Your Attitude Is Showing: A Primer of Human Relations, Tenth Edition

Avoid Self-Victimizing

We must all learn to live with frustrating experiences without becoming verbally aggressive on the job, without damaging our relations with others, and without victimizing ourselves.

Aggressive behavior resulting from inner disturbances and hostilities takes many strange forms. It’s not always physical or verbal. It may be passive. In extreme cases, passive aggression takes the form of silence. Deliberate silence. Planned silence.

Silence on the part of the person who has been frustrated is a most potent weapon. Nothing is more uncomfortable to your fellow workers than your silence. Nothing destroys relations faster. No one can interpret your silence. All anyone can do is to leave you alone and wait. But it is uncomfortable ...