlfriends tell them that they're driving them up the wall. Wetzler recalls one patient whose passive-aggressive traits were so intense that they verged on the suicidal. Wetzler's patient was a diabetic who kept forgetting to take his insulin. Ultimately he went into shock and nearly passed out while driving to a session. Failing to take his medicine was a seemingly passive act that masked a huge self-destructive impulse: an inwardly turned aggression. In less dramatic ways, passive-aggressive men are hurting themselves all the time. Apart from the trouble they have with functioning normally in some part of their lives, they can be so willing to keep the peace that they seem to lack all conviction. He's not at home in the world, no matter how he seems to act. Firestone, a Manhattan psychoanalyst in practice since 1957, thinks the problem is as basic as a loss of potential growth. The true harm for him is in not really living. Aggressive Response: You tell her she can't go, you won't go, but you'd be happy to send a dead fish. Passive-Aggressive Response: You go, but you come late, and you say you're not hungry. But even if numbers can't reflect it, the popular culture does. When it comes to expressing aggression, the men we're seeing in TV shoes and films-especially those created by and for the postwar generation's sensibility-would make Ralph Kramden weep. Think of Bruce Willis in Moonlighting. Everything with him is subterfuge, subtext, even sublimation. Maddie gets married without telling David, and David just disappears: — Maddie: are you upset? I mean it's ok if you are, I mean, I suppose you have a right to be. I just wish you'd tell me. I mean, I absolutely understand. I would be very. I would be very, very…upset. May I ask why? Law, when Kuzak is mad, he doesn't answer Gracie's calls. On thirty-something, Michael wants another baby and Hope doesn't so he tries pouncing on her before she can get up to get her diaphragm. In Broadcast News, Albert Brooks is crushed, but he's too scared of losing Holly Hunter to risk expressing his rage. As in Moonlighting and L. Law, it's the woman who finally gets angry and lunches the confrontation. You didn't say anything to me? Will you meet me now? Men may have learned to hide it-from themselves as well as from others-but they haven't gotten rid of it. But wait I hear every man I know saying , what about the woman? Well, women have more than done their time on his particular emotional ride. I'll just sit here in the rain. But the same feminism that told me to stop acting macho in the Sixties and Seventies also told women that it was all right for them to express their feelings. The result is a double whammy for men. Women have more permission to be assertive in the culture now. The overt balance has shifted. Men of the baby boom generation started out life with a powerful female controlling their behavior. There was some hope that they might come into their own when they were finally out of the house. But then they ran into women who told them not to be macho schmucks. They're caught between a rock and a hard place, so they just sit there and jiggle. Passive Response: You figure the job doesn't call for a rocket scientist, and you give her what she asks for. Aggressive Response: You tell her she's got two weeks, which is ten working days, and you hold up both hands to drive home the point. Passive-Aggressive Response: You tell her you'll get back to her as soon as you can, spend the next three months avoiding all but essential contact, then give her a cost-of-living raise but tell her you have no complaints. Moe is uncommonly good at giving reasons why he never gets closer to the women he dates. Why did he think she never said a word when we all went out together? Maybe for some reason it's an unspeakable source of dread and embarrassment when the woman he loves sounds like she wears big white gloves. But if my own experience with Curly is any indication, the problem here is not the woman's voice. Curly was my first passive-aggressive. Let's not, I told Moe, waste time talking about the Minnie Mouse voice. In addition to the Only One Flaw gambit, passive-aggressives have other rationales for not getting closer to the people in their lives. A man I know justifies his passive-aggressive management style by saying it breeds insecurity and insecurity breeds competition and competition reeds creativity and creativity breeds success. Women want to go through life face-to-face with men. In fact, those areas are devalued by men generally, although it is certainly safe to say that the impoverishes human life. Predictably, the deeper problems have to do with childhood; childhood rage on the one hand and childhood need on the other hand. The need-for love, for food for life-makes letting the rage out too much of a risk. But the rage doesn't ever go away. It just goes underground. The possible roots of rage are exhaustive: lack of attention, excess attention death of a parent, divorce, ridicule, the need of a mother for company, even the need of a mother for sex. Firestone believes that most passive-aggressives had mothers who simply wouldn't let go. Pinned down by expectations and guilt, the men are essentially trapped into infancy, trying to please but wanting to kill. There is so much anger inside them that to express it becomes unthinkable; even to let themselves see it is rare. Who knows what horrors would be uleashed, and how terrible that would make them seem. Firestone tells of a patient who had an unusual impotence problem. He had no trouble making love on his back, but when he was lying on top of a woman, he'd get a permanent hard-on and could not ejaculate. This didn't bother the women much, but the patient wasn't too thrilled. He actually had dreams about it. As long as he was underneath, he