W. Nicholas Abraham, MDiv, PhD, LPC
8414 Bluebonnet Blvd., Suite 100
Baton Rouge, LA 70810
225-767-3200
Baton Rouge, LA 70810
225-767-3200
Please scroll to the bottom of this blog to hear the podcast! The terrible two’s evoke memories of the dreaded sound of NO, an utterance with the frequency of summer southern humidity. Toddlers and stubbornness travel in pairs. The egocentric world roars as desire develops in little people. Aware of their power, they grab everything in sight as if they were the creators of the world. Having the freedom to move without restraint is shown to be an essential human drive. But so too is frustration.
Little people learn quickly to say NO when they don’t like being separated from or blocked. They experience the world as restrictive and they don’t like it.
The larger power, a more ominous Goliath that seeks to frustrate unbridled movement, clashes with the tiny David. And in this epic war for survival, Goliath always wins, one way or another.
Reflect on this, and you’ll realize how one’s self-image is affected by such a marvelous self-made movie, and how it contributes to our default buttons as we balance separateness with intimacy, self-assurance with the need for love and approval.
With this quest in mind, I began to ask people what it felt like to say NO, to reject a request that goes against their value system, to turn away from gossip, to avoid another family member’s drama, to honor a prior commitment by passing up a better invitation, to deny a personal favor, to forsake a friend’s need for a higher need, to end an unhealthy friendship, to say NO to a worn out lifestyle, a behavior that was self-abusive, or a job that was no longer fulfilling.
The answers followed a universal pattern. No one really likes to say No. We like to say YES because we are made for service. We are hard wired to help.
But that’s not the only motive. We also fear the response – the consequence – the outer power that still appears to be larger than us. We fear for our reputation, our image, our stature, our inability to survive. It’s as if without thinking, we draw from the well of life as a two year old and we ready ourselves for a struggle over where the line is drawn. Without much thought about whom I need to help more, myself or the other, whom I need to serve more, myself or the other, we automatically default to what we SHOULD do. We take one of the following courses by either 1) avoiding an answer, 2) saying yes and aborting the process by not following through, 3) saying yes and harboring bitterness, or 4) saying yes out of guilt, fear, an overly inflated power to save or a highly developed sense of obligation.
While I suspected that NO would not be easy for people, more eye opening was what people did after they said NO! The word always carried an explanation, judgment or self-incrimination.
It appeared to me that when we do say NO, we have to give a commentary on the reasons. We explain that we can’t because of (fill in the blank) and make sure we defend the response so as to NOT offend the other. To simply say NO or NO THANK YOU is never sufficient. A wall of explanation goes up immediately.
And then there’s the other side of NO. It’s when we say NO out of a history of co-dependency or if you will, a pattern of saying yes when we didn’t want to but were addicted to the all encompassing “need to be loved” and “fear of being abandoned”. We carry and harbor resentment over a history of saying YES and it eventually takes us down to the hell of “door matting.”
But when trampled on enough, the toddler roars fowl! The “I’ve had it” victim finds a renewed sense of power and rage is created.
What could be a simple NO becomes, “No, I will not clean up your mess.” “No, I will not continue to enable that behavior.” No, I will not be your crutch or your drug or your savior or your slave.” “No, I will not forgive your drinking anymore. I’m done.” “No, it’s not me, it’s you who are the problem.”
Notice a pattern? It’s not just a NO. It’s a judgmental NO. It’s a NO that has to somehow put the other person down, punish the other, make known that it’s not just NO. It’s a NO that is steeped in resentment and past wounds – either felt for the event/person of the moment or more often and more sinister, the painful “door matting” of our past.
Let’s face the hard fact. It’s just hard to say “no” and leave it at that. We have been programmed early on to either justify the raising of our drawbridge because we fear the consequences of NO, or worse, dropping it on those to whom in the past we have given of ourselves and whom now we call invaders and robbers.
Often underneath the fear of saying NO is a core and unconscious message. Because we already have to live with certain inadequacies, saying NO amplifies the pronouncement that we can’t meet another’s needs but SHOULD be able to. Saying NO, instead of being a simple acceptance of one’s personal limits and responsibility, becomes a shaming signal that sets off feelings from long ago that one should always be there, on alert, available, giving, helping, fixing, supporting, providing, enabling, correcting, or worse, used to medicate someone else’s pain. By saying NO, we admit that we are limited and at times powerless. And so the explanation, even the judgments, helps to cover the feeling of inadequacy.
Ironically, NO’S with judgment in the wings are indeed a way of getting back at and making others feel inadequate – of throwing bitterness around, of making sure that NEW boundaries are reset by clearly stating “not anymore.”
Yet those who re-discover the power of NO without explanation or judgment, a simple word that carries more force than any Iron Man or Thor could ever muster – find that it need not come from the bottle of a two year old, but from the interior reign of an adult – a force that is rooted in one’s core self-assurance.
Think about the times when you neither fought, defended, lashed out, judged nor explained. You simply said NO and in doing so, said YES to your own needs; you felt taller, walked more confidently, and slept better. You may have lost friends and the world you had grown accustomed to, but in the moment of saying, you knew the end was actually the beginning. With a simple NO, we are saying that we “don’t want to” and we discover that the sky isn’t going to fall.
Keeping the NO clean and simple cleanses and simplifies one’s life.
It’s not that saying NO makes life any more pleasurable. But it does make it more authentic, more self-aware and self-assured. In keeping NO’S clean, we believe that others will get what they need from a power greater than us. And that is the essence of true faith. When we say respectfully and joyfully, NO, I AM NOT GOD, we applaud our humanity and enjoy peace.
These are the times when we speak most deeply from integrity – when we respond to the world through a simple word that means we neither live in, for, nor through others – for we are all passing through this world.
But that we do live in, for and through ourselves and in our own unique world; only in our confidence in and not hatred of – a larger power within us – can we find a resting place.
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