Prideful women tend to operate in a covert or overt manner.
The overt prideful woman is easier to identify because her behaviors are flamboyant and obvious. Overt pride manifests in aggressive and obvious behaviors. Such behaviors may leave you feeling small, less manly, and insignificant.
While the covert woman‘s behaviors are hidden and hard to explain. This makes it hard to identify her level of pride because her behavior is passive-aggressive and subtle. These behaviors may leave you feeling crazy and thinking you’re being over sensitive.
What are the causes of pride?
Here are a few of the underlying causes and signs of a prideful wife:
- Trying to fix everything: A prideful wife believes she has all the answers and can do everything better than others. This may stem from a fear which causes her to control. Or she may feel powerful when she has control and when she’s better than others.
- Fear of humility: Women that struggle with pride might be afraid to ask for help. Asking for help might open her up to being harmed by others.
- Fear of Vulnerability: A prideful woman might fear being weak because she is afraid of being mistreated. Love is a risk and not everyone is comfortable with the potential to be hurt.
- Low self-esteem: Pride is a mask that insecure women wear. If she pretends everything is perfect and that you’re the problem, then she won’t have to feel small, insecure, and weak.
- Impossible standards of perfection: Prideful woman want to do everything right. They may be obsessed with perfection and have a hard time hearing they did something wrong. They may need to blame things on others to feel better.
- Know It All: a prideful woman may think they know everything and have a hard time listening to opposing opinions.
16 Signs You Have A Prideful Wife
It’s important to approach the signs she has too much pride with caution and not jump to conclusions. These signs can be indicative of pride, but they can also be indicative of other issues within a relationship.
- Your wife blames you for all the problems in the relationship and is unable to see her own faults.
- She never admits to being wrong, even when it’s clear that she is.
- She manipulates and controls situations to get what she wants.
- She’s defensive and doesn’t listen well when you try to express your feelings.
- She tries to get others on her side to manipulate you into doing what she wants.
- She constantly points out your shortcomings and makes you feel inadequate.
- When you try to change for the better, she finds more things to criticize and belittle you for.
- She always plays the victim, never taking responsibility for her actions.
- She thinks you’re lucky to be with her, but fails to see how she benefits from the relationship.
- She seems to be in competition with you, always trying to one-up you.
- She uses her social status, physical appearance, career title, or material possessions to assert her superiority over you.
- She believes that she has all the answers and no one else does.
- She doesn’t respect you or your opinions. If she doesn’t agree with you, she belittles or invalidates your point of view.
- She believes that you exist to make her feel loved and validated, rather than as a partner in a mutually fulfilling relationship.
- She belittles your accomplishments, and resorts to name-calling and insults.
- She overly focuses on what people think and does things to impress or please others.
Here are 38 Signs other signs of pride in a person.
How to Deal With A Prideful Wife
Being involved with a prideful woman can be very tricky. Generally, women are seen as the victims in difficult relationships, so this can cause the man to look guilty immediately. In addition, being with a prideful woman can be even more complicated because she may not know she’s operating in pride. Her lack of behavioral awareness maybe due to a blindspot.
1. Identify the problem
Take a moment to identify what your wife’s behaviors are and when they occur. This will help you recognize patterns in her behavior and feel less confused. Additionally, trying to understand her behaviors will help you seek effective support to deal with the problems.
- Pay Attention: Watch how your wife acts in different situations.
- Stay Open-Minded: Don’t assume things, just observe without judging.
- Take Notes: Write down when you notice certain odd behaviors.
- Remember When: Note the times when these behaviors happen.
- Look for Repeats: Check if the same behaviors happen again and again.
- Think About Why: Consider if there’s anything that triggers these behaviors.
- Stick to Facts: Focus on what you actually see, not what you think it means.
- Notice More: Watch for these behaviors happening more than once.
2. Communicate with your wife
When you’re ready, have a talk with your wife. Tell her you’ve noticed some things and you want to understand her better so both of you can grow.
When you talk to your wife, remember good communication matters. Share your feelings honestly and kindly, and listen to what she says. Make sure you’re not attacking or being unkind. Check if your own pride might be making things harder. If you did something wrong, it’s okay to apologize – it can help both of you understand each other better.
Also, pay attention to how she acts and talks. Be cautious if she starts saying hurtful things or blaming you for everything without considering your feelings. Watch out for these signs to keep the conversation on track.
3. Trust yourself
Your wife may change the way events or things you said happened (distort reality) based on her level of pride. She may be unaware of her behavior, unwilling to change, and/or unable to see the truth. The truth might be too painful for her to hear. She may bring up everything you’ve done wrong.
Your wife may have an exaggerated view of her abilities or accomplishments, or she may minimize her mistakes or shortcomings. She may twist facts and events to fit her own version of reality and deny the reality of others. For example, she may deny making hurtful comments and/or blame you for her mistakes. Her distortions may lead to confusion, misunderstandings, and conflicts in your relationship.
Essentially, she may use manipulation, control, dominance, lying, blame-shifting, a victim mentality, gas-lighting, abuse, and other toxic strategies to deal with the situation.
4. Seek professional help
If your wife doesn’t see how she is adding to the relational problems then it’s time to seek outside help. Seeking individual and couple’s counseling is ideal. Essentially, you both need your own therapists to help address how you are adding to the problem. Then a couple’s counselor will help you both work together to address the problems.
