Living with the Passive-Aggressive Man by Scott Wetzler

Author:Scott Wetzler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 1992-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

DEALING WITH ANGER

The trick to dealing with submerged hostility is to bring it out into the open. Your hardest job will be to convince the passive-aggressive man in your life that it’s okay to be angry so he can own up to how he feels. What you do and how you decide to respond has a major impact on whether or not he will feel comfortable enough to express his anger in appropriate ways. Since anger is such a hot topic for all of us—it may frighten, embarrass or confuse us—we may unintentionally discourage its direct expression. The message comes through: it is not acceptable for him to be angry; we don’t want to hear about it; we don’t want to deal with it.

Worse yet is the impulse to retaliate. To be upset is to lose one’s thread of reason and become less clearheaded than one would like to be. It’s the difference between saying what you mean (“When you keep interrupting me, I can’t tell you what you need to know”) or retaliating with sarcasm and outright hostility. (“Here you go again—I don’t know why I bother talking to you at all!”) This is the very type of response that stops conversations or arguments dead. It will escalate problems with the passive-aggressive man, not diminish them.

In Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, author Carol Tavris writes, “verbal aggression usually fails because it riles up the other person and makes him or her inclined to strike back, whereas a description of your state of mind constitutes less of an attack, inspiring the other person to make amends.” When you encourage openness—that is, uncover the reason you feel angry in the first place—you’re bound to make a better case for yourself. This “feelings report” approach definitely has a better chance of working, especially with a passive-aggressive man.

Some women try the exact opposite way of coping with anger. More comfortable with a passive-aggressive man’s inclination to deny anger, they quickly try to humor him out of it. (“Oh, Charlie, forget about it… what does it really matter? You’re too good to let this get to you.”) For them, choosing the path of least resistance brings some comfort. However obnoxious and infuriating the guy’s sulking may be, passive-aggression is safer for them than direct aggression.

The man who’s humored out of anger that he may or may not have otherwise expressed doesn’t necessarily feel better, or less angry—he just stews. To make matters worse, he’ll interpret your attempts (and your jokes) as stifling, or controlling. On the one hand, he’s easily intimidated and afraid of confrontation, and on the other hand, he resents the condescension implicit in your attempts to “handle” his anger.

Suppressing anger isn’t constructive nor is it an airtight solution, even with good humor snapping the lid closed. You may find that humoring him is preferable in the short run, but over the long run, it has insidious effects on the relationship. Make no mistake about it, a passive-aggressive man’s anger will come out in other ways, inevitably, passive-aggressively.

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