Thanks for your input JustKim. What you describe sounds pretty much like our style of interaction.

I still intend to look more deeply into the PA thing. At this time, I'm not sure how much impact it has. Like I mentioned in a previous post, I have seen some of what they describe. A lot of it doesn't appear that uncommon though and based on other member's descriptions of their spouses, I just don't do the things they do.

My H thinks so, too. He admits that some of his behavior in the past was PA. He doesnt feel that it completely "fits" him, though.

Me, I see more PA in him than he does. For instance, I recently told him about something that was important to me. He listened, agreed and then said that we would do what I asked to resolve this. Fast forward a week. Guess what? still not done. This happens routinely and frankly, has the effect of me feeling like I just cant depend on him. That it is only "words" to pacify me. Previously, I would get angry and attack him on not doing this. now, I talk to him about it. I dont know if in the long run, it will turn out to be a good thing or not. Perhaps Mopey feels this way as well?

He claims he "forgets" and that I should "remind" him. He doesnt see this as PA at all. I do. I dont want to be the "enforcer" for lack of a better term.

I can tell you that when we were entrenched in the PA dance, I thought I was going nuts. I became a person I didnt even recognize. I was SO ANGRY all the time, yet I didnt know why. The PA behavior was so underground that I didnt even realize what was going on myself.

Mulan...can you please give me some explaination about what it is you see?

My wife and I discussed this thread last night (before your post), and her only disagreement that you quoted was about the amount of time she thinks we spend in a discussion. She thought 6 hours was stretching it. Last night, we talked from about 12am til 6-7am. Roughly 7 hours. 2 nights ago, we had a discussion of similar length.

It was her idea originally to say "I'm done" and ask for seperation/divorce. She was also the one that came into our room later to wake me up to talk about it more.

I don't see where I am controlling her or trying to change reality. We are in agreement of what needs to change.

We are both tired of each other's behavior and recognize change is needed.

Being labeled as PA, based on what I've seen you and Silverpool describe, is a terrible thing. I don't want to be that person, or treat my wife that way.

Wind - you are controlling her by controlling the truth (withholding information by refusing to speak to her) and by controlling her access to her own husband (stonewalling and ignoring her so that she is emotionally cut off, punished and starved.)

A lot of P/A behaviour is about power. When I would get just as upset as you describe your wife getting, WH would just sit there and smirk. That's because the more upset and hysterical I got, the more he was reassured that he had ALL the power and control in the relationship and I had NONE.

P/A behaviour includes:
Lying (especially lies of omission)
Withholding information
The silent treatment (ignoring the person for hours or days on end)
Stonewalling them when they try to talk to you
"Forgetting" to do something they've asked you to do
"Accidentally" doing something they've asked you NOT to do

Using P/A behaviour to control, manipulate, frustrate and punish a spouse is emotional abuse of the first order.

I hope you get help for this. There is NO hope for your marriage unless you do. And get help for your wife, too. I guarantee you, she is a complete wreck after being subjected to this by the man she thought was going to protect her and love her.

I've ended up with a full-blown nervous breakdown because I did not realize what this was. That's why I don't post so much anymore, except for when I see this.

I cannot emphasize to you enough how destructive, painful and tormenting this behaviour really is.
Mulan

Grrr....I ignored my sig line....

Thanks for the additional info Mulan.

Mopey and I will discuss this over the weekend. We've both just agreed we want a break from emotions tonight.

I hope you are taking care of yourself in a healthy manner. What you describe, and the website, sounds like taking care of a child that has the ability to ruin your life. I don't believe I would be able to put up with that for very long.

I cannot emphasize to you enough how destructive, painful and tormenting this behaviour really is.



I SECOND THIS ONE THOUSAND TIMES OVER. Unless you lived it, you can't really know HOW HORRIBLE it is to live with someone who does this to you. I too had a breakdown. It wasn't pretty and it last several years.

I don't see this happening here at all for the reasons you think. He is not withholding information, but refuses to make himself available anymore for her abusive, angry outbursts. I see abuse going on here in the form of angry outbursts, disrespectful judgements and emotional blackmail. It is not "gaslighting" to set protective boundaries against that. He is being punished routinely for his affair and every other thing that can be dredged up. Every WS who 'shuts down" emotionally is not "passive aggressive," but often simply EMOTIONALLY ABUSED. It is not "passive aggressive" to shut down emotionally in the face of abuse, it is a normal self protective measure.

WS, you did the right thing in agreeing to counsel with Steve Harley. I think he can be a huge help to both you and mopey.

