When I Say No, I Feel Guilty
... erroneously assume that if they decide to assertively take charge, they will only have two options: either being tyrannical bastards or indulgent jellyfishes with their kids. They see no meaningful middle ground between these two extremes. Faced with such a distasteful choice, they fall back upon the efficient, emotional manipulation taught them by their parents instead of assuming the frank, honest responsibility of taking authority: “I want you to …” Taking this authority and using it to make themselves and their children feel better about the stresses of growing up is simple behaviorally, but not easy emotionally.
One mother, for example, asked me, with a tinge of hostility, “How do you break a promise to a child?” The feeling tone that accompanied this question suggested that this mother, like many others, felt it was imperative that she always be on top of things and present at least the illusion of a super-competent mom to her daughter—someone who never breaks a promise, for example.
As I talked to her later it turned out that my analysis was correct. She was in the bind of having to be perfect, not to make mistakes, and above all not appear dumb to other people. As I like to describe it, she had set herself up in a “sucker’s play.” In trying to be perfect and a supermom to her daughter, she was an odds-on favorite to lose. Eventually she was going to have to break promises either because she could not or did not want to keep them. If she could drop her need to be perfect and her pretense that she was, she could break a promise to her daughter in an assertive way that would minimize both their uncomfortable feelings. She could say, for example, “I know it’s dumb of me to make you a promise that I can’t keep, but we are going to put off going to Disneyland on Saturday. You didn’t do anything wrong and it’s not your fault. Let’s see when we can go again, okay?” With this assertive negative statement, she would be giving her daughter the message that even Mom does dumb things now and then, but even more important she serves as a model for her daughter, showing that if Mom doesn’t have to be perfect, neither does daughter. She models this important part of being human while she makes the reality clear: for whatever reason, Mom has decided that they will not go this time, and they are not going.
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.
