When I Say No, I Feel Guilty (5 page)

These devices work well for a while in controlling infantile assertive activities but soon a baby matures into a young child. You could walk and talk and understand what your parents told you. At this point it was no longer appropriate to physically restrict your behavior
if you were ever to progress beyond the infant stage. The control your parents exerted over you changed from physical to psychological. As soon as you could learn to speak, the word that rolled from your tongue most assertively was an emphatic “No!” You would even give up a favorite treat sometimes to be able to say “No!” While this obstinacy may have driven Mom up the wan, it was only an extension of your innate assertiveness into the verbal sphere. To psychologically control your behavior while you were learning and exploring this fascinating verbal ability, as soon as you could understand what your parents told you, you were trained to feel anxious, ignorant, and guilty.

These feelings are simply conditioned or learned variations of our basic survival emotion of fear. Once we have learned to feel anxious, ignorant, or guilty, we will do a lot of things to avoid feeling these ways. Our parents train us to feel these negative emotions for two important reasons. First, playing upon our negative emotions is a very efficient way of controlling our natural, annoying, and sometimes explosive childish assertiveness. In using our emotions for controlling behavior, our parents are not necessarily uncaring, lazy, or insensitive to our wants. Instead, our assertiveness at that young age is readily mistaken by them for the innate, aggressive fight-coping we do show when we are frustrated. Second, our parents use this psychological control method because our grandparents taught
them
to feel anxious, ignorant, and guilty.

Our parents accomplish this emotional training in a very simple way. They teach us ideas and beliefs about ourselves and the ways people behave that produce feelings of anxiety, ignorance, and guilt. For example, place yourself in the shoes of a young child, your own child perhaps, or yourself when you were young, and look at the training you undergo. This training is given by both parents, but Mom usually has to do most of the “dirty work” since she is with you much more than Dad. When you clean up your room and put all the toys away, Mom usually says things like: “That’s a good boy.” When she doesn’t like the job you do—if
you do it at all—she usually says things that sound like: “What kind of kid are you? Only naughty children don’t clean up their room!” You soon learn that “naughty,” whatever that means, applies to you. Whenever it is used, Mom’s voice and mood tell you that something scary and unpleasant
may
happen to you. She also uses words like bad, terrible, awful, dirty, willful, unmanageable, and maybe even words like wicked or evil, but they all describe the same thing: You! What you are: small, helpless, and not knowing much. And what you “should” feel: dumb, nervous, perhaps frightened, and certainly guilty!

In training you to attach emotionally loaded ideas like
good
and
bad
to your minor actions, Mom is denying that she has any responsibility for making you do what
she
wants, like cleaning up your room. The effect upon you as a small child of using such loaded ideas as good, bad, right, and wrong to control what you do is the same as if Mom had said: “Don’t make that sour face at me. It’s
not me
who wants you to clean up your room.
God
wants you to clean up your room!” By using good-bad statements to control your behavior, Mom shifts the responsibility off her shoulders for making you do something. With external statements like right and wrong that have nothing to do with your interaction with her, she blames your discomfort at doing what
she
wants onto some external authority that made up all the rules we “should” obey.

This is nonassertiveness. This way of controlling behavior, ie., “That’s a good-bad boy,” is very efficient, but it is manipulative, under-the-table control and not an honest interaction in which Mom
would assertively, on her own authority
, tell you what
she
wants you to do, and stick to it. Instead of asserting her wants to an assertive young child until he responds to her wishes (and he will), Mom finds it easier to make you struggle through bad and good with God, the government, the sanitation and safety department the old man with the white beard, the police chief, or whoever else you childishly perceive as the one who decides what is good and what is bad. Mom rarely tells you: “Thank you. I
like it very much when you clean up your room,” or even “It must really bug you when I make you do your room over, but that’s exactly what I want you to do.” With statements like these, Mom teaches you that whatever Mom wants is important simply because
she
wants it. And that is the truth. She teaches you that nobody else is checking up on you but her. And that too is the truth. You are not led into feeling anxious or guilty or unloved because you don’t like what Mom wants. You are not taught that what Mom likes is good and what she dislikes is bad. If she uses simple assertive statements of “I want,” there are no implications or unspoken threats that “good” children are loved and “bad” ones are not.
You don’t even have to like what Mom wants you to do; you only have to do it!

