People Skills_How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts

by Robert Bolton PhD

  This chapter defines what is meant by both the defensive and impacting aspects of assertion, distinguishes assertion from both submission and aggression, and notes the payoffs and penalties of each of those approaches to living. The chapter concludes by highlighting the importance of responsible choice as a desired outcome of A.T. People who have a firm grasp of the materials in this chapter usually find it easier to learn the skills of assertive communication which are presented in subsequent chapters of this part of the book.

  THE NEED TO PROTECT

  ONE’S PERSONAL SPACE

  Each individual has a unique personal space—a physical, psychological, and values territory which is hers. The space varies in size and in many other ways from one person to another. Within our life space, we exercise the prerogatives of our own individuality. Outside of this personal space we move in a common area where the rights of others need to be considered and where adaptability is required. Occasionally (or perhaps even frequently), an individual becomes an aggressor encroaching on our territorial rights or infringing on our intimate concerns.

  The life space concept is easier to understand than to describe. The easiest part to portray is the territorial aspect. “Territory” includes a person’s possessions—her clothes, particular pieces of furniture, and so on. Beyond that, a person’s physical or territorial space includes an area that extends beyond the body and is surrounded by an invisible boundary. The poet W. H. Auden described his territory this way:

  Some thirty inches from my nose

  The frontier of my Person goes,

  And all the untitled air between

  Is private pagus or demesne.

  Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes

  I beckon you to fraternize,

  Beware of rudely crossing it:

  I have no gun but I can spit. 5

  Georg Simmel, the German sociologist, noted that the personal space of a famous person is larger than that of an average person. He said people typically show deference to important figures by remaining twenty-five or more feet away from them.6 The journalist Theodore White’s The Making of The President 1960 provides an interesting example of the large personal space accorded to important figures. The setting is a “hideaway cottage” used by John F. Kennedy and his staff:

  Kennedy loped into the cottage with his light, dancing step, as young and lithe as springtime, and called a greeting to those who stood in his way. Then he seemed to slip from them as he descended the steps of the split level cottage to a corner where his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver and brother Bobby were chatting, waiting for him. The others in the room surged forward on impulse to join him. Then they halted. A distance of perhaps 30 feet separated them from him…. They stood apart, these older men of long-established power, and watched him. He turned after a few minutes, saw them watching him, and whispered to his brother-in-law. Shriver now crossed the separating space to invite them over. First Averell Harriman; then Dick Haley; then Mike DiSalle. Then, one by one, let them all congratulate him. Yet no one could pass the little open distance between him and them uninvited, because there was this thin separation about him, and the knowledge they were not as his patrons but as his clients. They could come by invitation only, for this might be a President of the United States.7

  Some scholars claim that our territorial concerns are genetic—inborn, and “ineradicable.” Others say they are culturally determined and that in some rare societies, territorial concerns are absent.8 Though there is controversy over some of the fine points of this theory, it is generally established that a sense of territoriality is a powerful force in contemporary life. As Albert Scheflen and Norman Ashcroft note in their book Human Territories: How We Behave in Space-Time, we humans “have now marked off most of the planet’s surface, some of its waters, and the surface of the moon as well.”9

  Just as respect for someone’s personal space means keeping a fitting spatial distance from the other, it also involves maintaining an appropriate emotional distance. Other persons can keep off our psychological or emotional turf by refusing to make put-down comments, ask nosy questions, offer unwarranted advice, endeavor to manipulate us into doing their will, overwhelm us with their affection, attempt to submerge our own identity in theirs, and so on.

  Respect for our personal space allows us the right to our own values. People often attempt to push their values on us. Teachers commonly try to impose values on their students, coaches on their players, employers on their workers, and spouses on their mates. For many people, it is extremely difficult to avoid intruding on another’s space in values issues.

  Undoubtedly there are other factors that constitute one’s personal space, but by now I think you have a feel for what I mean by that term. Let me sum it up in one sentence: Respect for my personal space involves honoring my physical territory and possessions and allowing me to be my own person.

  When two or more people are together in a vital way, they form a social space that belongs exclusively to them. People honoring their social space will respond in a variety of ways. They will walk around rather than between a pair or, when there is no alternate route, they may duck their heads as they walk between them. They will refrain from interrupting the pair when their interaction is most intense and will ask if they may join them when that seems appropriate.

  Maintaining an appropriate emotional and values distance from other people’s social space is often difficult. Frequently when children grow up and marry, their parents intrude on the young couple’s social space to the detriment of the fledgling marriage.