wasn't responsible for what happened. In the dominant position, though, to come meant pulling the trigger. Passive Response: You move back to South Africa. Aggressive Response: You lead a civil war. Passive-Aggressive Response: You march to the sea and make salt. Passive-aggression burns deep, and passive-aggression spreads far, and its tendency to travel is part of what makes it so insidious. The mother who gives her son a mixed signal-grow up and make me proud but why do you want to go out and play when you can keep Mommy company-may herself be passive-aggressive and may pass on both her anger and her tendency to say one thing and feel another. One woman who is married to a passive-aggressive man says he tells her that he loves her but he's not very good and showing it. I want to know that he wonders whether he could live without me. And I want to feel that way about him. But if you're married to a guy who won't get out on the limb, you're not about to climb out there alone. So I wind up treating him the same way he treats me. I wind up giving these little digs, not telling him what I'm feeling. A passive-aggressive approach can infect a while company's culture. A middle manager with a passive-aggressive boss will tend to treat his employees in the same way that he's treated. It seemed to be harmless, but really I left people hanging in the wind. It was actually quite aggressive, and it was unfair to the next people down. Passive Response: You buy a baby seat for the car. Aggressive Response: You tell her the guilt trip won't work anymore and remind her that Sunday is your day for golf. Passive-Aggressive Response: You take a job in another city. Susan is an associate. This is not a lot of time. Thirty minutes later, she appears there, legal pad in hand. No, Daddy won't be home for dinner tonight.. The phone call is followed by several others. Stan never looks Susan directly in the eye. He never tells her he's sorry. Finally Stan has to leave to go to a partner's meeting down the hall. Seven hours later, he has still not called. Susan is stymied on the brief. Several times she calls his office and leave word with his secretary. Finally, at 6:00, she goes downstairs to his office again. The punch line is: he's left. There is no acknowledgment the next morning. Stan gives Susan the fifteen minutes she's needed, and she works till four in the morning to complete the brief. Woe is me, To have seen what I have seen, see what I see! The first was that she knew a passive-aggressive when she saw one; the second was that she saw one; the third was that she loves him; the fourth was that she was going to help him work it out somehow. Ollie's wife has an amazing way of standing out side the pattern of their lives and not taking his act too seriously. She also has a way of calling him on his passive-aggression without being holier-than-thou about it. Personally, I think she's incredible. Ollie gets major points, too: he seems to sense the rareness and the strength of this woman, and I've heard them laugh together about the tricks that his anger can play on them. In effect, Ollie's wife is doing just what a shrink would do for him. She's helping him see the pattern, which is usually the toughest part. The whole psychological point of passive-aggression is to spare oneself the messy implications of one's anger. And it's no picnic getting a grown-up man to say he's a child inside. Their feeling of anger is so intense. It's never been dealt with and never brought out, so it feels like a monstrosity. If you can start by assembling an accurate picture of what the man was as a child, he says, then show how the childhood beliefs are still present in his life, the very act of observation becomes the see of the adult, and the man who is looking at the child in himself gets stronger and stronger over time. Seeing the child, of course, is only the first step. And passive-aggressives are great at paying lip service to their problem. But it doesn't solve the problem to go on being guilty. You don't go off by yourself and mediate and solve this problem alone. These are some of the things that a passive-aggressive man can learn to want: — Less of what is holding him back — More of what he loves These are some of the things that a passive-aggressive man can learn to do: — End a bad relationship — Laugh at himself — Reward good work and criticize bad. But not all children turn into Passive aggressive, not every condition is cause by the parents and the home environment, Fraud is dead. I never believed in spell casting or magic. I felt silly even looking at spell sites online. I have been in tears over the loss of my husband. I ordered a love spell from and got my husband back Thanks for simply being legit and delivering where other sites never could. Tamara Williams © 1984-2018 The Couples Institute. 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It can be tough to gain a firm footing when he custodes you for everything. As this makes him look victimized, he will look for ways to heal his wounds. He's been taught that anger is unacceptable. Reach out for a passive aggressive men, happy marriage. Their unconscious anger gets transferred onto you, and you become frustrated and furious. If del boundaries is difficult with him, exercises in my ebook and the companion webinar. Get support, such as individual therapy, or you may find CoDA meetings helpful as well as my e-workbooks on and Dealing with a Narcissist or other difficult people. Although quick to anger, I do note an infrequent display of love or kindness. If so where do i start. Making ChangesTo change passive-aggressive behavior, use Self-Therapy Journey--an interactive online tool for psychological healing and personal growth which has a To change controlling behavior, Self-Therapy Journey also has a.