how do you respond to passive aggressive behavior

Really feeling lost and hurt at the moment. I am finding out more and more that my SA is passive aggressive. Always makes me feel like I am at fault. Today was particularly bad. I was having an awful day at work, and all he could do was send me a text saying “not surprised”. All I wanted was for him to call. He just said he was at work and didn’t have the time. He had to travel and hour to pick his friend up.. surely he could have called me then?? He did eventually call.. to tell me to F off.. actually he screamed it.

Feel mentally battered, emotionally wrecked. He thinks its the state of my mind that is making me behave like this. I felt like a nuisance contacting him in the first place. He said he was unable to communicate.

I was doing ok. Then contact began again and now I am a complete mess.

You’re right NAP. I think its all to do with feeling wanted. I was there for him through everything, took time away from others who needed me to make sure he was OK. I guess it doesn’t work the other way round. I have never been able to rely on him emotionally, because it always gets turned round to be about him.

It took me years to get away from my mums control. I feel like I’ve got myself into something worse. I feel vulnerable again, and I don’t want to. I have to “shut down” my emotions and move myself mentally away from him. Just so hard though, when I still have feelings for him.

Sorry, NAP and MMP…takes a long time to realize that the ones that you are conditioned to look to for love and support are sometimes toxic. Feels disloyal somehow to finally see it clearly. You can still love and honor them, but not look for what you will never get. We’ll sort all that out in heaven 🙂

I had so much anger at my husband about our strange lack of physical intimacy that manifested itself all over the place and his therapist said that women often (subconsciously) dislplay anger when they are simply trying to get someone to ENGAGE. When your stuff is ignored or you get that PA response that is basically dodging engagement, we resort to rage to shake it loose and get a conversation started. Sadly, it seldom works.

NAP, My mouth literally fell open when you wrote about your mother. My marriage fell apart and I needed to go “home” to mother where I thought I would be safe. I packed up and left London for Manchester, taking my two little ones with me. The family home is owned by all the family, not just my mother. My brother was living there also with her. I turned up in such a state, really needing to be cuddled. She spent the next six months trying to drive me crazy, turning my brother against me. It was when she started on my daughter that I packed everything and went back to London. I had a nervous breakdown, not from my divorce, but from her. One by one, my siblings have realised what she is like. We are now very close, but none of us talk to my mother.

Do you think we repeat our history? How can we not recognise the signs? Maybe as Lylo says, we are conditioned to love our SAs, and it takes strength then to decondition ourselves. The only way we can do that is to cut the contact. They are so clever at pulling you in, just to spit you back out when you weaken.

I once said to my mother that it doesn’t matter what I say/do/achieve, she will never acknowledge I have done well. She simply looked away. Hurtful yes, but it also made me see that I didn’t need her anymore.

Baby steps then it has to be. Breaking the cycle, and it is a cycle because I really feel we nuture the way our SAs treat us by staying, by forgiving, by turning a blind eye. Its when we say enough, and they start to do something about it, we really see them for what they are. Its like a drug addict withdrawing. We get the blame, the irritation, the passive agressiveness and so on.

I don’t know what the answer is. I just know that there has to be something better than this.

My husband is very PA. Quite heavily on the passive side. The worse he feels the more passive he gets until he reaches a point where he’ll get really mad. His aggression really comes out sideways though, through addictions to work, alcohol, spending, sex and indirect anger.

Now that I know what this is and have learned the lingo and can identify his behaviors and his deflect, avoid, minimize, blameshift tools, I immediately challenge him now.

If we’re having a conversation and I ask him a question that he doesn’t answer directly, I just name the strategy he’s using. “Minimizing. Now answer the question.” And because he knows that I’ve learned to identify the game…..and he can’t deny it now because of his counseling, he’ll usually give it up and answer me.

It is maddening to have to babysit a 58 year old man who answers like an 8 year old. But my counselor said that is where they are stuck, at the age of their wounding. I believe that and have had compassion for that but a lot of other people are also hurt and don’t behave in this manner. It is not an excuse.

Hi Lylo,
Thank you for the information about how woman may use anger to engage their husbands. In the early years of my marriage, when my husband was so disconnected and preoccupied (now I know why), and passive, there was alot of fighting. I think I was just trying to connect with him. Makes sense now, then it was confusing.

“He sets up impossible situations where YOU are responsible for making difficult decisions he doesn’t want to make.”

This one was so very true with mine when it came to the whole topic of divorce. For years and years he had would pick fights just for the sake of being PA it seemed, and he would throw out the “D” word, but it was always him saying to me “Do you want a divorce?” – he needed it to be me and i called him on that about a million times, telling him if he wanted a divorce, don’t try to put it on me and make me somehow the bad guy – grow a pair and tell me you want a divorce. But he never grew a pair, so I had to, and he’s not the least bit broken up that I’ve gone.