When I Say No, I Feel Guilty (4 page)
Diane, like many of us, also coped with some problems through passive flight. When someone presented her with a problem, she avoided that person as long as possible. For example, Diane came into therapy with a breakdown of marital relations and a possible divorce as her presenting problem. While they were separated, she saw her husband almost daily. Both worked in the same office building. At times during these chance meetings, her husband was cool toward her. His attitude was, in part, understandable since he blamed her for most of their marital troubles. Diane had difficulty coping with his coolness, especially when it happened
in public. She reported at the time that she was still fond of Bob and felt like crying when he acted that way. Diane didn’t know what to do when Bob was cool. She tried to cope by spending a great deal of effort in avoiding him. When Bob tried to call her about the disposition of their common property, she avoided his telephone calls for weeks. Diane carried her flight behavior to the point of walking away from her desk phone when it rang, even if she didn’t know who was calling. In carrying her flight to this extreme, she couldn’t be comfortable even in her own apartment for fear Bob was going to call. When Diane told me of this problem, we set up coached sessions to teach her to
assertively cope
with Bob’s behavior in place of her passive flight coping. With practice, Diane was able to telephone Bob, settle the property division, and most importantly, to set up a lunch date for discussion of what she didn’t like about their chance meetings.
If Diane’s passive flight had continued, it would also have continued to fail as an effective method of coping (just as her passive aggression with her boss did). She was required to face the issue of property settlement ultimately, or really run away from both Bob and the divorce process. Later in therapy, Diane was able to trace many of her marital problems to her methods of passive aggression and passive flight in conflicts between Bob and herself. As Diane found out the hard way, if you or I passively flee continuously from someone during conflict, it is likely that person will become disgusted, give up, and break off the relationship.
When we interact only through aggression or flight, we also feel terrible since these modes of behavior always have the unpleasant emotions of anger or fear associated with them. If we cope in these ways, not only do we get angry or afraid but we usually lose the battle—and there are real battles in life, to be won or lost—with other people; we get frustrated and eventually sad or depressed. The triad of anger, fear, and depression is our basic set of inherited survival emotions and the common emotional denominator that prompts troubled people to seek professional psychotherapy.
The patients I see in therapy get angry and aggressive toward other people too often for their own liking, or continually fear and then retreat from other people, or are fed up with losing and being depressed most of the time. Most people seen by therapists are seeking help as a result of over-reliance on fight or flight in various, sometimes bizarre forms. All of us have felt the emotions of anger, fear, and depression associated with aggression, flight, and frustration. If you feel angry, afraid, or depressed, that does not mean you are necessarily sick in any sense, even if you decide to get help because of these emotions. You and I get angry, fearful, or depressed because we are physiologically and psychologically constructed to feel these ways. We are built the way we are because this particular arrangement of nervous tissue, muscle, blood, bone, and the behavior following from it, allowed our ancestors to survive under harsh conditions.
The negative emotions of anger, fear, and depression have survival value in the same way physical pain has survival value. When you touch a hot object, your hand will automatically retract. Your nervous system is constructed so this reaction will occur automatically; no flunking is required. When you sense an unpleasant emotion, you really sense the physiologic and chemical changes ordered by the primitive “animal” parts of your brain to ready your whole body for some behavioral response. In the case of anger, you are sensing your body’s preparation for an attack toward some person or animal. Not only can we feel this preparation for aggression in ourselves but we can see its results in the behavior of other people. For example, how many championship football teams have been upset in the big game because the underdog team physically outplayed their traditional rivals after the coach insulted and abused them in the locker room? We are not nature’s favored children when it comes right down to physically defending ourselves. Even so, if we get angry, we have a better chance to survive by aggressively defending ourselves when there is no chance to escape or to talk our way out of a dangerous situation.
