When I Say No, I Feel Guilty (16 page)

Lack of eye-to-eye contact, the most common anxiety cue, is a learned avoidance response. We learn to avoid eye contact without being aware of it. In the past, when we have made eye-to-eye contact in conflict and not coped well with that conflict the other person made us nervous. Without realizing it to reduce this anxiety, we develop a conditioned avoidance response; we shift our focus away from the person who makes us anxious and we feel better, at least temporarily. If we don’t look at the other person, we don’t get so anxious. After a while of successfully avoiding this anxiety, not looking someone in the eye becomes a habit.

Since it is an anxiety-produced response, the treatment
of lack of eye contact is a simple one. In conjunction with the previous social conversation exercises I use the following phobic desensitization exercise to help people eliminate anxiety when making eye-to-eye contact. This exercise is always done in pairs with the learners seated approximately four to six feet from each other: “I want only one of you to keep looking at your partner’s eyes and see if you can tell what he is looking at. If he’s looking at your feet, you can probably tell it. If he’s looking within an imaginary circle having a nine-inch radius around your nose, you can see his eyes change position but you can’t tell what he’s actually looking at. Now I want one of you from each pair to look at your partner’s nose, chin, neck, Adam’s apple, collar, upper chest in that order, and let’s see
when
your partner can tell you are
not
looking him in the eye. (Learners follow instructions.) Could any of you tell exactly when your partner was not looking you in the eye—not when he was moving his eyes—but when his eyes were still? What was your anxiety level when you looked him in the eye? Use a fear thermometer’ scale of zero to 100. Zero means you are so relaxed you’re going to fall asleep and 100 means you are about to hit the panic button. Remember your anxiety level and compare it to how you feel after we complete the whole exercise. Now I want both of you to focus your eyes wherever I tell you to. I’m going to have you gradually focus from your partner’s toes to his nose and spend about ten to thirty seconds on different parts of the body. Ready: right foot—left foot—right knee—left ankle—right knee—bellybutton—left knee—right calf—left thigh—bellybutton—right elbow—chest—left shoulder—bellybutton—collar—left elbow—right shoulder—neck—left shoulder—top of head—left ear—chin—right ear—hairline—left ear—mouth—right ear—forehead—left cheek—right ear—nose—left ear—right cheek—left eyebrow—nose—right eyebrow—bridge of nose—left eye—nose—right eye—left eye—nose—forehead—right eye—left eye—right eye—both eyes—hold it there for one minute.”

I have learners practice this exercise on their own
with friends, spouses, or whoever they can get to sit down with them for about three times a week for three weeks. In class, however, immediately after this exercise I have the same partners practice eye-to-eye contact while repeating the last part of the social conversation exercise. Most people find it difficult to look someone in the eye when they are answering a question or making a verbal statement. They find it difficult to concentrate. When this happens, I suggest that they still keep their focus within the nine-inch radius around their partner’s nose, but stare at one ear, for example. Most learners find that looking at ears while answering a question produces less anxiety and disruption of their thoughts.

6
Assertively coping with the great
manipulator: criticism

There are two major results when we systematically assert ourselves using the verbal skills I call FOGGING, NEGATIVE ASSERTION, and NEGATIVE INQUIRY. First, and most important—for the therapeutic goal of becoming whole, fully effective human beings—the practice of these skills can minimize our typical negative emotional response of anxiety to criticism, whether it’s real or imagined, self-directed or from someone else. This internal change in our emotional reaction and attitude occurs with repeated practice of these skills; this is a clinically observed fact and not a theoretical assumption. Why the practice of these assertive skills causes this beneficial result could be the subject of another complete book on the theory of psychophysiology, behavioral or emotional change, and behavior therapy. Regardless of “why,” the net effect of this internal process is that we feel less at war with ourselves and thus can feel more comfortable about the negative as well as the positive aspects of our personalities. Second, the practiced use of FOGGING, NEGATIVE ASSERTION, and NEGATIVE INQUIRY cuts our learned emotional puppet strings, those which make us automatically react, perhaps even panic, to criticism from other people; the learned anxiety triggered by criticism which allows us to be manipulated into defending what we want to do instead of doing it.