Professional help can provide valuable insight into the root causes of your relationship conflicts. It’s possible that your partner’s isn’t struggling with pride, but may be frustrated with your behavior, which may have caused her to lose trust and respect of you. In this case, couple’s counseling can help address these underlying issues and work towards restoring your partner’s confidence in you.
5. Be Humble
It may be difficult to help your wife recognize her pride if you’re struggling with your own pride. You need to make sure that you’re not simply blaming your significant other for everything that’s going wrong in your relationship without considering your own contribution to the problem.
If you can’t identify any areas where you could improve or recognize any of your own negative behaviors, it’s possible that you have a blind spot when it comes to your own pride. It’s important to be honest with yourself and examine your own behavior, even if it’s uncomfortable or difficult to do so. Remember that thinking you’re more emotionally mature than your wife can also be a sign of pride.
Am I Prideful Quiz:
Take this pride test to find out if you are struggling with pride.
What are blindspots?
When we enter into a relationship, it’s easy to assume that we know ourselves and our partners well. However, we eventually realize that everyone has their unique way of thinking, behaving, and communicating.
Good Therapy defines a blind spot as an area where a person fails to exercise judgment, awareness, or perspective. In a relationship, a blind spot can refer to any area that a person fails to recognize as impacting their relationship either negatively or as a needed growth area.
The challenge with blind spots is that they can lead to communication difficulties and heated arguments. The issue is we often don’t know when we are operating from a blind spot. Instead, we tend to blame the other person and focus on their wrongs because we aren’t able to see our unhealthy behaviors accurately. Many of us have grown up seeing our unhealthy behaviors, so we subconsciously view them as normal. Seeking the help of a therapist can assist in identifying blind spots and addressing unhealthy behaviors in a relationship.
Most of us have grown up seeing our unhealthy behaviors, so we subconsciously find it NORMAL.
What are the causes of blindspot?
To reduce the negative effects of blind spots, we must learn to accept that we don’t know everything, that our behaviors affect others differently, and that we always have room for growth. This mindset shift can dramatically improve our relationships. Here are 7 causes of blind spots:
1. People are unique and think differently: Our cultures, age, income bracket, intellect, gender, family trauma, childhood experiences, and other differences affect how we communicate and how we perceive what others communicate.
2. Unhealthy behaviors: Our way of coping with emotions can be unhealthy if we have never learned healthy tools. Unfortunately, some people don’t know that they are using unhealthy tools, and they think it’s normal and okay to communicate with toxic strategies.
3. Emotional needs: you may want to feel loved, safe, and support, but you don’t know how to get your needs met in the right way. This can cause us to throw a childlike tantrum to force our partner to appease us. Withdrawal, numbing, and avoidance are also unhealthy coping mechanisms.
4. Un-forgiveness: if you are still harboring anger towards someone you will interpret everything the other person is saying or doing from an emotionally charged perspective. And your partner can hear the unforgiveness in your words and behavior! I know it’s hard, but if you want healthy relationships you have to let go of whatever you’re holding against them or YOURSELF!
5. Lack of vulnerability: Some people may retreat when it’s time to be vulnerable because of their fear of abandonment and insecurities. Opening your heart up and sharing yourself with another person can be scary, however it’s important to remember that honesty is not the same as vulnerability. Vulnerability involves acknowledging and confronting our fears and trusting someone despite the risk of rejection or hurt. However, it’s crucial to recognize that vulnerability should not be shared with individuals who have a history of abusive behavior.
6. Overwhelming emotions: whenever we communicate from a place of pain or heightened emotions it will spill out into everything we are doing. For instance, if someone feels they’re always getting in trouble at work then they may feel their spouse is picking on them. Or a person that feels misunderstood might get angry when their partner doesn’t acknowledge their hard work.
7. Romantic Expectations: the purpose of a relationship isn’t about making you feel loved and pumping up your self-esteem. What if the purpose of a relationship is having a companion and teammate to tackle life with? What if we weren’t meant to be perfect before a relationship? What if we just have to be humble enough to allow someone to see us in our mess? And what if we had enough unconditional love to love someone in their mess?
8. Lack of wisdom or maturity: you can communicate all you want, but if the other person doesn’t understand it won’t be effective. Sometimes we can’t understand a perspective of someone that has gone through something different than us. It takes maturity to acknowledge that understanding others requires listening and being open to new perspectives. Also it takes maturity to realize we can’t understand someone else.
9. Pride: there will be communication issues when someone thinks they know everything and there isn’t anything to learn.
Everyone has blindspots, including myself! That’s why it’s important for couples to work on creating a safe, patient, and kind environment to explore unknown parts of theirselves.
Nathan
This was powerful and I needed it. I plan to do my best from here on out! In Jesus name.
Christina
Amen! I’m glad this helped Nathan. I’m praying for you!
Joseph
A powerful write up. Am really passing through a lot with my wife and I believe it’s pride of getting more money, more influence and talking to many more female and male friends. Really difficult for me. I really pick something from here . Thanks
Christina
Wow! I’m very sorry this is happening. Here are some prayers that may help?
https://www.adornedheart.com/prayer-against-pride-2/
I also prayed for your situation!
And, Thanks for stopping by.