Coping With tears. For some people tears are the major coping mechanism when confronted with an assertion. Crying is often a manipulative way to avoid confrontations and dodge any behavioral change even though the individual is trespassing on another person’s space. Unfortunately, this method can be highly effective. When I assert to a person who typically cries when confronted, I vow not to let her tears control me. I believe that the tears are real and that the person is genuinely sad. I reflect the fact that she is sad about being confronted (or having failed to meet the deadline, or whatever she is sad about) and then I gently but firmly reassert. If she gets too upset, I suggest we continue the conversation at a specific time that day or the next day, and at the appointed time I reassert. Unless the person has been subjected to unusual emotional stress in this period, I stick with the second assertion until the problem is resolved.
Overcoming Withdrawal. Some people respond to assertion by withdrawal—like the turtle who pulls into its shell whenever it feels threatened. This person may sit in total silence following an assertion. Sometimes the body language is disapproving; sometimes it is despondent. Often the individual puts on a poker face, making it difficult to read her feelings. Inappropriate silence, however, communicates that the person is feeling uncomfortable and defensive. In these situations I provide a lot of silence, reflect what I think the body language is saying, and then reassert. If the other person continues to say nothing, I say, “I take your silence to mean that you don’t want to talk about it and that you will meet my needs by getting the car home at the agreed-upon time. I’ll touch bases with you next Sunday to make sure this is working out OK.” In these and many other situations it is important to realize that the goal of this kind of an assertion is for the other person to change her behavior. She doesn’t have to be joyful about it.
We have looked at some of the most prevalent ways of expressing defensiveness and how to deal with them. There are, of course, many other ways of being defensive. Fortunately, the general strategy for dealing with defensive responses is always the same: listen reflectively (especially to the feelings) and reassert.
Helping the other express understanding of your predicament and/or a solution to the problem. Sometimes we are so busy trying to reflect the other person’s defensive responses that we overlook statements they eventually make which tell us they are beginning to acknowledge the validity of our assertion. The recipient of an assertion message is often very indirect and vague when she begins to move from a defensive posture to a problem-solving role. She may drop a hint in the midst of highly defensive remarks. If you can note it and reflect it back, you will shorten that process and decrease the stressfulness that both parties may be experiencing.
It helps to realize how difficult it is for most people to say, “Boy, I really hurt you when I did that. This is what I will do to correct the situation….” People are often quite guarded when they acknowledge your discomfort or offer a solution. The concern they express or solution they offer may be so camouflaged that you can miss it altogether. An important assertion skill is to catch the slightest nuance of an offered solution or concern for your predicament—and reflect that back to the other. Then offer silence so the person can further explore that. When you become skilled at doing this, you can achieve desirable results much more quickly.
Recycling the Process
Once you have sent your assertion message, provided the other with silence in which to think or respond, and reflectively listened to the predictable defensive response, you are ready to begin this process all over again. Because the other was defensive, she probably was unable to understand the situation from your point of view. You send the identical message again. Follow it with silence. Then reflect the expected defensive response. In many situations it will take five to ten recyclings of the process before the other really understands and suggests a way of meeting your needs.
Effective assertion hinges on a rhythm of asserting and reflecting. Shifting between these two different roles is the most demanding interpersonal skill we teach. After asserting, most people forget to listen. When the other person makes her defensive response, they clobber her with another confrontative statement and a battle ensues. Their interaction becomes aggressive even when they intended to assert. Other people get stuck in the listening role and neglect to reassert. They may end up consoling the other person while their own needs continue to go unmet. Their interaction becomes submissive even though they meant to assert.
Persistence is one of the keys to effective assertion. One of the main reasons why people do not get their needs met when they assert is because they give up after the first defensive response of the other person. Typically it takes three to ten repetitions of the assertion message (interspersed by silence for the other’s solution or defense and the asserter’s reflective listening responses) to change the other’s behavior.
After sending several well-phrased messages and listening reflectively to the other’s defensive responses, you may reach a temporary stalemate. Though the other person may be able to repeat your assertion word for word, she probably hasn’t understood you yet. You need to increase the affect—the level of feeling communicated by your tone of voice and body language. As some trainers put it, “You can’t send a boy to do a man’s work.”