  It also takes some effort for a spouse to figure out the relationship between one’s personal space and the social space of the marriage. Healthy relationships will keep inviolate each partner’s physical, emotional, and values “space.” Each party in the relationships needs to maintain a separate life space apart from the loved one. A husband and wife need to allow each other emotional space which is separate and unique. A parent also needs to respect her child’s emotional space.

  We live in a crowded world of imperfect people. It is inevitable that some of them will, knowingly or unknowingly, intrude on your space unless you vigorously defend it.

  You have undoubtedly watched animals defend their territory. I see it daily on my walks with Misty, our Brittany Spaniel. As she approaches a house where the owner’s dog is in the yard, the other dog clearly indicates through ruffled neck fur, bared fangs, and surly growls just where the boundaries of her territory lie. Even a small and seemingly weak dog utilizes enormous energies to defend her territory against trespass by dogs of virtually any size or strength. Away from their home turf, the behavior of these dogs toward each other is far different than when they are in or near one of the canine’s territory.10 Fortunately, assertion skills enable human beings to defend their personal space with more finesse than occurs in the animal world.

  Lois Timmons summarizes the concept of life space in these words:

  Life space is acquired through birth, kept through determination, and lost through weakness…. When I have life space I either occupy it or lose it…. When I have life space I feel a purpose in life, self-confidence, assured, satisfied, well-adjusted, full, responsible, self-controlled, powerful and aware.11

  IMPACTING

  To learn to successfully defend one’s space is important, but if that is all a person does, she will have a bleak, narrow, and dismal existence. Assertive people enjoy a personal venturesomeness that launches them into nourishing relationships, ennobling work, creative leisure, and/or causes worthy of their devotion. I use the word impacting to describe this nonaggressive spiritual adventuresomeness that takes a person outside herself.

  An impacting individual reaches out to other people, establishing vital relationships. She also influences institutions and society. She uses the raw materials of nature while following sound ecological practice. Impacting provides the assertive person with constructive ways of meeting her needs, exercising her abilities, doing her truth, u
tilizing her creativity, and developing powerful relationships of equals.

  Each of us has a psychological need to give and receive love—to be caught up in a few significant and powerful relationships. We also need to devote ourselves to a worthy purpose. As George Bernard Shaw says, the true joy of life is “being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; … the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”12

  The psychologist Abraham Maslow, who devoted much of his life to the study of psychologically healthy people, found these were the people who lived their lives to the full. Calling them “self-actualizing” people, Maslow concluded from his research that they “were, without one single exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside of themselves.”13

  I think of impacting as a responsibility as well as an opportunity because we live in a society that, like other societies, is encumbered with social malfunctions and grave injustices. When others suffer because of the injustices of our society, I am unavoidably involved. I feel some obligation to try to have some impact on my society even though I recognize my influence will be slight.

  THE SUBMISSION-ASSERTION-AGGRESSION

  CONTINUUM

  One way of understanding assertion is to see it as a way of defending one’s space and impacting on other people and society in nondestructive ways. A useful and more common way of defining assertion is to place it on a continuum between submission and aggression and contrast it with them (see Figure 8.2). For the sake of contrast, some of the descriptions of submission and aggression that follow come from fairly extreme positions on the continuum.

  Figure 8.2. The submission-assertion-aggression continuum.

  Submissive

  Aggressive

  Assertive

  Behaviors

  Behaviors

  Behaviors

  Submissive Behaviors

  People who typically behave submissively demonstrate a lack of respect for their own needs and rights.* They do this in many ways.

  Many submissive people do not express their honest feelings, needs, values, and concerns. They allow others to violate their space, deny their rights, and ignore their needs. These people rarely state their desires when in many instances that’s all it would take to have them met.

  Other submissive people do express their needs but do it in such an apologetic and diffident manner that they are not taken seriously. They add qualifying phrases like “… but it really doesn’t matter that much to me” or “… but do whatever you want.” Sometimes they think they have spoken clearly, when unwittingly their message was coded to such an extent that the other person doesn’t understand what they mean. Nonverbals like a shrug of the shoulder, lack of eye contact, an excessively soft voice, hesitating speech, and other factors may undercut their expression of a need or the defense of their space.

  For example, at a family conference everyone agreed to put their dishes and silverware into the dishwasher so the mother would spend less time in the kitchen at night. When anyone forgot his plate, mother took care of them. Within a month, mother was regularly cleaning the table for everyone. Though the mother was not even aware of it, she was systematically training her family to ignore their agreements.

  *Most books on assertion use the word nonassertive rather than submissive. Nonassertive behavior implies a lack of action. It conveys a rather neutral meaning. Submissive behavior indicates a choice. The person has selected a way of relating. She not only refrains from asserting herself; she submits. Submission usually involves collaboration with the aggressor. Although this point of view can be pushed too far, I believe the distinction is useful.

