When I Say No, I Feel Guilty (7 page)

The same concept of personal insecurity prompting us to invent rules to control behavior applies to other more significant things. What is the “right” way to have sex? The standard missionary position? How about the things they describe in the Kama Sutra? If those are okay too, how come it was not published in most countries until a few years ago? In other areas of living, how do you tell your mother to stop bugging your wife? What are the rules on how mothers and daughters-in-law “should” behave to each other? How come your wife doesn’t take care of this problem herself? Are only sons “supposed” to deal with mothers? Where did all these arbitrary ways of “properly” doing things come from? The answer is a simple one. All of us invent the rules as we go along, using the beliefs taught us in childhood as an outline. We then manipulatively use them with other people to control their behavior, through violation of their assertive rights, and thereby relieve our feelings of personal insecurity about not knowing what to do and how to cope. But when we act as if we are the ultimate judge of our own behavior and someone’s arbitrary rules must first be approved by us before we follow them, we will severely threaten this arbitrary structured order that nonassertive people use to cope with us. Consequently, the nonassertive person will be loath to grant other people any assertive rights and powers to influence their relationship with him. As a self-protective measure, he will psychologically manipulate you with rules and standards of right and
wrong, fairness, reason, and logic to control behavior that may be in conflict with his own personal wants, likes, and dislikes. The manipulative person will invent this type of external structure or assume it already exists in a relationship in order to control your behavior. The tragedy of this manipulative coping is that the manipulator is unaware that the only justification he really needs to negotiate a change in anything is
the fact that he wants a change
. He does not need external structure or arbitrary rules as a manipulative backup for what he wants. To negotiate his wants with you, all he need do is to make a judgment that his likes and dislikes are sufficient justification for the effort he will expend in negotiation.

Does the manipulator’s use of structure, i.e., the way he determines and tries to convince you of the “right, wrong, fair, or logical” way of doing something mean that all structure is manipulative? Does it mean that if you rely on rules and structure to make your relationships a bit simpler and easier, you open yourself to manipulation? These questions are difficult to answer with a simple yes or no. An answer more in touch with the reality of how structure can be used is
“probably yes,”
depending upon how the structure in the relationship was worked out and what type of relationship exists between the people in conflict. How can structure in a relationship work for you or against you? What are the important things about structure and relationships that allow you to make the distinction between structure used to manipulate and structure (workable compromises) used to make things easier, more stable, and less chaotic? First, all structure or rules in any interaction between two people is arbitrary. If one particular blueprint on how things will operate can be designed, you can usually find a half dozen other ways that will more or less produce the same results. For example, if you and your business partner design a scheme whereby you handle the office while he meets the public, that is not the only way you could have arranged things. You could have shared the bookkeeping or hired a part-time bookkeeper or any of a number of
things that would produce the same result, i.e., a successful business with you doing more of what you want. If you take care of the kids while your husband works, that is only one arbitrary arrangement. You can share the responsibility with him, hire a babysitter, use a daycare center, drop them off at Grandma’s, get a job yourself, or any of a number of arbitrary possibilities—none laid down in heaven.

Second, to better understand how structure can be used either to make things easier or to violate your right to judge what you will or will not do, it is convenient to classify all your relationships with other people into three gross categories: (1) commercial or formal relationships, (2) authority relationships, and (3) equality relationships. How you categorize a particular interaction between yourself and someone else depends upon how much of the interaction between the two of you is regulated by rules from the outset perhaps even before you and the other person meet. For example, in spite of what you may first think, of all your interactions, commercial dealings have the most structure imposed upon them before the interaction even starts. This structure may even be in the form of a legal code or contract. Both parties in buying and selling merchandise, for example, know or spell out exactly what all their commercial behavior toward each other will be. One usually selects and pays for merchandise and the other usually receives money, delivers the goods, and backs up performance of what is sold. Problems arise in commercial relationships when one of the parties (usually the seller) brings in external manipulative structure that has not been mutually agreed upon in advance and does not allow you to be your own judge of what you will do. For example, “We’ve got nothing to do with the repair of your radiator. That was subcontracted out to the radiator shop. You’ll have to go see them about that.” (Implying: “You dummy! Don’t you know how we do business around here at Ripoff Motors?”)

