Blog Post
Have You Ever Seen Contentiousness in Love, Work or Leadership? - Part 1
4/4/2025
Are You or Someone You Know Contentious? Here's 21 Ways To Check
1) Contentiousness defined: Words like feisty, anxious, testing, grouchy, critical, perfectionistic, blaming, shaming, hostile, opinionated, quarrelsome, argumentative, and nagging all help to describe this problem.
2) People who struggle with this issue may have a lot of anxiety as both children and adults.
3) Contentious people usually repel others, and this may come from an unconscious fear of closeness, vulnerability, and or inferiority.
4) Sometimes, contentious people major in the minors, starting fights over minor points of fact, doctrine, opinions, or other people’s behavior.
5) Blaming is a big symptom in contentious people. This is usually a result of feeling lonely and unsuccessful as well as having so much hurt, shame, anxiety, or anger at themselves on board that it spills over onto others.
6) Some women will frequently express anger through contentiousness: Some men do, too, but may either act out angrily, act out sexually, or act passive-aggressively.
7) Contentious people believe, at a deep level, that others are responsible for their lives, happiness, and or emotions.
8) Believing that they are unloved or unloveable, contentious people think they must test others, especially those close to them, to ensure they won’t leave, get too close, or somehow fail to love them.
9) A contentious person is much more likely to live by anxiety, shame, fear, or hate than by faith, love, grace, and truth.
10) In reality, a contentious person’s hate, blame, criticism, and testing are really about how they see themselves, not others.
11) Acting contentious is a way of testing other people to see if the contentious person is loved