When I Say No, I Feel Guilty (32 page)

Several months after that talk about raising children, we got together again and Bert picked up the discussion where we had started it. He pointed out that just empathizing with his youngest girl solved a problem when she came up to him crying over a scraped knee. He did not pick her up or make a big fuss about her complaint, but said simply: “When you cry that much, it must really hurt,” instead of: “It’s not that bad a scrape, Marcie, you should be a big girl now and not cry over everything.” Marcie stopped crying immediately after hearing Bert’s first empathic FOGGING response, looked up, as Bert described it, with stunned amazement, and after getting a pat on the head, ran back to play with the other children. The message Bert gave with empathic FOGGING—that Marcie received and acted upon—was that her father understood that she was hurting, he agreed that she was entitled to hurt, but that there wasn’t anything he could or would do about it. With his actions and words, Bert was teaching Marcie an important lesson; “Sometimes you get hurt in life. I’ve been hurt too, so I can understand how you feel, but I can’t take the hurt away. If you want to play, you have to learn to suffer the hurt”

Sara was also enthusiastic about being more assertive in coping and told me of a situation with her oldest
daughter Katy where use of several systematic assertive verbal skills solved an old problem for her. In this incident, Sara was to meet Katy, at 3:00
P.M
. sharp in front of the Contempo Boutique in Westwood Village to go shopping together. At fifteen minutes past the hour, a rushed Sara parked in front of the store and stepped out of her car to face a cold, fishy look from an irritated young teen-ager who had been made to wait too long for her liking. The following is the dialogue between an assertive Sara and a grumbling, bitchy Katy.

SARA
: Hi,
I’m late
. [NEGATIVE ASSERTION]

KATY
: You sure are! I’ve been waiting for you for over half an hour.

SARA
:
That’s irritating when you have to wait. I don’t blame you for being mad at me
. [FOGGING]

KATY
: What have you been doing to take you so long getting here?

SARA
: Nothing.
It’s my fault entirely
. I just didn’t look at the clock, and made a late start.
Just a stupid thing to do
. [NEGATIVE ASSERTION]

KATY
: Well, I wish you would be here when you say you are going to be here. You are always late!

SARA
:
I am, aren’t I? That’s dumb for me to be careless when you’re waiting for me
. [FOGGING and NEGATIVE ASSERTION]

KATY
: (Silent)

SARA
: Where do you want to start first? The U. N. or Contempo?

Sara was delighted in finding a new way to cope with an old difficulty, a different way of coping that accomplished two things for her. First being more assertive to her daughter made Sara feel better about herself. Her assertive coping made her realize that it was true she had screwed things up,
but so what?
Being fifteen minutes late in that situation did not mean the sky was going to fall down on her head. Second, assertively coping with Katy’s grumbles about being late gave Katy an inescapable message of: “You’re right, I am late, I did
screw things up for you and I can appreciate your feelings about it, but I’m not going to roll over and play dead for you,” and Katy responded to it. What before had been at least ten minutes, off and on, of Katy bitching, grumbling, and complaining white Sara was making up one excuse and denial after another was over within less than thirty seconds.

As Barbara, an elementary school teacher in her first year of teaching, found out, children can be just as manipulative and difficult to cope with outside the family situation. At the time Barbara learned to cope assertively with schoolchildren of all ages, she was a student in one of my classes. Barbara brought up the subject of how to cope with children who didn’t follow a teacher’s orders at school by asking: “What do you do when a child won’t take part in a class activity? How do you get him to play with the other kids during sports time?” Upon being assured by Barbara that the boy in question was a healthy, apparently normal six-year-old who passively resisted doing what she wanted him to do, I asked her if she had already tried all the manipulative ploys we all know so well, like external structure—“It’s a rule that you have to play”; or threats—“I’ll tell your mother (or the principal) if you don’t”; or making him feel guilty if he didn’t—“Everyone likes to play with the other children”; or making him feel ignorant—“You should learn to play with the other children if you are going to be anything in life”; or even anxious—“If you don’t play with the other boys, they may not like you and want to play with you.” Barbara said she had tried about everything and nothing worked. I then asked her why in her supervisory-authority relationship with this boy she hadn’t persistently told him something like: “I’m the teacher and you’re the student. I’m in charge here. When I tell you I want you to play with the other boys, you go out and play with the other boys. You don’t have to like it, all you have to do is
do it
.” Barbara cast a doubtful look in my direction at this suggestion which implied: “Look, dummy. You may know a lot
about assertion but you sure as hell don’t know much about teaching a bunch of kids!” Vocally, however, Barbara agreed to give straightforward assertive communication a try. Except for a chance meeting on a coffee break some weeks after the course was over, I could only have guessed at her success in class with this young student and others. Over coffee, Barbara told me quite enthusiastically about the following dialogue with the boy who didn’t want to play with others.

