One for the fool in Philadelphia
Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder doesn't exist. Officially. It is just a fancy-dan label applied by people who need to sound smarter than they are to individuals who would more efficiently and effectively described as 'a pain in the arse'.
But as a meaningless assemblage of attributes of someone suffering a non-existent condition, that list is compelling.
In my struggle to articulate the challenge of living with the Fat Bastard I have focussed on the absence of any sense of responsibility towards or respect for himself or others, the lack of self-discipline, the lack of ambition, the lack of common sense. The manifestations of this non-adult state include the lying, the deceit, the poor academic and employment records, the financial crises and the narrow stagnant social circle.
One site I found cited alcohol abuse as a recognised 'complication'. There's no doubt he consumes too much alcohol too frequently.
Anyway he dealt with me saying NO (repeatedly, firmly and unambiguously) to B going away on camp in text book fashion. The day before the start date he turned up at work to tell me that "he'd got the dates mixed up and it starts tomorrow". This is the thing I'd said NO to in January and in May. This is the thing his mother cooked up in the first place and took it upon herself to book MY daughter on to. No information provided, no research conducted, no preliminary visit, no personal endorsements or recommendations from anyone I know and I was being expected to send MY eight year old only child off for a week.
Me saying no had meant fuck-all as I'd pretty much expected all along. But the day before the start of this camp I found myself confronted by a determined father (quite determined to take absolutely no account of my point of view, that is) and the child he's told will be going away to camp for a week on the following day.
The following day we took our daughter in to London and put her onto a coach at Victoria in the company of a small group of people about whom I knew absolutely nothing. God help me. I didn't eat for four days, not sick with worry about B because the odds always were that she'd be fine (and she is), but sick with anger at myself and my predicament and my continued inability to extricate myself and put this sort of thing behind me.
His argument is that by me saying NO I'm taking no account of his feelings - as though there's some equivalence between my concerns and his determination to fall in with his mother's plan. In essence he trusted his mother to have found out about a perfectly safe holiday camp. He didn't visit it, check up on it in any other way.
We circled around one another for the entire week. Others at work knew of my feelings and to them he conceded that I was still in 'a bad mood' if asked. Towards the end of the week he got sick of me continuing to feed my anger and decamped to his mate's house (it has several advantages over ours such as 500 channels of porn, a serious stereo system and the music collection to go with it).
My repeated demands that he finally pull his finger out and clean up his room have fallen on deaf ears and it is this behaviour specifically that got me exploring the passive-aggressive behaviour and led me to see that this is a pattern that fits not only his life since we met but all his adult life, based on what I know of it.
The question a counsellor might ponder at this point is whether recognising the pattern of behaviour could constitute a first step towards recovery - not of me but of the marriage. And the answer to that is no. The lies and the thieving and the squalor might all be part of a syndrome with an established and recognised label but they're still corrosive behaviours and I'm still holed below the waterline.
If as the 'perts have it this condition is something that responds to treatment then I advise the Fool in Philly to put him in therapy pronto should he ever take up her offer to resettle in the States.
Oh and by the way the shafting me over the holiday camp mentioned above is the piece of bastardry to which I've been referring frequently over the past twelve days but not been able to deal with directly. So that's that done now.
But as a meaningless assemblage of attributes of someone suffering a non-existent condition, that list is compelling.
In my struggle to articulate the challenge of living with the Fat Bastard I have focussed on the absence of any sense of responsibility towards or respect for himself or others, the lack of self-discipline, the lack of ambition, the lack of common sense. The manifestations of this non-adult state include the lying, the deceit, the poor academic and employment records, the financial crises and the narrow stagnant social circle.
One site I found cited alcohol abuse as a recognised 'complication'. There's no doubt he consumes too much alcohol too frequently.
Anyway he dealt with me saying NO (repeatedly, firmly and unambiguously) to B going away on camp in text book fashion. The day before the start date he turned up at work to tell me that "he'd got the dates mixed up and it starts tomorrow". This is the thing I'd said NO to in January and in May. This is the thing his mother cooked up in the first place and took it upon herself to book MY daughter on to. No information provided, no research conducted, no preliminary visit, no personal endorsements or recommendations from anyone I know and I was being expected to send MY eight year old only child off for a week.
Me saying no had meant fuck-all as I'd pretty much expected all along. But the day before the start of this camp I found myself confronted by a determined father (quite determined to take absolutely no account of my point of view, that is) and the child he's told will be going away to camp for a week on the following day.
The following day we took our daughter in to London and put her onto a coach at Victoria in the company of a small group of people about whom I knew absolutely nothing. God help me. I didn't eat for four days, not sick with worry about B because the odds always were that she'd be fine (and she is), but sick with anger at myself and my predicament and my continued inability to extricate myself and put this sort of thing behind me.
His argument is that by me saying NO I'm taking no account of his feelings - as though there's some equivalence between my concerns and his determination to fall in with his mother's plan. In essence he trusted his mother to have found out about a perfectly safe holiday camp. He didn't visit it, check up on it in any other way.
We circled around one another for the entire week. Others at work knew of my feelings and to them he conceded that I was still in 'a bad mood' if asked. Towards the end of the week he got sick of me continuing to feed my anger and decamped to his mate's house (it has several advantages over ours such as 500 channels of porn, a serious stereo system and the music collection to go with it).
My repeated demands that he finally pull his finger out and clean up his room have fallen on deaf ears and it is this behaviour specifically that got me exploring the passive-aggressive behaviour and led me to see that this is a pattern that fits not only his life since we met but all his adult life, based on what I know of it.
The question a counsellor might ponder at this point is whether recognising the pattern of behaviour could constitute a first step towards recovery - not of me but of the marriage. And the answer to that is no. The lies and the thieving and the squalor might all be part of a syndrome with an established and recognised label but they're still corrosive behaviours and I'm still holed below the waterline.
If as the 'perts have it this condition is something that responds to treatment then I advise the Fool in Philly to put him in therapy pronto should he ever take up her offer to resettle in the States.
Oh and by the way the shafting me over the holiday camp mentioned above is the piece of bastardry to which I've been referring frequently over the past twelve days but not been able to deal with directly. So that's that done now.
posted by Enyo @ 9:33 am
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