While at the Sepulveda V.A. Hospital in the spring of 1970, I was faced with the problem of teaching a skill that a husband or wife, for instance, could use to cope with manipulative criticism from a nonassertive, perhaps nagging spouse. I observed that almost without exception, the person being criticized becomes defensive
and denies the criticism. This manipulative criticism occurs in the first place because the nagging wife, for example, has been taught that her wants have to be justified, have to be reasonable, must be able to “stand up in court” or even church. Like the rest of us who have been psychologically trained to keep in line, she has great trouble in giving logical, sound reasons to “justify” what she wants in life. She, like most of us, has been trained that she must have a reason to want the things she wants. If her husband does something that keeps her from doing something she wants to do, like just tinkering around the house instead of going out to visit friends, she has no assertive recourse to deal with his behavior but can only impose her own nonassertive, arbitrary, manipulative structure upon him
and criticize him for not behaving according to it
. If he wants to work on his car, for example, he must have a reason to “justify” it, otherwise he is in the wrong and is open to criticism. Manipulative criticism occurs so often in dealing with other people, since, as my grandmother used to say, you can always find something wrong with someone else if you really want to. We can easily find things to criticize by simply imposing our own arbitrary structure upon the relationship which outlines what the rules of right and wrong are; how things “should” really be. Each of us can and does impose our manipulative structure upon one another, and most of us have been well trained to automatically accept or even believe in the other person’s imposed structure. A nonassertive wife might deal critically with behavior that displeases her by telling her husband: “You’ve just fooled around with the car all weekend!” The arbitrary structure she is trying to impose upon the marriage relationship and her husband’s behavior is that it is somehow wrong to relax and tinker all weekend. This arbitrary right-and-wrong structure really has nothing to do with whether or not
she likes
her husband to relax all weekend instead of doing something else with her. That she would rather do something else is not manipulative. Coping with her wants by criticizing her husband’s behavior is manipulative and it is
produced by her own nonassertiveness. She cannot justify her own wishes to visit their friends and get out of the house. If the husband who tinkers and is criticized for it automatically accepts his wife’s arbitrary right-and-wrong structure (it is somehow “wrong” for him to relax and be casual), he must also automatically accept as true any criticism of the deviation in his behavior from his wife’s right-and-wrong structure. Furthermore, he must also accept that the criticism by his wife is relevant; he is in the wrong and “should” change whatever she criticizes. Since most of us have been taught to feel anxious, nervous, or guilty when we make mistakes (mistakes are “wrong”), the person being criticized, in this case our nonassertive, relaxed husband more than likely tries through logic, argument, or even countercriticism of his wife’s daily behavior to deny the (totally irrelevant) truth in the manipulative criticism. For example: “I did not work on the car all weekend! I didn’t even think of it when we had lunch yesterday! And I took a nap this afternoon for at least an hour. Besides, you should talk. All you do when I’m not here is watch those silly soap operas on TV!” This “trained seal” type of response to nonassertive criticism is invariably followed by more criticism producing a cycle of criticism—denial of error—further criticism. As the cycle is escalated, one or the other typically gets angry and fights the partner, walks out, or both.

In such a situation of nonassertive criticism, some other coping style besides defensiveness and denial of real, imaginary, or suggested error is required for the relationship to be less destructive to both partners. A kind of behavior that would effectively, assertively, and nonmanipulatively cope with criticism would contain the following important elements:

1. The coping behavior would train you to distinguish between (a) truths that other people tell you about your behavior (that you always tinker with the car), and (b) the arbitrary right and wrong that other people may tack on to truths about your behavior by implying or
suggesting that you are in the “wrong” without openly saying so (that it is “wrong” to relax a lot).

