Saying no has always been problematic for me. Maybe it’s partly due to my age. I was raised in the seventies. I was raised in a time when children were not allowed to say “no” to their parents. Under any circumstances. (Regrettably, I raised my kids this way as well.)
And as a child of the seventies, for all the progress that women made in that decade, women were still not really free to say no without disapproval. We were still being groped and cat-called and told to smile regularly. We were still expected not to say anything and if we did, we were called a bitch. And let’s be honest, that still goes on today. Progress is slow. Women in the seventies not only suppressed their “no”, they generally didn’t have much of voice to say much of anything at all. They followed their husband if his career uprooted them. They spent as he decided. They cooked as he preferred. They didn’t admit to having periods or cramps. Women had cute little carriers in their purses for tampons because heaven forbid someone actually saw the tampon! Many women showed up to breakfast fully dressed with hair and make-up done. They didn’t swear and they didn’t shout. They didn’t fart or burp.
I heard Glennon Doyle say once that it has historically been a woman’s job to make everyone comfortable and this couldn’t be more true. We have acted and spoken and looked a certain way in order to be approved of and in order to make everyone around us more comfortable.
My mom lived with me from 2015-2020. It’s interesting when we live with our parents as adults. All the things that just seemed normal in our childhood, stand out in bold relief years later. I left home in 1981 and 34 years later, when mom moved in, her lack of a voice was obvious to me in a way it had not been growing up. I would ask her, "what do you want?" and she'd reply, "whatever you think." If I made any kind of assertion she would reply, "I suppose you're right.” She almost never voiced an opinion, a need or a want. I had to pull it out of her. I found that it was not only frustrating, but it hit a nerve in me. Maybe because I have worked so hard as an adult to have a voice and use it. When it came to my mom, my brothers would say, "maybe she just doesn't want to have to make the decision, maybe she wants you to make it for her, she's so used to dad making all her decisions for her, maybe she doesn't know what she wants." And all that was true. But I didn't want to play that game. I wanted her to have a voice, to connect with what she wanted, to speak up for herself. She just wouldn't. Or couldn't. It made me see so plainly that this was what was modeled for me growing up. I wanted to speak up for myself. And often I couldn’t either.
My mom once told me when I was a teenager that if a woman never says no to her husband, he never has a reason to "look elsewhere". I believed this. It seemed reasonable to me and seemed like a good way to enact some control over my one-day future husband’s fidelity.
In addition to culture silencing my voice, and the messages from my mom; my church silenced me as well and told me that I was not allowed to have a "no". They were fond of quoting 1 Corinthians 7:5 at marriage retreats, “Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” I internalized this. Just like with my mom’s advice, it seemed reasonable to me and seemed like a good way to enact some control over my husband’s fidelity.
(Side note: in my experience “mutual consent” for devotion to prayer never happened……did it happen for anybody?)
The church silenced women in more ways that sexually. A woman was not allowed to have a voice in the church. 1 Corinthians 14:34 “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.” For many years, I internalized this and kept my thoughts an opinions to myself in church. I wanted to be good, Christian woman, a good wife and it seemed to me that this meant not having a voice.
But, by my mid-thirties, when everything fell apart despite all my attempts at silence and rule following, I began to rethink all this. It occurred to me that silencing myself was a form of deceit. My voice was my truth. I recognize now that I had to frame it as morally superior truth-telling to be able to speak. I was still very concerned with being “good.”
When I started using my voice, it was not well received by my then-husband. It was part of the beginning of the end for us.
That was over 20 years ago, and frustratingly, “no” is still very hard for me. For so many reasons.
I don't want to admit that I can't do it all.
I don't want to let people down.
I don't want to be rejected if I say no.
I still want to be “good” and somewhere deep in my psyche, “no” is bad.
I recently noticed that there was an area of my married life that I had been hoping would change for years, and suddenly it had. It was one of those things that kept getting talked about over and over, but real change had not occurred. You know those things. All marriages have them. Those things where you think to yourself, “are we really going to have this conversation AGAIN?” Then suddenly, after years of the same conversation, it shifted. I thought the anger I had harbored would go away when the issue went away. I waited for the anger and resentment to pass through me, but they didn’t. So, it was time to talk to my therapist about it.
I think that what I learned is important. Even though it’s been years since I believed that it was wrong to use my voice and say “no”, the programming went deep and try as I might, I still usually feel bad for saying “no.” The intellectual belief was not changing the emotional response.
Anger and resentment were the internal weaponry I had been using for years in order to find the courage to say no; in order to say no with minimal guilt. To be sure, I kept them well hidden. (I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.) And yet, the anger and the resentment were also the reason the "no" was only comfortable for me intellectually and not emotionally. They were keeping the "no" stuck in my head and keeping the guilt stuck in my emotions.
So, I'm working to lay down that weaponry. I’m telling myself I don’t need it anymore. I am learning to just say “no” with peace. Not with any anger or bitterness to armor myself. In the hopes that this gets the "no" into a place of grace and peace emotionally.
