By 
Living with a passive aggressive husband is a very disconcerting experience. You are fighting the shadows, and it may take you a long time to realize the true nature of the relationship. By “fighting the shadows”, we want to convey the meaning that you never have a concrete, real and constant obstacle. Because it’s based on an emotional resistance to intimacy, it gets the full range of denial, avoidance, silence, and every form of “not really being here with you” it can muster.
This style of communication is usually perceived by the victim as in this case:
“My husband never says my name, he doesn’t acknowledge my presence, he never gives me any compliments or voluntary help or information. He rarely asks me a question of any kind, or God forbid, inquires about my wants, needs, feelings.” , etc.”
The wife’s experience is one of emotional abandonment, including the rejection of any intimacy. Her safest moves are often related to the basics of shared life: food, household items, the weather, car trouble.
What is missing here? the very heart of marriage, which is a level of openness and intimacy: the ability to connect with intangibles like feelings, perceptions, and dreams.
“He has severed almost all connections between us and is not involved in our marriage relationship. He never drinks, smokes, yells or hits me, but I prefer that he does, so I can know what’s inside him…”
WHAT IS PASSIVE AGGRESSION?
Passive aggression is caused by a person’s learned and deep-seated fear of expressing their anger directly at the one (in this case their spouse) who is wronging them, having to resort to covert abuse to express their frustration and anger.
The passive aggressive person is a master at covert abuse. Covert abuse is subtle and is veiled or disguised by actions that appear to be accidental. A passive-aggressive personality involves a range of “resistance” behaviors, from innocuously dropping things or seeming to forget tasks, to outright task procrastination.
It can escalate to outright sabotage, in which case we recognize that there is a passive aggressor’s intent to get back at their partner without that person being able to acknowledge their underlying anger or do anything to resolve it.
Passive-aggressive people have an ax to grind with regard to past situations in which their right to anger was not allowed to surface. Probably in their family of origin there were threats of abandonment or any other punishment that prevented them from being honest with their feelings, so they never learned to be able to express them in the most appropriate way.
Now, as adults, their goal is to resist work, marriage and other social demands, because they identify them as coming from the hated enemy of their past: such as parents and authority figures. This unresolved anger issue, a holdover from your past, is now played out daily against unsuspecting partners: bosses, spouses, parents, teachers, or anyone with power or authority.
AP husbands enjoy here and now frustrating their spouse, seen as a “stand-in” or replacement for the authority figures of their past. Either spouse can assume the role of absentee parent, teacher, or teacher, unknowingly “invited” to participate in this game while he thinks he is instead in a cooperative partnership of equals.
A passive aggressive husband can drive his wife into a state of madness and confusion, but he seems genuinely dismayed when confronted with her behavior. Due to her own lack of understanding of her feelings, the passive-aggressive person often feels that other people are misunderstanding her or holding her to unreasonable standards when they confront her about her behavior.
What are possible strategies for handling a passive aggressive husband?
There are three types of strategy you can choose to deal with the Palestinian Authority:
a) May decide to put severe limits on his behavior in an oppositional way, which risks an all-out war (he will escalate into isolation, extreme silence, leave the house, slam doors, deny affection and sexual intimacy, and grow emotionally detached and resentful) and divorce;
b) You can support his need for his problem to be understood: you can see him as a person who is using old and outdated defense mechanisms (“playing dead with his own emotions; denying anger; accepting to belong”, etc.) a new different situation (marriage) that addresses him as an adult, on a temporary basis. He needs to realize that he is now in a different situation.
In this case, it is good to have a clear deadline to review the situation and plan improvements periodically and incrementally.
c) Find a way to balance the need to protect yourself from his real aggression, with a compassionate attitude towards his immature feelings. You will have to accept the loneliness of a single father who has to raise a family with little support and without company and without hoping for the best.
This acceptance has to be temporary or there is a very real risk: being in a long-term marriage supported by an unconscious treatment: she fears loneliness, so she stays, and he can be who he is forever, denying the passage of time. time and the fact that people (eventually) mature with age.
IN CONCLUSION:
The PA husband is fighting the wrong war: he is defending himself here and now against his father’s/mother’s perceived intrusion into his inner self and does not see you, his partner, as a different person in a different cooperative relationship;
He can’t distinguish between different types of humans and different types of relationships, so his reaction is always like he’s in the past, having to protect himself from that person who oppressed him. The tragedy is that now that person is the person who claims to love…
How do you make him understand that you are NOT that person from his past and that your marriage is NOT the concentration camp that he imagines it to be? You need a lot of support from family and friends, a lot of learning about the different aspects of this behavior, and convincing yourself that you are worth a lot, regardless of their lack of appreciation or connection with you.