Tru - I doubt that you are anything like the FIL you describe.

But in any case, wouldn't your husband have chosen you after his mother and not his father? What was his mother like?
Mulan

My two cents on it being deliberate. I don't believe it is. IMHO it is a learned behavior a defense mechanism that is used to deal with every situation.

It is a way to manipulate almost every situation to the PA's liking. If it isn't to their liking it will be to nobody's liking. That way in the future you will not think to do something they don't like. This is the passive side in a way.

I do not believe they think about it much it is just ingrained.

In a case where the Passive side won't work they switch to aggresive. So if you are separated or doing things separately then aggressive is all that is left.

Kinda hard to make things suck in a passive way when you know what is going on and separate yourself from it.

Hi. I just wanted to say that this thread and the one in Recovery have been such a breath of fresh air for me and have helped me makes sense of alot of things.

When my WH first told me that he wanted out, I don't think he was involved in a full blown affair. I believe it may have been the beginnings of an EA that has progressed into a full blown PA since (they are living together).

WH has always been what I call a "bomb thrower"....when there was an issue between us he could never confront it directly, but would create some other reason to be mad. He didn't really have a problem expressing anger...but it was always something different than what he was really angry about. Very frustrating dealing with that because no matter how hard you try to "correct" the things he says he's angry about...nothing ever gets better because you are always "correcting" the wrong thing. Talk about crazy making.

I think that is what his "I want out speech" was about. I can't explain it rationally, but my gut level emotional reaction was that I was being manipulated. Couldn't put my finger on how or why, just that was the feeling I got. His reaction when I told him "okay" confirmed that. He got angry and was suprised. That was not in the script. He wanted to stay in the house a while so we could "make arrangements" and I told him no, if he wanted out, then he needed to leave then. He had made no financial arrangements or any arrangements for a place to stay. I know that if the situation had been reversed, I would have at least been prepared for the possibility that I would be asked to leave immediately.

Anway, his telling me he wanted out was his way of letting me know there was a problem...without telling what the problem really was, because that meant he would have to take responsibility. He fully expected me to give him the "What can I do to make you stay" reaction and in doing that take responsibility for the problem he had created.

I know I am rambling,here but does any of this make sense?

PB,

I think you're onto something...because I relate to the bomb thrower...the distractive anger...displaced...

When WS's say, "It's not about OP or the affair. It's about us" would that be similar?

I can see affairs, as TruBluz said on the other thread, as a P/A act...I really do. This ties in.

You're not rambling...like a lot of the underground manipulation, hard to put a finger to...you're on to something...

LA

I got the following from a link posted in an earlier post on this thread (make sense?) <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" /> These really describe my WH and our R.


The man with passive aggressive actions is a master in getting his partner to doubt herself and feel guilty for questioning or confronting him. He encourages her to fall for his apologies, accept his excuses and focus on his charm rather than deal with the issue directly. He blames her for creating the problem and keeps her focused on her anger rather than his own ineptitude. When backed into a corner, he may explode and switch to aggressive aggressive behavior then switch back to passivity. He keeps his partner held hostage by the hope that he will change. He may appease her and clean up his act after a blow up for several weeks, then it's back to business as usual.

Don't know how I ended up this way but.....
When she grows up, the woman unconsciously chooses men who will play out the familiar patterns of her childhood of retreat and attack. She falls for the man's charm, his neediness or sense of poise and togetherness and ignores his real lack of connection with others. If the man's hostility and withdrawal is left unchallenged, the woman's doubt in herself grows. His failures become her failures. The harder she works on the relationship, the cleverer he is in eluding her. Her life is in continual uproar as she mulls over the inconsistencies in daily events. He feels threatened and insecure and withdraws, she gets angry. She gets angry, he withdraws and the unresolved conflict boomerangs between then. Relationships, which do not allow straight talk, frankness and appropriate expression of anger become destructive.
Point out his victim messages. He may beat himself up first so you will feel sorry for him and won't punish him.


I have always wondered if b/c my MIL was the way she was(cursed the kids out, very poor - my WH left home at 15 and has been on his own since then - now early 40s) was that why he is attracted to older women? First wife was 2 years older, second wife 12 years older, I'm six years older, the OW is 11 years older. Is he trying to find a "mother"?

Also, he constantly makes snide, cutting comments out of the blue. Nasty comments that are uncalled for. Examples would be that, while talking on the phone w/me, I say that I'm going home to take a shower (we're separated now x 2 years). His comment would be "Did you really stay at work all day or were you somewhere else" - alluding to me having sex w/someone.

On more than 4 occasions now, when I have talked about D and moving forward and no way to work things out, he threatens suicide. The last time was this past Sunday when he came by my house and had a shotgun in the front of the vehicle w/him to make sure I would see it. Comments like
"I'll make sure things are good for you".

