You’ll encounter resistance as you deal with the affair. One of the frustrating forms is passive-aggression.
All resistance is about blocking or frustrating your efforts at moving forward. Passive Aggression challenges you by giving double messages.
Dealing with Passive Aggression <<– listen to the audio here
Hi, this is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio. I’m glad that you’ve tuned in today and that you decided to listen to the podcast.
The topic we’re going to be dealing with today is an important one with affairs. It is dealing with passive aggression.
As you deal with the affair, talking with your spouse as well as yourself, and other people, along the way you will encounter resistance. The more you deal with the affair and the real issues, the more you’ll encounter resistance. One of the frustrating forms of resistance is passive aggression.
Passive Aggression: a form of resistance
With passive aggression, on the surface they appear to be cooperative but they’re actually fighting against you. It’s almost like they have this nice external appearance, but the reality is they’re fighting against you tooth and nail.
Bear in mind that all resistance is about blocking or frustrating your efforts at moving forward. Many times, in dealing with the affair, you are attempting to move your relationship forward and trying to get closer to your spouse.
When they fight you, especially with passive aggression, it can be very frustrating. Because you feel blocked, you feel unable to move forward.
Passive aggression gets to be doubly frustrating because it challenges you by giving you double messages. On one hand you’re given the message that they’re cooperating, and you’re also at the same time being given the message that they’re resisting.
This leaves you in a state where you’re feeling blocked and you’re wondering which is it. Are you cooperating, or are you fighting me? Which is it?
Dealing with Passive Aggression
The solution I want to present for dealing with this is intent, response, and the hurt/heart. I use the acronym IRH. I’ll explain what each of these are.
1. With the intent, or the I part of the IRH, you want to explore if their passive aggression is intentional or unintentional. Knowing their intent is key to dealing with passive aggression.
If they are intentionally blocking you that’s going to call for one solution. If they don’t even realize that they’re blocking you and their fighting you is unintentional, in those cases you’re going to need to talk about what the effects of the passive aggression are.
If they aren’t doing it on purpose, they don’t realize it. Many times just talking about what their behavior’s doing will wake them up to it and they can make the changes.
If it’s intentional, you want to talk about how it leaves you feeling as you’re dealing with it. That will start changing these dynamics behind the passive aggression.
2. You want to avoid responding in kind. This is the R part of the IRH. Avoid responding in kind. I know the temptation is when they get passive aggressive you want to get passive aggressive. You want to avoid that.
You want to improve communication and increase the honesty, not make it worse. There’s an old communication game that often happens called NIGYYSOB, Now I’ve Got You, You SOB.
Many times what happens when they are passive aggressive with you and you respond passive aggressively to them, a grin goes across their face and NIGYYSOB. Now I’ve got you, you SOB. That type of thing.
You want to avoid those type of game play. A marriage is not the place for that type of game play.
3. You want to find the hurt, or the heart, behind the passive aggression. Because when passive aggression is being used your heart’s not with you.
It’s almost like you’re only getting a partial response. They’re partly with you and partly not, and you want to get their whole heart in line with what they’re doing. In order to do so you need to find a way to connect before you move forward.
So many times what happens, people get a partial connection and then they take that as an agreement and they try to move forward. And then when things blow up they wonder what happened.
I can tell you what happened. You didn’t connect 100% before you moved forward. And you want to make sure that you have that.
If you don’t have that connection you may have to explore what’s at the heart of the matter, what are the hurts behind it that are keeping that resistance there. And talk about those issues. Because hurts in the heart become passive aggressive roadblocks.
The hurts behind the aggression
When you do have the passive aggression going on they’re experiencing some hurts, and you’re going to want to deal with those hurts. For some reason they have not been able to talk about it, or they chose not to talk about it. With passive aggression it’s almost like they’re finding a way to hurt you without hurting you.
Many times with affairs there’s a lot of mixed messages. That’s one of the reasons why people oftentimes wonder if they’re going crazy because they’re getting mixed messages.
This is part of the mixed message, this part of the passive aggression. These are some ways, the IRH solution, to dealing with passive aggression. This will start you on the way.
In the downloadable “Affair Recovery Workshop” you’ll discover other ways of dealing with communication problems. I’ll show you ways of bypassing their defensiveness and improving your communication with your spouse.
Discussing the affair doesn’t have to mean communication shutdown. You can instead know how to bring things up and what to bring up that opens up communication.
Best Regards,
Jeff