I can appreciate that someone who has never been the target of P/A behaviour may doubt that it really exists - but I can tell you that Wind is not the victim here. His BW is experiencing these DJs and AOs *in response to* his gaslighting of her, but all he will do is sit there and play the abused and innocent victim and claim he cannot understand what she is so upset about.

Which is exactly what he wanted in the first place.

I would not have believed it either if I had not experienced this same treatment first-hand.

Wind, was your wife exhibiting this crazy behaviour when you married her?
Mulan

Sorry Mulan, but I ain't buying it. What I do recognize is emotional abuse and the tactic of manufacturing grievances to indict a wayward. Been there, done that. That is what is happening here. I used to do the same thing to my H and my angst wasn't because he was "passive aggressive," but because I kept myself furious by constantly rehashing events and exaggerating every little action out of all proportion.

And honestly, I don't care if he is the KING of "passive agressiveness," it does not entitle her to abuse him with angry outbursts and disrespectful judgments. Just as there is no entitlement for adultery, there is no entitlement for abuse.

He is not withholding any information from her, he is refusing to be abused anymore. Nothing passive aggressive about that.

I am thinking both things are going on here. Can you both see how this dance would be easy to continue based on both of you being correct? And how easy it is for us to blame each other?

We just had a wonderful learning moment while discussing today's events when I got home.

Mopey had an IC appt where they spent the entire time discussing/researching her anger. Her father was physically and verbally abusive. The family lived in fear of him. She was the youngest. She developed into a fighter and protector.

I grew up with an absent father (military) who had a flash temper and critical mother. With Dad, everything could be going well one moment, a wrong word was said and he would explode. I would not say he was verbally or physically abusive, just scary when not prepared. There was no way to prepare. With Mom, little to nothing was good enough. They were married 7 months before my birth. There was little love expressed in the house. I felt their primary form of punishment was to take things from me that I valued. I developed an "I'm ok mask" and remember spending a fair amount of time alone.

As much as it pains me to believe, I think I am P/A. As much as it pains Mopey, she believes she is verbally abusive.

I do not know the depth of P/A or all the ways I use it, but we are going to find out and get rid of it.

We entered this marriage with all the tools needed to Cha-Cha-Cha, Rhumba, Tango and Swing.

BTW - the P/A was OK'd to write this post....hahahahaha.....

WS, [what an ironic screen name! lol] did you say y'all had set up an appt with Steve Harley?

I believe we each entered the marriage with a full set of tools to torment the other. Mopey agrees.

Neither of us see any good that would come out of persuing that question further.

Hahaha.....yes it is. I actually got a little mad at someone early on for refering to me as "WS". A couple posts later, it dawned on me why. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

We have contacted them, but decided to decline the first available. It fell on our anniversary. We will take the next available. I think we have to call to do that. Mopey is handling it, so I may not know all the detail.

Hello everyone.....



If I hadn't of been so emotionally drained, I would have responded to this thread earlier.

I am still very tired but wanted to get on long enough to say thank you to everyone who has posted here, especially Mulan and Holymoly who I know, knows where I am coming from.

Last night when I read this thread, when it had just gotten started, I prayed and asked God to please help us here. After I got home from my IC appt today I read it and broke down crying in relief that some of you understand.

Melody.....unless you've walked a mile in my shoes, you have no idea what goes on around here. I can assure you, that a large amount of what goes on around here is the PA behavior first, and then the angry outburst out of frustration. Not all the time, but most of the time and Windstopped may disagree with that. I also have been guilty of being angry at my husband for gas lighting me all of these years and betraying me in the worst possible way more than once, over the last 8 months since d-day.

Remember this?.....



Maybe you can remember what it's like at my stage in this game. Especially when you're fed [censored] for the 1st 1/2 of the recovery, typical PA behavior btw. You take that same situation and the WS is a PA, and you can compound the BS's hurt tenfold. You have to live it to know it.

It is so complicated it boggles the mind sometimes. My only saving grace is that Windstopped does recognize some of these behaviors and seems to want to identify them and correct them, and there are others here who saw right through him. This is not the first time this has been mentioned to him in my post.

I DO NOT beat Windstopped up about his affair all the time either and I want to make that PERFECTLY clear to everyone! I guarantee you though there have been some non-angry outburst conversations where he has felt beat up though. And there has been times where I did let him have it and I'm sure most people here can understand that pain. He has a hard time separating who is now to who he was then and gets so defensive it's has NEVER been easy to have a healing conversation about his affair whether there is voice raising going on or not. His PA behavior PREVENTS that, leading to frustration and drum roll.....the other half the PA.....the angry wife.

