When I Say No, I Feel Guilty (3 page)

assert,
v. t
. Vindicate a claim to (rights);—
oneself
, insist upon one’s rights; declare. Hence -able, -ive, aa., -ively (-vl-)
adv
., -iveness (-vn-)
n
. [f. L AS (
severe sert
- join) pot one’s hand on slave’s head to free him (whence obs. sense “free” in English) or claim him, claim, affirm]

The Concise Oxford Dictionary

—to assert is to state positively with great confidence but with no objective proof.

Webster’s Dictionary

1
Our inherited survival responses;
coping with other people by
fight, flight, or verbal
assertiveness

Almost twenty years ago, in college just after being discharged from the army, I met an honest, gutsy man. Joe was a young professor then and I was one of his students. He taught psychology when I met him, and still does. He taught it in a tough, opinionated, open style. He left his students none of their naïve notions about the discipline of psychology. He refused to give the expected explanations for morbidly interesting aberrations or even for mundane normalities of the human mind, behavior, or motivating spirit. In place of complicated theories on why we behave in a certain way, he stressed simplicity. For him, it was enough to describe how things worked psychologically, and that they did work, using simple assumptions, urging us to let it go at that. He held the firm, scholarly belief that 95 per cent of what is pandered as scientific psychological theory is sheer garbage and that it will be a long time before we really know our basic mechanics well enough to explain completely most of what we see.

The merit of Joe’s argument is as compelling now as it was twenty years ago … and I agree with it! Long-winded technical or mystical explanations are often intriguing and even literary, but not only are they unnecessary, they actually complicate without adding a jot to our understanding. To
use
what psychology does have to offer, it is more important to know
what will work
, not why it will work. For example, in treating patients, I find that it is typically useless to concentrate a lot on
why
a patient is in trouble; that tends to be academic masturbation and can go on for years with no
beneficial results. It may even be harmful. It is much more beneficial to concentrate on
what
the patient is going to do about his behavior rather than to understand why he behaves as he does!

Joe even took away any notion we had about psychologists being the new, all-knowing high priests of human behavior by grumbling in class, “I hate students who ask questions I can’t answer!” As you might guess, Joe’s character out of the classroom wasn’t too much different, and in spite of being an expert in human behavior, he had his share of problems with other people. Joe had enough problems besides those I caused him to grouse at me with gusto each semester after assigning grades: “These students always complain about having too many personal problems to study. They can’t cope with problems? If you haven’t had problems, you haven’t lived yet!”

As I came to know Joe over the years as a close friend and a fellow expert on human behavior, it turned out that he had the same problems with other people that I did, and in about the same proportion. As I gradually got to know more and more experts on human behavior in psychology and psychiatry, I found that they too had problems in coping. The title of “Doctor” and the knowledge that went with it did not exempt us from experiencing the same problems we saw in our relatives, neighbors, friends, and even in our patients, no matter what their occupation or education. Like Joe, like other psychologists and nonpsychologists, we all have problems with other people.

When our husbands, wives, lovers are unhappy about something, they have the ability to make us feel guilty without even talking about it. A certain look does it, or a door closing a bit too loud announcing an hour of silence, or a frosty request to change the television station. Joe once complained to me, “I’ll be damned if I know how they can do it, or why I respond that way, but somehow I finish up feeling guilty, even when there’s nothing to feel guilty about!”

Problems are not limited to those provided by our mates. If parents and in-laws want something, they
have the power to make their grown sons and daughters feel like anxious little children, even after they have children of their own. You and I know too well what the gut response is to a mother’s silence over the phone; or an in-law’s disapproving look; or a prompt from Mom or Dad like, “You must be very busy lately. We never see you any more,” or “There’s a nice apartment for rent in our neighborhood. Why don’t you come over tomorrow night and we’ll all look at it.”

As if having to cope with those stomach-knotting conflicts was not enough to make us wonder about ourselves, we also have problems with people outside our families. For example, if the auto mechanic does a poor repair job on your car, the garage manager has the knowledge to explain in great detail why your radiator still overheats after you paid $56 to have it fixed. In spite of his ability to make you feel ignorant about your car and rotten for somehow not taking better care of it, there is still the nagging uneasiness that an honest day’s work for a day’s pay does not apply here. Even our friends cause problems. If a friend suggests something to do for an evening’s entertainment that doesn’t appeal to you, the almost automatic response is to make up an excuse, you have to lie so your friend doesn’t get his feelings hurt, at the same time feeling like a guilty sneak for doing so!

No matter what you or I do, other people can cause problem after problem. Many of us have the unrealistic belief that having to live with problems day after day is an unhealthy or unnatural lifestyle. Not so! Life presents us all with problems. It is entirely natural. But very often, as a result of the unrealistic belief that a healthy person has no problems, you may feel the lifestyle we are all caught up in is not worth living. Most of the people I get to know well from therapy sessions develop this negative belief. But it is not the result of having problems, it is the result of feeling inadequate to cope with our problems and the people who present them.

In spite of similar feelings in myself when I cope poorly, the sum of all my experience as a psychologist
rebels at the idea that human beings are some genetically obsolete species designed for an earlier age when things were simpler. Rubbish! I do
not
accept that we are losers who cannot happily live our everyday lives and cope adequately in this industrialized, urbanized, sanitized space age. Instead, I have a different, more hopeful outlook from my own experience; from my professional reading; from what I was taught and my own teachings; from my research in the laboratory and in the clinic; from training people to cope with life’s problems; from going out into the community and having to hospitalize hundreds of people against their will simply because they did not know how to cope with other people; and from clinically treating the mildest to the most bizarre and dangerous psychiatric disorders. Placing all these experiences in perspective with a naturalistic observation of the thousands of other humans encountered in my lifetime prompts a sounder and more realistic conclusion:
not only is it natural to expect that we will have problems in living, it is also natural to expect that we all have the ability to cope adequately with these problems
.