He has an explosive temper when pushed and then calls later to apologize for cursing me out, pushing me around, threatening me, etc.

Is this a P/A person?

I don't really fall for the charm anymore but I can't seem to totally escape. I have an attorney and papers drawn up. Why can't I take that next step? I believe he will not change and I believe he is a serial cheater. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

Yup - I think you are exactly right. You WERE being manipulated. And he didn't get the response he wanted! So, what happened next? Did he get angry? Did he leave?
Mulan

life2short - from what you describe, this is not just passive/aggressive. At least, not any more. This is just plain all-out aggressive. He is not just trying to manipulate you into doing what he wants, he is trying to terrorize you into it.

That incident with the shotgun was not just passive/aggressive. It's criminal. I believe it's called "menacing".

Please get away from this man before he takes it to the next level. When a shotgun is involved, it's over. There is nothing else you can do but get away from him.
Mulan

Mulan

Yes, he left that night, never to return except to pack up his things. In some ways I regret doing that because it never gave me a chance to do a plan A. But on the other hand, when he told me all I could think of was ...here we go again. I was just so tired of it. LIke LA said, it is difficult to explain or put your finger on exactly, but the feelings that I had were so familiar and I just knew what the future would be like if I had agreed to let him stay. Even if I had agreed, nothing would have changed, and I would probably be sitting here still trying to figure out what was going on.

We had been going thru a period in our marriage when I think he was really beginning to recognize how destructive his behaviour had been, and I am not just talking about A, but about manipulation and emotional abuse in general. He had been getting counseling from several men at church about the concept of "mutual submission". I don't think he ever really understood the concept and saw it as outward behavior and not a heart attitude. He tried for awhile, by "behaving" in ways that he thought represented mutual submission. I am really beginning to believe that his decision to tell me he wanted to leave was an attempt to set the balance of power back for him. He saw his control slipping and it scared him.

I told him that night that I didn't think he would ever have a fully satisfying relationship with anyone because he didn't know how to invest himself in other people. I didn't realize it at the time, but I think that would be consistent with PA behaviour. Investing emotionally, physically and even financially in other people is a way of giving them a certain amount of control over you.

He has done this several times. If I start to seriously go forth w/D, he either threatens suicide or gets really nasty. When he threatens suicide he starts dropping hints. He has even gone so far as leaving a suicide note where he knew it would be found.

He has been trying his best to convince me that we can make it work. I just took a peak at his cell bill online and he has continued to call OW and 2nd EXW and at least one call to the one he had just sex with!!!!

He is very manipulative and has the ability to make me so sad over what I'm losing by moving forward w/divorce.

He has the ability to make me start to think that things could be better but I know in my heart that they can't.

OK... this is some SERIOUS stuff and I've been doing some SERIOUS thinking. I'll start responding a bit at a time...

L2S

He doesn't have any opportunities that you do not give him directly.

He is not that powerfull.

What you need to know is what is true..not be led astray by wishes and dreams and empty promises.

.........

OK here I go. Phew!

TruBluz, awesome post, thank you. STBXH comes from the mother of all dysfunctional families. He himself has a P/A father and enabling mother, one that exhibits some of the same traits as me.


Great insight! Makes sense to me.


Again, good to know I'm not alone. Thank you for explaining this to me.


Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. I read that Boomerang article and KNOW I was enabling. My eye is this: my parents were extremely loving and passionate, but they were also fiery and lousy examples at conflict resolution. They'd fight. They never made up in front of us. It'd be there one day, and then another day (days later, sometimes) it was over. My mother couldn't bring herself to cry. Not just that, but she believed that women who cried in front of their husbands were manipulative. I learnt this lesson really well. Whenever I was hurt by my H's behavior, I'd withdraw, or I'd snap in anger. It was the only thing I knew how to do.

In my defence, as I grew (and I literally did grow in my M, because I married young), I saw exactly what I was doing and tried to change. I tried to change my behavior, but it was really ingrained. I also saw that my withdrawing served a valuable purpose: if I withdrew when H hurt me, and I was left alone, I actually went through a process inside. I was left to nut it out, deal with it, and sort myself out, and then I was OK. The problem was, he never WOULD let me do this. Whenever I withdrew or was angry, he went into what I called "little boy mode". He would hover around, plead with me to forgive him, do nice things, or come to me with a repentant look saying, "I'm sorry, you're right"... it would abort the process I was going through inside and it just made me mad, because I didn't WANT any of this stuff. Firstly, I needed to go through that essential process. And secondly, I didn't want him to plead forgiveness (just asking, once, at the right time, would have sufficed), or for him to do nice things, or tell me I'm right (many's the time I yelled out, "I KNOW I'm right! I don't need to be told I'm right!). I needed conflict resolution. I'd get it, sometimes, for a few weeks. Then it was back to the same old patterns. What did I get from it? Tough, tough question. I've never thought about this, but I've been giving it a lot of thought for about 24 hours now. I think what I needed was someone who wouldn't leave in the face of this glaring fault. Because I LOATHED this about myself. I struggled with my temper and my lousy conflict resolution skills, every day, praying for help, exerting changes tiny steps at a time. I needed someone who (I thought) would patiently stand by me in my faults.

