S2 EP231 – The Yes Trap: Overcoming the Struggle to Say No

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Often, I work with people who have a very hard time saying no to people. And I know what this is like since I used to never be able to say no to anyone. At that time, I would rather give myself up and over give to them than run the risk of someone being angry at me and having to face their lack of caring about me.

What are you afraid of if you say “No” to people? Here are some of the things my clients have told me regarding their fear of saying no:

“I’m afraid of hurting their feelings. Then they will get angry at me, and I will feel like a bad person.”

“I’m afraid of ending up with no friends. People will reject me if I say no.”

“I’m afraid that my partner will get angry and withdraw his love.”

But, when you are afraid to stand up for yourself and say “no” when saying “no” is what is in your highest good, then you might put walls around yourself to avoid having to say “No.”

For example, my client Janice keeps herself 50 pounds overweight because it makes her feel safe from men approaching her for sex. A beautiful woman who was sexually abused as a child, she never learned that it is her responsibility to take care of her own feelings and safety, rather than take responsibility for others’ feelings. She is so afraid of hurting a man’s feelings by saying “no,” that she would rather attempt to protect herself by being overweight than have to face saying “no.”

My client Ron is terrified of being taken advantage of. He believes that if he is open hearted, he will be vulnerable to being used and taken advantage of by others. Because he doesn’t want to face his fears of rejection should he say “no” to his family, friends, or co-workers, or even to a persistent salesperson, he keeps himself safe by being closed, hard, and aloof. He believes that by being unapproachable, he’s safe from being taken advantage of. However, he then ends up experiencing the very rejection he is afraid of, because people are put off by his aloofness. Not only that, but keeping himself closed and hard cuts him off from connection and fun with others. All this can change for Ron if he learns to take responsibility for himself by saying “no” when this is what is in his highest good, rather than letting himself be taken advantage of.

My client Gayle finds herself going along with what others want her to do, and saying the things that she thinks others want to hear, because she is so afraid of others’ anger at her. But giving herself up feels awful to her, so after a while, she gets angry and shuts down as a way to protect herself from losing herself. She spends all this energy giving herself up, and then getting angry and shutting down, to avoid having to say “no.”

As a child, did you experience the heartbreak of rejection or even of abuse if you said “no” to a parent, a sibling, a friend or relative? Did you learn that either going along with what someone wanted, having a temper tantrum, or shutting down and numbing out were ways to avoid the feeling of heartbreak at not being able to say no due to being rejected when you did? 

It is very painful for all of us when someone just wants what they want and doesn’t care about what we want or about what we feel is right for us. It’s painful when others want to use us or take advantage of us. So you might be protecting yourself against the heartbreak of knowing that another doesn’t care about you by giving in, getting angry, gaining weight, or shutting down.

But the irony of this is that when you try to avoid the heartbreak of feeling another’s uncaring behavior, you are not caring about yourself. You are abandoning yourself when you give yourself up or close your heart to avoid feeling rejected. By avoiding others’ rejection, you are rejecting yourself, which causes anxiety and depression. 

Were you trained as a child to give yourself up to be loved? Did you learn to confuse love with approval? Did you learn to attempt to have control over how others feel about you by giving yourself up? Is it bringing you joy to give yourself up, or are you tired, drained, anxious and depressed from this loss of self?

Since giving yourself up is a form of self-abandonment, it’s likely leading to anxiety and depression. Are you ready to give up giving yourself up? 

In order to give up giving yourself up, you need to be willing to accept and manage the responses you have been avoiding.

Are you avoiding conflict? Are you avoiding being judged and being told that you’re selfish? Are you avoiding someone’s anger, disapproval and blame? Are you avoiding losing a relationship? Are you avoiding your deeper existential painful feelings, such as loneliness, heartbreak, and helplessness over others if they are angry or uncaring about what feels right for you?

What are you trying to control by giving yourself up? Are you trying to keep the peace? Are you trying to get love and approval? Are you trying to be seen as a good person? Are you trying to be good and do the right thing so that God will love you?

What are the results of giving yourself up? Do you feel anxious and depressed? Do you feel alone and empty inside? Do you feel tired and drained? Do you feel a lack self-worth and a lack of confidence? Do you feel unimportant and abandoned? Are you sometimes or often verbally or physically abused? Are your relationships not working out? Is your relationship filled with conflict? Does your relationship lack intimacy and passion? Are you lonely in your relationship? Is your partner now more needy and dependent on you than ever? Do you feel like everything is on your shoulders? Do you lack energy? Do you get sick a lot?

In order to give up giving yourself up and learn to say no when that is what is loving to you, you need to learn to embrace conflict as a learning experience rather than continue to avoid it.

This means that you need to develop your loving adult to the point of being able to move into an intent to learn with another, and to loving disengage when the other is not available to learn with you.

