When I Say No, I Feel Guilty (18 page)

STUDENT
: Do you know your IQ in specific numbers?

ME
: Yes.

STUDENT
: Is it above normal, above 100?

ME
: Yes.

STUDENT
: Then how can you FOG me if I say: “Your IQ is so far below normal that half a moron could replace you?”

ME
: Simple. I’d say: “I’m not surprised you feel that way. Sometimes my brain works so poorly that I wonder if the IQ examiner didn’t make a mistake.”

STUDENT
: Let’s try something else. Are you queer?

ME
: I don’t think so.

STUDENT
: Let me put it another way. Are you a practicing homosexual?

ME
: No.

STUDENT
: Then how can you agree with me if I say:
“You’re the faggiest teacher I’ve ever seen. You swish all over the place!”

ME
: Again simple. I can say: “Maybe you’re right I wonder if that’s why I’m not as sexually potent as I used to be. At seventeen I used to think about sex all the time. Now I only think about it half the time!” I’m not perfect in anything. Want to try another one?

Another occasional comment I get from students, after I demonstrate FOGGING by having them criticize my teaching style is: “But were you
sincere
in agreeing with my criticism with FOGGING?” I answer this question with one of two (hopefully) thought-provoking questions in reply, either: “How sincere is a probability?” or as my colleague Fred Sherman often says in response to the same question in his classes in the San Diego area: “Does it really matter?” One interpretation of this type of question is that the student (or anyone else) who asks it is very wedded to logic and ah the other external systems that can be used to manipulate you out of being your own judge. In thinking of one particular person who asked him this question, Fred remarked that in order for her to be happy with Fred as a teacher, he had to be “all sincere” or “all insincere.” She wouldn’t or more charitably, couldn’t allow him any middle ground between these extremes. Someone who is neither sincere nor insincere wasn’t capable of being moved by her logic. As it turned out the use of probabilities to describe what is reality and what is truth was not to her liking since it gave her a clear and unmistakable message of: “Hey. I’m not manipulable. I don’t fit into your game plan. You don’t like that? Okay. Find someone you’re more comfortable with.”

It is obvious, to me at least from teaching hundreds of people to be more assertive, that FOGGING is the most popularly received of all verbal skills. Recently, after one class, I ran into a former student a physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, set up and administered by the California Institute of Technology, and he told me an amusing story. The night before this incident happened, I had given an introductory demonstration
of assertive verbal skills to a number of Cal. Tech. students on campus. The following day, the physicist noticed one of the student assistants in the laboratory going around all morning and indiscriminately using a FOGGING response in reply to anything said to him. He kept enthusiastically saying: “You may be right,” to everything, including statements like: “You want some coffee?” Having heard me describe this typical phase of learning in class as “the impulse you get, after you are given a brand-new shiny set of tools, to go around looking for loose nuts to tighten up,” and having gone through it himself, the physicist knew I would appreciate the humor inherent in the situation. I did, and the more he described this student’s provocation of criticism from other staff members so he could practice FOGGING, the more an inane fantasy kept playing itself out in my mind. With all due apologies to JPL, Cal. Tech., their superb faculty and students, I couldn’t help but picture this student saying to an irate professor: “You’re right, I shouldn’t have goosed you while you were leaning over the atom splitter.”

With a Puckish glint in his eye, but also with some sympathy for the novice FOGGER, the physicist told me that he was tempted to go up to the unaware student and say something like: “Harry, I’ve noticed that you’ve been using a lot of FOGGING this morning. Don’t you think you could save it for manipulative situations?” He restrained his impulse out of his own identification with the student’s situation. He remembered how enthusiastic he himself felt in first being more assertive and learning to cope better with other people. In spite of his altruism, he still wished he could have heard the novice’s probable response, “You mean you know this already?” and watch his jaw drop when he replied: “Of course. Everybody knows about FOGGING. Where have you been?” While appreciating the humor in his aborted prank, I asked him: “What makes you think he wouldn’t have simply replied: ‘You may be right. I probably am overdoing it’?” The physicist looked at me and said in kind: “I should have thought
of that. He might have!” and we exchanged understanding grins.

