When I Say No, I Feel Guilty by Manuel J. Smith Read Free Book Online

best efforts to avoid feeling these ways. Without an adequate, mature, and assertive outlet, these feelings eventually are expressed by you in verbal fighting or by running away from someone. The end result of this unresolved internal coping conflict between our natural wants and our childhood belief and habit training leaves us with some really dismal choices: we can do what someone else wants, be frustrated very often, get depressed, withdraw from people, and lose our self-respect; we can do what we want angrily, alienate other people, and lose our self-respect; or we can avoid the conflict by running away from it and the people who cause it, and lose our self-respect.
    As a first step in becoming assertive, you have to realize that no one can manipulate your emotions or behavior if you do not allow it to happen . In order to stop anyone’s manipulation of your emotions or behavior, you need to recognize how people do try to manipulate you. What do they say, how do they act, or what do they believe that controls your emotions and behavior?To make yourself as effective as possible in stopping manipulation you also need to question the childish attitudes and ideas many of us have been reared with which make us susceptible to manipulation by other people. Although the words and ways people use to manipulate us are infinite, in my clinical experience in treating nonassertive people, I have observed that there is a most common set of manipulative expectations that many people have about themselves and each other. The manipulative behavior prompted by these expectations can also be seen in the general nonclinical population. These childish expectations and their consequent behavior deny us much of our dignity and self-respect as human beings. If we have the same expectations about ourselves as our manipulators do, we surrender to them our dignity and self-respect, the responsibility for governing our own existence, and the control over our own behavior.
    This and the next chapter deal with the common set of childish assumptions on how we all supposedly “should” behave in order to avoid resorting to our primitive coping of anger-aggression and fear-flight. Such beliefs are the basis for most of the ways other people manipulate us into doing what they want us to do. They directly contradict our assertive rights as healthy, emotionally stable individuals. In this and the next chapters, I describe these beliefs along with each of our assertive rights: the rights that we and other people violate dairy in a futile attempt to keep aggression or flight out of our relationships with each other.
    Our assertive rights are a basic framework for each individual’s healthy participation in any human relationship . These assertive individual rights are the framework upon which we build positive connections between people, such as trust compassion, warmth, closeness, and love. Without this basic assertive framework that allows each of us to express our individual selves to each other, trust gives way to suspicion, compassion evolves into cynicism, warmth and closeness disappear, and what we called love acquires an acid bite. Many people are afraid to show their true feelingsof love and closeness because they think they may be trod upon and will have no way to cope with rejection. If they were confident that, yes, in fact there probably will be difficulties to iron out, but that they can assertively cope with these difficulties, even with rejection, there would be less fear in showing tenderness, closeness, and love. I like to think that being assertive means being confident of yourself and your abilities! “No matter what happens to me, I can cope with it.”
    The Bill of Assertive Human Rights presented herein is composed of statements about ourselves as humans, statements about our true responsibilities for ourselves and our own well-being, and statements about our acceptance of our humanness which set practical limits on what other