Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (30 page)

That should be enough should removal techniques for you. Oops! I just did it myself! Let me say—it would be nice if you found those methods helpful. I think you’ll find that by reducing this mental tyranny, you’ll feel better because you won’t be berating yourself. Instead of feeling guilty, you can use your energy to make necessary changes and enhance your self-control and productivity.

3. Learn to Stick to Your Guns.
One of the big disadvantages of being guilt-prone is that others can and will use this guilt to manipulate you. If you feel obligated to please everyone, your family and friends will be able to coerce you effectively into doing many things that may not be in your best self-interest. To cite a trivial example, how many social invitations have you halfheartedly accepted so as not to hurt someone’s feelings? In this case the price you pay for saying yes when you really would have preferred to say no is not great. You only end up wasting one evening. And
there is a payoff. You will avoid feeling guilty, and you can fantasize that you are an especially nice person. Furthermore, if you try to decline the invitation, the disappointed host may say, “But we are
expecting
you. Do you mean you are going to let the old gang down? Aw, come on.” And
then
what would you say? How would you feel?

Your obsession with pleasing others becomes more tragic when your decisions become so dominated by guilt that you end up trapped and miserable. The irony is that, more often than not, the consequences of letting someone manipulate you with guilt end up being destructive not only to you but to the other person. Although your guilt-motivated actions are often based on your idealism, the inevitable effects of giving in turn out to be quite the opposite.

For example, Margaret was a happily married twenty-seven-year-old woman whose obese brother, a gambler, tended to take advantage of her in a variety of ways. He borrowed money when he ran short and often forgot to repay it. When he was in town (often for several months at a time) he assumed it was his right to eat dinner with her family every night, to drink up the liquor, and to use her new car whenever he wanted. She rationalized giving in to his demands by saying: “If I asked him for a favor or needed his help, he’d do the same for me. After all, a loving brother and sister
should
help each other out. And besides, if I tried to say no to him he’d explode and I might lose him. Then I’d feel like
I
did something wrong.”

At the same time, she was able to see the negative consequences of continually giving in: (I) She was supporting his dependent, self-defeating life-style and gambling addiction; (2) She felt trapped and taken advantage of; (3) The basis of the relationship was not love but blackmail—she was constantly having to say yes to his demands to avoid the tyranny of his temper and her own sense of guilt.

Margaret and I did some role-playing so she could learn to say no and stick to her guns in a tactful but firm manner. I played Margaret’s role, and she pretended to be her brother:

After this dialogue we reversed roles so that Margaret could practice being more assertive. When I played her brother’s role, I gave her as tough a time as I could, and she learned how to handle me. This practice boosted her courage. She felt it was helpful to keep certain principles in mind when standing up to her brother’s manipulations. These were: (I) She could remind him it was her right not to say yes to all his demands. (2) She could find a grain of truth in his arguments (the disarming technique) so as to take the wind out of his sails, but she could then come back to her position that love did not mean always giving in. (3) She was to adopt a strong, decisive and uncompromising position as tactfully as possible. (4) She was not to buy into his role as a weak, inadequate little boy who couldn’t stand on his own feet. (5) She was not to respond to his anger by getting angry herself, because this would reinforce his belief he was a victim who was being unjustly deprived by a cruel, selfish witch. (6) She had to risk the possibility he would temporarily withdraw and thwart her by refusing to talk to her or to consider her point of view. When he did this, she was to let him storm off but she could let him know there were some things she wanted to talk over with him later on when he was more in the mood to communicate.

When Margaret did confront him she found he was not nearly as tough a customer as she imagined. He actually seemed relieved and began to act more adult when she put some limits on the relationship.

If you choose to apply this technique, you will have to be determined to stick to your guns because the other guy (or gal) may try to bluff you into believing that you’re
mortally wounding them by not giving in to their requests. Remember that the hurt you inflict in the long run by not following your best self-interest is usually far greater.

Practicing ahead of time is the key to success. A friend will usually be happy to role-play with you and provide some useful feedback. If such a person is not available to you, or you feel too shy to ask, write out an imaginary dialogue of the type illustrated. This will go a long way to firing up the appropriate circuits in your brain so you’ll have the necessary courage and skill to say no diplomatically but forcefully and make it stick when the time actually comes!

4. Antiwhiner Technique.
This is one of the most surprising, delightfully effective methods in this book. It works like a charm in situations where someone—usually a loved one—makes you feel frustrated, guilty, and helpless through whining, complaining, and nagging. The typical pattern works like this: The whiner complains to you about something or someone. You feel the sincere desire to be helpful, so you make a suggestion. The person immediately squashes your suggestion and complains again. You feel tense and inadequate, so you try harder and make another suggestion. You get the same response. Anytime you try to break loose from the conversation, the other person implies he or she is being abandoned, and you are flooded with guilt.

Shiba lived with her mother while she completed graduate school. Shiba loved her mother, but found her constant harangues about her divorce, the lack of money, etc., so intolerable she sought treatment. I taught her the antiwhiner method the first session, as follows: Regardless of what her mother said, Shiba was to find some way to
agree
(the disarming technique), and then instead of offering advice, she was to say something genuinely complimentary. Shiba initially found this approach astonishing and rather bizarre because it differed radically from her usual approach, in the following dialogue, I asked Shiba to play the role of Mother while I played her role so I could demonstrate this technique:

Shiba reported that in her role as Mother she found it was “no fun” to complain because I kept agreeing with her. We did a role-reversal so she could master the technique.

In fact, it is your urge to
help
complainers that maintains the monotonous interaction. Paradoxically, when you agree with their pessimistic whining, they quickly run out of steam. Perhaps an explanation will make this seem less puzzling. When people whine and complain, they are usually feeling irritated, overwhelmed, and insecure. When you try to
help
them, this sounds to them like criticism because it implies they aren’t handling things properly. In contrast, when you agree with them and add a compliment, they feel
endorsed
, and they then usually relax and quiet down.

5. Moorey Moaner Method.
A useful modification of this technique was proposed by Stirling Moorey, a brilliant
British medical student who studied with our group in Philadelphia and sat in with me during therapy sessions during the summer of 1979. He worked with a chronically severely depressed fifty-two-year-old sculptor named Harriet with a heart of gold. Harriet’s problem was her friends would often bend her ear with gossip and personal problems. She found these problems upsetting because of her excessive capacity for empathy. Because she wouldn’t know how to help her friends, she felt trapped and resentful until she learned the “Moorey Moaner Method.” Stirling simply instructed her to find a way to agree with what the person was saying, and then to distract the moaner by finding something positive in the complaint and commenting on it. Here are several examples: