Mulling

I've been thinking about starting another blog - one about living with a passive-aggressive spouse.  I've looked and looked and can find few blogs about this topic, and the ones I have found are authored by life coaches and psychologists - and there's certainly nothing wrong with that, but my experience has been that those who have gone through living with a personality-disordered person are much more likely to understand it on the cellular level.  And that's what I need and want - real input from real people who've been through the real thing.

Then I realized that many of us who were raised by N's married people who were in some way familiar - we weren't worthy of true love, we'd been conditioned to take care of people, we didn't expect anything from relationships except hurt and pain.  And there you have it - the passive-aggressive is the perfect choice for someone with those criteria!  Like N's, passive-aggressives don't show their true colors at first - in my case, things were going pretty well until the children arrived (OK, I had by then realized that he wasn't at all in touch with his emotions, that he had to have his own way or he'd go even more silent and pout, and that he didn't seem to like women.  Hmph.  After being raised by wolves, this wasn't all that bad....)  But after the children were born, he seemed to feel that they were competition for him - mostly, I think, because I was no longer HIS mother - I was THEIR mother.

Our arguments generally revolved around him appearing to believe I was his mother - I was to take care of him, interpret life for him, identify his feelings for him, etc.  My most frequent line was, "I am NOT your mother!"   But he, unfortunately, became his father, a textbook example of a passive-aggressive.  And I stayed for decades with a man who just honestly  could not express or receive love, whose idea of intimacy was hand-holding - and even that appeared to be "dangerous" at times- whose only real emotions seem to be simmering anger and "blankness" (I'm not sure that qualifies as an emotion, but it's certainly one of his states of being...).

All this to say that having been raised by narcissists, OF COURSE I married a passive-aggressive!  He didn't rage, did he?  He seemed to be a deep thinker - this turned out not to be true - he was often just pouting or blank...  Aack.  My young self was pretty stupid (I know, I know - "conditioned"), but my mature self stayed and kept hoping that he could change, that he could start to actually feel emotions other than this simmering anger, that he might some day love me - sound familiar???  And the very saddest thing?  I still love him - or perhaps I love the idea of what might have been if he had been brave enough to actually look at himself and realize that life offered so much more than this perpetual need to be loved by his mother/mother substitute.

So I'm going to continue here - it seems all of a piece.  If you've been reading this blog, you know that my spouse is now in care - the perfect storm of dementia and passive-aggressive behavior became way too much for me to deal with.  Since he can't listen to me, but often does the exact opposite of what I say,  I can no longer keep him safe in the world.     I had a homebirth, I homeschooled, and I'd anticipated home care for him until he dies - but both disorders are getting worse and worse.  Not surprisingly, I suppose, since he's left our home, my stress levels have gone way down, I'm more relaxed and happier than I've ever been, and I'm loving my life again.  I thought I'd feel guilty, but having worked through all the NFOO nonsense, I'm not feeling guilty at all!  He made a lot of bad choices early on and could never gather the courage to change.  It's sad, but it can't be my sadness.