This built-up resentment often eventually becomes focused on a “larger” issue about which it seems more “reasonable” to be upset. On a subconscious level, people frequently transfer their irritations from many small issues to a larger one. Their assertion is displaced from the actual troublesome behavior to a target that seems more “legitimate.” When handled by assertion, these displaced confrontations do not bring the kind of resolution that normally accompanies assertion.
Another form of displaced assertion takes place when a person wants “love” from his spouse, friend, or child or “respect” from his boss or subordinate. He may become angry over some behavior, feeling that if the other really loved him, he wouldn’t do that. He may even attempt assertion to alter the behavior, but if what he really wants is assurance of love or respect, he will still be unhappy even if the other alters his troublesome behavior. This process can continue indefinitely because people seeking love or respect are rarely convinced when another person changes his behavior following an assertion. “If he loved me, I wouldn’t have had to assert for him to change that behavior” is the way the reasoning goes. Asserting for behavior change when one really wants reassurance of being loved and respected is always fruitless.
Displaced assertions keep a relationship in such frequent disharmony and offer such little possibility for improvement that the whole relationship often goes sour. These pseudoassertions that do not deal with the real issues rarely if ever help and often hinder a friendship, marriage, or work relationship.
Sixth, be sure to assert to the right person. People commonly confront the wrong person. This is known as a misattributed assertion. When there is trouble at work, a person may become more confrontative at home. Or confrontations at work may be directed at subordinates rather than the superior when the assertion should be directed at the boss. Some people find a scapegoat—one person who takes the brunt for everyone. You undoubtedly recall some teachers who unfairly singled out a particular child for confrontation. It does not solve your problem to assert to the wrong person, and it probably will increase your interpersonal difficulties with the person who is unfairly confronted and usually with others in the group as well.
Disclosure of Feelings
The second part of the three-part assertion message communicates how the asserter feels about the effect the other’s behavior has on him. For example, a working wife had an agreement with her husband that when she was out of town he would be responsible for seeing that the household cleaning tasks were kept current so that she did not face a big accumulation when she returned home. When she returned from a tiring week-long business trip, she discovered that no housecleaning and laundry had been done and that dirty dishes from several meals were stacked in the sink. She had strong feelings and said to her husband, “When you don’t do the household cleaning and laundry as agreed, I feel very angry …”
The genuine disclosure of emotion underscores the importance the assertion has for the person sending the message. When you begin to send this kind of assertion message you will see how the expression of your own feelings contributes greatly to the other person’s willingness to change his behavior to meet your needs.
The beginning of assertion training in modern psychology is often traced to Andrew Salter’s innovative approach to psychotherapy and his influential book Conditioned Reflex Therapy. One of Salter’s major contributions was his emphasis on the direct expression of feeling.
Salter was the first of a long line of modern assertiveness trainers to discover that the average person in assertion training has a difficult time identifying and communicating his emotions. Many people are like the college professor in one of our workshops who was trying to express his feelings in an assertion message. After several struggling attempts he said, “I have smart brains but a dumb gut. It is hard for me to know what I am feeling—and when I do get in touch with my emotions it is even more difficult to express them.”
People tend to have three problems with the expression of emotion. First, they may substitute one emotion for another. Some people express anger when their primary feeling is that of fright. For example, if a child surprises a parent with a loud noise, the parent may respond very angrily without even mentioning the fear—yet it was the fearful feeling that led to the anger. We call that substituting a secondary emotion for a primary one.
Substitution of one emotion for another needs to be overcome if a person is to assert effectively. Fortunately, most people can accomplish this by asking themselves, “When I experienced the negative effect of the other’s behavior, what was the first feeling I experienced?” Often the first feeling is the primary feeling—the one which belongs in the assertion message.
Another method of tuning into the primary feeling is to recognize some of your patterns of emotional substitution. If, for example, you usually become angry when you feel vulnerable or sad, the next time you find yourself becoming angry check to see if it is possible that you are really stressed by feelings of vulnerability or sadness. Or if you tend to cry as a substitute for expressing anger, begin to search for possible traces or causes for anger as soon as you feel sadness welling up inside you.
People also find it difficult to accurately state the degree of feeling they are experiencing. It is not unusual for someone to say, “I’m angry” when he is merely annoyed, or “I’m irritated” when he is seething with rage.
The asserter can increase the emotional accuracy of his statement by selecting from several words of varying intensity to see which best matches his inner feeling. For example, he might try such words as “nervous,” “worried,” “afraid,” or “petrified.” It is better to select the word carefully so that one word will communicate the feeling. Sometimes, however, additional, modifying adjectives are helpful. A person may feel “somewhat worried.” Greater anxiety could be expressed by “very worried.”