  Some people habitually invite others to take advantage of them. They offer to do things that make their relationships very lopsided, thus insuring that others will violate their rights and ignore their needs.

  The submissive person communicates: “I don’t matter. You can take advantage of me. I’ll put up with just about anything from you. My needs are insignificant—yours are important. My feelings are irrelevant; yours matter. My ideas are worthless; only yours are significant. I have no rights, but of course you do. Pardon me for living.”

  The submissive person lacks self-respect, but her behavior indicates lack of respect for the other person, too. It implies the other is too fragile to handle confrontation and shoulder her share of the responsibilities.

  Submissive behavior is incredibly common in our society. Thomas Moriarity conducted several studies to determine the level of “assertive resistance” in various groups of subjects (who were unaware they were being observed). Moriarity found that college students were reluctant to ask another student to turn off loud music that annoyed them when they worked on an important and involved mental task. Eighty percent of the students did not voice their needs to the noisemaker. They simply tolerated what they later admitted was a bothersome distraction. Fifteen percent asked the other person to turn down the music, but when she did not comply, they did not repeat the request. Only 5 percent of the students asked twice and had their needs met.

  A similar pattern was observed in numerous other situations involving various age groups, including adults. Typically, 80 percent or more of the people would not say even one word to defend their personal rights or to get their needs met. Moriarity concluded that we are a “nation of willing victims.”14 Submissive behavior seems to have become a way of life for the majority of the population.

  Aggressive Behaviors

  The word aggression is somewhat confusing because two dissimilar meanings derive from its Latin root, aggredi (to “go forward, approach”). On the one hand, the word means to approach someone for counsel or advice. The other, more common definition of aggression is the one I use: to “move against” or to “move with the intent to hurt.”

  An aggressive person expresses her feelings, needs, and ideas at the expense of others. She almost always wins arguments. The aggressive person sometimes seems to carry a “chip on her shoulder.” She may speak loudly and may be abusive, rude, and sarcastic. She may berate clerks and waitresses for poor service, dominate subordinates and family members, and insist on having the final word on topics of conversation important to her.

  An aggressive person tends to overpower other people. Her point of view is:

  “This is what I want; what you want is of lesser importance—or of no importance at all.” Carolina Maria de Jesus was a woman trapped in poverty in a Brazilian slum. She wrote a moving book in which she raged against the aggression of many wealthy people: “What I revolt against is the greed of men who squeeze other men as if they were oranges.”15

  Assertive Behaviors

  The assertive person utilizes methods of communication which enable her to maintain self-respect, pursue happiness and the satisfaction of her needs, and defend her rights and personal space without abusing or dominating other people. True assertiveness is a way of being in the world which confirms one’s own individual worth and dignity while simultaneously confirming and maintaining the worth of others.16

  The assertive person stands up for her own rights and expresses her personal needs, values, concerns, and ideas in direct and appropriate ways. While meeting her own needs, she does not violate the needs of others or trespass on their personal space.

  People sometimes say that a given person has become “too assertive.” By my definition, that is impossible. If assertive behavior is action that considers the rights of ourselves and others and is appropriate to the situation, there is no such thing as behavior that can be too assertive.

  Examples of Three

  Styles of Relating

  One of the most helpful ways to distinguish between submissive, aggressive, and assertive responses is to look at each type of response in specific situations.

  After reading the following situations and each of the responses, classify each respons
e according to whether it is basically submissive, assertive, or aggressive. For the first situation, I will indicate the appropriate category. In the following situations you can categorize the responses. The answers are found on page 128.

  **Leaders in the field of assertion training have rarely dealt in depth with some of the relevant ethical issues that have engrossed philosophers for centuries. For many such thinkers, the basic ethical issue is how one deals with situations in which there is a definite conflict of interest between two or more people—that is, in the very issues we will be examining for the remainder of the book. One of the assets of assertion training is that it provides laymen with practical methods to change behavior without a detailed course in ethical or psychological theory. At its worst, however, assertion training merely provides lip service to heeding the rights of others and becomes, in part, a series of methods of counteraggression or even of aggression. Though the theoretical sections in this book do not delve into basic ethical dilemmas, I believe a strong and consistent case is made for trying to behave in ways that respect the rights and fulfill the needs of all parties in a transaction. Where that is not possible, conflict resolution methods and sound ethical judgment are required.

  Submissive

  Assertive

  Aggressive

  EXAMPLE

  In a packed theater, the people behind you keep talking in a fairly loud voice, distracting you from the plot and detracting from your enjoyment of the movie. The theater is so crowded that you cannot change seats.

  Response A

  You say nothing and suffer in silence.

  x

  Response B