Melody.....I think you're great. But I gotta tell you, I really hope since you post such much on these boards that you might consider educating yourself about PA's and how that dynamic works. A BS with a PA husband will be in excruciating pain and will most likely and need a lot of support and info. I feel like I have been raped and you won't believe this is happening to me.

I have had several relationships and two marriages in my lifetime. One of the relationships before marriage lasted four years. The only time I ever exhibited angry outburst were in my two marriages. My first husband was a WS spouse and left me and my two young children to defend for ourselves. Literally. He moved out of state and abandoned us. My kids are grown and can't stand him. I believe he was PA too. Lucky me.

I am so grateful to everyone here who posted.

mopey, I'm sorry I don't buy the PA angle. I think everyone is passive aggressive to a degree, but I also believe that many people sabatoge their recovery by endlessly punishing the WS with lovebusters. PA may be part of what is happening here. But what I do recognize is a very familiar pattern of LOVEBUSTERS called angry outbursts and disrespectful judgements; a pattern of punishment and abuse just like Dr.Harley alluded to in his article. No one here has to "walk in your shoes" to recognize such behavior. It is very easily definable. And it is having the expected result: huge explosions.

Now, if you want to ignore your lovebusters and pretend that this is all a result of WS's "passive aggressive" tendencies, that is your prerogative, but others are not obliged here to endorse a plan that ensures defeat. I sure won't. I am especially concerned that by placing all the focus on him instead of meaningful recovery that it only serves as a needless diversion.

So, I will ask you again, mopey, do you want to fall in love with your husband TODAY? Are you willing to do the things TODAY to have a romantic, loving marriage? Because you CAN have that. If you work on TODAY. Do you want help in that regard?

Because I will wager that Steve Harley is not going to be spending time focusing on how "passive aggressive" WindStopped is, but rather on SOLUTIONS such as avoiding lovebusters [both ways] and learning to care for each other. THAT is what will change your marriage. If he is PA, then that will be flushed out rather quickly by POJA. Examining your H's romantic feelings from years ago will not achieve change. Examining his romantic feelings from TODAY will.

Mopey, I completely understand your feelings and your angry responses to what your H has done to you. I have done it all myself...for years. My FWH is PA also and it drives me insane, sometimes literally. I have screamed, yelled slammed doors to get him to HEAR me. I felt entitled to my raging because of the pain I am in. He says when I do that he "just shuts down". And he does. That enrages me more, so round and round we go.

We have practised this dance to perfection.

And, until recently, it has gotten us both absolutely NO WHERE. I have learned that I am absolutely an equal partner in the destruction of my family by my actions.

Melody is absolutely correct. It's not about whether you are deeply hurt, of course you are. It's about finding a way out of the pain, to heal. After two years post affair, my raging hasn't gotten me to where I wanted to be. Sure I feel entitled to be angry about the affair, his PA behavior, his gas lighting and his numerous failings at trying to be sober. I am at times so blinded by my pain that I just react. I am learning to stop this. I have spent years focusing on HIS behavior and didn't really see my own. I have to be responsible and accountable for my behavior.

I have recently put my weapons of marital destruction down. I stopped reacting. I started thinking. I saw that all I was doing was raging. It was not changing a thing. I wanted healing. My way was not working. When I control MYSELF (still hard to do, BTW) he HEARS me. I am exercising control over my behavior and we are making progress. And that is the goal.

It's not clear to me that this is about full-blown PA behaviour. It looks to me simply that two unhealthy defence mechanisms are feeding off each other - a fairly common marital dynamic, taken to an extreme.

As I see it, WindStopped deals with emotional discomfort by disengaging, ie disconnecting emotionally from the situation - clamming up, stonewalling, making himself unavailable. This, as I know from bitter experience, is collossally frustrating to deal with, because it stops everything dead in in its tracks - you can't negotiate with a empty room.

There is a 'natural' tendency to deal with this by trying to blast through, but, as Mopey has discovered, it rarely works. It just hardens the other's defences and makes them clam up even more.

Mopey, at present WSt can tell himself that disengaging is OK because he must protect himself from your anger. If you didn't get angry - if you were calm and rational at all times, dependably, for a long period - he wouldn't have that excuse, would he? Saying 'And there has been times where I did let him have it and I'm sure most people here can understand that pain.', is essentially looking for affirmation that it is OK to lash out with rage if you are provoked and frustrated enough. Frankly, it's not. Behaving badly in response to someone else's perceived bad behaviour is a child's action, not an adult's. You can manage yourself better than that.