Increasing the affect isn’t a calculated manipulation. After a few defensive responses by the other, the asserter’s emotional temperature will probably rise spontaneously. As the asserter’s anger or frustration increases, she often expresses these feelings to the other person. When increasing the affect, use the same words you used before (to protect your assertion messages from being contaminated by blame, put-downs, or irrelevant statements). The higher your emotional temperature rises, the greater the tendency to contaminate the message and the greater the need to discipline yourself to use the message you formed in moments of clearer objectivity.
Even when you are very angry, you can be genuine without being hostile or aggressive. It is important not to fake—to express neither more nor less emotion than you feel.
As the affect in the interaction increases, it is more difficult to listen reflectively. As the emotional impact of your assertion is heightened, however, effective listening responses are even more necessary than when lower-octane assertions were sent.
Allan Frank says, “One of the marks of adult maturity is a balanced relationship between the emotions and rational control systems, which allows for emotional responses without permitting them to overwhelm reason.” The assertion process enables a person to maintain this mature balance between rational control systems and genuine expression of emotion. This system permits the expression of much emotionality at the same time that it offers protection to both parties and to the relationship.
You will not always work the assertion process perfectly. You will forget to listen. Or you will state the message poorly. Or you will forget to concentrate on feelings when you reflect. Keep going. Unless you make too many mistakes, your assertion will probably be effective.
Once in a while, the other person will agree to meet your needs immediately. There is no defensive response—just an instant solution. People who are conditioned by training to expect a defensive response often do not know what to do. Simply reflect the solution and say, “Thanks.”
Focusing on the Solution
One of the reasons assertion messages work so well is that they do not back the other person into a corner. The other does not have to say yes or no to a solution that I suggest. She may think of something that meets her needs, too. And when she arrives at a solution, she can offer it as a gift. It is not a concession that is grudgingly wrested from her. This allows the other to regain her dignity. When she offers me the gift of a satisfactory solution, even after what may have been a heated exchange, we both feel better. The process of reconciliation makes our relationship stronger.
When the other comes up with a solution, make sure it meets your needs. It is important to be f
lexible and open to a broad range of possible options that could meet your needs. But if your needs are not met by the other’s proposal, it is important to say so. After turning down an offered solution, it is well to allow for a lot of silence. In that time, a person may come up with another solution. Or she may become defensive again. One needs to allow the silence that encourages either of these responses if the assertion is to reach a successful conclusion.
Don’t insist that the other person be cheerful about meeting your needs. All you can ask from an assertion is that the other’s behavior be changed. You cannot count on an attitude change (though that may come) or a conversion experience. Whether the other grumbles or smiles, you can rejoice that she has removed herself from your life space.
Paraphrase the solution back to the other. That way, you can be sure you both have the same understanding. The paraphrase also reinforces the solution on the other’s mind.
Say “Thanks.” The process you will have just completed may have been so arduous that you forget the elementary courtesies.
Arrange a time when you will check with each other to make sure the solution is working. Sometimes a solution proposed with the best of intentions does not work out well and a new arrangement needs to be devised. Or occasionally the receiver of the assertion will come up with a solution he doesn’t intend to implement. The proposed solution may merely be a cagey defensive response designed to get you “off her back.” We call this ploy being “kissed out the door.” When you arrange to check back to see how well the solution is working, the other realizes you mean business and her games will not work with you.
SUMMARY
Whenever you send an assertion message, there is a high likelihood that the other person will respond defensively. Defensiveness in one party in an interaction tends to trigger defensiveness in response. The result is frequently an escalating spiral of defensiveness which results in aggression or alienation. An assertion process designed to help the asserter get her needs met while responding constructively to the expected defensiveness of the other person follows these six steps:
Preparation
Sending the Assertion Message
Being Silent
Reflectively Listening to the Defensive Response
Recycling the Process
Focusing on the Solution
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Increasing Your
Assertive Options
The assertive education process can be compared with learning a foreign language. At first you master words, phrases, ground rules. Suddenly, you can communicate with a child’s vocabulary. You continue to learn until you acquire fluency. With the mastery of your new skill, you feel the freedom to be more creative in what has become your second tongue.
—Herbert Fensterheim, psychiatrist, and Jean Baer, writer
MANY VARIETIES
OF ASSERTIVE BEHAVIOR
There are many ways of being assertive. The preceding three chapters were devoted to a fairly detailed presentation of the three-part assertion method. Once you have mastered the principles and practices of that method, other ways of asserting can be learned more easily.
This chapter outlines twelve additional ways of being assertive. I refer to them as methods, but that is a much more formal designation than they deserve. The way most of these “methods” developed was by someone observing something in his own or others’ behavior which achieved desirable interpersonal outcomes. The behavior being noted may have been spontaneous—following no conscious pattern. In trying to find out what made that spontaneous behavior work effectively, the observer noted specific patterns of behavior that occurred again and again. In writing them down, they became guidelines. In teaching them, they became methods which could be used by a larger number of people.
The methods in this chapter were observed and recorded by a number of people. The treatment here is brief, but the footnotes will help the reader find more extensive explanations when available.
Once one has learned these methods well and practiced them frequently, one can become less conscious of the guidelines and freer in his expression.
“NATURAL” ASSERTIONS
“Natural” assertions are nonaggressive ways of getting one’s needs met without following any particular method. They are most appropriate when neither you nor the other person is experiencing much stress and when the assertion is unlikely to trigger much tension in the other.
Most of the assertion messages I send are “natural” assertions:
Jim, since we’re having company on Sunday, I’d appreciate your mowing the lawn on Saturday this week.
I don’t like it when you leave your jacket over the railing in the front hall.
I need the workshop registration report each Friday in order to do adequate planning.
Give me a hand, will ya? This is too heavy for me to move alone.
I don’t want my workbench used as a storage area. When would be a convenient time to get your things off it? … Tonight? Great. Then I want the top free and clear for my work projects.
These assertions do not follow a formula. They are spontaneous ways of letting others know my needs and the boundaries of my space. Even though the assertions were “natural,” some negative things were avoided. There were no put-downs, there was no swearing, and there were few roadblocks.
Our trainers find that people’s “natural” assertions become more constructive and yield better results after thorough training in the consequences of roadblocks, methods of listening, the concept of life space, the implications of the assertion message. Without the person even thinking about it, some of that training influences what is said and increases the likelihood that the “natural” assertion will be effective.
As people practice the other assertion “methods” over a long period of time, they find themselves using these other methods at appropriate times without consciously thinking about it. Thus, with practice, you can have much more variety and richness in your “natural” assertions.
SELF-DISCLOSURE
Sidney Jourard writes:
A choice that confronts everyone at every moment is this: Shall we permit our fellows to know us as we now are, or shall we remain enigmas, wishing to be seen as persons we are not?
This choice has always been available, but throughout history we have chosen to conceal our authentic being behind masks….
We camouflage our true being before others to protect ourselves against criticism or rejection. This protection comes at a steep price. When we are not truly known by the other people in our lives, we are misunderstood. When we are misunderstood, especially by family and friends, we join the “lonely crowd.” Worse, when we succeed in hiding our being from others, we tend to lose touch with our real selves.
Self-disclosure occurs when you are your real self in the presence of others. It is intellectual and emotional honest—a refusal to veil one’s inner self from the other people. All true assertion involves some degree of self-disclosure, but there are higher levels of interpersonal transparency which are both intimate and redemptive. T. S. Eliot says:
If a man has one person, just one in his life,
To whom he is willing to confess everything—
And that includes, mind you, not only things criminal,
Not only turpitude, meanness and cowardice,
But also situations which are simply ridiculous,
When he has played the fool (as who has not?)—
Then he loves that person, and his love will save him.
Self-disclosure includes the expression of my true opinions and values, but is far more than that. It is basically feeling-talk—or even more accurately, the direct expression of my feelings through words and body language. It is being my feelings. Self-disclosure is King David dancing jubilantly before his victorious soldiers as they return home from battle. It is Job shaking his clenched fist at the heavens and shouting his anger and hurt to God because of the incredible tragedies that befell him. It is Butch Cas
sidy and the Sundance Kid openly expressing their affection for each other.
This kind of emotional directness between people is both rare and difficult. Rollo May says, “The act which requires the most courage is … simple truthful communication.” The goal of the assertive person is not emotional nudity, but appropriate authenticity. In the fifth century, Basil of Caesarea offered a guideline which is still sound today: no one should keep secret, or declare incautiously, any agitation of his soul, but confess it to “trust-worthy brethren.” Self disclosure is best when it is:
to the right person—often one who is capable of empathic understanding;
to the right degree—;you may decide to disclose all or part of your experience;
for the right reasons—be sure your goal is to disclose yourself rather than to burden the other or “show off”;
at the right time—in hours that are appropriate and when the other is not heavily burdened with his own needs; and
in the right place—in a location conducive to this kind of communication.
While too close an adherence to these guidelines can inhibit spontaneity, to ignore them totally would probably make a person too vulnerable to survive in this world.
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