Brave or Shameful?

Cindy hated that her story still had the power to make her cry. She hated the feelings the story still stirred up in her: embarrassment, powerlessness, rage, and, the fuel for her tears, shame. Cindy still had shame about what she’d done.

Many years before, she reported to a leader who was verbally abusive. The behavior was known and tolerated. People working for him were constantly fearful. Many left. The ones that stayed suffered.

One day, when the leader’s eye-to-humiliate once again turned to her, Cindy snapped. She yelled back. She cursed him. She hurled insult for insult. Finally, she stormed out of the room, yelling, “Fire me! Please! Somebody! Fire me!”

But she wasn’t fired. She wasn’t even disciplined. The world of work just went on turning. In hallways and bathrooms, people quietly celebrated her bravery. But Cindy didn’t feel brave. She felt ashamed.

Now, pushing back her tears, she said to me quietly, “What does it say about me, that I snapped like that? I clearly lost control. I lost my mind! How can that be good for me?”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

She gave a sigh. “Look, Tom, growing up with my mom, I learned to just suck up whatever came my way. But every now and then, I’d snap with her, too. It never went well. I think I snap because I’m either completely passive or I explode like a bomb. I don’t have any middle ground. I’d like some help with that.”

I said, “You’d like to be between passive and explosive, right?”

“Right,” she agreed.

“You want to be assertive. Great. Let’s see what we can do. Can I start by making a guess about something?”

Awareness & Expression

“Sure,” she said.

“I’m guessing you’ve thought a lot about being passive and being explosive, am I right?”

“Yeah!” She said, “I think about it because I don’t like either extreme. Being passive makes me mad at myself, and being explosive, well, it’s just not right. I’d be happy if I never did it again.”

I said, “You may be closer than you think. When I talk about assertion, I focus on two steps in the beginning. Awareness and expression. It seems you’re doing pretty well on awareness, so maybe you’re closer than you think!”

She laughed. “You mean, knowing that most of the time I’m a doormat, but every now and then the pin comes out of my hand grenade, that actually counts for something?”

“Actually, yes!” I said, “It’s awareness. Awareness counts because until you knew your triggers, and knew your feelings, you couldn’t be assertive.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Your triggers and feelings showed you your patterns. And when you saw your patterns, you saw where you want some boundaries. You want to be able to speak from that middle ground. That’s a boundary. Boundaries allow you to be assertive. You can’t be assertive without boundaries.”

She gave a rueful snort. “Huh! Boundaries! Boundaries were not allowed in the house I grew up in. You had no privacy, no rights, no feelings that mattered. These days, when I think about boundaries, I get all frozen up. I’m not sure I’d know a good boundary from a bad one.”

I agreed. “So many people struggle with boundaries. Can I give you a way to think about it?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said.

“A boundary defines where you end and where everyone else begins. What do you consider yours? Your feelings? Are they yours? Your opinions? Are they yours? What do you allow from others? Disrespect? Abuse? Whatever you answer, that’s your boundary. That’s where you end and the other person begins. Don’t know if that helps.”

She paused before saying, “You talked about ‘are those my feelings mine.’ That really resonated with me.” She said, “This is all about building awareness, isn’t it?”

Awareness Tools

I nodded. “Patterns? Triggers? Feelings? Absolutely. It’s all about awareness.”

She asked, “Suppose I wanted to build my awareness, where would you send me?”

“They’re a lot of ways to it. You could reflect. That would build awareness. Reflect on your patterns, then you could journal about it, or make a mood board. Another think you could do is make sure you and I talk about it in every session. That’d build your awareness.”

She nodded. “I might do some journaling. That would be okay with me.”

I said, “I also have some assessments I could send you. That’s their whole purpose – to raise awareness.”

“What do they assess?” she asked.

“Your responses when there’s conflict. Are you passive? Aggressive? Assertive?”

“I think we already know the profile,” she said. “Mostly passive with sprinklings of aggression.”

I smiled and shrugged. “The assessments may not be ‘news.’ They’re just building awareness.”

“Well, send them along, for sure,” she said. Then, “Let’s suppose I want to tell someone that my feelings are mine, but I don’t want to explode, how does that happen?”

I said, “That’s the second step I mentioned. Expression.”

Expression Tools

“Oh, good,” she said. “Do you have like a script I could follow? Those’re really helpful for me.”

“I do,” I said, “but before we get there, I want to put a frame around the whole idea of expression. So, we’re talking about being assertive through expression. You don’t want to be passive, and you don’t want to be aggressive, you want to be assertive. Do that by expressing yourself fairly. Express concern for both party’s needs. Don’t express concern only for their needs and ignore your own.”

“Being passive, right?” she interjected.

“Right. And,” I said, “don’t only express concern about your needs and ignore theirs.”

She said, “That’d be aggressive, right? I would never have thought of aggression that way, but I get it. Ignoring someone else’s needs is totally aggressive, isn’t it? Like they’re invisible. Huh! Okay, so it’s the Goldilocks balance. You want to be right in the middle, balance their needs, and mine along with them.”

“Right, because each person’s needs are valid and important. One way you can express that – you may have heard of this – is ‘I’ statements. Can I do a quick drill-down on ‘I’ statements?”

“No need to be quick for me,” she said.

I smiled, saying, “’I’ statements are assertive because they set boundaries and they’re also non-combative. They’re not challenges. So, suppose I get upset about something you’re doing. I could say, ‘Cindy, you have to stop doing that!’ That’s a challenge. It’s a command. It’s not an ‘I’ statement. Or I could say, ‘Cindy, I get so uncomfortable when you do that. Could you stop?’ I express my experience, which is valid and important, but not combative.”

Cindy nodded her head, thinking. “Can we talk more about ‘I’ statements later? I’d really like to learn that script. Unless that was the script!”

“No,” I said, “the script I want to give you is different. This script helps build sentences. Healthy, assertive sentences. It has four parts: Situation. Feelings. Wants. Outcomes. Ready for a demo?”

“Do it!” she said.

Assertiveness Script

“Okay. I’m going to demo situation, feelings, wants, outcomes. So, I would say, ‘When you’re on your phone while I’m talking to you …’ That’s the situation, the trigger. ‘…I feel totally rejected.’ That’s feelings. ‘I would appreciate you putting down your phone when we’re talking.’ That’s the want. ‘That would really calm me down because right now I’m really angry.’ That’s the outcome. So, the script is: situation, feeling, wants, outcome.”

She asked, “Could you actually say all that all together so I can hear it? Do you remember what you said?”

“I do, actually. Here it is. ‘When you’re on your phone while I’m talking to you, I feel totally rejected. I’d appreciate you putting down your phone when we’re talking. That would really calm me down because right now I’m really angry.’”

We were both silent.

Then she said, “I’d like if someone spoke to me that way.”

“Me, too,” I agreed.

“And this is how you speak, like, every day?”

“I try to. I know how to, let me put it that way. But I don’t always do it. Especially if I haven’t sorted out my feelings yet. I’ve learned. You can’t be assertive if you can’t name your feelings. I named my anger. Owning your feeling is, by definition, assertive. So, I figure them out. And they’re not always ‘nice’ feelings. It might be jealousy or rage or whatever. But no matter what, I will own it. I will name it. But I will not act on it.”

“No exploding,” she said. Then she considered. “Awareness and expression. I can work on those.”

And she did. She practiced awareness and expression in low-risk situations and found being assertive exhilarating. She uncovered a voice she barely knew she had. She liked it. It felt to her very much like The Look & Sound of Leadership.

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