When I Say No, I Feel Guilty (14 page)

At least one student in each class will object to my analysis of systematic assertiveness as being the most straightforward way of coping with conflict, by saying: “Where’s the safeguards? You might take advantage of the other person if he hasn’t taken this class also. With these assertive skills, you could go over him like a steamroller!” While not sharing this student’s fears at the helplessness of mankind in the face of systematic assertiveness, I could recognize his apprehension at giving people a set of verbal skills that would allow them to enforce their right to be their own judge, to place in their hands an effective means to do what they wanted to do. The best response I have heard to statements like the one from this student came from an old Peace Corps colleague, Mr. Fred Sherman, while visiting one of my classes: “These assertive verbal skills are like any other skills you learn; they are amoral. After you learn to drive a car, you can use that skill to take children to a Sunday school picnic, or you can use it to drive a getaway car for the Mafia.” If you are your own judge, you are responsible for your assertive behavior also. What you do with it is up to you.

WORKABLE COMPROMISE

Many people learning to be assertive, often for the first time in their adult lives, do not understand why verbal skills like BROKEN RECORD are used. They ask: “What do I do when the other person doesn’t give in or is assertive to me also?” The answer to this question is that our true sense of self-respect has a priority over everything else. Consequently, if you keep your
self-respect through exercising your assertive rights with skills like BROKEN RECORD, you will feel good even if you do not achieve your goal immediately. Feeling good about yourself is a major goal of systematic assertive therapy. Once we feel good about ourselves, our ability to cope with conflict “snowballs.” It is not just a wonderful little “extra.” That you feel good about yourself, however, does not exclude the possibility of obtaining what you set out to get, in addition to maintaining your self-respect. The other person’s being assertive back to you simply results in the conflict being settled on the real issues of the dispute, not on the relative personality strengths of the participants or who is the best manipulator. It is practical,
whenever you feel that your self-respect is not in question
, to offer a workable compromise to the other person. You could, for example, offer to wait a definite period of time for your merchandise to be replaced or repaired, agree to do what the other person wants next time, or simply flip a coin to see who does what and when. You can always bargain with other people for your material goals unless the compromise affects your personal feelings of self-respect. If the end goal involves a matter of self-worth, there can be no compromise.

With some exceptions, we cope better and in a healthier fashion through the use of systematic verbal assertion and the process of workable compromise. What are these exceptions—the situations where it is best not to be systematically assertive? There are several, so let’s take a moment to look at them briefly.

It is not very realistic to be assertive in some situations. In situations where you have little control over what is going to happen, it is foolish and possibly dangerous (unless you are a trained professional) to assert yourself in the systematic manner outlined in this text. The situations where you have to limit your assertiveness are those that involve legal or physical factors.

Not all members of our federal, state, county, and municipal judiciary or law enforcement agencies are assertive themselves. Some members of these professions, unfortunately, cloak their own personal biases on how
people “should” behave with their robes of office, and have the real, if not absolutely “legal” authority to act out on their personal feelings. It does little for you to persistently assert yourself in broken-record fashion to an angry judge. He may reward you with thirty days in the “slammer!” All you are likely to get from a policeman who jabs you with his nightstick is more of the same if you have any further dealings with him. On the other hand, by setting limits for your assertive behavior in such situations, I do not mean to imply that you have to shut up and say nothing. For example, if you are physically abused by a police officer it is foolish to protest on the spot. Get his badge number and report his behavior to his superior officer; if he does this often and a number of citizens complain, the police officer will change his hostile behavior.

This balance between restraint and assertiveness is pointed out in the case of Jerry. I first saw Jerry when he was seventeen. He had a history of three years of drug abuse, including the use of heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines. Jerry, like many drug-dependent patients, was extremely nonassertive and didn’t know how to deal with the “straights”: his parents, family, schoolteachers, the law,
etc.
Jerry stayed within his nonassertive drug culture for several reasons. His associates never criticized or harassed him, never got mad at him, never tried to make him do something he didn’t want to do, and they let him do pretty much whatever he liked. Jerry did the same for them. He treated them in the same way—a nonassertive, acquiescent stand-off described in the glowing words, “Love,” “Peace,” and “Brother.” Jerry stayed within his drug culture because he liked it; very few people bothered him, and he didn’t know how to handle “straight” people outside his drug culture. With this background, Jerry was treated for drug dependency using assertive therapy as a means for getting him in contact and effectively dealing with non-drug people. After four months of assertive group therapy and two months of individual assertive therapy, Jerry dropped his job as drug pusher at his former high school, gained regular employment, and was enrolled in
college within twelve months. After a twenty-four-month follow-up, Jerry had not relapsed into the use of any hard drugs but has occasionally used marijuana.

Prior to assertive therapy, Jerry was invariably stopped and frisked or had his car searched whenever he came in contact with the police. Even though he was “clean” whenever he was searched, and therefore not arrested, Jerry somehow was giving off cues to the police that were “suspect.” Since therapy, Jerry has been stopped several times by police,
but his car has never been searched and he has not been frisked
. Jerry received traffic tickets on some of these police encounters after therapy, but felt strongly that he was not at fault on one particular occasion, that he didn’t deserve a ticket then. Jerry reported to me after he appeared in court that he had asserted himself to the judge on this particular ticket. Fearing the worst, that Jerry was in for a stretch in jail for possible contempt of court, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that he simply told the judge in his own words what he thought had happened … and the judge agreed with him. For Jerry, being assertive in court meant simply to speak his piece, to tell his side of the story and be heard, whether anyone agreed with him or not. Jerry’s court experience is a good example of balancing our assertive behavior with restraint in legal circumstances where someone else with the power to do so, can, if they wish, play tricks with our future.

