Like those who sabotage their lives and relationships with passive aggression, those of you afflicted by this dishonest spirit also lack the courage to get real about what is really driving the pain and problems in your relationship.  But as opposed to passive aggression, what you do here is to give your partner overt misdirection signals at almost every turn with regard to how you are feeling or what is important to you.

In this self-defeating menagerie of smoke and mirrors, you contaminate your relationship by hiding the real agenda and instead substitute superficial but safe topics to talk or argue about.  You criticize one thing about your partner when you're really upset about another.  One partner may nag the other partner, for example, for being too overbearing as a hostess because he feels inadequate socially and is jealous of her social success.  Or you could seem very excited about doing one thing when it's all a ruse to keep from doing something else.  For example, a partner acts inexplicably interested in taking a walk through the neighborhood when in truth he or she is trying to kill time so as not to have to sit quietly with the other partner or have a sexual interaction.

The result is utter emotional confusion.  What is real never gets voiced, and what gets voiced is never real.  When you deceptively control the perceptions of your partner, you make your partner spend untold energy trying to solve a problem that is nothing more than a decoy---a decoy that is set up because you lack the strength to get real about what matters.  Operating on a hidden agenda is bad for both partners.

These are some warning signs that you can use to determine whether or not the hidden agenda is part of your relationship:

• Your interactions constantly focus on superficial and trivial topics.

• Your interactions that begin to approach the real issues are disrupted by anger, abrupt changes of subject, or withdrawal.

• You tend to talk passionately about the problems of other people that mirror what is really bothering you, but when confronted, you deny its relevance.

• You find yourself becoming very defensive if your partner directly asks you if there is anything bothering you.

• You are a master of defensiveness.  You always know how to direct attention away from yourself if the questions get too personal.  You're so good at self-protection that if someone asks you, "Why were you later yesterday?" you have five ready answers.  ("I wasn't late, and besides, it was raining.")

That's where you're wrong.  Perhaps the most devastating result of partners who operate on hidden agendas is that the real issues eventually burst forth in a torrid way.  Do you remember how in the last chapter I talked about "cumulative reactions"?  Each time a frustration is experienced yet suppressed, the associated emotional energy does not go away.  It just gets stored up.  And like a balloon that gets too much air, that frustration will explode.  If you operate on a hidden agenda, you'll find yourself exploding in response to some seemingly trivial event.  The magnitude of that response will leave your partner bewildered, angered and certainly cautious about any future disagreement.  The level of trust in your relationship will plummet.  The hidden agenda may seem to protect you from having to deal with a dangerous truth, but in fact it does nothing but compounds it.  If you hide inside a hidden agenda, you still have an appointment with pain---pain that grows in intensity each time it is suppressed.