“I don’t understand it,” she moans to me. “He seems to bring out the monster in me. He’s so good, I can’t stand it. He keeps wanting me to do meditation with him, implying that if I just calmed down, things would be alright. He thinks everything’s my fault—that I’m hysterical, and that’s why we have problems. If I yell at him, he just looks at me with a sad expression, like he’s thinking, ‘Why, God, have I been burdened with such a witch?’ When I complain that he isn’t interested in sex, he says maybe he would be if I weren’t so sarcastic to him. He always passes the buck back to me. I can’t stand him! I want to strangle him! I want him to disappear! I hate him! He disgusts me!”
What happens in such a case is that the husband is disowning his own aggression and projecting it onto the wife: “I don’t hate her. I’m not a hateful person. It is she who is the hateful person.” However, he passive-aggressively provokes hateful feelings in her by frustrating her. This is all the more galling because he is doing that while appearing to be nice. The passive is an individual—and, as we have said, it can be a woman as well as a man—who has a rigid ideal image that must be lived up to at all costs. This person must not harbor any hateful thoughts and must always be right and good. The passive husband in our example was convinced that he felt only love for his wife, and that if only she would calm down, everything would be dandy.
*43/196/1*