The middle category (2), involving relationships with some sort of authority figure, is only partially structured
beforehand. Not all the behavior that people in this relationship show each other is covered by mutually agreed-upon rules. You will observe defined roles and organization imposed upon both people from the start, but not all their behavior is regulated as in a commercial relationship. One example that fits this category is the interaction between a boss and an employee. In my dealings with my boss, not all the rules have been spelled out and mutually agreed upon in advance. I may know specifically how to deal with him on the job, but what do I do when we get together after work? Who buys the drinks? Or who chooses the bar? Or even on the job, for instance, what do you do when your boss brings in something out of left field that you haven’t seen before, like taking on more responsibility, working odd shifts, or covering overtime without more money? In this type of interaction you can see problems occur when manipulative structure is arbitrarily imposed in areas where no mutually agreed upon rules exist and this structure does not allow you to be your own judge of what you will do. For example, your boss at work is not your boss on the tennis court (thank God!), so how come you are always making all the arrangements when you play tennis together? How did that one come about? Your boss during working hours is not your boss after 5:00
P.M
. on your way home, so how come you are dropping his suit off to be cleaned? Even more galling than the tennis situation, you resent being his flunky, but still don’t say anything about it to him! This is the sort of thing that
will
happen to you when arbitrary structure is introduced into areas of your relationships with other people which do not require structure for
mutual convenience
. When structure is imposed unilaterally, its effect and
intent
are to control your behavior, and this violates your own right to judge what you will or will not do.

Another good example of the authority type of relationship exists between young children and their parents. Here you can observe that the parent starts out with the authoritarian roles of mother-father, helper, teacher, nurse, protector, provider, model, disciplinarian,
decider, and judge. You can also see that the child begins with the roles of dependent, learner, patient, petitioner, etc.,
etc.
Over the years as the child grows up and assumes more and more self-responsibility for his welfare, the initial reality-imposed parent-child structure requires modification. Less and less structure and fewer and fewer rules are required since the child has to be allowed more and more freedom of choice if he is ever to take the initiative for managing his own life. As you may remember from your own experiences, when the roles between parent and child become more equal, both parents and their children can share some of their personal feelings, goals, and problems with each other. Usually this sharing does not reach the level of closeness that characterizes the relationship between equals. Too often, due to ignorance or insecure clinging to the old, safe, but obsolete structure, parents allow their children adult freedom but do not surrender their initially imposed roles as all-knowing father-mother, thus violating their children’s assertive right to be their own judge. The result of this resistance to inevitable change is an unnecessary distance between parents and their children.

This unfortunate circumstance was evident in one case between a mother and her forty-year-old daughter, before the daughter came in for therapy. In reaction to being constantly frustrated, this nonassertive daughter found at least some satisfaction in life from eating, and eating, and eating! Consequently, she was often on a strict diet. On one occasion while she was dieting, she went shopping with Mom. At the end of the trip, they stopped in a coffee shop to relax. Mom promptly proceeded to talk her daughter into having something besides a cup of coffee, on a “Mother knows best” basis. Although the daughter pleaded that she knew what she was doing, she ended by eating, even though she didn’t want to. And until assertive therapy was completed, this patient never dared or desired to shop with Mom again. Mom manipulated her daughter (who knows why?—and for our purposes, it doesn’t matter) by bringing in structure from a previous situation (childhood)
that had no current basis between two women, one aged sixty and the other aged forty. At the same time, this mother was having severe difficulties in her own home life. Her husband was physically disabled and she was making a mess of things financially and organizationally by undertaking projects she was just not suited or experienced for. Her daughter wanted to help but avoided getting involved since she realized that Mom probably wouldn’t trust her judgments or advice. She also had her fill of Mom’s continual manipulative shenanigans and simply did not want to be around her.
Parents like this have failed to work out new adult-to-adult roles with their sons and daughters that would be more appropriate to the unique, and hence more wonderful, relationship which parents can have with their grown children
.

