# Confrontational personality



## Chelly

Is anybody else here married to someone with an extremely confrontational personality? I am-- and it's driving me to the brink of leaving him. He seems to thrive on "getting into it" with other people.

Yesterday, alone:

--He starts off the day arguing politics on Facebook-- spends an hour of his time arguing back and forth with people. Relishes it. He frequently spends large chunks of the day in political arguments on Facebook.

--We go to the mall, and a woman bumps into him in a store. "EXCUSE ME???" he yells after her. She doesn't hear him. "Can you f-ing believe that?" he says to me. "She tried to push me out of the way." This woman is of an ethnic group that he routinely disparages as being rude people.

--We're backing out of a parking space at the mall, and the car behind us speeds up; in his mind, the driver is doing this to prevent us from backing up. "That f-ing *****," he says. Then as we are leaving the mall five minutes later, the car drives past us. "*****," he says again.

--We go to a game in which he's a league player, and he gets into an argument with one of his teammates' wives over how their kids are behaving at the game. 

--Driving home from the game, he becomes frustrated and angry with the car in front of us that is going under the speed limit during a huge rainstorm. He asks if I think he should pass the person-- I say no, because the visibility is almost zero.... a few minutes later, he passes the person and leans on the horn as we go by.

I don't know. I am just exhausted from his constant arguments and confrontations. He is always angry, always confronting... it is EXHAUSTING to be married to someone so full of anger...


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## Acorn

He sounds like one of the types of people I try very hard to keep out of my life.


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## Jellybeans

Chelly--I was married to someone like that. It becomes very exhausting.

Have you talked to him abou thow this makes you feel? Suggested marriage counselling? 

The problem is within him. He is the only one who can fix it. What you can do is call him out on his bad behavior and not take any crap from him if he takes it out on you.

Realize you are not the reason he is the way he is. It's his issue to deal with. 

How do I help my angry husband? | Ask the Therapist

Advice: My Angry Husband | Psychology Today


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## Lazarus

He needs to go to anger management classes. 

Used to know a co-worker who got angry at anything and everyone and he died of a heart attack. Probably angry at the time when it happened and no doubt angry (as opposed to shocked) at it happening too!


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## Halien

How do you think he would respond if one of the guys he yelled at stopped and called him on it?

I tell my kids often that they have to learn to just ignore people like him. Especially on the road, with road rage. I was a young man, and stood up to one who started insulting me when I accidentally bumped into him. The guy pulled out a gun. I thought he was going to shoot me, but the store manager pressed an alarm button and the guy bolted.

I only ask the earlier question because I wonder if most people who are confrontational just assume that people will take it. A vacation or trip to another part of the country can get people like this killed. Seriously, he is putting you at risk if he does this in your presence.


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## Chelly

Thanks, everyone.
He basically seems to cons
ider it a point of pride that he is like this. He always says, "I don't take anything from anyone." The problem is that he seems to seek out opportunities to get into confrontations or arguments. Road rage is definitely an issue-- though he would never admit it's road rage; he says he is always in control of himself. But if someone cuts him off in traffic, he will then tailgate the person, often at high speeds, and then pass him and flip him off. When he does this with me in the car, it is frightening, to say the least.

I separated from him briefly a couple of years ago, for this and other reasons -- mostly just his angry attitude at everything-- and he promised to go into therapy if I would come back and help him, but he did not.

I just never feel at peace.


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## Prodigal

I was married to your husband's twin brother. Mine was a classic narcissist - everybody else on Earth was an a-hole and wrong, while he alone was right and had all the answers. Heaven forbid if anyone accidentally bumped into him at the store! I clearly recall some kid, in a bunch of somewhat drunk kids, one New Year's Eve flipping my ex the bird as we drove by.

My ex was out of the car and had that kid flat on the ground in a second. Scared the heck out of me and the other kids. We could have been slapped with an assault suit if that teenage boy had gone home and told his parents what happened.

Yeah, I was married to one very angry, confrontational man. And I am forever grateful that I walked away for good from that nutcase.


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## Chelly

Prodigal said:


> I was married to your husband's twin brother. Mine was a classic narcissist - everybody else on Earth was an a-hole and wrong, while he alone was right and had all the answers. Heaven forbid if anyone accidentally bumped into him at the store! I clearly recall some kid, in a bunch of somewhat drunk kids, one New Year's Eve flipping my ex the bird as we drove by.
> 
> My ex was out of the car and had that kid flat on the ground in a second. Scared the heck out of me and the other kids. We could have been slapped with an assault suit if that teenage boy had gone home and told his parents what happened.
> 
> Yeah, I was married to one very angry, confrontational man. And I am forever grateful that I walked away for good from that nutcase.


What happened? How did you walk away? My problem is that I have way too much empathy; I worry how he would feel and how it would hurt him, and it keeps me here, even though logically, I can see how much happier I'd be on my own.

