Perhaps you are unsuited to the narcissistic role of demanding that others live up to your standards. No problem. You can try to live up to theirs instead. Whatever the relationship—familial, friendship, romantic, work related—you can make it your goal to satisfy the demands of the people around you. If they tell you to jump, you can say, “Pardon me for asking, and I know I should have paid closer attention to instructions previously, but how high?”
For this to have the maximum effect, the best people to have in your social group should be those for whom the previous strategy (“Hold High Expectations of Others”) comes naturally. You want to collect people who adopt exacting and inflexible standards—the demanding, hard-to-satisfy types who are unaware that few could measure up to their expectations and who are therefore scornful of all those who fail.
The core element of the strategy is to eliminate the word no from your vocabulary:
Whatever they desire—favors, money, work, a blind eye to their indiscretions—give it.
The nice thing about this strategy is that it does not require the learning of any new skills. In fact, the people who are the best at it are those who have never mastered the art of setting interpersonal boundaries. The inability to say no is one of the primary hallmarks of the passive mode of communication, which places other people firmly in charge of your own life.
How does this produce misery? Let me count the ways.
First, it cultivates in others the expectation that you will fulfill their every demand—making you a cross between a scullery maid and a genie. This causes them to increase their expectations over time. Soon they will expect more than you can possibly deliver and will be just as enraged as they would be if, at the outset, you had flatly refused their simple request to pass the butter.
Second, by practicing this role with many people at once, you can create steadily increasing circles of personal responsibility that eventually intersect. Next Tuesday, for example, your mother wants a ride to her dental appointment, your son wants to borrow the car, and your best friend demands an afternoon confab about her impending divorce. The rules you have chosen for yourself dictate that you cannot say no to any of them. It’s possible to stickhandle a few of these situations, but eventually you will be entirely overcommitted. The balls you have volunteered to juggle will plop to the ground, and your audience will pounce on your failure.
Third, any remaining time you have for your own needs will be steadily whittled down to nothing. The activities that sustain you (exercising, eating, sleeping) will have to be relinquished.
Fourth, you will reinforce a perception of yourself as being deserving of this treatment. A part of your mind always watches your own behavior, like a hidden observer trying to understand your role. Seeing you routinely subvert your own interests to pander to others’ whims, that portion of your brain will conclude that you are worth less than others, and you will develop (or intensify) a corresponding feeling of inferiority.
The easiest way to maintain this strategy until it bites especially deeply is simply to avoid learning any principles for the setting and maintaining of interpersonal boundaries. Another route is to tell yourself that you shouldn’t have to have any of these skills. Others should be more considerate. No matter how hard you try to hide it, no matter how many times you say, “No, really, it’s just fine. I’d be glad to,” they should read your exhaustion and limit their requests.
They, of course, will rely on your agreement rather than on their nonexistent telepathic powers and take you at your word—or at your behavior. If you hand them money, then it will seem obvious that you are willing to offer the loan; asking was not the wrong thing to do.
You need never worry that they will stop asking or stepping across the lines that you have spent a lifetime erasing from their view. The requests will go on escalating—and their spurs will dig ever deeper—unless you make the mistake of stepping forward and taking the reins from their hands.
This strategy is easy to adopt in part because resentment is seductive. A part of us likes to feel aggrieved at the unreasonable demands of other people. We enjoy the comforting self-pity of being nailed to the cross and don’t like to see that we are the ones holding the hammer.
After all, what’s the alternative? In order to adopt the assertive posture, we would have to remove our blinders and gaze into the glare of uncomfortable truth. Our life isn’t really under anyone else’s control. We are in the saddle.
We tell ourselves that others are the problem, so they are the ones who have to change. But we can’t change them (despite our efforts), so we’re stuck. Real control would mean relinquishing attempts to change them and changing our own behavior instead. We could say no. We need not stamp our feet, get red in the face, or scream in frustration. We could simply smile calmly and state our position:
This frightening prospect is the road, ultimately, to greater happiness with one’s life, though in the short term the people around us would object, and probably wouldn’t take us seriously. You’ve said things like this before, after all, and then you backed down. When confronted with a newly installed boundary, people always test its strength. If you were to stand your ground and do what you told them you would do, they would eventually get the message that your life is your own, and that you were taking charge of it.
Best not risk that, however. It’s easier just to follow instructions.