The examination of all this somewhat serious, somewhat tongue-in-cheek discussion of FOGGING hopefully points out its therapeutic purpose—to enable the learner to look at his own personal qualities, the ones he has doubts about, without feeling insecure, and to say meaningfully, “So what? I can still cope quite well enough with what I have and be effective and happy.” Just understanding this concept, however, is insufficient. The systematic practice of FOGGING provides what cognitive understanding—knowing you can agree with your critic—does not give, the reduction of conditioned, gut-twisting anxiety in response to the stimulus of personal criticism.

NEGATIVE ASSERTION

At the same time that I was working on the problem of teaching patients how to cope with manipulative criticism of their behavior through FOGGING, it became apparent to me that these people also made errors because of their reduced ability to cope with things in general. In order for them to be able to be more assertive, to begin again to live with other people, they also had to learn to cope with their errors without falling apart in the face of hostile criticism of these errors. As I began to teach nonassertive people in nonclinical settings how to cope, it became glaringly apparent that
many of us have the same difficulty
in coping with our errors in everyday life. As one novice learner asked: “How can I cope differently and keep my dignity and self-respect when someone criticizes me for making a mistake that without a doubt, is a bonafide, 100 per cent error, not a probable one, and I am guilty of it?” If you are like him, like most of the rest of us, in order to cope more realistically with your errors in life, you must learn to change your verbal behavior when confronted with your error and modify your trained belief that
guilt
automatically is associated with making a mistake.

If you are nonassertive in coping with your mistakes, you can be manipulated by other nonassertive people through your feelings of guilt and anxiety into (1) seeking forgiveness for making the error and somehow making up for it, or (2) denying the error through defensiveness and countercriticism which provides your hostile critic with a verbal punching bag to aggressively work out his own feelings of frustration. In either case, you cope poorly and feel worse.

Again, as with most of the beliefs we learned in childhood, few of us can change our belief that errors are wrong (
we are guilty
) simply by thinking about it. Most of us must first change our verbal coping behavior when confronted with an error so that we can emotionally desensitize ourselves to possible criticism from other people (or from ourselves). Once this emotional change is accomplished through behavior change, the childish belief of guilt through error will automatically change. It is difficult to maintain a negative belief about yourself when it is no longer supported by feeling rotten about yourself as a result.

How, then, do you cope assertively with your errors? In the simplest manner, you verbally cope with your errors as if they are exactly that, no more or no less—errors are just errors. In the terminology of systematic assertion,
you assertively accept
those things that are negative about yourself. In the spring of 1970, during my appointment at the Veterans Hospital, I used the verbal skill that I call NEGATIVE ASSERTION to help people to learn more quickly in coping with errors or negative points about themselves. For example, when you are confronted in a critical, possibly hostile manner with an error you have made, you can assertively accept the fact of the error in the following way. Assume you have agreed to leave an information file on your desk at work so a fellow employee could use it over the weekend. On Monday morning, the friend approaches you and asks where the file was on Saturday. You remember that the file was locked up on Friday night and not left on your desk. What can you say? In negatively asserting yourself, you would probably say
something like: “Oh, my God! I forgot to leave it on my desk! What an incredibly stupid thing to do! I must be brain-damaged! What are you going to do now?” Depending upon how your fellow employee receives this information, it would be repeated until he or she realizes that it serves little or no purpose to criticize your error since such behavior will not turn back the clock and produce the file when he needed it.

In other areas, NEGATIVE ASSERTION can be used to cope differently when receiving valid criticism of your performance in learning a concept, a new skill, a new language, a new trade on the job or in a social situation. In any of these situations, when substandard performance is pointed out you can cope assertively as follows:

“You didn’t do too well in … (criticism)
*
“You’re right
I wasn’t too smart in the way I handled that, was I?”
[NEGATIVE ASSERTION]

We can negatively assert ourselves even when our personal competence, habits, or appearance is critically appraised: “Sis, for a young girl with a good figure, you sure walk like a fullback.”
“I’ve noticed that myself. I do walk funny, don’t I?”
[NEGATIVE ASSERTION]
or
“Sue, you shouldn’t have cut your hair. It just doesn’t suit you now.”
“That was a dumb thing for me to do, Mom. I don’t like it this way myself.”
[NEGATIVE ASSERTION]
or
“My God, Connie! That new outfit makes you look like mutton dressed up like lamb.”
“I was worried about that. These new styles just don’t suit me at all, do they?”
[NEGATIVE ASSERTION]

One important point to remember, these assertive verbal skills were developed to help you cope with social conflicts, not physical or legal ones! If someone says to you critically: “You just ran over my foot when
you backed up your car,” the appropriate response is
not
: “How stupid of me!” but instead, “Here is the number of my insurance company (or my lawyer).”

In using NEGATIVE ASSERTION to cope with criticism of your errors, the persistence of your critic will determine if you need assert yourself in other ways also, such as by using FOGGING and NEGATIVE INQUIRY. This type of mixed dialogue in response to criticism of error is given in
Chapters 9
,
10
, and
11
.

Although it may seem paradoxical at first glance, those of us who cannot cope assertively with criticism also seem incapable of coping with compliments. If we are hard-pressed to cope with criticism, it certainly seems as if we would take all the compliments we get as a relief from the negative marks chalked up against us. Unfortunately, for most of us, this isn’t the case. When we are praised or complimented, we stammer, mumble something, look and act sheepish, feel like twisting our hat in our hands, and change the subject as quickly as possible. This coping inadequacy is not due to modesty. It has roots in our childish belief that other people are the real judges of our actions. If, on the other hand, we are independently assertive in our thoughts, feelings, and behavior, we reserve the final judgment of actions, even the positive ones, to ourselves. Such an assertive attitude does not make you loath to accept compliments and praise, but only to be the ultimate judge of the accuracy of such praise. For example, when you are genuinely complimented on your choice of clothes and you feel they suit you well, you might reply: “Thank you.
I think it looks nice on me too.”
(AGREEING WITH TRUTH). On the other hand, when you suspect manipulative flattery, you might respond: “Really, I don’t understand. What is it about my clothes that makes me look so good?” (POSITIVE INQUIRY; see
Chapter 7
.) If you have mixed feelings about the tiling, behavior, accomplishment, etc., for which you are complimented, you might disclose your true feelings; “I appreciate your compliment, but I haven’t yet decided myself how good it is.” When assertively coping with positive comments you may use
different words from those in coping with negative comments, but the basic assertive coping behavior and attitude are the same; you are your own ultimate judge of all you are.

*
Alternatives: inefficient, wasteful, unproductive,
etc.

*
Examples: … figuring that out; … mastering that; … translating that sentence; … using that tool; … doing that work; … making an impression on Nancy.

7
Prompting people you care about
to be more assertive and less
manipulative toward you

FOGGING works very well in dealing with the manipulative criticism of people you relate to formally or commercially, people who are not very close to you. FOGGING is a very effective skill for desensitizing you to criticism and actually reducing the frequency of criticism from others. It rapidly sets up a psychological distance, boundary lines between you and the person you FOG. It is a passive skill, however, and does not prompt the person you are coping with to be assertive himself—which is what you really want—instead of manipulative toward you, a condition much to be desired if you are in frequent close contact with this person, such as a husband, wife, parent, family member, or close friend. The probability of achieving assertiveness in the other person too is much more likely with the use of the verbal skill I call NEGATIVE INQUIRY. As in learning FOGGING, when you use NEGATIVE INQUIRY, you do not respond to your critic’s statements of wrongdoing with denial, defensiveness, or countermanipulation with criticisms of your own. Instead, you break the manipulative cycle by
actively
prompting further criticism about yourself or by prompting more information about statements of “wrongdoing” from the critical person in an unemotional, low-key manner. As the label of the skill describes, you ask for more things about yourself or your behavior that may be negative.