Life Has Gotten In The Way of Even the Passive Aggressive

That’s right. Life has gotten in the way of even the passive aggressive! LOL. I can’t even bitch too much because I haven’t had a lot of time recently to interact with him, which is also why I haven’t been able to post anything new in awhile. Sorry, but I am still here, and am still in my situation, and still interested in how everyone is doing.

I have checked all the comments and approved the ones that were waiting. I would like to explain that while I wish I could just let everyone comment so you guys could go ahead and help each other without me, the SPAM is incredible. I deleted 5 pages, or 86 comments tonight. I don’t have time to read them all and weed them all out, so I read the first page and delete the rest, but if I let everyone comment without looking at them first, this blog would turn into crap, and I can’t let that happen. So, I would ask that you just have a little more patience. After Monday I will have more time again and be much more attentive.

So, as for what I’m up to lately (I figure if you’ve left a comment, I have an idea of what you are up to, LOL, but if I haven’t heard from you lately, please feel free to share), I am running a care center for old passive aggressives. LOL.

I have an older lady friend (80) two doors down from me, I’m bringing my mother home from rehab, and I have the BF. I am a gluten for punishment. LOL. My mother is like a lot of the passive aggressive parents I read about here, except she’s also downright aggressive. My girl friend a couple of doors down, we’ve known each other for almost 30 years, and competed for the same man at one time. She’s been a substantial help to us since we moved down the street from her, except she seems to forget she gets a lot of help in return. And then I have the passive aggressive BF, who used to come home from work and tell me about people wanting to hire him on the side. I ordered him cards, etc. but now wonder if he ever gives them out. LOL. I love it!

A Passive Aggressive Mother and Me

Ok, I gripe here and there about my passive aggressive boyfriend, but I don’t usually say too much about my passive aggressive mother who lives with us. Tonite’s the night. She’s taken to running over my toes with her walker lately, and I’ve had it so she’s getting it. LOL.

My mother is the opposite of the boyfriend in the way that the boyfriend is passive passive aggressive, while my mother is aggressive passive aggressive. Yeah, it’s a lot of fun around here. LOL. What has been especially interesting for me is watching the two of them interact. I spend a lot of time in my office so I am not privy to everything that goes on, but what I get when I am out in the other room with the two of them, why world war III hasn’t started I don’t know.

When the BF isn’t around, my mother will tell me how he watches her like a hawk with every move she makes. When my mother isn’t around, he says she’s imagining things and he can’t believe how much she eats. So of course, when I’m out in the other room with the two of them, I observe to see who is out of whack. When I catch the BF staring at everything she does, which he does do, he says he was just wondering what she was looking for (all this is usually in the kitchen). He never asks her what she’s looking for, because passive aggressives don’t do that. He just watches.

In the old days when he cooked, he used to take dinner into her, and he was her hero. He cooks very well, plus he waited on her. Since I told him not to wait on her because she needs to move around, she’s done everything she can to sabotage him. Poor guy. She even told me one day she thought he was a jiggalo. LOL. I had to inform her he paid as much towards the rent and bills as we all did.

Today I took my mother and we went for a haircut. What started out to be a good thing for charity, turned into disaster and the car broke down in a city a few miles away. I had to call the BF to come get us as I was having the car towed by AAA. Mom always sits in front, as she cannot get in the back of our 2 door vehicles.  She usually has a hard time with the seat belt, so I usually do it for her. Today he got in the driver’s seat, I was in the back, and she was having trouble with her seatbelt. The next thing I knew, he had reached over, took the seat belt, pulled on it to get it across her and of course in his passive aggressive way of not noticing what he was doing, was hitting her in the face with it until he  finally got it buckled for her. I’m sure he was thinking “Score!” She came really close to knocking his block off. LOL.

Between these two, my psycho kitty that prevents me from adopting any other kittens because she’s so crazy, and me, what is it they say when advertising the USA channel? Characters welcome!

Unhappy? Reject Your Loser Parents

I am borrowing this post today from John Shore at JohnShore.com . I would love to say “My good friend John Shore”, but alas I know him not. I’ve just been reading his stuff for a couple of years and following his growth on the internet. If the name sounds familiar, this is the same John Shore that let me give you his articles “Why Women Stay In Abusive Relationships” that there is a link to over on the right hand side.

The reason I am reprinting this is to sort of give us an understanding of some of the anger, etc. behind passive aggressiveness and maybe a new approach to helping the passive aggressive get past some of the childhood issues that turned him/her into the passive aggressive person you know today. Enjoy=)

“I believe the number one reason people are unhappy in life is because they refuse to believe that when they were kids their parents either didn’t love them, or loved them in a way that was so deeply tweaked it amounted to the same thing as not loving them.

It’s also my belief that the reason people refuse to accept the truth that when they were kids their parents treated them awfully is grounded in the fact that as very young children they instinctively grasped how terribly vulnerable their parents not loving them made them.

We spend the first years of our lives utterly dependent upon our parents for virtually everything we need to survive. If they don’t choose to give us what we need, we perish. I think that’s a basic fact of life that all humans understand pretty early into the big game o’ life.

And so children born to crappy parents do virtually the only thing they can do, which is to immediately, absolutely and without question convince themselves that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, their parents really are good, caring people who really do love them.

Having parents who really do love you = an outstanding chance of you surviving.

Having parents who obviously don’t love you = you probably won’t make it.

That’s not much of a choice, is it? And so most (and I would even argue all) children “decide” that, come hell or high water, their parents, no matter how much information they’re getting to the contrary, really do love them. In the choice between what is true, and what needs to be true, what needs to be true inevitably wins.

And so children born into unhappy families begin to build their lives upon a lie.

And as surely as one day follows the next, children who are forced to build their lives upon a truth they can’t possibly face turn into adults whose lives are built upon a truth they can’t possibly face. And so as adults people who had unhappy childhoods continue their suffering: they’re angry; they’re forever imagining themselves victims; they’re easily upset; their relationships don’t work. In short, they have no idea who they are. They don’t know who they are, because the core truth of who they are was lost in the lie they had to live — which is to say, very often, in the person they were essentially forced to become — in order to as effectively as possible deal with the threatening dynamics of their dysfunctional family life.

Adults who are lost and unhappy in life have a simple, terrible choice to make. They must either accept the fact that their parents didn’t love them — which is tantamount to utterly and completely rejecting their parents — or they must continue to live lost and unhappy lives.

They either toss their parents off their shoulders, or they continue to sink with their parents strapped to their back. That’s the choice waiting to be made by every adult who was raised in a psychologically unhealthy family.

And what people almost always choose is continuing to go down with their parents strapped to their back. And they make that “choice” for a perfectly understandable reason: it’s still in their mind — it’s still in their heart; it still defines the psychological paradigm of the only life they’ve ever known — that rejecting their parents means they themselves must be rejected. They’re continuing to operate within the context of their initial, original paradigm — and all too dearly paying the price for it.

If you are unhappy in life — if no matter what you do, say, think, or believe, you’re still dogged by this feeling that something fundamental just isn’t right with you or your life — then do yourself a favor, and give some thought to the idea that you have or had Genuinely Lousy parents. That maybe it’s not you. That maybe it’s them. That maybe it’s always been them.

That maybe the reason you’re so burdened is that you’re carrying around weight that doesn’t, or shouldn’t, belong to you.

If you’re regularly dogged by a sense of unhappiness or anxiety, just try on the thought that your parents were awful, that they were in no way emotionally or psychologically prepared to have children.

Go ahead. Give it a shot. In the privacy of your own mind, really reject your parents. Scream at them. Blame them. See them for the sorry, ill-equipped losers they were.

Banish them from your heart.

Walk away from them.

Let ‘em die.

It won’t kill you. I promise.

As the one and only Jesus put it, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

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As always, feel free to leave any comments. John has a lot of really good stuff on his blog. You can visit at JohnShore.com and now he’s also writing for the Huffington Post.

How Does Someone Become Passive Aggressive?

Isn't It So Sad?

How does someone become passive aggressive? Anyone who is involved with a passive aggressive has had to ask that question, among the many others, like “how can I help” or “how can I fix it” or “what in the Sam Hell did I do wrong?” “How do I cope with this?”

I am here to tell you I saw a prime example of how the men we love end up being the men we hate.

I had to take my mother to the hospital lab today to get some blood drawn. I thought we went at a time that there would be relatively few people. I forgot how many people are out of work these days and obviously are taking the time to make up all their blood work from the past. LOL. Anyway, this place was packed.

In the crowd I spied a young woman with two young boys, one I would say is probably about a year and a half, the other maybe 3 or 4. The oldest child was very good at entertaining himself, no gadgets, no reading a story to, he was extremely well behaved for such an environment and such a long wait. The young woman was with a man, who as I watched was not her husband but was evidently her father (now a-days you never know). He was holding the younger child who was going in to get his regular childhood “shots”.

In the time that I observed them, I would say that the older child 1) reached for the mother’s hand and was totally rejected. She completely withdrew her hand 2) He had begged for her attention after she had been holding the younger sibling and she rejected him a second time. She put on this “play” (like you would see in a theater)like she was too tired now. The child gave up, almost like he was used to this ploy.

A little while later, as the line progressed and we were moving closer to the front, the little boy went over to some strangers in the front of the line ahead of the grandpa. That caught her attention. She apologized to the people from the chair she was seated in, for her son disturbing them, and then called her son over by acting so sweet and clapping her hands for him.

He was on to her game! I watched as this darling little boy looked over at her, and proceeded to totally ignore her and keep his stance in line. You wonder where passive aggressive behavior comes from? It starts Here! This child at 4, maybe 5 years old is learning the passive aggressive game. Who is he learning it from? From at least one of his parents! This absolutely darling child that any one with any feeling would have wrapped up in a minute in your arms, was learning at the age of 4 how to be passive aggressive.

I hope this young mother learns “more better” before her children get to old.

It’s amazing where you find passive aggressiveness once you learn how to spot it. Feel free to leave your stories of what you’ve seen. When you see something like this, it’s a little easier to understand. Maybe not easier to live with, but easier to understand. LOL

Passive Aggressive And Hostile

A Little Hostile?

I’ve noticed my passive aggressive BF is getting a little hostile lately. I don’t know if he’s spending too much time sitting across the table from my passive aggressive mother or what, but he seems to be a little on the verge. On the verge of blowing up.

Anyone who has been with me very long knows I usually write about how passive a passive aggressive he is, but I can’t help noticing a change lately. He’s the kind of passive aggressive partner that everyone wonders how you got so lucky to have him. Even my kids stick up for him when I get on his case about being passive aggressive. He’s a “man’s man”, a woman’s dream, or so she thinks. Of course as is typical with a passive aggressive, the stuff I see at home they don’t know about. He’s so sweet, and I’m the one who’s out of control. That’s ok. I’m used to playing that part.

The other night in bed (that we only use for sleeping) I evidently rolled too far to his side and instead of just nudging me to get me over or waking me up a little and asking me to move over, he gave me quite the shove. I was so startled, I got out of bed immediately and just figured I would take a nap after he got up. I guess this is the new way of handling me taking up too much room since the last time I woke up to him having a swearing tyrade while sitting on the side of the bed, I confronted him. That had happened a few times. For one that usually is fairly good about his language, do you know how disconcerting it is to wake up to someone swearing their brains out in the middle of the night? LOL. I’ve told him for 10 years, all he has to do is nudge me a little and I’ll move. For 10 years he’s tried everything but that. I’ve been thinking of getting a hide-a-bed for the living room.

At times, in the typical passive aggressive fashion, the PA boyfriend can be very thoughtful. When I get a phone call, he automatically turns down the TV for me if we happen to be in the same room. The only problem is he never remembers to turn it back up when I’m done. I don’t usually sit in front of the TV as I never have the time. The other day I did it while having a quick lunch, got a call, he turned it down, went back to his crossword, and you would have thought I asked him if he could build the Taj Mahall when I asked him to turn it back up. He proceeds to tell me how he turned it down for me, I acknowledge how thoughtful that was and how good he always is about that, “but you don’t remember to turn it back up”. It ended up with me storming out of the room and telling him “now you can just mute the damn thing”.

He’s still not working. He does crosswords and soduko most of the day and usually cooks dinner (which that part is a good thing). You would not think someone would get so upset about turning the TV up. Yes People, for all my experience and words of wisdom on how to cop with the passive aggressiveand not let them get to you, I have my moments of letting my guard down, and that passive aggressive behavior just sneaks right in there and gets to me too. LOL.

We Made It Through Thanksgiving and…

everyone’s alive and well! That’s a good thing right? Dinner turned out beautifully as usual when the BF cooks, and of course their is never enough praise. The day before when I was cleaning the kitchen/diningroom for us to serve dinner, I had the CD player blaring and worked like crazy. Unfortunately my passive aggressive mother as she is, asked if I had the music loud enough. She can’t even hear it in her room. I told her she could either go back to her room and don’t bug me, or after 7 years of doing nothing she could clean and play the music however she liked. Needless to say she chose her room (she has a recliner and tv, etc. in there).

The son got in a fender bender Thanksgiving Day. That provided some excitement for the afternoon. He was driving his truck and his sisters were in his older sister’s car. Every Thanksgiving they go to see a movie in the afternoon while dinner cooks. Right at the end of our street as he was pulling out to the main street, he runs into the side of a Mercedes. Luckily no one was hurt. I’m not totally sure it was his fault. He said he looked both ways and the car wasn’t there when he looked. Come to find out they had pulled out of a driveway across the main street, and they very well may not have been there when he looked.  Thank goodness he’s been straight lately because they tested him and checked his eyes like 3 times.

His license has been suspended for an unpaid ticket, so they towed his vehicle which is impounded for 30 days. Needless to say he’ll never see that vehicle again. He only paid $500 for it and it needs a transmission etc. Not exactly worth the $1200 or $1400 it’s going to cost to get it out. I kept telling him just because nothing had happened didn’t mean nothing will. As usual, he thought I didn’t know what I was talking about. Guess he’ll rethink that now (I hope). The one good thing is he’s staying relatively clean and a job is looking a lot better to him now, but he has no transportation. I told him he better learn how to read a bus schedule. 

The people who own the Mercedes are a little pissed. He has no money and no insurance so if they want their car fixed they’re going to have to do it themselves. I don’t blame them for being upset. This is why I carry uninsured motorist insurance, and I drive an old junk car. LOL. Just because the law says everyone’s to have insurance doesn’t mean everyone does.