What a happy situation: being able to bitch and grumble to Mom and Dad to get things off your chest and know they still love you. Using psychological guilt to manipulate your behavior, on the other hand, is the same thing as teaching you that you have to like the taste of aspirin before it will cure your headache. Thankfully, when parents assertively assume themselves to be the authority on what their child can and cannot do, they then teach the assertive concept that when you grow up, not only can you do what you want,
just like Mom and Dad
, but you will also have to do some things you don’t care for so that you can do other things you do want, just like Mom and Dad.

Children unfortunately are taught to respond to psychological control of their learned emotions of anxiety, ignorance, and guilt in many childhood situations. For example, if you are playing with your dog in the living room and Mom wants to take a nap on the couch, she teaches you to respond to manipulative emotional control by saying: “Why are you always playing with Rover.” You then must come up with an answer as to why you are always playing in the living room with Rover. Not knowing any reason why except the fact that you like to and it is fun, you feel ignorant, because if Mom asks for a reason, there must be one. She wouldn’t ask for something that didn’t exist, would she?
If you honestly but sheepishly reply: “I don’t know,” Mom counters with: “Why don’t you go play in your sister’s room with her?” Lacking a “good” reason why you prefer to play with the dog than with your sister, you are again induced to feel ignorant for not knowing why. Searching awkwardly for a reason, your mumbled reply is cut off by Mom: “It seems like you never want to play with your sister. She wants to play with you.” Feeling guilty as hell by now, you remain silent as Mom delivers the coup de grace: “If you never want to play with your sister, she won’t like you and want to play with you.” Now feeling not only ignorant and guilty but also anxious about what your sister might think of your attitude, you depart with Rover on your heels to take up your rightful station in life beside Sis and out of Mom’s hearing.

Ironically, all the tortuous finagling Mom goes through to convince you that you “should” like to play with Sis is more harmful to your natural assertive initiative than if she showed you her down-to-earth, obviously human grouchiness and said: “Get the hell out of the living room while I’m trying to sleep and take that mangy mutt with you!” Even with statements like this, she is exposing you to the hard realities of living with other humans. Sometimes the people you love and care for are going to treat you rottenly, because they are human. They can love and care for you and still get angry with you. Living with people is never just peachy all the time, so with occasional episodes of anger, tempered by everyday love, Mom prepares you emotionally to cope with this human paradox.

Manipulative training of learned negative emotions is reinforced and carried on when you are out of the home. Older children who have been trained themselves this way use manipulative emotional control to get other children to do what they want. Teachers in school pick up where the mother leaves off and use manipulative emotional control as a very efficient means to run their classrooms with less work on their part. Eventually,
when you are very well trained in being controlled through your learned negative emotions and effectively blocked from being assertive, you begin to use passive aggression, passive flight, or countermanipulation in an effort to gain some control over your own behavior.

Your own early manipulations, for example, sound like: “Mommy, how come Sis always sits in her room playing when I have to clean up the yard?” critically suggesting that Mom is playing favorites. At this young age, you haven’t yet learned enough about manipulation to be a match for Mom. You won’t be that facile until you are a teenager and want your own car, or the use of one, to stay out late on dates, or any one of a hundred other things. By then you are slick enough to play on your parents’ learned feelings of anxiety and guilt with barbs like: “Ron’s father bought him a car, aren’t you as rich as him?” or “Jennifer’s mom has a maid. Why can’t you have one to clean up the house?” But in the meantime, your first manipulative attempts are quite sufficient to make Mom feel defensive and protective of herself. Your criticism implies that she is not being fair or sticking to the external rules she taught you. In the same manipulative spirit that you offered your veiled criticism of her, Mom replies with something like: “Your sister helps me around the house. It’s only fair that she shouldn’t have to do the yard work too. You should do
something
around here! Girls clean up the house and boys clean up the yard.” Here again, safely hidden behind the curtain of her manipulation, Mom subtly implies that not only are you perilously close to being a useless loafer, but that it is not by her wishes that you have a displeasing task. Mom implies that she’s only following some complex set of rules which she didn’t make up and which you don’t fully understand yet (You, incidentally, will later also use these rules, but
never
fully understand them, since each of us, like Mom, improvises our own details of the rules as we go along, selectively uses the rules when it suits us and conveniently ignores them when
that serves our purpose.) Faced with this formidable verbal tangle, you find it easier to retreat to the yard for a long session of grumbling and passively dragging your rake. Not only does Mom’s manipulative control of your emotions and behavior train you further in the arbitrary use of ideas like right and wrong, or fairness, but with the same words, Mom is conditioning you to think according to vague general rules that “should” be followed.