Whenever you feel afraid, on the other hand, you sense a physiochemical change ordered by your primitive brain that automatically prepares your body for running away from danger as fast as possible. Our chances for survival are better if we can run away from a danger that cannot be dealt with by talking. If a mugger approaches you with an open switchblade knife on a dimly lighted street; the panicky feeling you sense in your breathing, gut, and limbs is not cowardice but a natural feeling of arousal automatically triggered by your brain centers preparing your body for flight.
Even though we have a third human alternative to aggression and flight—verbal problem-solving—at times all of us are going to feel angry or nervous and afraid, no matter what we do. When the careless driver cuts in front of me at 70 mph on the freeway, it doesn’t help me one bit to try to be assertive and keep my hands from trembling, that close to disaster I get shaky and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. When a dent mysteriously appears in the fender of my brand-new car, it doesn’t help me to be assertive to someone who isn’t there; I get mad as hell no matter what I tell myself! If my wife comes home frustrated and grouchy and vents her feelings by kicking me instead of the dog, we go six rounds occasionally and really get into the spirit of it! If things like these happen, our inherited psychophysiology allows us no choice; we are going to feel afraid or angry. But when you
can
assertively interact with other people and, by doing so, have a chance of getting at least part of what you want, automatic anger or fear is less likely. If, on the other hand, we are frustrated by something we cannot change, or we fail to use our innate verbal ability to cope with something we can change, we are likely to feel emotionally depressed.
Although depression would appear to have little or no survival value today, its worth to our ancestors becomes clear if we look at how you or I typically behave when we become depressed. In fact, we hardly behave at all! We do little or nothing except maintain our essential body functions. We usually don’t make love or
enjoyably explore things like going to the movies, learn anything new, solve many problems, or get much done at home or at work. If we look at how we get depressed, we can observe that when we are mildly depressed or sad, we miss something we are used to or we have been mildly frustrated. When we are deeply depressed, we have suffered an emotional loss or we have been very much frustrated. When you feel depressed, you sense the result of messages sent by the primitive parts of your brain to slow down much of the normal functioning of your body physiology needed for most common, everyday activities.
For our early ancestors, depression was a beneficial state when they had to put up with a period of harsh conditions in their environment. When things got rough, they really had to withdraw to retrench. Our early ancestors who got depressed and just sat around during very frustrating times were more likely to conserve their resources and energy. In doing so, they increased their chances for survival until better times came along. We probably see an indication of this primitive emotional residue in ourselves on a cold, overcast wintery Saturday when, for no reason we can put our finger on, we find it difficult to do anything besides snacking, napping, and moping around the house. The common depression you and I often experience may last from several hours to several days. We feel miserable, but with time and some positive experience our depression lifts.
In the relatively affluent society we live in today, depression and withdrawal have no apparent survival benefits. For most of us, conditions are not so physically harsh and demanding as they were for our early ancestors. So this psychological “hibernation” mechanism of depression, evolved by our ancestors for successfully waiting out harsh periods in the environment does nothing for us. Our frustrations today do not come from the environment but from the action of other people. Patients that I, and other therapists, have seen for long-term depression have a history of being frequently frustrated.
Clinical experience in treating persons for temporary or even long-term depression suggests that it is more beneficial to help the depressed person to get his or her feet moving again and reconnected with positive life experiences than to sit out the course of the depression. The treatment of Don, a thirty-three-year-old divorced bookkeeper with recurrent phases of long-term depression, illustrates this concept, Don was reared by a mother and father who constantly frustrated what he wanted to do. When he was a young child, the typical interaction between Don and his parents was for him to receive little or no thanks for performing his tasks around the house, but to be severely punished and made to feel guilty whenever he did anything poorly. When he wanted his first bicycle, for example, Don was given all sorts of reasons why bike riding at his age was dangerous—bikes were expensive, and he was reminded that a careless child like himself probably would not take care of a bike if he were given one. He never got one. When he wanted to learn to drive, he was told that teenagers are bad drivers and he would have to wait. He learned to drive in college, away from home.