The second situation where assertive behavior is inappropriate is also sensible and obvious: when you are at the physical mercy of other people. During a hit-and-run, a riot robbery, or mugging, assertion is of little use to you. Walter, a graduate student in history at a local university, posed the question of what to do in the following situation. Walking home from class one evening, he encountered four large, tough-looking men on a dimly lighted street. Flicking out a switchblade knife, one of the men asked Walter for a “loan” of five dollars. Walter asked me what I would do in such a situation. My answer was: “Is that all you need? I can loan you twenty dollars!” When we have no other option,
it is in our best interest to cooperate fully with someone who physically threatens us. Walter had confused, in his thinking—but not in his behavior (he ‘loaned” the mugger the five dollars)—the dividing line between being foolishly brave (stupid) and being assertive.) When someone points a gun or knife at you, it doesn’t help much to say, BROKEN RECORD fashion, “You can’t have my money,” over and over again in the hope that the mugger will go away!

There are also situations where no matter how assertively persistent you are, you are going to lose; you are not going to achieve your material goal. No set of skills or procedures can guarantee 100 per cent success in getting what you want in every situation. To be more specific, failure is more likely in situations where you may try to use systematic assertive techniques (particularly in commercial and formal interactions) to renegotiate a priori structure. This, for instance, happened to one learner in a recent class who asked for coaching on returning a tire with a defect on its side. After that practice, he went back to the tire dealer, persistently used BROKEN RECORD to get his money back, and the dealer laughed at him. Reporting the failure of being verbally assertive to reach his goal, the class curiously asked him for the details of the interaction. Still puzzled after the postmortem inquiry, since they could find no lack in the student’s assertive behavior, one of the class asked him why he thought the dealer refused a refund. The class was dumbfounded when the student reported that, “I guess it was because the tire had 24,000 miles on it when I took it back.” I found out later that he was trying to use assertiveness to regain his self-respect eighteen months after he silently accepted a defective tire. I give him credit for lots of
chutzpa
, but not much common sense.
Chutzpa
, incidentally, if you are not familiar with this Yiddish expression, is the prime personality trait of a man who murders both his parents and then pleads to the court for mercy because he is an orphan!

5
Assertive social conversation and
communication

In both my general psychotherapeutic practice and in teaching people to be assertive, I have observed that to the degree that they
are
assertive, they are also socially adept I have also observed that people who benefit from learning to be systematically assertive usually require some help in improving their social skills. The nonassertive person typically has some difficulty in communicating with others in social situations. He is shy. These adults, like many teen-agers, often find themselves tongue-tied, anxious, and at a loss for words even in a relaxed, nonthreatening social atmosphere. This observation makes me ask the question: Of what importance is social conversation in being healthy and happy and how is it related to our own assertiveness? The answer is a simple one but has implications for each of us in our important or even potentially important relationships with other people. Communication is the “glue” that keeps people together while a relationship grows and strengthens into a channel of mutual support, counsel, productivity, excitation, and satisfaction. In order for any social relationship to develop, both of the partners must have at least a minimal level of assertiveness in their dealings with one another. If they do not deal assertively with each other, even on their first meeting, the relationship may take months to develop, if it ever does. If a new relationship falters or fails, particularly those of a heterosexual nature between men and women, most likely one or the other of the pair did not assertively communicate to their social partner what type of person he or she is; their wants, likes, dislikes, interests, things they are doing or want to do, their ways of doing things,
etc.
The ability to talk about ourselves, who we are, how we live, and the
ability to make other people comfortable in talking about themselves in the same way are assertive social skills. Assertive behavior, then, is much more than demanding your rights from other people or, as I have emphasized so far, keeping other people from manipulating you. In this social sense, being assertive is communicating to another person what you are, what you do, what you want, what you expect of life. Hopefully, the other person is assertive also and you can discover a basis for a mutually rewarding, self-sustaining relationship. Equally important, social assertiveness allows you to find out if there is little or no mutual interest and avoid a dead-end relationship that has no potential for either partner.

If you lack these social skills, the communication block may be due to a history of frustration in generally dealing with other people. Such a history of frustration could trigger an anxiety reaction within you in any new social setting. Your conditioned anxiety from past failures inhibits your spontaneity in talking about yourself as well as listening effectively to what the other person reveals about himself or herself.

In developing a training method for teaching nonassertive people to verbally cope with a potentially anxious social relationship, I have observed that, in a social setting, all of us tend to give out
free information
about ourselves that has not been asked for specifically. Much of this free information about ourselves is related to our interests, desires, prejudices, what makes us happy as well as what worries us, and our style of living. If you talk to someone else and use anything more than yesses, noes, or grunts, no matter what you say, you will give the other person a great many free clues and indications of what is important to you at that particular moment in your life.

FREE INFORMATION

In order to become an assertive communicator in a social setting, you must master two skills. First, you have to practice listening to the clues other people give
you about themselves. Following up on the FREE INFORMATION people offer about themselves (which you have not asked about or commented upon) accomplishes two things in a social setting. The free information gives you something to talk about besides the weather and avoids those awkward silences in which you ask yourself: “What do I say now?” In addition, and even more important, when you follow up free information, you are both assertively prompting and making it easier for other people to talk about themselves by showing an interest in things important to them.