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

people can expect of us. Let’s examine, first, our prime assertive right—from which all the other assertive rights are derived: our right to be the ultimate judge of all we are and all we do . Then let’s see how we let people manipulatively violate this right in different types of relationships.
    ASSERTIVE RIGHT I
You have the right to judge your
own behavior, thoughts, and
emotions, and to take
the responsibility for
their initiation and
consequences upon
yourself
    You have the right to be the ultimate judge of yourself : a simple statement that sounds so much like common sense. It is a right, however, that gives each of us so much control over our own thinking, feelings, and behavior that the more manipulatively trained and nonassertive we are, the more likely we are to reject it as the right of other people or even ourselves.
    Why should this be? Why should such a simple statement—that each of us has the right to be the ultimate judge of ourselves—generate any controversy at all? If you exercise this assertive right, you take the responsibilityfor your very existence upon yourself and away from other people. To those who are fearful of what others may do, and therefore feel that people must be controlled, your independence from their influence is quite disturbing, to say the least. Those who are disturbed by independence feel that the people they relate to must be controlled because they themselves are powerless. This feeling of helplessness is a result of their failure, because of nonassertive attitudes, beliefs, and behavior, in attempting to cope with other people. If someone they relate to is not controlled by some external standard of behavior, they feel that their own goals, their very happiness, will be subject to the whim and mercy of the uncontrolled person. When we truly doubt that we are the ultimate judge of our own behavior, we are powerless to control our own destiny without all sorts of rules about how each of us “should” behave. The more insecure we are, the more fearful we become when there is no superabundance of arbitrary rules for behavior. If we are very insecure and disturbed by a lack of guidelines in any particular area of behavior, we will invent enough arbitrary rules until we again feel comfortable and unthreatened. For example, there are no laws in most municipalities specifically controlling each individual’s bodily waste elimination, a matter with serious public health consequences. If you voided your bowels at high noon at Wilshire and Westwood Boulevards, you might be arrested for littering, but not specifically for that act of waste elimination. There are also no rules on how we all “should” behave while eliminating the waste products from our bodies. Yet our behavior in this area does not vary much from person to person even though there are a great number of ways we could behave. In a public rest room, is it all right to converse with the person in the booth next to you? What would he think? I don’t really know, but my guess is that he would think I was some kind of nut if I did. No one has ever talked to me in that circumstance. When standing up at a crowded public urinal, is it permissible to be curious about what the guy next to you is doing? What would he think if he saw you lookingat him? Is it allowed to trace out your initials on the porcelain? What’s the approved way to get rid of that last drop of urine? A nervous snap? An insolent flip? A dignified shake? If there are no rules, and I have never been told or read of any, how come all the other men in there with me behave identically and none of us engage in these finer nuances of elimination? If they are like me, then they too have invented an arbitrary set of rules on what they “should” or “should not” do while performing this function. Although this example describes an unimportant pattern of our behavior, the behavior observed is very regulated.
    The same concept of personal insecurity