When I Say No, I Feel Guilty Read Online Free Page B

like himself probably would not take care of a bike if he were given one. He never got one. When he wanted to learn to drive, he was told that teenagers are bad drivers and he would have to wait. He learned to drive in college, away from home.
    Don married a woman he described as similar to his mother. His wife never praised him and always seemed able to find something to bitch about. Three years before treatment, Don’s wife divorced him with his consent. Shortly after their separation, Don began experiencing depressed periods that became longer with each occurrence. At the time of treatment, Don had been given antidepressant “mood-elevating” medication for several months with little effect. The treatment of choice, in Don’s case, was to discontinue his medication since it had no effect on his depression but did have the side effect of making him nervous and irritable. In place of this medication, I told Don to make up a list of things he enjoyed doing when he was not depressed. His job, then, was to indulge himself in at least two of these activities each week, to force himself if necessary, no matter how depressed he was. In addition, whenever he sensed he was doing something poorly at work or socially, he was not to repeat his past habit of fleeingfrom the situation by rehearsing his depressed feelings and withdrawing into himself or going home, but was to finish the job at hand or to continue the activity he was engaged in, even if his own immediate feeling was that he didn’t want to. With this therapeutic program in effect, Don’s chronic depression of five months lifted within four weeks.
    While our neurophysiologic coping mechanisms of anger-aggression, fear-flight, and depression-withdrawal are not in themselves signs of sickness and maladaptive coping, they just aren’t of much use to us. They seldom work, they rarely even help. Most of our conflicts and problems come from other people and in dealing with other people, our primitive responses are insignificant in comparison with our uniquely human coping ability of verbal assertive problem-solving. Anger-fight and fear-flight, however, actually interfere with this verbal coping ability. When you become angry or afraid, your primitive lower brain centers shut down much of the operation of your new human brain. The blood supply is automatically rerouted away from your brain and gut to your skeletal muscles to prepare them for physical action. Your human problem-solving brain is inhibited from processing information. When you get angry or afraid, you just don’t think clearly or efficiently. You make mistakes. To an angry or frightened man, two plus two no longer add up to four.
    For our ancestors and sometimes for ourselves, this inhibition of our new human brain by our lower primitive brain presents no problem. If we can do nothing but physically fight or run to survive, we don’t have to be fancy about it. That we fight as hard as we can or run as fast as we can is enough, and our inherited psychophysiology insures that we will. But our usual dealings with people require neither fighting nor fleeing. And, in fact, these primitive responses also interfere with our verbal problem-solving ability in a second way. Most of us verbally assert ourselves with other people only when we have had enough frustration to become irritated and angry. Not only does anger make you less effective in dealing with the issues in conflict,but when you are angry, other people tend to put your grievances down to: “He’s just blowing off steam. When he calms down, he’ll be okay. Just forget it.” Our primitive coping responses are less than useless: they usually cause us more problems than they solve.
    If this evolutional view of three major coping behaviors, two animal and one human, is correct why do so many of us get angry or fearful and resort to aggression and flight when other people give us problems and conflict? If our entirely human coping alternative of verbal