BARBARA
: Tommy. You still don’t want to play with the other kids?

TOMMY
: (Walking around in a small circle kicking the ground, silently shaking his head)

BARBARA
:
I can appreciate that
, but I’m in charge of you here and I want you to go play ball with the others. [FOGGING]

TOMMY
: I don’t want to.

BARBARA
:
I’m sure you don’t, Tommy
, but
I’m in charge, and I want you to play with the others
. [FOGGING and BROKEN RECORD]

TOMMY
: (First excuse) My foot hurts. (Starting to limp)

BARBARA
:
I’m sure it hurts
, but
I want you to play with the other boys
. [FOGGING and BROKEN RECORD]

TOMMY
: It will hurt more if I play with them. (Limping even more)

BARBARA
:
Maybe it will
, but
I still want you to play with them. If it still hurts after you are finished playing, I’ll take you to the nurse myself
. [FOGGING, BROKEN RECORD, and WORKABLE COMPROMISE]

TOMMY
: (Second excuse) I don’t like them. (No longer limping)

BARBARA
:
It’s okay if you don’t like them or even like playing with them. I first want you to play ball with them
. [FOGGING and BROKEN RECORD]

TOMMY
: (Third excuse) I don’t like playing ball.

BARBARA
:
That’s okay, you don’t have to like it
,
all I want you to do is do it
. [FOGGING and BROKEN RECORD]

TOMMY
: I don’t know how to play ball.

BARBARA
:
That’s okay too. You don’t have to know how. I’m a lousy ball player myself. You’ll make a lot of mistakes while you’re learning and that’s going to make you uncomfortable, like I did when I was learning
, but
I want you to go out there and play ball
. [FOGGING, SELF-DISCLOSURE, and BROKEN RECORD]

TOMMY
: I still don’t want to.

BARBARA
:
Sure you don’t want to
, but
I want you to
. Which would you rather do?
Stay here each play period and talk to me like this or go out there and play with the other kids?
[FOGGING, BROKEN RECORD, and WORKABLE COMPROMISE]

TOMMY
: (Walking out onto the playground toward the other children) I still don’t want to.

BARBARA
: Super! You feel any way you want to. Just play ball.

It became apparent as the details of the interaction between Barbara and Tommy unfolded that Tommy was avoiding playing ball with the other boys because he thought he was a lousy ball player, and I asked Barbara if he was inept or uncoordinated. Barbara replied with a smile, “He fumbled a bit the first week, but whenever I saw him do something well, in my best behavior-modification manner, I praised him afterwards. Now he’s just the same as the rest of the boys. He catches some. He drops some.”

At the same time Barbara was more assertive to Tommy, she was also changing her behavior toward the other children in her classes when conflict arose over things like learning exercises, behavior during class,
etc.
Over a period of weeks with repeated assertive confrontations between herself and her students, like the one with Tommy, Barbara found that the children gave her less and less trouble when she told them to do something. As she put it: “Before they didn’t say anything about me or what I wanted them to do, but half of them
didn’t do it. Now when I tell them to do something, they all move together even though they bitch and moan about it. They may not like me or what I tell them to do, but they do it and they do it quick!”

Other teachers have also found that being assertive with their students resolves conflicts in the classroom quickly, even with older students who can be very clever at times. One of these learners, Zeke, used systematic assertiveness to cope with manipulation from his high school students, particularly during test and grading time. Zeke reported that he didn’t need to go into long dialogues with his students when they complained or tried to get him to change their grades, but felt very good about responding to their manipulative comments and criticisms of his teaching and testing with “one-liners” such as: “You’re right. Some of the true-false questions were ambiguous, but I’m not going to give another test,” or “That’s true, I could have made that point a bit clearer before you took the quiz, but you still get a ‘C’,” or “I can see how you feel being right on the cut-off point between a ‘B’ and an ‘A.’ That’s rough, but you still get a ‘B,’ ” or “Of course it’s unfair that you got sick and have to take a different makeup quiz from the other students, but that’s the test I’m going to give you.” Or even humorously to the whole class: “I’m sure a lot of you feel that you could have gotten a better teacher who doesn’t mumble a lot, but you’re stuck with me!”