You need to be willing to let go of trying to have control over how others feel about you and learn to define your own worth so that you stop giving yourself up to get approval. This means that you need to develop your spiritual connection to the point of knowing and loving the beauty of your own essence. It means that you know that loving yourself is self-responsible rather than selfish. It means that you give up defining your worth through fixing others and instead define your worth by your ability to love. It means that you let go of responsibility for others’ feelings and take care of your own.

The more you practice Inner Bonding, the less likely you are to continue to give yourself up.

The more you are in touch with your feelings, the more you experience how deeply unloving it is to you and to others to continue to give yourself up rather than say no what that is what is in your highest good. By practicing Step 1 of Inner Bonding – practicing staying present in your body and wanting responsibility for your feelings – you will know the moment you are giving yourself up and you can begin to make new, loving choices.

Moving into personal power and emotional freedom means being willing to take the risk of others’ uncaring or rejecting behavior and learning to manage the heartbreak of this, rather than continue to abandon yourself.

But you also need to accept that when you have been practicing giving yourself up your whole life, it’s very challenging to shift into taking loving care of yourself. Please do not expect yourself to just be able to stop giving yourself up. After all these years of practicing Inner Bonding, I still occasionally find myself giving myself up. But my inner child lets me know immediately by feeling so bad that I have to get the message! So accept that it is an ongoing learning process.

Part of the healing process is learning to set compassionate limits for your wounded self.

Each of us has a wounded part that wants to act out in various addictive and controlling ways. Many of us frequently indulge this part in destructive and self-destructive behaviors – overeating or eating junk food, drinking too much, using drugs, procrastinating, judging ourselves and others, yelling at and blaming others, gambling, acting out sexually, and giving ourself up. Often our wounded self seems to be in charge of us, with no loving adult around to set inner limits or speak up and say no when that is what is loving to you. Indulging our wounded self is definitely not in our highest good, and we all need to learn to set compassionate limits on our wounded self if our wounded self has an addiction to giving ourselves up. 

Our wounded self may seem to be big and out of control, but it’s really just a child who needs limits. The only part of us big enough to set these limits is our spiritually connected loving adult. We will not have the strength to set loving limits on ourselves by ourselves – we can do it only in connection with the power of our higher power. By ourselves, we are one wounded part trying to control another wounded part, which never works. With spirit, we have the strength and power to set inner limits against giving ourselves up and follow through on speaking up for ourselves.

We will never feel safe and loved until we develop a loving adult capable of setting inner limits. As long as we indulge our wounded self in addictive and controlling behavior, we will feel inwardly abandoned and anxious. Our wounded self not only wants to indulge in substance and process addictions to get love, avoid pain, and try to feel safe, but it may also want to control others’ feelings about us by giving ourselves up. Our responsibility as a loving adult is to learn to speak up for ourselves even in the face of fear, rather than indulging the wounded self in not speaking your truth, which ironically often causes pain, anxiety, and lack of safety – the very feelings you are trying avoid by giving yourself up.
 
The challenge here is in having the loving adult in charge rather than the wounded self. This will occur only through practicing staying connected with your spiritual guidance throughout the day. The more you practice the six steps of Inner Bonding and develop the loving adult, the more power the adult has to limit the actions of the wounded self – who is, after all, just a child trying to be safe. Imagine how safe you would feel if you had a powerful spiritually connected loving adult making the decisions regarding your highest good, rather than your wounded self just trying to control getting love and avoiding pain! Imagine how you would feel if you were truly a loving mom and dad to your inner child.

How often do you walk around in a fog, not present in your body, not present with your feelings, and not present with your guidance?

Now take a moment to think about this – how often are you not present because you are stuck in fear, obligation, or guilt – stuck in a FOG?

That’s where I used to live. My wounded self was relentless in telling me things that created the FOG feelings. My wounded self had been deeply programmed with hundreds of beliefs that invariably put me into fear, obligation and guilt.

The scary, judgmental voice of my wounded self would say things like, “Did you remember to turn the flame off on the stove? No, I’m sure you didn’t and the house is going to burn down and your children will die.”

Or, “Sandra invited you to her party and you don’t want to go but you know you will hurt her feelings and that’s not okay. She will think you don’t care – that you are not a caring person, so you have to go to prove that you care.”

Or, “He’s angry and it must be your fault. You didn’t do something right – again. He’s probably angry because you are not sexy enough.”

Or, “He feels hurt because you want to read your book tonight rather than have sex. It’s not okay to read your book instead of having sex if he is upset about it.”

Or “Mom’s angry that you didn’t call her this week. You are not a caring daughter.”

On and on. Of course it never occurred to me that others weren’t caring about me when they were angry and blaming and guilting. I couldn’t even think that thought because then my wounded self would really get into gear, saying, “Don’t be so selfish. You are selfish if you do what you want if others are upset about it. You are selfish if you don’t go to the party. You are selfish if you don’t have sex when he wants it. You are selfish if you read your book when he wants to make love. You are selfish for not calling your mother.”

