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Item 1 - Passive aggression
"Anger is fuel. Anger can be healing and healthy. Anger can be a monster. When we feel it, we want to take action. We want to hit someone, break something, throw a fit, smash a fist into the wall, swear and use obscenities. Anger isn’t nice. We’re conditioned to stuff it, deny it, bury it, block it, hide it, lie about it, medicate it, muffle it, ignore it... everything but to experience it.” Julia Cameron, The Artist Way
The criticize defend pattern can spin a couple so far out of the ordinary, that they are taken to places they have little experience in handling. Recently I worked with a couple caught in this trap and he decided to rebel for the first time in his life. Not even as a teenager did he. It took the form of an affair with his wife's best friend. In another couple I worked with, she had the affair and in both cases the offender breached an almost righteous position they had held about affairs before they made their choices to cheat. Both the betrayed wife and the betraying wife, had habitually hammered their men every time they popped their head "above the battlements". In both cases the affair was sopmething like, "have I got your attention now?" A significant difference between teh two, however, was that in the second case, the husband drove his wife crazy with his passive aggressive behaviour, which he denied was such.
These are some of the things that the passive aggressive male says:
- "Nothing. I'm just thinking."
- "No, why do you ask?"
- "Angry?"
- "I don't hate it."
- "I won't stop you."
- "What's the problem?"
These are some of the things that a passive-aggressive man does:
- Has a new lock put on the front door and forgets to give his wife the key.
- Calls an early staff meeting and shows up forty minutes late
- Talks on the phone for an hour when he knows that his girlfriend is trying to call.
- Hears about passive-aggression and decides that it doesn't apply to him.
These are some of the things that a passive-aggressive man can find tough:
- Meeting deadlines
- Firing people
- Getting angry
- Saying no. Source
This got me interested: (a) do more women hammer their men and more men withdraw more often than do their partners in the dance and (b) do more men use passive aggression in marriage than women, who tend to be more overtly aggressive?
Here are some answers:
