When I Say No, I Feel Guilty (6 page)

In summary, you and I and most of the rest of the population are trained to be responsive to manipulative emotional control as soon as we are able to speak and understand what other people tell us. These psychological puppet strings that our parents attach to us through
learned
feelings of nervousness or anxiety, ignorance and guilt, control our childish assertiveness. They effectively and efficiently keep us out of real and imagined danger as children and make the lives of the adults around us a lot easier. These emotional strings, however, have an unfortunate side effect. As we grow into adults and are responsible for our own well-being, they do not magically disappear. We still have feelings of anxiety, ignorance, and guilt that can be and are used efficiently by other people to get us to do what
they
want irrespective of what we want for ourselves. The subject of this book is the reduction, at least if not the elimination of these learned emotions in coping with other people in the ordinary experiences of our lives. In particular, the following chapters deal with (1) the nonassertive beliefs we acquire because of our feelings of anxiety, ignorance, and guilt, and how these beliefs allow other people to manipulate us; (2) the rights we have as human beings to assertively stop the manipulation of our behavior by others; and (3) the systematic verbal skills easily learned in everyday situations that
allow us to enforce our human assertive rights with family members, relatives, parents, children, friends, fellow employees, employers, repairmen, gardeners, salesclerks, managers; in short, other human beings, no matter what their relationship to us is.

2
Our prime assertive human right
—how other people violate it

Each of us, at times, gets into situations that confuse us. A friend, for example, asks you to pick up his aunt flying in from Pascagoula at 6:00
P.M
. The last thing in the world that you relish is fighting the traffic rush to the airport and then trying to make bumper-to-bumper conversation with someone you know zero about, without giving her the idea you wish she had stayed in Mississippi. You rationalize with: “Well, a friend’s a friend. He would do the same thing for me.” But other nagging thoughts intrude: “But I never asked him to pick up anybody for me. I always did it myself. Harry never told me why he couldn’t pick her up. How come his wife couldn’t do it?”

In situations like this, all of us feel like saying: “When I say ‘No,’ I feel guilty, but if I say ‘Yes,’ I’ll hate myself.” When you say this to yourself, your real desires are in conflict with your childhood training and you find yourself without cues that would prompt you in coping with this conflict. What can you say? If I say “No,” will my friend feel hurt or rejected? Will he not like me anymore? Will he think I am self-centered, or at least not very nice? If I don’t do it, am I an uncaring son of a bitch? If I say “Yes,” how come I’m always doing these things? Am I a patsy? Or is this the price I have to pay to live with other people?

These internal questions on how to cope are triggered by an external conflict between ourselves and another person. We want to do one thing, and our friend, neighbor, or relative assumes, hopes, expects, wishes, or even manipulates us into doing something else. The internal crisis comes about because you’d like to do what you want but are afraid that your friend may think what you want is wrong; you may be making a mistake;
you may hurt his feelings and he may reject you because you did what you wanted; perhaps you fear that your reasons for doing what you want are not “reasonable” enough (you don’t have a broken leg and the Feds aren’t looking for you so why can’t you go to the airport?). Consequently, when you try to do what you want, you also allow other people to make you feel ignorant, anxious, or guilty; the three fearful emotional states you were trained as a child to feel when you don’t do what someone else wants you to do. The problem in resolving this conflict is that the trained manipulated part of us accepts without question that someone else “should” be able to control us psychologically by making us feel these ways. With the innately assertive part of us suppressed by our training in childhood, we respond by countermanipulation to the frustration of being manipulated. Manipulative coping, however, is an unproductive cycle. Manipulatively dealing with another adult is not like manipulatively dealing with a little child. If you manipulate adults through their emotions and beliefs, they can countermanipulate you in the same way. If you again countermanipulate, so can they, and so on. For example, in trying to get out of picking up your friend’s aunt, the words and phrases you use would be much more subtle but still boil down to something like this short segment of a manipulative dialogue:

YOU
: God, Harry! I’m so tired at that time of day. [Trying to induce guilt in Harry by implying, “How could anybody ask a tired friend to fight the traffic at that time of evening,” even though Harry’s telling himself, “Hell! I fight the same traffic every evening at five.”]

HARRY
: Little old ladies can get really scared arriving in a strange airport with no one to meet them. [Trying to induce guilt in you by implying, “What kind of fellow would make a little old lady go through that just because he is a little tired,” while you’re thinking, “Where did all this fragile-old-lady business come
from? After fifty years of living with the Pascagoula mosquitos she must have the endurance of a horse!”]

YOU
: Well, I’d really have to go out of my way … [Trying to induce guilt by implying, “I will really suffer if you make me do this,” while Harry says to himself, “It’s a pain in the neck, but you’ve done it before and it won’t kill you.”]

HARRY
: If I had to pick her up, I wouldn’t even get there until seven thirty. [Suggesting that you are ignorant of the facts by implying, “My trip would be much longer and harder than yours,” except you think, “Where and what would he be coming from? He’s probably closer to the airport than I am!”]

The farce of this manipulative-countermanipulative interchange is that who goes to the airport, you or Harry, does not depend upon what you want but upon whoever can make the other one feel guiltier. As a result of these types of manipulative interactions with other people you are more likely to finish up frustrated, irritated, or anxious, in spite of your best efforts to avoid feeling these ways. Without an adequate, mature, and assertive outlet, these feelings eventually are expressed by you in verbal fighting or by running away from someone. The end result of this unresolved internal coping conflict between our natural wants and our childhood belief and habit training leaves us with some really dismal choices: we can do what someone else wants, be frustrated very often, get depressed, withdraw from people, and lose our self-respect; we can do what we want angrily, alienate other people, and lose our self-respect; or we can avoid the conflict by running away from it and the people who cause it, and lose our self-respect.