Genuine disclosure of feeling is the only appropriate expression of emotion in an assertion message. Sometimes people feign stronger emotions, thinking that that will be more convincing. I find that pretense distasteful because it is manipulative. It is also counterproductive. People who are likely to respond to genuine emotion often disbelieve the magnified emotion and tend to be less responsive to that kind of message. When a person understates his feelings, it deprives the other of some important data that will motivate him to alter his behavior. So the assertion loses much of its strength.
Another problem experienced by people trying to phrase the feeling part of an assertion message is that they may choose a word that is laden with judgment. The word selected provides more of a slur on the other’s character than a disclosure of the asserter’s feelings. One person’s assertion message came out like this: “When you smoke in our small office I feel abused because my eyes smart and my throat becomes irritated.” The message can be improved by the substitution of another feeling word. “When you smoke in this small room, I feel annoyed because my eyes smart and my throat becomes irritated.”
People often ask, “How do I get in touch with what I am feeling?” Three things prove helpful. First, try to listen to your emotions without distorting or censoring them. John Powell says, “Whenever you are ready to stop telling your emotions what they should be, they will tell you what they really are.”
Another way to increase your sensitivity to your emotions is to listen to your body. When you have a headache your body is usually telling you about some emotions. When you have muscular tension, your emotions are trying to speak through their primary channel of communication—your body. When I began listening to my body, I was amazed both at what my body tells me and how constantly it informs me about my inner feeling world. Sometimes I don’t like what I hear and I will ignore the signals for weeks at a time. My body continues to transmit its message, however, and whenever I am ready to receive again, I can regain contact with my rich emotional life. Unfortunately, if one ignores the body’s messages too long, the ability to hear them atrophies.
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p; A third way to increase your emotional awareness is to express the feelings that you do experience. You can acknowledge your feelings silently to yourself, talk about them with others, or express them vigorously through laughter, crying, shouting, dancing, or lovemaking. The more we express our feelings, the more we sharpen our emotional awareness.
The benefits gained by constructive expression of emotions in assertion messages are impressive. As we have already seen, the disclosure of feelings provides the receiver with important emotional data that can significantly influence his decision to alter troublesome behavior. Constructive expression of emotion also releases positive feelings for the other person. It is a psychological rule of thumb that once a person is able to express “negative” emotions to another person, he becomes liberated to discover and express the “positive” feelings that may have been hidden for a long time.
Those who give expression to their feelings constructively are stimulated to greater mental and physical health. Andrew Salter noted that most people suffer from “constipation of the emotions.” We are all aware of the harmful effects of constipation on one’s physical condition. In a similar way, “negative” emotions need to be disposed of continually or our physical and mental health and interpersonal relationships will suffer.
Clarification of the Tangible
Effect on the Asserter
A major reason the three-part assertion works is because it describes how the other person’s behavior affects the sender of the message. If I want you to voluntarily alter a specific behavior, it certainly helps if I provide you with a convincing reason to change. My experience is that people are usually willing to modify their behavior if they can see that they are trespassing on my space or interfering with my efforts to secure my legitimate needs.
The effectiveness of this part of the message depends on whether or not the person intruding on my space believes that his behavior does indeed have negative consequences on my life. “Concrete or tangible effects” seem to be most convincing to people. By concrete or tangible effects we mean those things that unnecessarily cost the asserter money, harm his possessions, consume his time, cause him extra work, endanger his job, and/or interfere with his effectiveness at work. These results negatively affect the asserter in what may be described as a materialistic way. A well-delivered assertion message that cites a concrete and tangible effect usually persuades the other person to change his behavior to meet the asserter’s needs. I estimate that by using this type of assertion I have been able to satisfy my needs about 90 to 95 percent of the time.
Let’s look at some examples of tangible effects from the assertions made by some of our workshop participants.
Behavior
Description Disclosure
of Feeling Tangible
Effect
Costs money
When you use my
car and don’t
refill the
gas tank …
I feel unfairly
treated …
because I
have to pay more money for gasoline.
Harms
possessions
When you borrow
my tools and
leave them out
in the rain …
I feel annoyed …
because they become rusty and don’t work well.
Consumes
time
When you are
frequently late
to pick me up
after work …
I feel
frustrated …
because my time
is wasted while
I wait for you.
Interferes
with effectiveness
at work
When you call
me at work and
talk at length …
I feel tense …
because I don’t
get all my work
done on schedule.
Causes extra
work
When you do not
put your dirty
clothes in the
hamper …
I feel
irritated …
because it makes
extra work for me
when I do the wash.
