When I Say No, I Feel Guilty (8 page)

Such a husband was married to one of my patients of several years ago. This unfortunate couple had had no social or sexual experience with anyone else before marriage. The only close, equal relationship they ever had was with each other. They were completely devoid of any other experience in coping on a close, equal level. The husband’s arbitrary structure was dominant in their interactions from the start, and this young woman was not assertively independent enough to challenge it. Consequently, the only coping styles she had at her disposal were passive aggression, passive flight, or a manipulation that was second-rate in comparison to her husband’s. After six years of marriage, they came into therapy, all their coping problems piled on a psychic wheelbarrow with a flat tire which she pushed around
and called “my sexual problem.” Unable to assertively cope with his manipulations in their everyday life, she gradually withdrew from him in all ways, including sexually. After four years of unsuccessful sexual relations, she complained of orgasmic dysfunction (frigidity), vaginitis (vaginal irritation), vaginismus (involuntary contractions of the vaginal opening preventing sexual intercourse), dyspareunia (deep vaginal pain typically reported in sexual malingering) as well as not being turned on sexually by her husband. Denying that she was nonassertive and insisting that their marital coping outside of the sexual area was satisfactory, she started treatment for the sexual dysfunction. Vaginismus typically takes three weeks to correct with behavioral methods. For her, it took three months. After several of these foot-dragging attempts to rectify her specific sexual difficulties, general exploratory psychotherapy was initiated with no results. Both spouses could not see or accept that their sexual problems were in any way connected to their general behavior toward each other. When she was questioned on why she wanted to rid herself of her sexual difficulties, she responded truthfully with: “So Chuck will be happy,” while saying nothing about her own sexual gratification. She did not realize that having difficulty in being sexually turned on by your husband is a nifty way to cut him up and express your frustration in being married to him without being caught at it! Who can kick back at an invalid? This couple discontinued this type of psychotherapeutic help shortly after its inception and showed no later interest in resuming it. At last report, they were contemplating a divorce.

A personally insecure wife, on her side, may also impose manipulative structure into the marriage in order to deal with her own fears of not being able to cope with the unknown. She may violate her husband’s assertive right to be the judge of what he does by subtly, even condescendingly, treating him as if he were an irresponsible little boy. She will allow him the freedom of working for a living, but in not trusting him, she will try to control everything else he does and make him
feel guilty if he does not agree with her rigid methods of coping. As with the manipulated wife, this husband must believe that it is okay for his wife to do this to him before he can be manipulated. He must believe that he is not his own judge before the structure imposed by her can have a manipulative effect. If he doesn’t accept it, she can’t impose it on him.

One patient I saw recently had this type of interaction with his wife. Prior to therapy, he was employed as a manager in a chain store. With his promotion to manager, he was subjected to various pressures both from the public he dealt with and from the district management of his firm. Because of his nonassertive belief system, he did not draw firm limits on what he would do for his customers and also did not insist on definite commitments of support from his firm. Consequently, he did not last very long in his job as manager. During the time he was unemployed, he felt he had to lie to his wife about having a job rather than tell her he was drawing unemployment insurance. When he was offered a temporary low-pressure job as a warehouseman, he avoided taking it because he dreaded a confrontation with his wife on what her relatives would think about his being a blue-collar worker. This poor fellow clearly did not believe he was the ultimate judge of his own behavior and therefore showed a primary coping style of passive flight instead of verbal assertiveness.

A common source of problems in any of these three ways you relate to other people—commercially, authoritatively, or equally—exists when you have more than one type of interaction with the same person. For instance, when you enter into a commercial relationship with a friend, each of you may have difficulty in keeping your commercial behavior with each other from interfering with your equal, friendly interactions or vice-versa. Your friend may manipulate you by imposing previously agreed-upon ways of doing things as friends that have nothing to do with your commercial dealings. He may, for instance, begin to borrow your car for business purposes since both of you have extended this
courtesy to each other in the past. He may try to borrow larger sums of money since a previous arrangement of lending small amounts has worked well. If you and your friend have not yet worked out a true, equal interaction that is free of manipulative structure, your friend will probably make the same manipulative assumptions about how friends “should” behave toward each other in your commercial dealings with him, i.e., “How could a friend put pressure on just to meet a deadline?” These examples of mixed relationships resulting in manipulation have a parallel in the common-sense folk saying, “Friends and business don’t mix.” As my cousin Edgar from Hawaii emphatically pointed out when we talked about these problems, “When I need some business done, I want to start out simply, with a clear understanding that if my associate doesn’t do what he said he’d do, I’m gonna come down on him hard! I don’t want to have to act tough with my friends. I’ve got better things to do with them.” While Cousin Edgar’s solution to the problem of mixing relationships has great appeal, you may find yourself in the position of having no choice but to deal on two different levels with the same person. Like getting into a bar room brawl, after you are involved it doesn’t much matter if you slipped and fell into it, jumped in willingly, or were shoved and dragged into the fray. Does it matter how it came about that your friend totaled your car, or wants you to help him out by investing in Magic Moment Wart Remover? You still have to cope with what’s going on. If you cope with manipulation in mixed relationships by assertively being your own judge, deciding yourself what
you
want, and spelling out compromises you are willing to accept each step of the way, you can do business with a friend and maintain the friendship.

