When I Say No, I Feel Guilty

Informationen zum Autor Manuel J. Smith (19342007) was a psychologist and a pioneer in the life-changing assertiveness training movement. He was the author of a number of self-help books, including the bestseller When I Say No, I Feel Guilty , which became a standard text used in assertiveness training in schools and the workplace. Klappentext The best-seller that helps you say: "I just said 'no' and I don't feel guilty!" Are you letting your kids get away with murder? Are you allowing your mother-in-law to impose her will on you? Are you embarrassed by praise or crushed by criticism? Are you having trouble coping with people? Learn the answers in When I Say No, I Feel Guilty, the best-seller with revolutionary new techniques for getting your own way. Zusammenfassung The best-seller that helps you say: "I just said 'no' and I don't feel guilty!" Are you letting your kids get away with murder? Are you allowing your mother-in-law to impose her will on you? Are you embarrassed by praise or crushed by criticism? Are you having trouble coping with people? Learn the answers in When I Say No! I Feel Guilty ! the best-seller with revolutionary new techniques for getting your own way.

Auteur
Manuel J. Smith (1934–2007) was a psychologist and a pioneer in the life-changing assertiveness training movement. He was the author of a number of self-help books, including the bestseller When I Say No, I Feel Guilty, which became a standard text used in assertiveness training in schools and the workplace.

Texte du rabat

The best-seller that helps you say: "I just said 'no' and I don't feel guilty!" Are you letting your kids get away with murder? Are you allowing your mother-in-law to impose her will on you? Are you embarrassed by praise or crushed by criticism? Are you having trouble coping with people? Learn the answers in When I Say No, I Feel Guilty, the best-seller with revolutionary new techniques for getting your own way.

Résumé
The best-seller that helps you say: "I just said 'no' and I don't feel guilty!"  Are you letting your kids get away with murder?  Are you allowing your mother-in-law to impose her will on you?  Are you embarrassed by praise or crushed by criticism?  Are you having trouble coping with people?  Learn the answers in When I Say No, I Feel Guilty,  the best-seller with revolutionary new techniques for getting your own way.

Échantillon de lecture
1
Our inherited survival responses;
coping with other people by
fight, flight, or verbal
assertiveness”
 
Almost twenty years ago, in college just after being discharged from the army, I met an honest, gutsy man. Joe was a young professor then and I was one of his students. He taught psychology when I met him, and still does. He taught it in a tough, opinionated, open style. He left his students none of their naïve notions about the discipline of psychology. He refused to give the expected explanations for morbidly interesting aberrations or even for mundane normalities of the human mind, behavior, or motivating spirit. In place of complicated theories on why we behave in a certain way, he stressed simplicity. For him, it was enough to describe how things worked psychologically, and that they did work, using simple assumptions, urging us to let it go at that. He held the firm, scholarly belief that 95 per cent of what is pandered as scientific psychological theory is sheer garbage and that it will be a long time before we really know our basic mechanics well enough to explain completely most of what we see.
 
The merit of Joe’s argument is as compelling now as it was twenty years ago … and I agree with it! Long-winded technical or mystical explanations are often intriguing and even literary, but not only are they unnecessary, they actually complicate without adding a jot to our understanding. To use what psychology does have to offer, it is more important to know what will work, not why it will work. For example, in treating patients, I find that it is typically useless to concentrate a lot on why a patient is in trouble; that tends to be academic masturbation and can go on for years with no beneficial results. It may even be harmful. It is much more beneficial to concentrate on what the patient is going to do about his behavior rather than to understand why he behaves as he does!
 
Joe even took away any notion we had about psychologists being the new, all-knowing high priests of human behavior by grumbling in class, “I hate students who ask questions I can’t answer!” As you might guess, Joe’s character out of the classroom wasn’t too much different, and in spite of being an expert in human behavior, he had his share of problems with other people. Joe had enough problems besides those I caused him to grouse at me with gusto each semester after assigning grades: “These students always complain about having too many personal problems to study. They can’t cope with problems? If you haven’t had problems, you haven’t lived yet!”
 
As I came to know Joe over the years as a close friend and a fellow expert on human behavior, it turned out that he had the same problems with other people that I did, and in about the same proportion. As I gradually got to know more and more experts on human behavior in psychology and psychiatry, I found that they too had problems in coping. The title of “Doctor” and the knowledge that went with it did not exempt us from experiencing the same problems we saw in our relatives, neighbors, friends, and even in our patients, no matter what their occupation or education. Like Joe, like other psychologists and nonpsychologists, we all have problems with other people.
 
When our husbands, wives, lovers are unhappy about something, they have the ability to make us feel guilty without even talking about it. A certain look does it, or a door closing a bit too loud announcing an hour of silence, or a frosty request to change the television station. Joe once complained to me, “I’ll be damned if I know how they can do it, or why I respond that way, but somehow I finish up feeling guilty, even when there’s nothing to feel guilty about!”
 
Problems are not limited to those provided by our mates. If parents and in-laws want something, they have the power to make their grown sons and daughters feel like anxious little children, even after they have children of their own. You and I know too well what the gut response is to a mother’s silence over the phone; or an in-law’s disapproving look; or a prompt from Mom or Dad like, “You must be very busy lately. We never see you any more,” or “There’s a nice apartment for rent in our neighborhood. Why don’t you come over tomorrow night and we’ll all look at it.”
 
As if having to cope with those stomach-knotting conflicts was not enough to make us wonder about ourselves, we also have problems with people outside our families. For example, if the auto mechanic does a poor repair job on your car, the garage manager has the knowledge to explain in great detail why your radiator still overheats after you paid $56 to have it fixed. In spite of his ability to make you feel ignorant about your car and rotten for somehow not taking better care of it, there is still the nagging uneasiness that an honest day’s work for a day’s pay does not apply here. Even our friends cause problems. If a friend suggests something to do for an evening’s entertainment that doesn’t appeal to you, the almost automatic response is to make up an excuse, you have to lie so your friend doesn’t get his feelings hurt, at the same time fe…