In sharp contrast to this example of children still being children-to-parents at age forty and parents still being parents-to-children at age sixty is the relationship between another mother and daughter I know well. These women also had severe disruption in their lives, but at an earlier age. When this daughter was entering puberty, her father died. In spite of all the problems naturally encountered by a family in such a situation, through trial and error over the years, this mother and daughter evolved a mutual respect for each other’s choices and decisions. At present, Mom is fifty-six and living alone while her daughter is thirty-one and married with two children. Each is a source of good feeling, support, and counsel for the other. This mother told her daughter recently about her problems in living alone and commented: “I really like talking to you about my problems. You aren’t judgmental about my boy friends. You don’t cut them up and try to tell me what to do. You just listen and give me an opportunity to get things off my chest. I really appreciate it.” And not only is this mother able to accept help and counsel from her daughter, she is also able to respect the limits her daughter places on her when interacting with her grandchildren and son-in-law.

In the third category of relationships—between
equals—there is no initial structure imposed upon either person’s behavior beforehand. All structure in this type of interaction is evolved as the relationship progresses, through compromises that work. These mutually agreed-upon compromises (structure) are practical ones; they allow the business of the relationship to be carried on without daily negotiation of who does what and when. People I have taught to be more assertive often naively insist that these compromises should be fair ones. They often seem a bit shocked when I respond to them with: “Compromises don’t have to be fair to be useful. All they have to do is work! Where did you ever read that life is fair? Where did you ever get that crazy idea? If life were fair, you and I would be taking turns visiting the South Pacific, the Caribbean, and the French Riviera with the Rockefellers! Instead we’re in this crummy classroom trying to learn to be assertive!”

Examples of equal relationships are those between friends, neighbors, roommates, co-workers, dates, lovers, adult family members, cousins, in-laws, brothers, sisters; relationships where you have the most freedom to work out what you want as well as having the most chance for getting hurt. The most obvious example is between spouses in a marriage. In those effective, equal marriages that you know of, you will see both partners collectively work, and expect to rework, the compromise structure they require through frequent communication with each other of what they want and are capable of giving to one another. There is no fear of appearing odd or selfish in their own eyes or violating some sacred set of rules on how husbands and wives “should” behave. With this assertive sharing ability, the partners lay down a minimum of renegotiable, workable compromises on each other’s behavior, thus keeping their marriage structure as flexible as humanly possible to deal with the real problems of life instead of the self-frustrating, manipulative ones.

Problems in this type of equal relationship come about when one or both of the partners, due to personal insecurity or perhaps ignorance, have entered the situation with preconceived ideas on how friends,
roommates, or husbands and wives “should” behave. For example, if you look at the troubled marriages you know, you will probably see that one or both spouses have definite roles in mind for themselves and each other. These imposed rules do not allow the other spouse to be the judge of his or her own behavior in the marriage. But imposed rules do not work in reality: the details of each of their roles must be worked out as
they go along
if they are to pull together and create a happy life for themselves. The more personally insecure either of the marriage partners may be, the more arbitrary and manipulative a structure she or he tries to impose on their mates and themselves as soon as possible. The insecure person copes best in a very structured situation where there are very few unknowns to deal with. The insecure husband may impose arbitrary structure upon his wife simply in order to deal with his fear of coping poorly with her. He may, for instance, insist that wives should not work, should stay home, take complete care of the children, or not be allowed to manage money. He may even feel wives should be punished or at least made to feel guilty if they have other ideas about such an artificially imposed way of dealing with marriage. He may do this even at the same time that he is mouthing platitudes about fairness and give-and-take.