When I Say No, I Feel Guilty Read Online Free

break off the relationship.
    When we interact only through aggression or flight, we also feel terrible since these modes of behavior always have the unpleasant emotions of anger or fear associated with them. If we cope in these ways, not only do we get angry or afraid but we usually lose the battle—and there are real battles in life, to be won or lost—with other people; we get frustrated and eventually sad or depressed. The triad of anger, fear, and depression is our basic set of inherited survival emotions and the common emotional denominator that prompts troubled people to seek professional psychotherapy.The patients I see in therapy get angry and aggressive toward other people too often for their own liking, or continually fear and then retreat from other people, or are fed up with losing and being depressed most of the time. Most people seen by therapists are seeking help as a result of over-reliance on fight or flight in various, sometimes bizarre forms. All of us have felt the emotions of anger, fear, and depression associated with aggression, flight, and frustration. If you feel angry, afraid, or depressed, that does not mean you are necessarily sick in any sense, even if you decide to get help because of these emotions. You and I get angry, fearful, or depressed because we are physiologically and psychologically constructed to feel these ways. We are built the way we are because this particular arrangement of nervous tissue, muscle, blood, bone, and the behavior following from it, allowed our ancestors to survive under harsh conditions.
    The negative emotions of anger, fear, and depression have survival value in the same way physical pain has survival value. When you touch a hot object, your hand will automatically retract. Your nervous system is constructed so this reaction will occur automatically; no flunking is required. When you sense an unpleasant emotion, you really sense the physiologic and chemical changes ordered by the primitive “animal” parts of your brain to ready your whole body for some behavioral response. In the case of anger, you are sensing your body’s preparation for an attack toward some person or animal. Not only can we feel this preparation for aggression in ourselves but we can see its results in the behavior of other people. For example, how many championship football teams have been upset in the big game because the underdog team physically outplayed their traditional rivals after the coach insulted and abused them in the locker room? We are not nature’s favored children when it comes right down to physically defending ourselves. Even so, if we get angry, we have a better chance to survive by aggressively defending ourselves when there is no chance to escape or to talk our way out of a dangerous situation.
    Whenever you feel afraid, on the other hand, you sense a physiochemical change ordered by your primitive brain that automatically prepares your body for running away from danger as fast as possible. Our chances for survival are better if we can run away from a danger that cannot be dealt with by talking. If a mugger approaches you with an open switchblade knife on a dimly lighted street; the panicky feeling you sense in your breathing, gut, and limbs is not cowardice but a natural feeling of arousal automatically triggered by your brain centers preparing your body for flight.
    Even though we have a third human alternative to aggression and flight—verbal problem-solving—at times all of us are going to feel angry or nervous and afraid, no matter what we do. When the careless driver cuts in front of me at 70 mph on the freeway, it doesn’t help me one bit to try to be assertive and keep my hands from trembling, that close to disaster I get shaky and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. When a dent mysteriously appears in the fender of my brand-new car, it doesn’t help me to be assertive to someone who isn’t there; I get mad as hell no matter what I tell myself! If my