It wasn’t until Inner Bonding that I discovered that taking care of myself was loving instead of selfish and discovered that it was not only my responsibility to take care of myself, but my right. It was through Inner Bonding and getting connected with my guidance that I discovered that when someone expected me to give myself up for them instead of take loving care of myself, they were the ones being selfish. Learning that was huge for me.

It was from my guidance that I learned that when someone blamed me for being selfish, it was often a projection of their own selfishness. They were trying to guilt me into giving myself up instead of taking care of myself.

It was through my guidance that I learned that acting out of fear, obligation, and guilt was not only unloving to me, it was also unloving to others, because in giving myself up, I had an agenda that they give to me what I was not giving to myself.

Operating out of fear, obligation and guilt is operating in the FOG of my wounded self, while operating out of love, caring and compassion, for myself and others, takes me out of the FOG and into the clarity of mind that comes when I am guided by spirit rather than by my wounded self. 

It was practicing Inner Bonding and learning to be a spiritually connected loving adult that gave me the strength to stop giving myself up and instead speak up for my inner child. Before Inner Bonding I didn’t believe that I could ever easily say no when that was what was in my highest good, but now I can, most of the time. Nor did I believe that I could speak up for myself in other challenging situations with other people.

What do you generally do when you are in an interaction with someone and you are feeling anxious, scared or lonely from the interaction?

Perhaps the other person is judging you, blaming you, or threatening you, or is being sarcastic or discounting of you. Or maybe the other person keeps interrupting you and bringing the conversation back to himself or herself. Perhaps the other person is going on and on, not letting you get in a word edgewise. Or maybe the other person is just completely non-responsive to you, not listening to you or acting as if you are not there.

These interactions will often bring about an inner feeling of stress. How do you respond to your inner stress?

Most people, in response to their inner stress, have learned to protect against the feeling in a number of ways: arguing, defending, explaining, attacking, withdrawing or complying. These are just of few of the ways you might have learned to protect against inner stress. Yet none of these actually deal with the stressful feeling.

This stressful feeling is your inner child telling you that something is wrong. The feeling is telling you that you are picking up a negative energy, an energy that is not in resonance with peace and love. If you respond to this stressful feeling with your own protective, controlling behavior, such as giving yourself up, then you are also moving out of alignment with yourself, out of alignment with peace and love. By protecting against your stressful feelings with some form of controlling behavior, you have abandoned yourself, which results in even more stress. Now, not only are you responding with stressful behavior to the negative energy that is being aimed at you, but you have also abandoned your inner child in the face of it.

However, if you are consistently practicing Inner Bonding, you will begin to be more aware that the energy coming at you is unloving. You will gradually become more aware of your feelings, of the stress that comes when unloving energy is aimed at you. With consistent practice, you will be more and more able to stay in Step One of Inner Bonding – being mindful of your feelings.

Then you can move on to Step Two, moving into compassion for your feelings with a deep desire to learn what is causing them, rather than just reacting to them. Once you are in a compassionate intent to learn, you can quickly discern that you are feeling stressed due to negative energy being aimed at you. Once you are aware of this, you have a much better chance of moving into loving action and speaking up for your inner child.

In an important relationship such as with a partner, a close friend, or a co-worker, speaking up for your feelings – for your inner child – can take different forms, depending upon the situation. But a sort of standard response could be something like, “This isn’t feeling good. This is feeling stressful.” Once you have made this kind of statement, then you can decide what is the next loving action. You could open to learning with the other person, which might look like this:

“This isn’t feeling good. This feels very stressful. I’d like to understand what’s happening for you right now. Are you willing to explore it with me?”

Another option is to express your limit and take action on it, which might look like this:

“This isn’t feeling good. This negative energy is feeling stressful. I’m going to take a 30 minute time out (or whatever time you want), and then see if we can talk about it with openness and caring.” Then you would need to leave the interaction by going into another room, taking a walk, or getting off the phone. You can come back in 30 minutes or whatever length of time you stated and see if the other person is open.

If the other person is not open when you come back, then it is best not to discuss the issue until both of you are open. Neither of these options are about giving yourself up to the other person. If they are demanding something from you, you are not saying yes or no – you are not engaging in the conversation until both of you are open.

You will find that as you practice speaking up for yourself and saying yes when you mean yes and no when you mean no, and opening to learning or lovingly disengaging when someone is being negative or demanding, you will feel much less fear, obligation, and guilt. Your inner child will feel much safer and more inner peace and freedom knowing that you no longer give yourself up, and instead, take loving care of yourself. 

I invite you to join me for my bi-monthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership. 

And, I invite you to join me for my 30-Day at-home Course: “Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships.”

And you can learn so much about loving yourself and creating loving relationships from my new book, “Lonely No More: The Astonishing Power of Inner Bonding” and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.