When I Say No, I Feel Guilty (11 page)

In our equality relationships, a lack of goodwill from someone else also in no way affects our realistic coping ability to resolve a conflict. Spouses, for instance, may routinely remove their goodwill when there is a conflict. This temporary lack of goodwill does not mean the marriage is on the rocks, or the weekend is spoiled, or that very evening cannot still be enjoyable. In discussing the removal of goodwill with my editor, Ms. Joyce Engelson, she neatly summed up my years of clinical experience with this problem: “People get so damned frightened if someone threatens not to like them or doesn’t like them. They get paralyzed and don’t function to their own benefit on jobs, with friends, spouses, lovers, dates,
etc.
Sometimes one feels like telling people:
You’ll never be loved if you can’t risk being disliked!”

My clinical and personal observations have demonstrated to me that people only remove their goodwill toward you (assuming some existed to start with) if there is a payoff to them for doing so. If you respond as if your mate’s withdrawal of goodwill affects your behavior, its withdrawal is a potent manipulative device for the other person and he or she will use it again. If you do not respond to the withdrawal of goodwill as a manipulative device, there is no payoff for it, except for venting anger (a transient state), and its frequency of use will diminish. Because of its possible potency, if the people you deal with are as nonassertive as most of us, they will probably try to manipulate you into doing things their way by consistently threatening to remove
their goodwill toward you; they threaten directly or subtly to dislike you, or even reject you. Our childish belief, which people use as the basis for this type of manipulation, expresses itself like this:
You must have the goodwill of people you relate to or they can prevent you from doing anything. You need the cooperation of other people to survive. It is very important that people like you
. Examples of manipulation based on this belief are everyday occurrences, particularly in close relationships, but also in the authority relationships of work and school. For example, you may notice that you become anxious and susceptible to manipulation by other people when you automatically believe what other people hint at when they say: “I’ll remember that,” “You’ll be sorry you did that,” or “It’ll be a cold day in hell before I …,” or even more subtle cues like “hurt” or “cold” looks. Statements like these are similar in meaning and intent to those used when we were conditioned to become automatically anxious as children. When we did things that annoyed adults and older children, to control our behavior they told us things like: “If you keep that up (unspoken: if you still annoy me), the boogie man will get you (unspoken: I won’t like you anymore and won’t protect you from him).” When told, “I’ll remember that (I won’t like you anymore and maybe I’ll get back at you someday),” the anxious adult makes a judgment that conditions are still the same as when he was a helpless child and required the goodwill and friendship of everyone else to be safe and happy. If, in coping with these intimidating hints of possible future reprisals, you make your own judgment on whether or not you need the goodwill of everyone else to be happy, you are more likely—sensibly and assertively—to reply: “I don’t understand, why will you remember that?” or “I don’t understand, it sounds like you won’t like me anymore.” Your behavior does not have to be liked or admired by those you deal with,
nor do you have to be anxious because you may not be liked
; all that counts is getting across the finish line. You get no points for form and style. You still get the
prize no matter if you fall, slip, trip, or dash proudly through the wire!

Many of us seem to have great difficulty in simply saying “No” to requests made of us or even invitations to us. Somehow we assume—whether we are aware of it or not—that either the other person is too weak to cope with our refusal and will be offended, or a relationship is impossible to maintain without 100 per cent mutual agreement. Daily examples of the results of this nonassertive belief can be seen when other people invite you out to join them in some social activity. How comfortable do you feel in assertively revealing your true state by saying simply and openly: “No, I just don’t feel like it this weekend. Let’s try it another time?” Instead you invent “good” reasons that will not allow the other person to get irritated, feel rebuffed, and possibly dislike you. Most of us follow this inane behavior pattern because of our childish belief that we cannot function properly if we do things that cause other people to remove their goodwill toward us, even a little bit. Although generalizations are suspect and typically useless, our behavior in this area is sufficiently childish to prompt me to make this observation: one cannot live in terror of hurting other people’s feelings. Sometimes one offends. That’s life in the big city!

ASSERTIVE RIGHT VIII
You have the right to be
illogical in making decisions
.

Logic is a reasoning process all of us can use sometimes to help in making our judgments about many things, including ourselves. Not all logical statements are true, however, nor can our logical reasoning always predict what will happen in every situation. In particular, logic is not much help in dealing with our own and other people’s wants, motivations, and feelings. Logic and reasoning generally deal with yesses or noes, black or white, and all or nothing as an input to the logical process. But in fact our wants, motivations, and emotions
are usually not apparent to us in terms of all or nothing. Often we have mixed emotions about things and people. Our emotions are felt in different degrees at different times and places. We may even want different things at the same time. Logic and reasoning don’t work easily in dealing with such “illogical” gray areas of our human condition. Logical reasoning may not help us much in understanding why we want what we want or in solving problems created by conflicting motivations.

On the other hand, logic is a great help to other people in dealing with your behavior if they want to talk you into changing it. If I were asked to explain to a small child what the word “logic” means, I would not be too far off the mark in telling him: “Logic is what other people use to prove that you’re wrong,” and he would understand what I meant. Logic is one of the external standards that many people use to judge their own as well as your behavior. In spite of the misuse of logic in human relationships, many of us have the trained childish belief that “good” reasons must be given to justify our desires, our goals, and our actions, that the keen intellectual razor of reasoning and logic will slice through personal confusion and expose the proper course to follow. Many people will use logic to manipulate us into doing what they want us to do. The basis for this manipulation is our childish belief which says:
You must follow logic because it makes better judgments than any of us can make
. Examples of logic-bred manipulation are seen in our everyday relationships. In college, for example, some faculty advisors use logic to manipulate student choice of classes. Advisors manipulate with logic to keep the student “on schedule” and to keep the student from taking “unnecessary” classes in another department which may interest that student. This is done by reminding the student that he wants to graduate, wants to go to graduate school, or wants a good job when he graduates. The advisor then points out logically that unnecessary classes in Egyptological pornoglyphic sarcophagi (graffiti on mummy cases), for example, will not help the
student graduate on time, go to graduate school, or get him a good job. It is never pointed out to the student, however, that graduating as fast as possible with a maximum of courses from the advisor’s department benefits the advisor’s department in terms of funding and teaching positions. If the student lets the advisor “logically” make his judgments for him he is likely to queue up like another sheep for departmental processing. If he
assertively
makes his own decision on what is more important to him—taking extra classes that interest him or possibly graduating a semester or quarter earlier—he is more likely to respond to his advisor’s logical manipulation by saying: “That’s true, I may spend more time in school this way, but I still want to take some of the classes that interest me.”

