The Self-Abandonment Trap: Why do I say yes when I want to say no?
Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 205
Why do I keep saying yes when I want to say no?
This is something that most of us have probably thought and it really doesn't align with our politics. We know that no is a full sentence and shouldn't be defined or need any additions, and yet quite often most of us find ourselves saying yes when we might not actually want to.
Underneath a lot of this is often giving ourselves a hard time for all of those other times where we said yes when we didn't really mean to.
And the reason that we do this is because in the moment our yes feels safer. Noes often bring consequences. It can bring disappointment, conflict, someone deciding that you're difficult or telling you that you are.
Yes defers all of that, but it doesn't solve it.
What you're trading is future you's peace for present you's safety. You are reminding your body and your nervous system that you can't be trusted with your own care, and that is a really shaky ground to be making decisions from.
But it's really natural.
Somewhere along the line most of us learned that our needs are negotiable and other peoples' aren't.
And it might not have been a big dramatic thing, although for many of us it can have been. Quite often it's just these repeated cycles that other people may be cross with us if we don't do the thing that they want. Other people may say things about us that we don't feel that we can handle if we don't do the thing that they want us to.
Often we say things to ourselves that we can't handle if we don't do the thing that other people wants us to.
Over time this stuff builds up and our brains receive it as danger. If I don't do all of that stuff for other people, this dangerous thing is gonna happen again.
But the reality is that for every yes that you don't really mean, it's a tiny act of self-abandonment, and that is also very dangerous.
Danger might feel like a really big word for me to be using here, because individually these little yeses feel like inconveniences or irritations or mild disappointments. But collectively, they can quite often become the reason that you don't really know who you are anymore. You feel like you've lost yourself somewhere along the way.
You only know what you are when other people want something from you, and you also know that doesn't feel right.
So what I would like to invite you to think about this week is Saying yes itself isn't a problem. You may want to say a full-chested yes to something that someone requests of you. It isn't the yes that's the problem. It's the lack of checking in with yourself, and that can be summarised as a lack of pause.
Between someone asking you to do something and the answer there is a gap, and that's where your actual response lives. That's where checking in with your body lives.
That's where your deep knowledge about how you relate to this thing, that is being brought into your life, relates to the rest of who you are, what you have to do, and who you want to be.
The majority of people pleasers, and I think there are a lot of people pleasers around me and around my work, never access this pause because there's such a social pressure to respond immediately, to immediately come across as someone who is willing to put everything down for other people. It's a huge pressure that most of us feel even when it isn't spoken.
Learning to listen to yourself to take a breath, to take a pause without immediately giving an answer, without immediately giving it all away, that is a practice. It's something that you can learn to do, and the more you do it, the more it becomes familiar to you.
When I hear people say, "Why do I keep saying yes when I mean no? Why do I keep giving it all away to other people without checking in on myself?" It's because we don't fully believe that we're gonna be okay with ourselves if someone else feels disappointed in us, if someone else has emotions that they tell us that they don't like and that we have caused.
And that is the thing to work on. It isn't how you say yes or no. It's staying in that pause and knowing that no matter what is gonna go on here, no matter what someone else tells us, that we're gonna be okay with ourselves and we're not gonna turn into our own personal bully.
This is the thing to work on. Not how you say yes or how you say no. It's the belief underneath it and the way that you talk to yourself however you choose to respond.
And the thing is that when you've nailed this, when you know that you can handle your response to yourself being the one that is in tune with you, the people around you benefit so much more. Because they know that when you say yes, you're saying that yes with your full chest too.
My friends who have good boundaries, my friends who know when to say no, when to pause, and when to say yes, I know that when they say yes they're saying that because they really mean it and 'cause it's something that they really wanna do. And that, as a friend, is absolutely priceless.
I wish you gentle, fruitful, nourishing pauses, taking those deep breaths and being able to check in with your body.
If you'd like to learn how to do that, that's what we teach at www.SelfCareSchool.co.uk And if you want to try and fathom this all out on your own, maybe just count to three, pause before you respond.
I hope that it's been useful this week for you to go through some of these reasons why we all do some of this stuff. And I wish you eloquent, short, fully embodied nos whenever you need them, and full chested joyful yeses whenever you want them.
I'll speak to you next week
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