Don married a woman he described as similar to his mother. His wife never praised him and always seemed able to find something to bitch about. Three years before treatment, Don’s wife divorced him with his consent. Shortly after their separation, Don began experiencing depressed periods that became longer with each occurrence. At the time of treatment, Don had been given antidepressant “mood-elevating” medication for several months with little effect. The treatment of choice, in Don’s case, was to discontinue his medication since it had no effect on his depression but did have the side effect of making him nervous and irritable. In place of this medication, I told Don to make up a list of things he enjoyed doing when he was not depressed. His job, then, was to indulge himself in at least two of these activities each week, to force himself if necessary, no matter how depressed he was. In addition, whenever he sensed he was doing something poorly at work or socially, he was not to repeat his past habit of fleeing
from the situation by rehearsing his depressed feelings and withdrawing into himself or going home, but was to finish the job at hand or to continue the activity he was engaged in, even if his own immediate feeling was that he didn’t want to. With this therapeutic program in effect, Don’s chronic depression of five months lifted within four weeks.
While our neurophysiologic coping mechanisms of anger-aggression, fear-flight, and depression-withdrawal are not in themselves signs of sickness and maladaptive coping, they just aren’t of much use to us. They seldom work, they rarely even help. Most of our conflicts and problems come from other people and in dealing with other people, our primitive responses are insignificant in comparison with our uniquely human coping ability of verbal assertive problem-solving. Anger-fight and fear-flight, however, actually interfere with this verbal coping ability. When you become angry or afraid, your primitive lower brain centers shut down much of the operation of your new human brain. The blood supply is automatically rerouted away from your brain and gut to your skeletal muscles to prepare them for physical action. Your human problem-solving brain is inhibited from processing information. When you get angry or afraid, you just don’t think clearly or efficiently. You make mistakes. To an angry or frightened man, two plus two no longer add up to four.
For our ancestors and sometimes for ourselves, this inhibition of our new human brain by our lower primitive brain presents no problem. If we can do nothing but physically fight or run to survive, we don’t have to be fancy about it. That we fight as hard as we can or run as fast as we can is enough, and our inherited psychophysiology insures that we will. But our usual dealings with people require neither fighting nor fleeing. And, in fact, these primitive responses also interfere with our verbal problem-solving ability in a second way. Most of us verbally assert ourselves with other people only when we have had enough frustration to become irritated and angry. Not only does anger make you less effective in dealing with the issues in conflict,
but when you are angry, other people tend to put your grievances down to: “He’s just blowing off steam. When he calms down, he’ll be okay. Just forget it.” Our primitive coping responses are less than useless: they usually cause us more problems than they solve.
If this evolutional view of three major coping behaviors, two animal and one human, is correct why do so many of us get angry or fearful and resort to aggression and flight when other people give us problems and conflict? If our entirely human coping alternative of verbal assertive problem-solving is so valuable for survival, how come so many of us use it so poorly? The purpose of this introductory chapter is to help provide an answer to this perplexing and important question. An answer to it will help us understand why so many of us need
to rediscover the natural verbal assertiveness
we are born with but so often lose somewhere along the way. To begin to answer why most of us use primitive responses that are useless and compound our problems, let us look at what happens to us during childhood.
As infants, we are naturally assertive. Your first independent act at birth was to protest the treatment you were receiving! If something happened which you didn’t like, you let others know immediately by verbal assertion—whining, crying, or screaming at all hours of the day or night. You were also very persistent. You rarely stopped letting everyone know you were displeased until they did something about it. As soon as you could crawl, you persistently and assertively did what you wanted whenever you wanted to do it. You crawled into, over, and under anything you wanted to explore. Unless infants are physically restrained or sleeping, they generally create havoc for the people around them. Hence the invention of the crib, playpen, halter, and babysitter to allow parents freedom to do other things besides worry about chasing after babies.