As a first step in becoming assertive, you have to realize that
no one can manipulate your emotions or behavior if you do not allow it to happen
. In order to stop anyone’s manipulation of your emotions or behavior, you need to recognize how people do try to manipulate you. What do they say, how do they act, or what do they believe that controls your emotions and behavior?
To make yourself as effective as possible in stopping manipulation you also need to question the childish attitudes and ideas many of us have been reared with which make us susceptible to manipulation by other people. Although the words and ways people use to manipulate us are infinite, in my clinical experience in treating nonassertive people, I have observed that there is a most common set of manipulative expectations that many people have about themselves and each other. The manipulative behavior prompted by these expectations can also be seen in the general nonclinical population. These childish expectations and their consequent behavior deny us much of our dignity and self-respect as human beings. If we have the same expectations about ourselves as our manipulators do, we surrender to them our dignity and self-respect, the responsibility for governing our own existence, and the control over our own behavior.

This and the
next chapter
deal with the common set of childish assumptions on how we all supposedly “should” behave in order to avoid resorting to our primitive coping of anger-aggression and fear-flight. Such beliefs are the basis for most of the ways other people manipulate us into doing what they want us to do. They directly contradict our assertive rights as healthy, emotionally stable individuals. In this and the next chapters, I describe these beliefs along with each of our assertive rights: the rights that we and other people violate dairy in a futile attempt to keep aggression or flight out of our relationships with each other.

Our assertive rights are a basic framework for each individual’s healthy participation in any human relationship
. These assertive individual rights are the framework upon which we build positive connections between people, such as trust compassion, warmth, closeness, and love. Without this basic assertive framework that allows each of us to express our individual selves to each other, trust gives way to suspicion, compassion evolves into cynicism, warmth and closeness disappear, and what we called love acquires an acid bite. Many people are afraid to show their true feelings
of love and closeness because they think they may be trod upon and will have no way to cope with rejection. If they were confident that, yes, in fact there probably will be difficulties to iron out, but that they can assertively cope with these difficulties, even with rejection, there would be less fear in showing tenderness, closeness, and love. I like to think that being assertive means being confident of yourself and your abilities! “No matter what happens to me, I can cope with it.”

The Bill of Assertive Human Rights presented herein is composed of statements about ourselves as humans, statements about our true responsibilities for ourselves and our own well-being, and statements about our acceptance of our humanness which set practical limits on what other people can expect of us. Let’s examine, first, our prime assertive right—from which all the other assertive rights are derived:
our right to be the ultimate judge of all we are and all we do
. Then let’s see how we let people manipulatively violate this right in different types of relationships.

ASSERTIVE RIGHT I
You have the right to judge your
own behavior, thoughts, and
emotions, and to take
the responsibility for
their initiation and
consequences upon
yourself

You have the right to be the ultimate judge of yourself
: a simple statement that sounds so much like common sense. It is a right, however, that gives each of us so much control over our own thinking, feelings, and behavior that the more manipulatively trained and nonassertive we are, the more likely we are to reject it as the right of other people or even ourselves.

Why should this be? Why should such a simple statement—that each of us has the right to be the ultimate judge of ourselves—generate any controversy at all? If you exercise this assertive right, you take the responsibility
for your very existence upon yourself and away from other people. To those who are fearful of what others may do, and therefore feel that people must be controlled, your independence from their influence is quite disturbing, to say the least. Those who are disturbed by independence feel that the people they relate to must be controlled because they themselves are powerless. This feeling of helplessness is a result of their failure, because of nonassertive attitudes, beliefs, and behavior, in attempting to cope with other people. If someone they relate to is not controlled by some external standard of behavior, they feel that their own goals, their very happiness, will be subject to the whim and mercy of the uncontrolled person. When we truly doubt that we are the ultimate judge of our own behavior, we are powerless to control our own destiny without all sorts of rules about how each of us “should” behave. The more insecure we are, the more fearful we become when there is no superabundance of arbitrary rules for behavior. If we are very insecure and disturbed by a lack of guidelines in any particular area of behavior, we will invent enough arbitrary rules until we again feel comfortable and unthreatened. For example, there are no laws in most municipalities specifically controlling each individual’s bodily waste elimination, a matter with serious public health consequences. If you voided your bowels at high noon at Wilshire and Westwood Boulevards, you might be arrested for littering, but not specifically for that act of waste elimination. There are also no rules on how we all “should”
behave
while eliminating the waste products from our bodies. Yet our behavior in this area does not vary much from person to person even though there are a great number of ways we could behave. In a public rest room, is it all right to converse with the person in the booth next to you? What would he think? I don’t really know, but my guess is that he would think I was some kind of nut if I did. No one has ever talked to me in that circumstance. When standing up at a crowded public urinal, is it permissible to be curious about what the guy next to you is doing? What would he think if he saw you looking
at him? Is it allowed to trace out your initials on the porcelain? What’s the approved way to get rid of that last drop of urine? A nervous snap? An insolent flip? A dignified shake? If there are no rules, and I have never been told or read of any, how come all the other men in there with me behave identically and none of us engage in these finer nuances of elimination? If they are like me, then they too have invented an arbitrary set of rules on what they “should” or “should not” do while performing this function. Although this example describes an unimportant pattern of our behavior, the behavior observed is very regulated.