My husband definitely has narcissistic traits, but I don't think he fits the complete definition. He does demand/expect my undivided attention. If he is talking to me or showing something to me, and I turn away for a second because something else has distracted me, he will throw up his hands and walk out of the room. Or if I'm sitting on the couch reading a book while he's watching television, he will ask me repeatedly what is wrong. There's nothing wrong; I'm reading. But my attention is not focused on him, so he thinks something is wrong. He also calls me many times per day at work and doesn't seem to think anything of interrupting me even when I tell him I am busy...


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## Halien

Chelly said:


> Thanks, everyone.
> He basically seems to cons
> ider it a point of pride that he is like this. He always says, "I don't take anything from anyone." The problem is that he seems to seek out opportunities to get into confrontations or arguments. Road rage is definitely an issue-- though he would never admit it's road rage; he says he is always in control of himself. But if someone cuts him off in traffic, he will then tailgate the person, often at high speeds, and then pass him and flip him off. When he does this with me in the car, it is frightening, to say the least.
> 
> I separated from him briefly a couple of years ago, for this and other reasons -- mostly just his angry attitude at everything-- and he promised to go into therapy if I would come back and help him, but he did not.
> 
> I just never feel at peace.


That could've so easily been me if I hadn't made the decision to change. Prodigal is right - many are narcissistic, but some, like me, were from extreme insecurity. In my case, is was a fear from abandonment as a kid. You're husband does sound insecure, possibly.

In high school and college, fighting defined me. I looked for reasons. Through a series of events, I saw that I was exactly the person I hated. Before that, though, I just looked for excuses to pick fights with the guys from the rough crowd that my sister hung with, and then the frat boys in college. I thought of it as standing up for myself. It wasn't really a rage thing, and it didn't even matter if I didn't win the fight.

The important thing is that this insecurity and lack of real, mature self-confidence keeps your husband from ever living a life where he is at peace, I believe. He'll get old and more severe. If you leave, I'd offer that he may rewrite your history after a while. The story will change. You deserted him, when all he wanted in life was to make you feel protected.

Think of what he can accomplish if he would just channel that energy in a positive direction. 

This negativity becomes a part of your life, and that is the tragedy that he obviously misses. My grandmother was native american. At the point where I realized that I wanted to change, it was like all of my grandmother's sayings and warnings suddenly made sense. For the past twenty years, one of the most common things that friends say is that my calm seems so pervasive, they joke that I would sleep through a tornado or similar things. I think that you'll ultimately have to follow through with your earlier plan, and tell him that weekly therapy is the only way to keep you in his life.


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## Runs like Dog

My wife once browbeat a cop into writing an accident report for an accident that was clearly her fault changing it into the other person's fault while the other person just stood there slack jawed. I told her she should get a job at Gitmo.


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## Prodigal

Chelly said:


> My problem is that I have way too much empathy; I worry how he would feel and how it would hurt him, and it keeps me here, even though logically, I can see how much happier I'd be on my own.


I would suggest you get a copy of Melody Beattie's classic, Codependent No More. Your husband expresses no empathy for you; in fact, he is irritated if you are not making him the center of attention. Believe me, you DO have a narcissist on your hands, and they're not known for being particularly nice people when they're demands are not met.



Chelly said:


> He does demand/expect my undivided attention. If he is talking to me or showing something to me, and I turn away for a second because something else has distracted me, he will throw up his hands and walk out of the room. Or if I'm sitting on the couch reading a book while he's watching television, he will ask me repeatedly what is wrong. There's nothing wrong; I'm reading. But my attention is not focused on him, so he thinks something is wrong. He also calls me many times per day at work and doesn't seem to think anything of interrupting me even when I tell him I am busy...


This IS a narcissist in action. Classic.

I got sick and tired of being sick and tired. My ex was always "falling short" of cash to pay his own bills. So, one Sunday evening he demanded I hand over $800 of my paycheck. Told him $400 was my highest offer, take it or leave it. He didn't take it.

As he was blocking my way out the door, by threatening me (he had an unregistered handgun in his study, BTW) that I either hand over the $800 or not take my beloved cat with me, I told him to kill me and get it over with. I was so angry at him, I honestly didn't care if he blew my brains out. And my anger scared him. Suddenly, I was no longer in victim-mode. 

"All this for a cat??" you may ask. Yes. I had given this creep my time, my love, my money, and gotten a few bruises in return. I wasn't going to let him have MY cat, who was just about a year old at that time. I knew if I came back the next day, the cat would be gone. 

So that's it. The big showdown. He grabbed my car door as I was fighting my way into my car (with cat in hand). I managed to get the car started, even though he was fighting me for the keys. I floored it, throwing him to the ground. Three days later, I was in court getting a restraining order. I kicked his butt out of the house, had the movers come in to pack up my stuff, and didn't look back.

Sounds like pulp fiction, but it's really what happened. I don't take that type of treatment from men any longer, nor do I feel "empathy" for narcissists. They are a dangerous species, IMO.


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