Why It's So Difficult To SAY 'NO'

SPEAKER_00: Hi, this is Underground Confidence with Shelly Treacher. One of the things most of the people who come to see me have in common is an aversion to saying no to the apparent desires of somebody else. So today I'm going to be talking about what's going on when we want to say no but feel that we can't. First, I've been asked to comment on this. How to learn to love yourself so that you can accept love from someone else. The person ends the request with, I hope that makes sense. Today's podcast should go some way to answering this question, but there are also some clues to recovery in the wording of the request. The first thing that I find myself wondering is I wonder what it would be like to replace the word you with the word I. So to rephrase the question how to learn to love myself so that I can accept love from someone else. Can you hear how much more powerful that sounds? And that's the key to loving yourself and to finding love. To own that this is what you want, this is what you're gonna go for, this is what you deserve. And to answer your final question, yes, it really does make sense. I imagine it makes sense to almost everybody listening right now. I can't imagine there isn't anybody listening who doesn't want to improve how they feel about themselves, how they can love themselves, so that they can receive love from other people. So I wonder if you might try this sentence a little differently. How can I learn to love myself so that I can accept love from someone else? How would it be to say this without the caveat at the end? What would you be left with? Learning to love or to like yourself is mostly about uncovering the blocks that you have to that. I did talk about this in three previous podcasts about self-worth, but mostly it's about understanding ways that you learnt not to like yourself. What are they and who or where did they come from? And are they true? Let's turn to today's subject. Saying no. This is not entirely irrelevant. In COVID isolation we've had time away from people, so we had time to be less affected by people. Some of my clients have commented that they want another lockdown so that they can stay at home and not be overwhelmed by doing too much and looking after other people. COVID also gave many of us the chance to understand ourselves better. Lots of us have had the chance to see ourselves from a different perspective. We may now see the patterns that we were in before that we couldn't see at the time. Like many people, I switched off from all but my closest people in the beginning of the pandemic. This helped me to see that I'd been trying too hard with too many people in my life before the pandemic. This whole period has been another great level of shifting patterns for me, towards allowing myself to engage in what really interests me, much more than I ever did before, and my friends think I'm quite good at this already. Now that we're going back to integrating into society, I find myself saying no, or indeed yes, more or differently to before. Has this happened for you? Please let me know, I'd love to hear what you discovered about yourself in this time. Fundamentally, not saying no when you really know that you want to means merging with another person and feeling responsible for how they feel. You may intuitively feel what others want from you, and you may feel that you have to provide that. This may go back to what I've said in previous podcasts about the fear of rejection or the fear of not surviving. You may be avoiding saying no in case the person doesn't like it, which might be uncomfortable or frightening for you. An example of that voice might be she'll break up with me instantly if I say how I feel. All of my podcasts, and indeed my work, are about how you can come to terms with your own core wounding or suffering. So just as I cannot take that away from you, you can't take that away from someone else either. You know that deep down you're the only one who can do this for yourself. You can relieve people's symptoms of pain and you can care how they feel, but you can't take away what hurt them in the first place. Nor can you do the journey of recovery for them. So instead of being somebody else's punch bag or their waste disposal leaving you drained and tired and exhausted, what we need to learn in order to say no more often is to be emotionally separate. Being emotionally separate doesn't mean being emotionally cold. Being separate is not shutting off. It's staying with yourself and how you feel and what you might need. Most effectively at the same time as noticing how the other feels as well, ideally having compassion for both of you. Saying no is lifting yourself out of an abandonment script, the script that says you will not cope with any rejection. I completely understand this one. I needed to say no to a couple of people this weekend. They were my closest people actually and people that I trust, but still I noticed that I get a knot in my stomach and a fear that they won't like it if I say no to them. I did actually check it out with both of them later after I had said no, and both of them said they really didn't give it a second thought. So I know that this is something older for me. I actually confused myself with the thought, these are my favourite people, shouldn't I want to see them? Isn't this what I've been complaining about all my life that I don't have enough great connection? So I got myself in tied up in knots thinking that I should say yes, but thankfully I realized that I didn't want to. I needed something else. When you're in a place of not saying no, when you need to, your brain might be racing, and your body might be freezing or fawning, and resentment might be building. You know what I mean, the one that comes out at inopportune moments when you feel like a drudge and you have complaints that you're the only one who does anything responsible. Underneath not being able to say no at the time may be a belief that you can't rely on others. So what can you do? Firstly, identify when and how you lose yourself. Notice when you defer to others, for example, when you say yes to an activity that you just really didn't want to do, you wanted to relax or save money instead. Reflect on what you actually needed in that case. Take space and time to come back to yourself and to your values, to discover your truth. Have time to have room for you. Second, then you need the courage to speak your truth. I had a client