2. The coping behavior would train you to feel comfortable when you are told a truth about your behavior in a critical fashion and the other person does not openly spell out the “right and wrong” involved in your behavior, but only implies through his or her critical tone that your behavior is “wrong” (all you do on the weekend is work on the car); not feeling so anxious about criticism you do not have to respond at all to implications or suggestions of wrongdoing and need only deal with the truths about your behavior that people tell you. (That’s true, I do work on the car a lot.)

3. The coping behavior would train you to feel comfortable when a truth about your behavior is openly interpreted as wrongdoing within the other person’s arbitrary structuring of his or her life (it is wrong for you to fool around with the car so much on weekends); not feeling so anxious about criticism you do not have to automatically accept the other person’s arbitrary structure of “right and wrong,” but you can instead inquire into the other person’s structure and ask what is wrong about your behavior (I don’t understand, what is it about me working on the car a lot that’s wrong?); thus extinguishing use of manipulative structure and prompting the other person to state what he or she wants: “Well, I want us to visit our friends instead of staying home all weekend.”

4. The coping behavior would train you to distinguish between (a) truths that other people tell you about your errors and mistakes (you forgot to put the cap on the toothpaste again), and (b) the arbitrary right and wrong that other people may tack onto the truths about your errors and mistakes (it is “wrong” to forget to cap the toothpaste tube).

5. The coping behavior would train you to feel comfortable about your errors, and while errors and mistakes are inefficient, wasteful, usually but not always unproductive, stupid, and usually in need of revision, nevertheless, in reality, they have nothing to do with
right and wrong;—i.e., “That’s true, it’s stupid
*
of me to leave the cap off again.”

The systematic verbal assertive coping skills—FOGGING, NEGATIVE INQUIRY, and NEGATIVE ASSERTION—I have developed as a result of helping people to deal with manipulative criticism generated by our own or other people’s arbitrary structuring of a relationship, contain, collectively, all the coping elements described in the above statements. Let us look at each of these verbal coping skills in turn, beginning with a detailed examination of FOGGING.

FOGGING

In teaching people to cope with manipulative criticism from other people, I instruct them
not
to deny any criticism (that’s simply responding in kind), not to get defensive, and not to counterattack with criticism of their own. While at Sepulveda V.A. Hospital, in originally giving patients a starting point in learning to cope with criticism in this different way, I suggested that as a rule of thumb, they might learn faster by verbally replying to manipulative criticism as if they were a “fog bank.” A fog bank is remarkable in some aspects. It is very persistent. We cannot clearly see through it. It offers no resistance to our penetration. It does not fight back. It has no hard striking surfaces from which a rock we throw at it can ricochet back at us, enabling us to pick it up and throw it at the fog once more. We can throw an object right through it, and it is unaffected. Inevitably, we give up trying to alter the persistent independent, nonmanipulable fog and leave it alone. Similarly, when criticized, you can assertively cope by offering no resistance or hard psychological striking surfaces to critical statements thrown at you.

I have used other labels such as AGREEING WITH TRUTH, AGREEING IN PRINCIPLE, or AGREEING WITH THE ODDS to describe this assertive skill
when it is used in everyday situations to cope with manipulative logic, argument, guilt-and anxiety-inducing statements. My original clinical slang term of FOGGING seems to have made some permanent impression, however, since my colleagues and graduate students (and I myself) continue to use it even though it is an inadequate description of the many ways we can verbally assert ourselves using this skill in different situations.

Irrespective of the label used to describe this powerful assertive verbal skill, we can use it to cope in the following ways: (1) We can agree with
any truth
in statements people use to criticize us (AGREEING WITH TRUTH). For example, if an overprotective mother keeps checking up on her daughter even after the daughter no longer lives at home, the daughter might respond to her mother’s criticism of implied or suggested wrongdoing with assertive FOGGING, as one of my patients, Sally, did:

MOTHER
: You stayed out late again, Sally. I tried to call you until twelve thirty last night.