When I Say No, I Feel Guilty (20 page)

The practice of these skills has a second purpose which it would be quite foolish to forget or even to underemphasize:
the breaking of our own habits of being defensive and anxious when someone tells us something that we don’t like
. The truth is that our critics are not always manipulative or acting out of their own personal sense of insecurity. There are some of us in this frantic world who give others feedback on their behavior and performance without any other motivation than the noblest one, to help. A supervisor, however manipulative he may be with his wife, often refuses a merit raise in pay simply because performance on the job is not meritorious. In assertively dealing with this situation, for example, you can prompt further criticism from your supervisor using all the assertive skills, and empathic NEGATIVE INQUIRY in particular, to improve communication between the two of you. With these skills you give him several unmistakable messages: first, you are interested in improving your performance to the meritorious level; second, you do not crumple when criticized, but you seek criticism and use it; and third, by giving you more regular critical feedback in the future, he can help you achieve your goal of excellent performance on the job. An added side benefit from coping with such difficult situations in this nondefensive, assertive, and confident way is the improvement of relations, working and personal, between your critic and yourself. In my personal (and clinical) experiences in these situations I have found that when you respond nondefensively to your critic, you help make his sometimes very difficult job of giving negative feedback much easier by showing interest in his point of view.

Dialogue #7
Prompting criticism
of your work
to get a
raise

The following short dialogue between me and a student who wanted to know how to ask for a raise illustrates
the point of using empathic NEGATIVE INQUIRY to deal with nonmanipulative criticism without becoming anxious and defensive of yourself.

ME
: Harry, I’ve been meaning to ask you why you don’t recommend me for a meritorious raise.

STUDENT
: Sure, Pete. It’s simple, you didn’t deserve it.

ME
: I don’t understand, Harry.
What did I do that was unmeritorious?
[NEGATIVE INQUIRY response]

STUDENT
: Well, for one thing, you’re new on the job. Less than six months, right?

ME
: Right!

STUDENT
: You haven’t had the time to learn all the ropes yet. You’re not doing bad. You’re just average.

ME
:
What is it I’m doing that makes me just average?
[NEGATIVE INQUIRY response]

STUDENT
: You’re making all the typical mistakes that the new guy usually makes.

ME
:
What am I doing specifically that I’m screwing up?
[NEGATIVE INQUIRY response]

STUDENT
: A couple of things. Like, for instance, that estimating job on the cost of the air ducts in the El Rincon apartment building.

ME
: Okay.
How did I screw up on that one?
[NEGATIVE INQUIRY response]

STUDENT
: You underestimated costs by three hundred bucks. We lost that because of your errors.

ME
:
I guess that was dumb of me not to check my figures out with one of the older guys or maybe even you
. [NEGATIVE ASSERTION]

STUDENT
: Don’t worry about it. We all make mistakes and you are going to have your share of them.

ME
:
Anything else I’m doing that’s just average and I could improve?
[NEGATIVE INQUIRY prompt]

STUDENT
: A couple of other things.

ME
: Let’s hear them.

STUDENT
: You’re still a bit slow in getting the work in.

ME
:
I’m taking too much time?
[NEGATIVE INQUIRY response]

STUDENT
: No. Not too much time. Just average for your experience.

ME
:
Anything else?
[NEGATIVE INQUIRY prompt]

STUDENT
: One more that I can think of. When you turn in your drawings, make the small print a bit clearer. After it’s blueprinted, it gets hard to read.

ME
:
Is that all you can think of now that makes me just average?
[NEGATIVE INQUIRY prompt]

STUDENT
: That’s about it.

ME
: Okay, let me see,
it sounds like I’m not checking my work carefully enough, right?
[NEGATIVE INQUIRY prompt]

STUDENT
: Yeah, that sounds like it.

ME
. And
I could speed things up without making more dumb mistakes that cost money?
[NEGATIVE INQUIRY prompt]

STUDENT
: Yup.

ME
: And
I could be more careful of the neatness of the work I turn in?
[NEGATIVE INQUIRY prompt]

STUDENT
: That sounds about it.

ME
: Well, I want a crack at the meritorious list next time. I’d like to go over some of the things I may have an occasional doubt about with you.
Since I have to improve, I want to do it as fast as possible
. [NEGATIVE ASSERTION]

STUDENT
: Sure.

In another example illustrating this point, I draw from my own experiences as a clinical intern. When I was a novice therapist, like all the others I had a weekly conference with an expert clinician on how well (or poorly) I had performed in working with patients. This was before I began my own work in developing assertive verbal skills for my patients to use to cope with conflict As I had had most of my graduate training in experimental learning theory and psychophysiology, my clinical supervisors strongly felt that I could benefit by being “coached” by an analytic (Neo-Freudian)
supervisor. Feeling terrible in having to learn something I knew nothing about (except “Cocktail Party Freud”), I was quite nervous and defensive during that first feedback session on my performance in approaching the patient’s problem using the analytical method. But about halfway through that first session, as I remember it, some of what my coach was criticizing me about began to make sense: when I began to translate what he was telling me, in Freudian terms, into what I was more familiar with—learning theory and behavior therapy. At that point I became fascinated with his analysis of the patient’s problem and my performance. I began to prompt him to tell me more of the “why” of what I was doing that was poor and could he think of any other things I did that made the session more difficult for the patient. This I did to see if his clinical predictions would match my own, drawn from learning theory. In a crude way, I was making a NEGATIVE INQUIRY of my own performance to see how I could improve it and try to connect what he was teaching me to what I understood about behavior already. Needless to say, during that internship year I learned more about Neo-Freudian clinical technique than any other student of that professor! During our feedback sessions, I exhausted him! But he also liked it and once said: “Pete, you are one of the easiest students to work with that I know. You don’t get defensive about learning and how you can improve your down-home, folksy, low-key, cornball, seductive style of therapy. You have even taught me something about psychophysiology.” The lesson I learned from being nondefensive in an authoritarian situation?
If you are not dealing with manipulation, then prompting criticism may eventually result in praise
, and as it turned out for me, a lifelong friendship.

