Monday, June 30, 2008

COPING WITH PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR



COPING WITH PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR


Some interactions with your significant other can leave you feeling emotionally drained, dejected, and distressed. Those behaviors are not only confusing and hard to accept, but they have the capacity to damage your confidence and self-esteem. Vicious passive aggressive behavior can take its toll on you, slowly altering your personality, until you barely recognize your own actions. You feel depressed, you might cry or yell more often than before, and you feel out of control.

How do you identify passive aggressive behavior?

- Unexpected, unprovoked angry outbursts, disproportionate to the issue at hand
- Isolation or pouting without an obvious reason
- Dismissing your feelings off hand
- Ignoring or blocking you from communications with others
- Being sensitive and caring one minute; acting hostile and resentful the next

Even when we all do some passive aggressive behavior here and there, especially when we are resisting some other person ordering us around, but we don't want to challenge him, everyone knows what this behavior looks like.


What you need to look for is not the occasional response that blocks cooperation while saying that it is forthcoming, but look for the passive-aggressive behavior which is ingrained and the habitual way of dealing with the world, you included.

It can come across as a maddening mixture of evasiveness and contrition, agreeableness and resistance, connection and aloofness and in severe cases is often masked by more obvious mental illness, like depression.

The classic description of passive aggressive behavior includes a "stubborn malcontent, someone who passively resists fulfilling routine tasks, complains of being misunderstood and underappreciated, unreasonably scorns authority and voices exaggerated complaints of personal misfortune."

Sometimes you can even perceive him as doing a clever obstruction of all your plans to move ahead, progress and develop new experiences for both, so scared this person is of change and your role in any change happening to him/her. If you push a lot, then you will be served with aggressive outbursts, coming like "out of nowhere," but destined to protect his personality from any adult demand coming his way.



Do you need to know more? If you think passive aggressive behavior is the cause of your unhappy situation there are steps you can take to resolve it. Perhaps you need to get a copy of www.passiveaggresive.com, an ebook that will give you strategies to respond to Passive Aggressive tactics! If you are ready to break free of the chains of passive aggressive emotional bondage, if you are tired of feeling humiliated and alone, if you are ready to take control of your emotional well-being once and for all, then this e-book is for you.


www.passiveaggresive.com

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi,I am posting this,because my husband says that I am argumentative,dysfunctional& passive aggressive.I have felt myself change a lot in the past year. I do feel angry, because my husband continues to drink & take too many medications. I barely feel that I can be myself without including him in whatever I'm doing. And, yet, he goes on business trips & I have no idea what he is doing.I don't think he's cheating.I just think he's drinking himself to unconsciousness. That's what he does night after night. I bring it up & he says I'm an idiot & that's not where our problems lie. He says I'm ruining his life & he looks for any excuse to drink.My husband calls me an idiot&tells me to shut up constantly. If I try to get involved in my daughters discipline, he tells me to shut up. After he says this, I usually say fine--I'll shut up, be a robot & then maybe you will be happy. My husband seems mostly unhappy & disappointed in me. He has hit me & beaten me. If I am the passive aggressive person, I want to get help. I am currently taking antidepressants & the things my husband say to me make me feel hopeless about myself. When he is angry, he says he sucks & his life sucks.

Anonymous said...

Hi,
I think that you should look your relationship with some perspective.
Tags such as "Passive Aggressive" are sometimes easy to place and hard to remove.
As a first step, I would recommend that both of you learn a better way to communicate feelings without resorting to aggression or abuse.
One technique that can certainly help is called "Fair Fighting"
Using this technique you can restore trust and open a channel to discuss the real issues , such as what is the real cause of you husband’s attitude and complains.

All the Best,
Neil.