this week who reported that in being more honest and taking charge of what he wants more, he was feeling more confident socially, where he did feel really squashed before. He felt he was able to have more fun and had actually much more to offer, including affection and intimacy, which had all gone out the window once he'd started squashing himself. three. Explore what the hook is. For example, it might be easier to lie on the sofa eating all day than to say no to your mother. The fear may be of being invaded, judged, criticized, bullied, overtaken. But that might be a child fear. Does she really have that power now? Do you have different power now? The hook could be that you should be more loving or you need to be a nicer person. Is this because you were told you were a bad person when you were younger? With emotional blackmail? It's usually not true. And taking it out on yourself might be like sod you to your mother. Unfortunately here, what you actually want gets a little bit warped. It's just a rebellion. Number four. Hold the passivity you feel with compassion and curiosity. Be interested in why you would do that. What are you protecting yourself from? What is it that scares you enough to go into survival mode? Identify the discomfort that you feel and the belief behind it. For example, people couldn't be interested in me or all men want to overpower. These are beliefs that may have come from your childhood or from society, and they're not necessarily true. Really, it's more often a communication issue that's happening when you can't say no. So recognizing when you shut down is really important. You might be thinking, what am I supposed to do in this situation? Rather than what do I want? I see this all the time in therapy. Clients often come to therapy feeling what is it I'm supposed to do? And they expect me to tell them what to do. I can't do that because it's my job to find out what people want, really deep down. So often we need to explore this block to begin with, and to bear the discomfort of me not telling them what to do and them not knowing what the agenda is, and so realizing that there isn't an agenda, apart from uncovering who they really are. Number five. Learn about the physiology of what's happening to you. Learn about the freeze or the passivity or the fawning in your body. You might be fawning to make yourself pleasant to somebody. Learn how your body takes that on and notice how you do that. six. Personally, I find going into nature a massive resource on this one. Last weekend I was feeling quite overwhelmed with everything that I had to do for my business and launching my business in the week before, but I went out for a walk on the Sunday, and I could just feel myself regulating with the air, with the trees, with the water. I went by a river and a canal, and the sun came out. It's a nice rare treat at the moment. But all of it I could feel just kind of filled up my replenishment and made me feel a lot better by the end of the day. Number seven. Finally, practice being someone who can receive a no. Do you have a rebellion inside if someone says no to you? That might be something interesting for you to explore. Where you need to get to in order to say no is to a place of this is me, this is what I like, and how I want to be. And that is what they want, that's not down to me. Like I said, you can't fix someone's suffering. Nobody can, no matter how much they might appear to want you to. And often, actually that's not what they want anyway. Often we can be relieved by just having our feelings acknowledged instead. I know that's usually what I'm looking for when I tell someone how I feel. Just listening and reflection that I've been heard and felt compassion for is often enough to make me move on. So you might want to try that with your people. Just reflect how they feel, particularly if you say no to them. You can say, I know this sucks, I'm really sorry. You can tell me how you feel about it, but I need to do this thing for me. It may be important for you in your healing to admit and acknowledge that you might need lots of space and time to come back to yourself. We spend time alone preparing for social situations, that's just human nature. Some of us need more than others. I've heard it said that we need seven times the amount of processing time for one event. So allow it to be okay and real for you that you might not do so well in certain situations. Like you might not enjoy being dragged around by a group consensus or going away for more than two nights with someone. The key to your success is about noticing how you shift away from what you want to do physically and emotionally inside yourself. How does it actually happen? And then how do you hold on to your own energy and self-regulate? It's not about suppressing, it's about being really honest instead. Now more than ever, we still need that tranquil space, and it's harder to find with the threats that are still out there. So here's a good time for me to lead you through another exercise. You can keep your eyes open or close your eyes for this one, and just put a hand out in front of you like a stop sign. Now allow yourself to say, That is you, and then turn your hand towards yourself, pointing at yourself, and say, and this is me. That is you, and this is me. You may want to touch yourself on your shoulder or on your heart as you say, and this is me. Saying no or saying yes from a place of what you really want is about not being dependent on someone else for your well-being or your power. I'm gonna end on some client quotes. These are the kinds of things that people say all the time in my groups. Myself isn't there when I'm stuffing myself. I feel warmer inside because I've been attending to myself more. I need to practice being clearer with myself so that I have more of a chance of being clearer with others. I want to be really clear about what I want. I feel what I say is more valid. Thank you so much for listening again today. Next week I'll be talking about grief. To finalise this series on COVID-19 and how we're coping now, although of course I'll still be talking about that occasionally as we develop. If you'd like help with learning to say no more or with defining your boundaries, please check out my latest program. I'll see you next Wednesday. And I may also see you for a surprise bite in between now and then. So keep an eye on your podcast listing. Thank you so much. This is Underground Confidence with Shelly Treacher.