What happens when you lose all your tools for being assertive?
It was shortly after my parents found out about my throwing rocks at other kids that I lost the rest of my assertiveness. Long before then, I’d found out the hard way that growing up with disabilities meant that people didn’t always have to take you seriously, and this made me furious.
Confused? Let me explain. I was born with a condition known as Moebius syndrome in which the cranial nerves that control facial and eye movement never connected properly, leaving me with a bilateral facial paralysis. Moebius syndrome has several conditions associated with it including clubbed feet and a lazy eye, both of which were corrected before I became a teenager. But then there was the speech impediment, and that’s where a lot of the troubles began.
Let’s be clear: Trying to be assertive when you can’t even be understood by people can be incredibly frustrating. I had numerous people who bullied me because of my speech impediment, and I tried on more than a few occasions to tell them to stop. The teasing only intensified. It got to the point where I was kicking other kids in retaliation to their teasing, but nothing worked, and it only made me angrier to the point where, at the very tender age of eight years old, I started throwing rocks at my fellow schoolmates. As an adult, I would never condone this type of behavior. As an eight-year-old child who had been insulted repeatedly because of my facial paralysis, however, I had very few tools to deal with those situations.
This period of my life didn’t last very long as word got back to my parents about what I was doing, and they told me to stop throwing rocks immediately. And so, like an obedient kid, I stopped. Unfortunately, after this happened, a lot of my assertiveness vanished. From the ages of eight to eighteen, I felt like I had nowhere to go and didn’t feel I could speak up for myself. I felt as if I didn’t have any power left. It wasn’t until much later when I looked back at this period of my life that I realized that I wasn’t powerless; I was simply trying to develop new tools to deal with the same problems that wouldn’t result in me becoming violent or resentful. It also wasn’t clear to me until later that I realized that assertiveness takes time to develop. Because I’d lost those tools that helped me deal with bullies and other hassles, even knowing that most of those methods weren’t working, I had to learn new ways of coping with other people’s behavior.
Among the lessons I learned was the fact that assertiveness is situational. So much of what we know of assertiveness can be boiled down to politeness or courtesy. Simply saying “please” and “thank you” are ways in which we interact with others that allows us to be assertive without coming across as bullying or being overly bossy. Courtesy might not always work, however, depending on who you’re talking to and the context of the situation itself. When you need to defend yourself verbally, give orders, or debate someone, the assertiveness becomes essential for getting through those encounters.
Another lesson that I learned is that you are not responsible for other people’s actions or inaction. This was a particularly hard one for me to learn since I always took it personally when somebody was uncomfortable around my facial paralysis. When people did double takes, looked away from me, or sometimes had more extreme reactions such as laughing at my disability, I had to live with the emotional fallout. What made it even worse was when I had to deal with what I often refer to as the nervousness feedback loop, which is illustrated by the following: A person I need to interact with becomes nervous, which means I feel their nervousness as well, which in turn leads to a very awkward encounter. In most of these cases, I had to be the one to initiate the icebreaker. For example, if I’m in a line at the grocery store and the cashier is nervous around me, I can choose to behave as though this behavior isn’t there, or I might find a way to break the ice with humor or courtesy. However, while I might otherwise discover a way to defuse the situation, more often than not, they are ultimately responsible for their own prejudices and how they shape their behavior. The best I can do is take the high ground and try to remain calm even when some of those situations turn uncomfortable.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, assertiveness is a necessary part of growing up. No matter what else happens, you need to be able to state your needs clearly to people, and a lot of those lessons are learned early on in childhood. Learning how to say no, speaking up to ask for what you want (politely), as well as recognizing that other people may have the same needs as you but may go about asking for them differently – all of these things contribute to how assertive you are, depending on the circumstances. There are a number of times I wished that I could have been more confident with saying no to people or dealing with kids who thought the speech impediment was a credible excuse to bully me. However, as I’ve already noted, not everybody is going to be open-minded enough to listen to you – and that’s okay. Yes, it can be infuriating when you can’t get your way because other people would rather not pay attention to you. The point is that you recognize that you have the power to say no, or to state your own needs so that you’re heard and can be helped where needed. Eventually someone will start to take you seriously so that you can make your case for obtaining what you need or getting someone to stop treating you with obnoxious or horrible behavior.
The bottom line is, most of us will have times in our lives when being assertive isn’t enough. Circumstances may dictate that we endure the situation until another opportunity opens to express ourselves. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to stay quiet and assess the situation, nor are you responsible for other people’s behavior during that time. The main thing to remember is that developing the tools to become more assertive takes time and effort. Even if it means compromising with the other person, sometimes the best part of being assertive is simply realizing that no one gets it right all the time. I know for me learning to be assertive was a process of watching, waiting, and finally realizing that I didn’t need to have all the answers right in front of me. I simply needed to realize that I was enough and that whatever else happened, the tools for being assertive would present themselves in due course.