In any of these three types of interaction with other people, manipulation of your behavior occurs when extraneous rules are imposed upon you that you have not previously agreed to and which therefore violate your assertive right to judge how you do things yourself. If any of us were to verbalize the primary childish belief
we have learned that makes manipulation possible, each of us might use different words or phrases, but the meaning would still be approximately as follows:
You should not make independent judgments about yourself and your actions. You must be judged by external rules, procedures, and authority wiser and greater than yourself
. Basically, then, manipulation is any behavior prompted by this belief. You are being manipulated when someone reduces, by any means, your ability to be your own judge of what you do. The external rules and authority which this belief refers to have profound implications for the control and regulation of all you do, feel, and think. For example, in one class of eighty-five people learning to be assertive, when I asked about this primary childish belief: “How many of you
really believe
it?” only three people raised their hands. But when I asked them: “How many of you
behave as if you believe
it?” the whole class raised their hands.

The right to be the final judge of yourself is the prime assertive right which allows no one to manipulate you
. It is the assertive right from which your other assertive rights are derived. Your other assertive rights are only more specific everyday applications of this prime right. The other rights are important since they provide you with the details for coping with the most common ways that other people psychologically manipulate you, violate your personal dignity and self-respect. Examples of the ways other people try to manipulate you by setting up themselves or some arbitrary standard as the ultimate judge of your behavior are given with each of the specific assertive rights that follow. For the moment however, let’s briefly examine some of the consequences of exercising your basic assertive right to be your own ultimate judge.

When you become the judge of yourself, you learn how to work out independently your own ways for judging your behavior. The judgments you make through your own experience of trial and error are less like a system of “rights and wrongs” and more like a system of “this works for me, that doesn’t.” Your independent judgments are a loose system of “I like—I
don’t like,” not a system of “I should—I shouldn’t,” “you should—you shouldn’t” The particular judgment each of us makes about ourselves may not be systematic, logical, consistent, permanent, or even sensible to everyone else. They will, however, be judgments that fit our particular personality and lifestyle.

For many of us, the prospect of having to be one’s own judge can be frightening. Being our own ultimate judge, without a lot of arbitrary rules, is like traveling in a strange, new country without a tourist guide to point out what we should see, or even more worrisome, without a road map to tell us how to get there. Having to make up one’s own rules for living
as we go along is
no easy task, but faced with the alternatives of frustration, aggression, and flight brought about by allowing manipulation of our feelings, what other choice do we have? We have to rely upon our own judgment because the truth is—whether we wish to face it or not—only we have responsibility for ourselves.

The responsibility incumbent upon each of us for initiating and accepting the consequences of all we do cannot be avoided by denying or ignoring its existence. You cannot assume the responsibility of someone else for his happiness, nor can you automatically shunt the responsibility for your own happiness onto someone else. You cannot avoid your responsibility for the way you live your life with presumably rational reasons meant to show that you have been forced to do one thing or another.
It is your life, and what happens in it is up to you, no one else
. Many people deny that they are the judge of their own behavior. Refusing to take responsibility for it, they are apt to offer excuses, justifications. Examples of such denials of responsibility are usually some rephrasing of the classical Nuremberg defense: “I was only following orders.” One of several assertive alternatives in place of such a denial by the accused German soldiers could have been: “I chose to do what I am on trial here today for, instead of choosing to be reprimanded, reduced in rank, court-martialed, sent to the Russian front, or being killed myself.”

As a final step leading to the examination of our
other, more specific assertive rights—all based on the central one—let us clarify just how our behaving assertively relates to external authority such as moral and legal systems.

Morals are arbitrary rules people adopt to use in judging their own and other people’s behavior. The way we adopt and use moral systems is very much like the way we would behave backpacking in the Sierras after our surefooted guide tripped over a log and broke his neck. Each of us is then faced with the difficult task of finding our way home and the frightening possibility that we may not know enough to survive. As each of us finds a trail, we tell ourselves and the others: “This is the right way.” Our fear of being lost in the wilds and not knowing what to do is relieved by finding any sign of civilization, even though it may lead us farther into the forest. We refuse to worry about coping again by considering the possibility that there may be other trails out of the forest, some better than the one we choose. By rigidly declaring our trail as the right way, we dump the responsibility for getting home off our own shoulders and onto the arbitrary path we choose. If this trail doesn’t get us home, we can always blame the dumb people who made it instead of ourselves! This allegory is used to point out that there is no absolute “right or wrong” moral way to behave; there isn’t even any technically correct way to behave. There are only the personal ways each of us chooses to behave, which enrich or befoul our lives. For example, the assertive backpacker in the Sierras might choose to follow none of the paths found by the rest of his group, but instead to follow his own nose, using any information available; the path of the sun and stars, the position of light-sensitive plant growth, landmarks he remembers, and also his best guess on where highway 99 is from looking at his Standard Oil map.

Legal systems are arbitrary rules society has adopted to provide negative consequences for behavior that society wishes to suppress. Just as with moral systems, laws have nothing to do with absolute “right and wrong.” Systems of right and wrong are used to psychologically
manipulate people’s feelings and behavior. Legal codes ate set up to limit behavior and to settle disputes between people. But you always have the assertive judgment to break a law and face the consequences. How many of us can say that we have never chosen to break driving and parking ordinances and pay the fine if we were caught? We take the responsibility for the choice and for its consequences. Many of us, however, confuse systems of right and wrong with legal codes. Most legislators, judges, and law officers get as confused about right and wrong as the rest of us. Legal and judicial problems in controlling right and wrong courses of behavior demonstrate this confusion. The coupling of legal codes with systems of right and wrong turns laws into instruments of manipulative emotional control. A right-and-wrong system can be incorporated within the body of law as in the case of the United States Supreme Court’s mind-bending phraseology, “socially redeeming” pornography. Does the Supreme Court mean that you can read pornography that has socially redeeming value and not feel guilty because of your prurient interest? If a book’s characters who participate in a literary sex orgy do not later suffer the fires of hell or, even worse, repent and become social workers, does that mean you “should” feel guilty reading it?