WStopped, clamming up in response to emotional discomfort protects you from some pain, but it makes you a hugely frustrating marriage partner. It's a habit, isn't it, one you learned in childhood and have stuck to ever since? It's one you can investigate and change - if you want to. You can train yourself to deal with a little more uncertainty, fear, embarrassment and anger than you currently find endurable - can't you?

Both parties seem invested in finding a solution to this dynamic. Labelling the situation 'PA' allows everyone to distract themselves with pathology when they're actually ready to seek solutions.

TA

From Penalty Kill

Wow. Reading this thread brings me back to our early recovery times, two years ago. I think that I can understand where windstopped and mopey are coming from.

My H, the BS, was understandably angry at the revelation of my A. He spent a lot of time raging at me. After hours of this I would clam up, to the point of lying in a fetal position in my closet, door closed, while he tried to engage me without success from the other side. He is/was one of the BSs who wanted details, all the details, over and over again. He would then use those details to hammer me.

I started to think that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to give him details. Friends and family started telling me the same thing. So already we were going in an unproductive direction, since he *really did* need to know details in order to move forward. That's his nature. And so it became a vicious cycle.

I know that I reached a point where as soon as my H started to discuss the A something inside me would shut down. I would begin waiting for the onslaught, even before it began. Was I being P/A? Maybe. But the last thing I needed was another label. My scarlet A arrived in the room ten minutes before I did. And what we both needed was a way to begin recovery since that was what both of us wanted.

Then, in a turn of the tables, when I found out that my H had contacted the OM pretending he was me I proved that I could rage, too! I was furious to think that the OM was under the impression that I wanted to see him after all these years. I was furious that my H had hidden this from me for months while I had been honest with him. I shrieked and threw things. The only difference was that I didn't want details of their correspondence. My H pulled the emails he had exchanged w/OM up on the computer. I wouldn't read them, and asked him just to delete them, as they were polluting my hard drive.

Oh, were we ever a mess.

We did finally break out of the vicious cycle we were in, but it wasn't easy. He had to stop with the LBing, and I had to answer his questions and push aside my fear of recrimination. Oddly enough, after time, I realized that the experience of being lied to gave me a teeny, tiny taste of what it was like for my H. And I did get the satisfaction of being able to send an email to the OM, with my H watching, telling him that I was not the one who had been contacting him for the last few months - it had been my H all along.

S. Harley was the only counselor/coach that my H was able to talk to without being angrier when the session was over. He was actually calmer. So I am glad that WS and mopey will be using his services. And while Melody Lane and I do not always see eye to eye on some things, there have been times that I read her posts and agree wholeheartedly. This is one of those times.

Can any of you even try to understand how completely maddening this situation is? And how MB principles are utterly useless while the P/A is determined to hold on to P/A defenses?

"Well, BS, if you would just stop being upset everything would be fine."

"Okay, I will try."

Then the P/A deliberately (yes, deliberately) pulls something that they KNOW is guaranteed to cause the BS intolerable pain yet again so THEY can continue to be the victim.

"Well, BS, if you would just stop being upset everything would be fine."

BS screams like Fay Wray in an agony of rage and torment and starts looking at that full bottle of Xanax in her drawer.

"Well, BS, if you would just stop being upset everything would be fine. This is YOUR fault. I'm just the victim here. YOU are ruining everything with YOUR behaviour. YOU need help."

Have a nice day. You will never, ever understand if you have not been through it. And the only thing that is the BS's fault is not leaving a lot sooner.
Mulan

Regardless of who did what to whom, the answers are similar. Both of us need to learn how to handle ourselves differently and it's going to take a professional third party to referee.

Neither of us wll get anywhere by pointing a finger at the other. It's impossible to change our own behavior when we think the other is the cause.

Conversation is very difficult with us. We are both hyper-vigilant and dismissive of the other's feelings. She sees the things I do that are hurtful to her, and I see the things she does that are hurtful to me.

I can see some P/A behaviors in me. I believe there are some I don't see. I don't want this label and am not planning to drink the coolaid IF it doesn't fit. If it does fit, I intend to embrace it and look for help removing it. I plan to seek professional help in evaluating this. I have already told my IC that P/A behavior is suspected. Next session, I'll ask to dive into that further. If he isn't experienced with P/A, I'll find someone who is. We will also bring it up with the Harley's.