There are five common difficulties that people have in writing this part of an assertion message. First, a fairly large number of people say they cannot think of a single situation in which someone is intruding on their space in a tangible way. This, of course, does not mean that they are exempt from this kind of intrusion on their space. In most ordinary relationships and in every significant relationship, people trespass on one another’s turf in tangible ways. If a person cannot specify occasions when this has happened, he has simply banished them from his awareness. Our trainers have found that most people can increase their ability to identify behaviors with tangible negative effects on their lives once they have made the decision that this is worth doing.
A second, very common difficulty people have with this part of the assertion message is that they think these materialistic intrusions are insignificant compared to other behaviors. One father told me, “Sure, I get mad about the tools being left out in the rain. But what really bugs me is that my son doesn’t treat me civilly ninety percent of the time.” A young adult had a similar point of view. “It bothers me when my fiancé returns my records with scratches and dirt all over them. But what I really dislike is the way he takes me for granted.”
Like many others in assertion training, these people didn’t want to bother with assertions that seemed insignificant. They wanted to deal with “more important” things. While situations with tangible effects may seem less important than situations that are primarily values issues, we’ve often found that this is not true.
The assertion message that cites tangible effects often influences the intangible areas of a relationship. Not leaving tools outside is one specific behavior that constitutes “more civil treatment” of the boy toward his father. Moreover, when the father’s needs begin to be satisfied by the son’s response to an assertion message, the father’s reservoir of resentment is often diminished—which further strengthens the relationship. Usually the very process of effective assertion improves the communication between two people. They tend to respect and like each other more as a result.
A third problem when trying to send an assertion message is that people often discover that they can find no effect on their physical or psychological space. They have lots of strong feelings, but no concrete effects. A parent told his teenager, “When you wear jeans to the school play it annoys me [a feeling] and I feel irritated [another feeling].” This kind of a message is often an attempt by the sender to impose his values on the other person, and hence is an intrusion on the other’s space. When one person tries to change another person’s behavior about values issues, he often ends up aggressing against the other person rather than asserting.
One controversial parent-child issue raised frequently by parents in our classes is the anger and frustration they feel in reaction to how their children keep their rooms. Many parents value neatness, orderliness, and maintenance of clothes and other possessions. In contrast, many children rank these values much lower than others they hold, such as having an active play or social life, spending time with friends, or playing sports.
The central question to help clarify these values issues is: “Whose space is the child’s bedroom?”
In our family we have satisfied ourselves and the children by saying that the child’s room is his own space to be managed in the way he chooses. In the common areas of the house—the living room, dining room, and kitchen—which all of us use, our values for order, lack of clutter, and esthetics are met.
An elementary classroom teacher faces a similar dilemma when her values hold that students’ desks should be well organized. Many children see their desks as their personal space and jam into them whatever they wish in as disorderly way
as they choose. Again the clarifying question, “Whose space is the desk?” needs to be addressed.
Assertion training does not teach that we should avoid trying to influence other people’s values. It does teach that a three-part assertion on values issues is never appropriate (in fact, you can never complete the third part—citing a concrete effect of the other’s behavior on your life space).
Another difficulty people have in writing assertions is when the effect is on someone other than the asserter. It is the effect on you that is important. Don’t try to send an assertion for a third party. Let him send his own. If the offending person is not trespassing on your space, you cannot send a valid three-part assertion.
Finally, people sometimes state an effect that isn’t the real reason. Sean and Molly Molloy were newlyweds. Each Friday after work he went to the bar to drink with the boys for several hours. Molly didn’t like the behavior and sent this message: “When you stay late at the Clover Club I feel frustrated because things are not getting done at home.” Later Molly told me, “This was a very unsuccessful assertion. The message was incorrect. I was not frustrated because things were not getting done but because I was not with him. Thus, the message was not an honest one. Because the message was incorrect I kept getting off the track. We started talking about drinking, which really wasn’t the issue. Then we used a lot of roadblocks. It became real bad.”
Effective assertion is open and honest communication. Substitution of a more plausible effect for the effect that most concerns you is both inappropriate and ineffective in an assertion message.
We have focused on assertions with tangible effects because they are so important and because many people try to bypass them. Other varieties of assertion are also significant, and we will discuss many of them in a later chapter.
There are some assertions that fall into a “borderline” category. While certain people say the effect is tangible, others are not convinced that it is. Most people, however, believe that in these situations the person to whom the assertion is addressed would “buy” the effect on the other’s life. Here are some “borderline category” behaviors and effects:
People Skills_How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts Page 20
