NO.
Disengaging from drama
After some prompting from several Substackers, I’ve decided to launch a new series for paid subscribers to share my stories behind Hacking Narcissism’s content. I’ll talk about dealing with bullies and being a bully, exiting a cult, revenge, parenting challenges with toxic teen friendships and a variety of other stories. Stay tuned!
One day in 2019, after a day of wondering what the hell I was going to do with my life, I went to the beach with my daughters, came home and wrote a book. It just poured out of me and 4 hours later I had the first draft of the Little Book of Assertiveness.
I had been mentoring a group of medical professionals for about year on providing support to distressed and morally injured colleagues, peers and students without trying to be their saviour or succumbing to empathy fatigue. One of the recurring themes was fear about saying the wrong thing and making things worse for the other person.
Deeper inquiry with these mentees helped me see that a majority of them had an assertiveness problem. They defaulted to the freeze or fawn response when they were confronted by someone who showed aggression or assertiveness.
For the unfamiliar, the freeze stress response is when your mind goes blank and you feel immobalised when someone says or does something that seems dangerous or threatening. After the event passes, you go into a shame spiral because you were unable to respond in your ideal way to defend yourself. You can also feel powerless, creating the perfect conditions for the Inner Bully to add to your torment.
There’s a little more to this response. The person’s status or position relative to yours factors into what your body perceives as dangerous and threatening. When you have an interaction whereby you unconsciously default into an authority-subordinate or a parent-child dynamic (and you’re not playing the role of authority figure in this scenario), the possibility and the reality of upsetting, disappointing or being disapproved of by them is perceived as a danger to you, activating the freeze response. The annoying part is that you (and I) are often unaware that this power imbalance is even present, let alone contributing to your stress response.
The fawn response is also known as pleasing and placating in order to de-escalate the aggressor or form alliances with those in power. It requires a degree of self-silencing to restore peace when the other person is being aggressive or even when they’re advocating for a point of view with confidence. Fawning is a way to appear less threatening by acquiescing to the other so they are less inclined to fight or hurt you. Many women in healthcare settings and other helping professions are conditioned people pleasers through their upbringing and/or their training to unconsciously assume a non-threatening position that strong personalities would find appealing and trustworthy.
Habitual fawning requires self-silencing to the point of sacrificing your principles in exchange for status protection and social safety. Years of this reinforced habit turned these women and some men into doormats for abusive, dysregulated colleagues and patients. This is a similar trend to those who are often targeted by bullies and can’t seem to break the cycle. Habitual fawning is equivalent to saying YES YOU CAN DO X TO ME without actually giving verbal permission to treat you badly.
Why am I talking about these stress responses? Because when you go into a default state of shrinking yourself for a fleeting sense of security, you’re unintentionally reinforcing a precedent that’s keeping you stuck in someone else’s drama.
Sometimes the intervention that’s needed is the word NO.
When I listen to people speak about assertive skills, they often mean saying no. Of course there’s more to assertiveness than NO but if you can’t remember the vicious comeback you had rehearsed for the next unpleasant encounter with an aggressor, perhaps you need an easier starting point. NO can be a simple intervention to interrupt the tendency to please and appease when a known user asks for a favour. NO can also stop you from justifying your refusal to participate in an unpleasant interaction by opting out of it.
Saying NO in a Cluster B Society
Christopher F. Rufo and Josh Slocum described features and contributing factors to what is known as Cluster B Society. In a Cluster B Society, adults act like feral children and are rewarded for their antisocial and destructive behaviour. In this society, facts are fiction, theories are truth, and meanings of words can be changed at will. Devotees of this society demand others deemed privileged to provide them with comfort and safety without reciprocating. Adults who don’t exhibit these traits often go into freeze or fawn mode when confronted by these devotees, especially in professional settings because, I suspect, they don’t expect other adults to act that way and don’t know how to respond.
I was not always confident being assertive let alone great at saying NO. I pleased and appeased when a stronger personality asserted their authority. I went along with others’ plans at my own detriment. When I hit my breaking point, I still made excuses for those who blamed, shamed and hurt me. Slowly, I painfully discovered the cost of throwing NO grenades into dissatisfying relationships while learning to become assertive. I learned to expect backlash and retaliation for disrupting status quo. I have to develop thicker skin to repel the insults hurled at me for saying NO and NOT THAT. I also discovered other tricks to interrupt others’ attempts at dominating me (which are in the book) especially in professional settings that prefer protégés of narcissistic leaders.
As a society, I think it’s time more of us began saying NO to the manifestations of Cluster B society.
NO to people who demand special attention or beyond reasonable accomodations for their discomforts and feelings.
NO to clients, patients, friends, bosses or anyone else who screams at you when they don’t get their way and demand you fix things for them.
NO to those who perceive themselves as superior using their status to exploit you for their benefit.
NO to the people in your social sphere excuse or downplay abusive behaviour and accuse you of intolerance.
NO to people using your unpublished discoveries or personal stories for their own gain without compensating, citing or including you as a co-author.
NO to people at work who ask inappropriate questions, question your qualifications, or anything that suggests you don’t belong there because you are beneath them.
An internal NO to the intrusive thoughts and wonders about an abusive ex-partner, ex-friend, ex-lover, ex-colleague, or ex-cult leader beckoning you to wonder about their wellbeing or hope that they will come around and admit the error of their ways.
NO to policies and practices that cause harm to children, the terminally ill, people with disabilities, the elderly and everyone else. What I mean by causing harm is also eliminating them from a population.
NO to expectations of self-sacrifice to please the workplace authorities, or in the name of your noble profession.
NO to assimilating the ways of a dominant culture that requires you to suppress your beliefs, culture, unwelcome personality traits, and disengage from your family and friend lifelines.
NO to authoritarian governments and institutions who perform the caring, trustworthy elder.
NO to your Inner Bully and its self-destructive guidance.
NO to anyone doing anything on this list.
NO to internet strangers who prefer to waste your time than engage in constructive dialogue.
NO to people speaking nonsense.
NO to hustling and burnout culture.
Just NO.
What do you need to say NO to?
As always, thank you for reading, commenting, sharing, supporting and subscribing,
Nathalie
Hack narcissism and support my work
I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.
While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting, overriding and deprogramming our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.
I’m dedicated to helping people understand all the ways narcissistic traits infiltrate and taint our interpersonal, professional, organisational and political relationships, and provide strategies for narcissism hackers to fight back and find peace.
Here’s how you can help.
Order my book: The Little Book of Assertiveness: Speak up with confidence
Support my work:
through a Substack subscription
by sharing my work with your loved ones and networks
by citing my work in your presentations and posts
by inviting me to speak, deliver training or consult for your organisation
How great would it be if the series of "Nos" you offer could be posted on refrigerators everywhere, as regular reminder about boundaries!
Christopher Rufo and Josh Slocum might have some decent insights if they could get off the "women are to blame for everything" train. I have watched a couple of Josh's videos. He is a bully. This was my first encounter with Rufo and it will be my last. IMO linking to their sites is condoning so I think I should leave this here:
And from Margaret Joe, a member of the Yukon Legislative Assembly,
a brief quote by Margaret Atwood.
“‘Why do men feel threatened by women?’ I asked a male friend of mine.
“‘They are afraid women will laugh at them’, he said, ‘undercut their world view.’
“Then I asked some women students, ‘Why do women feel threatened by men?’ “‘They are afraid of being killed,’ they said.”
Hansard transcript from the 2nd session of the 27th Legislature (December 5, 1990).