Sometimes the people around us, including our close family, friends, and colleagues, make us feel uncomfortable, but we don’t know exactly why. For example, his colleague may not greet him in the hallway for the third time in a week. You make yourself believe that it is probably a slip, but you feel that something is wrong.
If this happens frequently with one or more people in your life, you may be dealing with a passive-aggressive behaviorwhich is much more hard to detect that a behavior openly aggressive.
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Passive aggressiveness, as the word implies, is a tendency to engage in indirect expression of hostility through acts such as subtle insults, surly behavior, stubbornness, or deliberate failure in carrying out the required tasks.
Because the behavior passive-aggressive is implicit or indirectcan be hard to detecteven when you feel the psychological consequences.
To help you identify this type of behavior, I’ve outlined five examples below. These are not all the ways a person can be passive-aggressive, but are the most common.
(Although passive-aggressive behavior can occur in all walks of life and be committed by people of any gender, for simplicity I describe here the case of a passive-aggressive male colleague.)
1. The silent treatment.
In its standard form, the silent treatment consists in to ignore completely to another person, refusing to answer any questions from the person and maybe even Refuse to acknowledge his presence. This kind of silent treatment is not especially passive-aggressive, since it is very explicit.
But there are more subtle ways a person can give you the silent treatment. For example, you may «accidentally» I didn’t recognize him in the hallway at work. It just happens randomly, so you’re having trouble knowing if it’s deliberate or accidental. The same can happen in meetings or during other interactions.
Your colleague may intentionally ignore your comments, but do so inconsistently, so you really you can’t tell if it’s deliberate or not.
2. Subtle insults.
Most of us recognize when we are openly insulted. But subtle insults can be harder to recognize for what they are. A colleague he can pretend he’s paying you a compliment, but when he gets a chance to think about it, he realizes it’s actually a compliment. insult in disguise.
For example, you deliver a report to your boss. He reads it and tells you that you did a good job (a compliment), but then adds that the report was «almost as good as Jamie’s(a subtle insult).
A subtle insult can also consist of a reference hide or semi-hide your weakest points.
Let’s say a colleague got his degree from Princeton and you got yours from (the fictitious) Miami Beach Junior College. If your colleague frequently does Irrelevant references to where you got your degree, and hints that it’s not a good school, is likely a subtle insult.
3. Sullen behavior.
It’s awkward being around people who are subtly grumpy, moody, gloomy, bitter, or moody.
It’s almost as bad as being around people who behave like this explicitly. For example, a person, if they feel like responding to you, may choose to respond to your comment, question, or innocent comment in a slightly negative.
a sullen person won’t smile, even when a colleague tells a joke and the rest of the office roars with laughter.
People exhibiting surly behavior may subtly complain about everything around them, making everyone in the workplace feel uncomfortable and sad without really knowing why they feel that way.
4. Stubbornness.
Being stubborn can be a beneficial personality trait in some situations, especially when it matters take a stand and hold it. But sometimes stubbornness is just a way to punish someone.
The indirectly stubborn person normally he will defend his position or point of view rigorously and you’ll have good arguments, so you can’t just dismiss what you’re saying on the basis of a lack of reasoning.
At the same time, it is clear that you defend your position only because you know that it will anger you, others and everyone who will have to listen to you.
5. Not completing required tasks.
Most of us are familiar with stubborn children. When children reach a certain age, the terrible two, the teenagers or at some other time during the childhood or adolescence, they refuse to do what they are told. But children are children.
It is less easy to understand when an adult behaves this way.
You may have a colleague who almost always finds a way to avoid tasks you need to complete. They leave all the responsibility to others or take on a task and then they don’t finish it on time.
If this is the result of work-related stress, problems at home, or a procrastinating personality, then it might not be a case of passive-aggressive behavior. But if it is frequent and not obviously attributable to independent external factors, it may be deliberate and count as passive-aggressive behavior.
Dealing with passive aggression
The same behavior is often seen in relationships and friendships. It can be caused by envy, jealousy, an underlying personality disorder, or a medication that produces passive-aggressive behavior as a side effect; the wrong dose of antipsychotic medicationfor example, can have this result.
What is the best way to deal with someone who is passive-aggressive? As usual, it doesn’t help to tell him: At some level, they already know what they are doing and can escalate their bad behavior to get revenge from you if you mention it.
The most effective approach is ignore the behavior and pretend not to notice it. If it doesn’t seem to affect you, there’s not much to them and they may stop the behavior due to your lack of reaction.
When ignoring passive-aggressive behavior is not feasible, perhaps because it affects you psychologically, the best thing to do is keep as much distance as possible from the person.
If the assailant is a colleague who works near you, ask whether you can be transferred to another space in your workplace so you don’t have to be near the person all the time.
That might fix the problem. If you can’t move, you can do whatever you can to interact only minimally with the person. Every interaction must be professional and direct, which will deter the assailant from escalating.