In the next dialogue, you will see how one father learned to begin the process of gradually changing the relationship between himself and his young teen-age daughter from that of a parent and child into that of one adult interacting with another adult.

Dialogue #24
Scotty prompts his teen-age daughter to be responsible for her own behavior.

Scotty is a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer, married fifteen years to his second wife, Lynn. Scotty has two children, a daughter Bunny, fourteen, and a son, Dave, twelve, by his second wife. His first marriage produced no children and ended in divorce after one year. Scotty’s second marriage to Lynn had been satisfying to both spouses until Bunny reached puberty. Lynn’s concern for Bunny’s well-being during her transition from child to young woman caused her to aggressively place pressure on Scotty. She continually insisted that Scotty deal strongly with Bunny when she broke dating rules, while she herself verbally “fled” and remained silent, communicating little of her personal concern to her daughter.

After discussing his daughter’s worrisome habit of not coming home on time, I recommended that Scotty persistently use self-disclosure of his private feelings to Bunny about her dating behavior. Several factors were involved in the decision to deal with Bunny’s troublesome behavior through persistent communication of Scotty’s personal feelings about his daughter’s behavior directly to her. By communicating his personal feelings to Bunny, Scotty would literally force her to deal with him on an adult-to-adult basis. He would be teaching Bunny to realize that if she wanted adult freedom within the family structure, she would have to take on some of the adult responsibilities within that structure; she would have to be responsible for her own behavior. The most important adult responsibility she would have to learn to shoulder would be regulating and placing limits on her behavior within the household through the workable compromise process. It was very important that she learn to function with the adults in the family
so that they could
all
reach some agreement on behavior that affected each other. Within this assertive compromise process Bunny would learn that assertive independence is not achieved by angrily alienating or sullenly withdrawing from adult family members. Instead, she had to learn to begin working out some arrangement with her parents that allowed her as much behavioral freedom as was realistically possible while she was learning to cope with this new adult freedom and all the problems it would generate. Bunny, like many teen-agers, would not accept as a basis for self-regulation of her behavior a list of all the troubles she could fall prey to: unwanted pregnancy through rape, seduction, or her sexual willingness; drug dependency or at least a “bad trip” through social peer pressure or experimentation; a police record through a chance arrest because of a dating companion’s illegal behavior; physical injury or perhaps even death through a driving mistake on the part of her relatively inexperienced teen-age date; getting involved emotionally before she could cope with it and getting hurt; etc., etc, etc This fatherly counseling approach was tried in the past and seemed to make no impression upon Bunny, probably due to the unrealistic optimism of her youth. On the other hand, due to their relative age and the problems they experienced, her parents had a more pessimistic but equally unrealistic prognosis for their daughter’s success in growing up. Taking into account both viewpoints, optimistic and pessimistic, for every “reason” Scotty could give Bunny as to why she should be careful and more conservative, Bunny could find an equally valid “reason” why she should be more unrestricted. Warnings and logical or statistical reasons for limiting Bunny’s behavior, therefore, would have little impact on her. They would, as in the past, prompt her to countermanipulate her parents. The only approach Scotty actually had at his disposal for changing his daughter’s behavior, with his relatively weak ability to restrict her physically, was the disclosure of his own feelings as a person, and the persistent asserting of these feelings and their consequences. The most powerful
communication he could bring to bear on Bunny to get her to regulate her own behavior was a persistent disclosure of his upset with her behavior whenever it worried him and his consequent “bugging” her, as well as the fact that if she worried him in the future, he would continue to confront her. Scotty needed to make clear to Bunny that keeping her word was the only solution to his worry about her transition from childhood to womanhood, no matter how rational or irrational his worry was. The aim of disclosure of his feelings of worry was not to make Bunny feel guilty but to make her deal with the reality of Scotty’s feeling on an adult basis. By using this assertive, persistent self-disclosure of worried feelings and a workable compromise procedure, Scotty was to accomplish three very important things for his daughter and himself.