The flaw in this conditioning process is that these abstract rules are so general they can be interpreted in any way desired, in the same circumstances. These rules are external to your own judgment of what you like and dislike. They tell how people “should” feel and behave toward each other, regardless of the relationship between them. They are often dogmatically and provincially interpreted to the point of training you for a totally arbitrary sexual lifestyle that has nothing to do with survival or reproduction. Why should boys do yards and not their sisters, for example?

Mom does have the more promising option, however, of dealing
assertively
with manipulative statements from her children, More hopefully she uses verbal assertion in her response, and in doing so, she neither punishes nor countermanipulates her child. In coping with your criticism of her job assignments, for example, she can assertively and empathically respond with: “I can see that you feel it’s unfair that you do the yard while your sister is playing. That must upset you, but
I still want you to rake the yard now.”
By her assertive response in the unpleasant job of coping with your manipulation, Mom is telling you a lot of emotionally supportive and reassuring things. She tells you that even though you are going to do something you don’t like, you are entitled to feel the way you do and she’s not insensitive to you; despite the way you see your ordered, fair world crumbling, things are still going the way Mom wants them, and most reassuring of all, disaster is not lurking around the next turn because
Mom is smart enough not to be “conned” by an insignificant little kid like you or your sister.

The mothers I see in my teaching all express similar uncomfortable feelings about the job of coping with young children. They have two main sources of worry. First, they are confused about the different methods used over the years for rearing children. Spock tells them one thing, Gesell told them something different, Patterson something else. Second,
all
the mothers erroneously assume that if they decide to assertively take charge, they will only have two options: either being tyrannical bastards or indulgent jellyfishes with their kids. They see no meaningful middle ground between these two extremes. Faced with such a distasteful choice, they fall back upon the efficient, emotional manipulation taught them by their parents instead of assuming the frank, honest responsibility of taking authority:
“I want you to …”

Taking this authority and using it to make themselves and their children feel better about the stresses of growing up is simple behaviorally, but not easy emotionally. One mother, for example, asked me, with a tinge of hostility, “How do
you
break a promise to a child?” The feeling tone that accompanied this question suggested that this mother, like many others, felt it was imperative that she always be on top of things and present at least the illusion of a super-competent mom to her daughter—someone who never breaks a promise, for example.

As I talked to her later it turned out that my analysis was correct. She was in the bind of having to be perfect, not to make mistakes, and above all not appear dumb to other people. As I like to describe it, she had set herself up in a “sucker’s play.” In trying to be perfect and a supermom to her daughter, she was an odds-on favorite to lose. Eventually she was going to have to break promises either because she could not or did not want to keep them. If she could drop her need to be perfect and her pretense that she was, she could
break a promise to her daughter in an assertive way that would minimize
both
their uncomfortable feelings. She could say, for example, “I know it’s dumb of me to make you a promise that I can’t keep, but we are going to put off going to Disneyland on Saturday. You didn’t do anything wrong and it’s not your fault. Let’s see when we can go again, okay?” With this
assertive
negative statement, she would be giving her daughter the message that even Mom does dumb things now and then, but even more important she serves as a model for her daughter, showing that if Mom doesn’t have to be perfect, neither does daughter. She models this important part of being human while she makes the reality clear: for whatever reason, Mom has decided that they will not go this time,
and they are not going
.