If we did not have an inherited ability to cope with all sorts of problems, human beings as a species would have died out long ago. Contrary to what some doomsday prophets tell us, we humans are the most successful, most adaptive, smartest, and toughest biological organisms ever to come off nature’s evolutional drawing board. If we can believe the evidence and general conclusions that anthropologists, zoologists, and other scientists place before us, we can see that eons ago, a long evolutional struggle took place on this earth. In this struggle, the genetic family of our human and animal ancestors competed with other species for survival under the harsh terms laid down by the ecological forces of nature. Not only did our ancestors survive under these competitive conditions, they flourished. We have survived and prevailed while other species have died out or are facing extinction because we are physiologically and psychologically built for survival under all conditions. Our primitive ancestors survived, not in
spite of problems, but because of them. We have developed as humans from a series of animals who evolved the ability to cope successfully with problems in harsh times and a harsh environment. With this ability, not only have we conquered our earth, our environment and found no other life form that could compare with us in terms of our grand capacity for coping with difficulties, we are beginning a process of preserving our earth and the other species on it for the survival of future generations.

What are these inherited coping abilities that have produced the success of humans? What have you and I in common with dying animal species and what have we that is uniquely human? If you observe the major coping behaviors of the subhuman species, particularly the vertebrates, whenever there is conflict between two animals of the same species, you can usually see a fight or flight response on the part of at least one of the pair. Both fighting and running away are very efficient ways for animals to deal with each other. These types of coping seem to be almost automatic, pre-programmed responses with great survival value for the lower animals. You and I do fight and run from each other too, sometimes not of our choice, sometimes freely, occasionally openly, more often in ways disguised from each other. We fight or we run as a result of evolving from prehuman ancestors who successfully used these same innate coping responses. In our present human form, however, we have no fighting teeth, no sharp claws, no specialized muscles to efficiently back up our inherited aggressive or flight behavior as primary ways for dealing with each other. You and I can’t even produce a decent growl that would frighten off a mugger, and though I trust my running ability in a tight spot, I wouldn’t want to rely on it very often.

Although we have fight and flight in common with the lower animals who survive now only by our sufferance, what distinguishes us from the other species most is our great
new
verbal and problem-solving brain that has been added evolutionally in layers over our more primitive animal brain. Roughly about a million
years ago, it is thought, evolution and competition for survival weeded out our ancestral cousins who could not add something more efficient to their primitive coping portfolio of fight or flight. At the same time, evolution genetically strengthened the verbal and problem-solving ability for each generation of our ancestors who survived and produced us as their descendants. Our new problem-solving brain enables us to communicate and work together when there is a conflict or a problem. This verbal communication and problem-solving ability is the key survival difference between humans and those species who have either died out, face extinction, or worse, have been domesticated.

While the nonhuman animal species have only those two major inherited survival coping behaviors—fight or flight—in common with us, thanks to our more successful ancestors we have
three
major survival coping behaviors—fight, flight, and a verbal problem-solving ability. Fighting and running away from danger are the responses inherited from our
prehuman
ancestors. Verbally communicating with one another and working out our problems in an assertive manner instead of fighting or running away is that part of our evolutional inheritance passed down from our early
human
ancestors. In short, while you have the inherited ability to either fight or run to survive, you are not instinctively forced to do either. Instead, you have the human option to talk with others and in that way to cope with what is bothering you.

When you or I try to cope with conflict in this modern, civilized world by aggression or flight, typically we do not do it openly. There is very little external payoff in acting out on these feelings. As a child, I was taught that I should not fight, I should not punch other children in the nose. I was also taught that I should be brave and not openly run away from people who frightened me. Most middle-class children in Western society are similarly taught by their parents. We are trained to cope with conflict in a passive way. “Do not fight back,” “Stand there and take it”—these are both passive modes. When someone makes us mad, for example,
we rarely show it openly. Instead, we silently grit our teeth and make the empty vow of later revenge. This was the typical pattern shown by one of my patients, Diane, a twenty-nine-year-old clerk-typist. Diane tried to cope with demands she didn’t like made by her boss through passive aggression. Instead of either talking to her boss about her dislikes or acting out her anger by jumping up and shouting at him “Go to hell!” or something similar, Diane would drag her feet on what her boss wanted. Whenever it was her turn to make the office coffee she made a botch job of it; she spilled it, made it too weak or very strong—in short, made a poor showing, as anyone does who is passively fighting something. If she was asked to work late for a short rush job, she made many typographical errors and took twice as long to do it. Instead of open aggression, Diane used passive aggression; her boss could not put his finger on any fight behavior, but she still frustrated his goals as much as she could. As you would guess, Diane’s passive aggression caused her more problems than it caused her boss.

Like Diane, if you or I passively aggress,
we
clean up the coffee mess, or make it over, or work twice as late by dragging our feet,
not the boss!
Even worse, if we passively aggress in this way, our boss is likely to make the same request again and again and we are as frustrated tomorrow in coping with it as we are today. Passive aggression usually works poorly for us and doesn’t get us what we want.