Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself by Anneli Rufus

Author:Anneli Rufus [Rufus, Anneli]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Personal Growth, Self-Help, Happiness, Self-Esteem
ISBN: 9781101616291
Google: lY6pAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2014-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

9. WE CAN’T SAY NO.

We say yes. Yes yes yes. It is a reflex.

Psychologists call this quality suggestibility.

As a child, I did what I was told because my parents were authoritarian, so nay-saying them made me fear that they might yell. Not that they ever asked me to do anything dangerous or perverse. They never said Slaughter this monkey or Jump off the roof. It was only ever a difference between slightly more pleasant and slightly less. But I had to say yes. I was physically capable of saying no, of forming that word with my mouth, but nothing ever came of that except sardonic laughter, penalties, and threats. What? You don’t want any boiled beef tongue? Ha-ha. Eat the fucking tongue. We are the parents, they said, and you are the child.

It became clear to me that this was true—and indisputable. The difference between saying yes and no was not the difference between right and wrong but between enraging someone or not. And as we all learned long ago, it’s best not to enrage them.

In a letter to his disciplinarian father, Kafka wrote: “For me as a child, everything you called out to me was positively a heavenly commandment, I never forgot it, it remained for me the most important means of forming a judgment . . . and there you failed entirely.”

Again, they meant no harm. They grew up in a bygone time when children were not asked but told. Was I born nondefiant, naturally passive, genetically likely to agree? Studies show that two out of every three babies are born strong-willed. The third is born compliant. That was me.

Sometimes I see a parent pleading with a child—whimpering: Drink your milk or Stop kicking Elise or Sweetie, darling, do Daddy a huge favor and get into the car. And the child retorts NO. When I see this, I clench inside and feel a little sick. A surge of envy—then I want to scream: Do what the grown-up says, you little brat! Then I try not to cry. And this is one more reason I never had children, because I would never want to say such things to them.

Because such statements stick. One study explored the divergent effects on two-year-olds of immediate, short, firm reprimands of the Do it because I goddamn say so type and delayed, long, gentle reprimands delivered after the fact. Toddlers exposed to short, sharp, instant reprimands “transgressed significantly less often” than did toddlers exposed to long, gentle, delayed reprimands. In other words, barking at babies turns them into Goody Two-shoes who always say yes. The study also found that the toddlers exposed to short, sharp, instant reprimands displayed markedly more “negative affect”—sorrow, fear, anxiety—than did the toddlers who were scolded latterly and softly. It’s a double-edged sword. Shouting short, sharp reprimands at children who are hurting kittens is (science says) the best way to make them stop. But shouting short, sharp reprimands at children simply because you are drunk, lazy, or overwhelmed might turn them into fearful zombies.

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