I actually told him this. When I discovered that I went through a process, I said to him: I'd explain it to him, "I'm not angry. I'm hurt. You don't have to do anything. I'm not holding you responsible for how I feel, I promise. Just leave me be to deal with this, to go through this process inside me, and I will come to you when I'm ready." For a while, he accepted this, and I thought this was a great leap, but eventually he fell back into his old habit of not allowing me this time, which made me angry, and started the whole dysfunctional cycle again.

This actually describes our entire marriage, actually. I don't think my H ever effected any permanent change in the things that he promised to. It'd always be a month, tops.


I'm in the process of getting an intermediary now, and the locks have been changed. Shutting the gate after the horse has bolted with that latter one, alas, but it's done now.


When he left, and he told me the reason he was leaving was because of my withdrawing and anger, I took this to heart. Even though the reason he REALLY left was the OW, this was a great gift because it allowed me to exert an enormous emotional effort and totally change this about myself. Hard, hard, HARD soul work. I think I've been successful, but I haven't yet put these changes to the litmus test of a romantic relationship, so I guess we'll see. But I'm just a totally different person now, and as I type this, it occurs to me now that I know what I know about P/A, that the reason I was probably able to exert this change so successfully is that because he hasn't been around to halt my progress. The relationship as it functioned, and his P/A, required for me to be this way. I also realize that I NEVER wanted to be that other person, that b*tch, that heavy. Like you, I was made worse by my relationship. That is a HUGE realization.

STBXH now calls my withdrawing and anger "abuse". When I told him he was behaving like his father in having an A (his father had multiple As), he told me: "I'm like my father in that we have suffered the same kind of abuse. The only difference is that I have decided to do something about it".


Thank you, I'll look this up.

Ditto! Ditto, ditto, ditto!

Well, you'll see from my post above that STBXH equates me with his mother these days. I USED to think that his mother was a piece of work too, but what I see nowadays, after a couple of heart-to-hearts (when she revealed to me, for the first time in the 22 years I've known her, how she felt after her H's As) is a broken woman. She's broken after a lifetime of betrayals by her H, and by his P/A.

Peachblossom, I think this, too.


Something SO similar happened to me! And this is the first time I have analyzed it in this light. See - a few times, when things had got bad in our M, I would throw up my hands at his inactivity and failure to exert any change (mostly, the change I wanted was for more effort put into the M and the children; work for him ALWAYS came first) I would say "Maybe we should think about splitting up." This would galvanize him into action, and he would exert the needed changes (again, temporarily). Before this whole thing blew up, things were SO bad. So so SO bad, worse than they'd ever been. He really didn't appear to care about me at all. (One time while I was out walking by the river, I rang him in a panic because I was being followed by a strange man, and he disinterestedly said, "A-ha.") At the time, I remember thinking, "It's like he's pushing me!" For the first time, I felt pushed. I felt I was being manipulated. And sure enough, after a couple of months of this, I suggested we separate, but within our property (we have twelve acres and more than one building). He bucked and reacted, but didn't try to resolve anything, and certainly wasn't galvanized into anything. He wouldn't move out, and me moving out wasn't suitable. Then I bucked and reacted, and gave him an ultimatum, and that was IT. He was off and running, out of the house, and I gave him the out. And I was left feeling that I had been manipulated into doing this. (Many months later, when he accused me of "always" threatening him with splitting up, I suggested to him that seeing as MY behavior in this regard was "typical", he could have behaved in such a way that he would have KNOWN it would elicit this response from me, and had thus planned this all along. He was outraged at the idea.) This is the feeling I've had, but didn't want to express it to anyone because it didn't fit the profile of the person that I THOUGHT I was married to (ie. the one who doesn't intentionally do any of this sick stuff), but now that I know a bit more about P/A, it would fit in, wouldn't it?

Almost what happened to me. The decision was made from one day to the next, and that was it. It was like he couldn't get away fast enough.

*bumpity bump*

Tam, I don't really understand this - you sound like you're blaming yourself because you believe that if H hurts you, you should have to deal with that all on your own and not expect him to either help you or take any responsibility for it - and that if you do expect those things, you are just feeding his P/A behavior.

If you're going to have a marriage, both parties have to take some responsibility for deliberate actions that they KNOW are going to hurt the other one. It's not like this other person is some stranger on the street that you have nothing invested in.

Intimacy requires vulnerability. You cannot be intimate with anyone, either emotionally or physically, when you cannot or will not allow yourself to be vulnerable.

And making yourself vulnerable to your spouse carries with it the expecatation that said vulnerability will be respected and cherished - not exploited for personal power.

When it comes to how your spouse treats you, you can't just say, well, you CHOOSE to get angry so that's YOUR problem.

To me, that's like saying, "If my husband bashes my foot with a sledge hammer, I am CHOOSING to react to that by crying out in pain and screaming at him to stop it - and if I wanted to, I could just not react at all because reacting is a choice."

It's one thing if the foot-bashing is an accident. If it is, I have every right to expect him to help me and support me and not just expect me to withdraw and deal with it myself.

It's another to understand that he's doing it deliberately because all the pain and pleading keeps me helpless.
Mulan

Mulan, River Tam, et. al, I was posting at the same time of your last post. Check out my new "P/A awards" thread.

Mulan:

My husband's mother could give lessons in passive-aggression. She had an extremely strict father that she outwardly rebelled against, and then she spent the rest of her life covertly rebelling against her husband.

Her favorite P/A gambit was to allow my FIL to plan a big night out with friends and then have a "flare up" of one of her many illnesses at the last minute. Now, she did have a lot of medical problems, but it seemed too coincidental that she would be fine during the day, get ill right before time to leave, then be perfectly fine again the next morning. Never happened when she planned something.

And it had the desired effect of driving my FIL nuts.

I have read that we choose our mates based on their similarities to either our most problematic parent, or the parent whom we are least like. That seems to be true for my husband and I.

Tru


River:

You sound like you are doing a lot of deep work on yourself. The only benefit of my husband's affair and all the other assorted marital issues is that they have pushed both of us into living more examined lives. And working to improve ourselves.

I think you would be interested in a couple books that have helped me understand myself and my marriage much better. Living with the P/A Man has already been recommended to you. It will help even though you are separated. Also, Intimate Partners, by Maggie Scarfe (not sure of spelling). This book examines the whole issue of projection and projective identification in marriage. It was a real eye-opener for me. And two more: Harville Hendrix' book Getting the Love You Want, and Robin NOrwood's, Women Who Love Too Much.

A couple things occurred to me while reading your post.

The first of them is that people have different definitions for control and abuse.

I read a book a while ago about verbal abuse where the author believed that every time you try to get a person to change his mind/behavior, you are attempting to control them and that is abusive and disrespectful.

I found that a little extreme.

But I think there is a good debate to be had on what constitutes "control" in a marital relationship. I think one's person's control can be another's person's caring concern.

For instance, I told a couple of male friends about Harley's POJA. All three of them were outraged, and said they would never agree to something like that. They viewed it as giving their wives "control" over them. And, they viewed it as controlling and insulting to their wives, who they said they trusted to make decisions. None of the benefits I listed for it outweighed what they saw as their loss of "freedom" from control.

In my own marriage, I've seen the same difference of opinion. What seemed controlling to my husband seemed like interest and friendliness to me.

For instance, I always wanted to meet his school/work friends and to have him meet and know mine. He didn't mind meeting my friends, but did not want to have to let me be a part of his work friendships. He felt that was me intruding into a sphere that should be entirely his. So he viewed that behavior of mine as controlling, and he hated it. I viewed it as him wanting to distance himself from me, and I hated that.

We've since learned that I wanted too much closeness, and that he wanted too little. (Substitute the word intimacy for closeness, if you like.) The "Us" was so important to me that I had a hard time seeing him and I as two separate inviduals. But he saw himself as so fragile and vulnerable that he fiercely guarded his autonomy as protection. He wanted the "us" to be tiny and powerless so that it didn't overwhelm the "him".

Those differents levels of need for closeness explained a lot of our problems.

The other thing that occurred to me in reading your post, River is that I was much like you in how I reacted to conflict. I also threatened divorce more than a handful of times in the early years of our marriage. And my reaction to disagreement was either to blow up or to withdraw.

I see now that those reactions did not make my marriage feel like a very safe place for my husband, especially considering his history as an abused child. Of course, his actions -- the affair, etc. -- made our marriage unsafe, too. But I also cdontributed to that feeling of the whole setup being tentative, shaky and subject to change at whim.

Which was a real shame, because one of my most deeply held values is loyalty. And yet I threatened to leave him when I didn't mean it. I used words to hurt, shock and manipulate. It's taken me a long time to begin to learn how to communicate openly and honestly. And to change the core beliefs that prompted me to do otherwise for so long.

Tru