Dervish

A couple of years ago I picked up a second hand copy of Manuel J. Smith’s When I Say No, I Feel Guilty. Looking for something not related to my PhD, I finally took it off my “must get around to reading one day” shelf and began reading. If you ignore the 1970s mores about sexual liberation, it is a very good book.

I have to confess, I am a terrible disease-to-pleaser, and this book addresses people who are easy to manipulate (wittingly or unwittingly) and who have difficulty saying “no” or asserting themselves.

In a funny sort of way it seemed to me to be a very Islamic message. The book begins with the central thesis that you (the reader) are the only judge of your own actions, nobody else is your judge unless you let them be. If you transfer that to Allah (and I mean Allah and NOT mullahs, imams, mufassirun etc. who are still only human beings themselves) it makes incredible sense.

Disease-to-pleasers spend a lot of their time worrying about what other people will think of them, whether they have done the right thing, whether so-and-so has taken offence at something. To the point where some of us unconciously submit ourselves to another creation instead of to the Lord of all. If we remember it is *only* Allah to whom we have to answer, then no one else has the right to make me feel bad or unworthy.

The book provides techniques for asserting yourself too. For example, remembering that when somebody makes a derogatory statement in order to try and get you to do what they want, the book suggests a technique called “fogging”. That’s where you confirm back to the person the possibility or the probability that they might be right, and then you assert your own decision. For example,

Person: “Umm Yasmin, you have loaned five dollars to everybody else, why are you being a hypocrite for not loaning five dollars to me too?”

Umm Yasmin fogging: “You may be right that I am hypocritical but I won’t be loaning you five dollars.”

Person: “Are you so stingy that you can’t loan me five dollars?”

Umm Yasmin fogging: “I probably am being stingy, but I won’t be loaning you five dollars.”

And on you go. You see, you’re not telling any lies - it is possible I am being hypocritical and stingy, but as the Person is no judge of me (I only have to stand before Allah on the Yawm) I have the right to make my own decision as to what I do with my five dollars.

Now I gave you a really lame example, but it feels very liberating to learn techniques to resist being manipulated. Sometimes it is much harder to see the manipulation, and it’s not always because the other person is a “bad” person, but it is very freeing to make my own decisions to say “yes” or “no” not because I want the person to *like* me, but because I have to make a decision as to what is the best thing to do at that point in time.

Laugh if you will, especially you assertive folk who think it is obvious, but I was raised in a society where women often put their own needs last, often to the detriment of the very people they think they are trying to help!

Anyway, thumbs up from this reader.

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