The idea of prompting criticism about yourself from others can also help improve communications in equal relationships as well as authoritarian ones. Someone you are close to—or would prefer to be closer to—may not be primarily manipulative in his or her style of interacting with you; instead this person may simply have
a passive style of coping which makes it very difficult for him or her to assertively complain or state what changes are wanted from you in the relationship.
And without an outlet for resolving differences, an equal relationship is destined for failure
. You may also consider the possibility that your own past behavior, be it manipulative, or perhaps showing you as quick to anger when criticized, or perhaps at times even in fearful flight, may have been one of the factors causing this passivity in your friend or mate; or at least it has not helped him to change his equally destructive way of coping with you. The practiced use of such verbal skills as FOGGING, NEGATIVE ASSERTION, and NEGATIVE INQUIRY can be helpful in opening up close communication by giving you, the learner, an alternate way of prompting your mate to express him or herself. These verbal skills, after much practice, also can give you the ability to cope with and look at any grievances you prompt from your mate that are attributed to you personally. Their use
first
in other situations reduces your automatic, conditioned response of feeling anxious and defensive when criticized and helps break your old habit of responding to your mate’s criticism with such classics as: “What do you mean I’m always down on you? If you would change and shape up (do what I want you to do), you wouldn’t upset me so much!” With such a manipulative and guilt-inducing response to your mate’s criticism and request for change, is it surprising that he or she decides to take the passive route and withdraws from close ways of interrelating with you? As you will see, in some of the last dialogues in this manuscript, this empathic new way of coping with a passive partner by a formerly defensive and/or manipulative mate is discussed in detail.

Let us turn now to what the first half of this book has been leading up to: assertively coping with the common problems that other people are apt to give us in such generous amounts as we live our everyday lives.

8
Everyday commercial situations—
assertively coping where
money is involved

In previous chapters I talked about the systematic practice of each verbal assertive skill in turn. Although other verbal skills were also used in the dialogues given to explain each skill, each dialogue emphasized the use of one of the assertive skills over all the others. In everyday situations that require you to be assertive, you will be more adept in coping with manipulation if you remember that the verbal skills interlock very well in an assertive verbal sequence. In a particular situation, you might find it efficient to employ one or all of the skills to keep other people from manipulating you and to achieve your goal or a workable compromise.

Except for the specified training dialogues, all the assertive interactions offered in the following chapters are reports of real situations from learners using the systematic assertive skills out in the field. They were transcribed from notes, memory, tape recordings, and verbatim reports of students, patients, colleagues, acquaintances, and friends and were edited for purposes of confidentiality, brevity, clarity, and instruction. Some of the dialogues are quite short and, as you can see, are examples of how some manipulation is rapidly extinguished. Others are quite long, and are left in their lengthy state to emphasize how persistent you need to be in some situations. These dialogues are offered as examples of using all of the systematic verbal skills in a variety of situations. Although the situations given do not cover every possible instance where you might find assertive coping helpful, they do indicate how you can cope in similar situations, even though specific dialogues covering each instance are not given. Manipulation
through guilt, anxiety, or ignorance induction is still manipulation, whether it comes from your used-car dealer, your physician, your lawyer, your friends, or your mother-in-law. The basic skills to cope with manipulation from any source are the same, even if different words are used. Although you may emphasize the use of one skill over another, depending upon the conflict you find yourself in, the systematic assertive skills of BROKEN RECORD, FOGGING, NEGATIVE INQUIRY, and NEGATIVE ASSERTION are general coping skills and are not limited in use only to certain situations or with certain people.

Dialogue #8
Coping with a
door-to-door
salesman

This first mixed dialogue is a training exercise that I use in class or therapy and, hopefully, the learners have the good fortune to encounter the situation on their doorstep. In this exercise, a stranger comes to your front door and introduces him or herself as either: (1) a disabled veteran of the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korean, or Vietnam conflict, depending upon his apparent age; (2) a representative of the society for all the world’s crippled children; (3) a representative of a minority group in plight; (4) a college student working his way toward a scholarship; or (5) just a neighbor from down the way (who has never met you during the brief, fourteen-year period you have lived in your house or apartment) and is working on a project to send children from the neighborhood to summer camp in the mountains away from all the urban, suburban (or even rural) congestion, smog, and unhealthy influences. After introducing himself, the stranger then explains that he is selling subscriptions to a variety of interesting magazines and a certain percentage of the profit from your purchases will be donated by his company to the worthy cause he represents (see 1 through 5 above).

Setting of the dialogue: the door-to-door salesman has just introduced himself and his wares and starts out with a statement:
SALESMAN
: I’m sure you would want to have these magazines in your home for your education and enjoyment.

LEARNER
: I can understand how you would feel that way, but they don’t interest me.