You can observe many other examples of manipulation by logic in your everyday experience. Spouses commonly point out to each other that they shouldn’t do one thing or another because, “We will get tired,” or “We have to get up early the next day,” or “Cousin Mildred is due in tomorrow night,” or a hundred other possible negative consequences which may result from doing what we want to do. This manipulation is done in a helpful, altruistic, logical way without the manipulator coming right out and saying what he or she wants to do in place of what was proposed. This logical manipulation cuts off the potential negotiation of conflicting wants between husband and wife as well as making the manipulated spouse feel ignorant or guilty for even suggesting such illogical behavior.

One of the first things I learned in graduate school was that in order to survive, it was necessary to keep the electronic equipment in the laboratories working for the professors. The second thing I learned, consequently, was that after you wasted your time by going through all the logical steps in the maintenance manual to figure out what was wrong with a piece of apparatus, you still had to turn the damned thing upside down and randomly jiggle its wiring to make it work! Being logical does not necessarily mean that you will solve your problem. Being logical does mean you will limit
what you will work with only to those things you completely understand, while, in fact, the solution to your problem many times will be outside these limits. Sometimes you just have to guess, no matter how crude, even inelegant that intellectual process is.

ASSERTIVE RIGHT IX
You have the right
to say, “I don’t
understand.”

Socrates observed that true wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us. His observation aptly describes one aspect of being human. Not one of us is so quick-witted, so perceptive as to fully understand even most of what goes on around us. Yet we seem to survive in spite of these limits placed on our capabilities by the human condition. We learn what we do by experience, and experience with other people teaches most of us that we do not always understand what another person means or wants. Few of us read minds at all, none of us can read minds very well, and yet many people try to manipulate us into doing what they want us to do by hinting, implying, suggesting, or subtly acting as if they expected us to do something for them. The childish belief we’ve been trained to hold and which makes this type of manipulation possible goes like this:
You must anticipate and be sensitive to the needs of other people if we are all to live together without discord. You are expected to understand what these needs are without causing problems by making other people spell out their needs to you. If you do not understand without being constantly told what other people want, you are not capable of living in harmony with others and are irresponsible or ignorant
. Examples of manipulation prompted by this infantile belief can be observed frequently in your relationships with people you see every day. Members of your family, fellow employees, roommates, etc., who have such a belief may try to manipulate you into changing your behavior
toward them with “hurt” or “angry” looks and silences. These manipulative attempts usually follow a conflict between yourself and the “injured” party where you have done something that the other person does not like. Instead of verbally asserting themselves in an attempt to gain at least part of what they want through a compromise, they make the judgment for you that (1) you are in the “wrong,” (2) you “should” intuitively understand that they are displeased with your behavior, (3) you “should” automatically understand what behavior displeases them, and (4) you “should” change that behavior for them so they will no longer be “hurt” or “angry.” If you allow the other person to make your own judgment for you that you “should” automatically understand what is bothering him, you are likely to change your behavior for their convenience and also do other things to relieve their “hurt” or “angry” feelings toward you. If you allow this kind of manipulation, you end up not only blocked from doing what
you
wanted to do, but doing something else to make up for wanting to do it in the first place.

You can also see the manipulation prompted by the childish belief that
you have to understand
on the part of people in commercial settings. For example, when you go to some private physician’s offices for medical treatment, the time it takes to fill out the forms he wants before he will see you, concerning income, job security, insurance coverage, etc., can take longer than the medical consultation. Sometimes I get the impression that the physician thinks a loan is being asked for instead of medical treatment I’m sure my impression is faulty, but more than once, I have felt that the behavior shown by medical staffs implies that the treatment is for free and I owe them something else besides money.

When I recently went for osteopathic treatment the straw that broke the camel’s back for me (no pun intended!) was the request for my social security number. At that I drew the line and stopped filling in the card. It’s a good thing that it was the last question or he wouldn’t have known whom he was treating. In looking over the nonmedical information form, the nurse told
me that a social security number was required before I could see the osteopath. When I said that I didn’t understand how my social security number was necessary to treat my elbow, the nurse told me the number was necessary. The patronizing look on her face also said I “should” know why social security numbers are required. Still unable to read minds after all my fine psychological training, I again replied that I didn’t understand how the number was connected to my elbow. Changing character, the nurse then explained that many cases were referred by workman’s compensation and other disability agencies. The office staff routinely asked for the social security number of all patients to make things easier when communicating with these agencies. This (by then very assertive) prospective patient made his own decision on the necessity of giving his social security number to people he was paying money to for services rendered. I received excellent treatment from a hell of a nice guy even with the last space on my biographical card empty. A petty victory over one of my petty peeves—IBM binary minds. Even so, I don’t understand why it was worth the bother at the time for me not to give my social security number upon demand. If you are like me and can’t even read your own mind fully, how can you expect to perform this service for other people?