Why Do I Keep Saying Yes to Projects I Don't Want?
The Pattern
The email arrives. You feel the no in your body. By the time your fingers finish typing the reply, the message says yes. You sit there confused by your own hands. You wonder why the yes is faster than the no. The yes is faster because the yes is older. The yes was learned before you could read. It is the reflex of a self that learned belonging required immediate compliance.
Origins & Context
The psychotherapist Pete Walker, whose work on the fawn response is foundational, describes the adult who learned in childhood that her safety depended on managing the moods and needs of others. The fawn-trained adult does not consciously choose the yes. The yes arrives before deliberation, because deliberation requires a felt sense of safety the body has not yet been given.
The psychologist Harriet Lerner, in her work on women and assertiveness, documented the specific gendered training in which girls learn that saying no produces relational consequences disproportionate to the actual no. The internalized cost calculation runs faster than the conscious decision. By the time the woman knows she did not want to agree, the agreement has already been made.
You do not have to learn to say no all at once. You have to learn to delay the yes long enough for the no to arrive.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You notice it in the meeting. The volunteer ask goes out. Your hand is up before you have asked yourself whether you wanted to volunteer. You notice the moment of confused recognition: did I want this? The body already committed.
You notice it in the calendar that fills with things you do not want to do. You notice the way you keep planning to start saying no next week. You notice that next week arrives and the same pattern repeats. The internal voice that wants to say no never gets a turn at the microphone because the fawn voice has the microphone wired to it.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the Fawn Response (Pete Walker), the survival adaptation in which compliance precedes deliberation. It is also named as Reflexive Yes (Harriet Lerner), the gendered training in which girls learn that the cost of refusal is higher than the cost of overcommitment. The contemporary workplace version is named as the Office Housework Trap (Joan Williams, Marianne Cooper), the pattern in which women are disproportionately asked, and disproportionately agree, to take on low-status, low-reward work that derails their actual careers.
Related entries in this library: Fawn Response, Self-Abandonment, Boundaries.
Nikita's Note
Buy yourself the pause. Train yourself to say, let me get back to you, before you say anything else. The pause is the entire technology. The pause lets the conscious self catch up to the reflexive one. The pause lets the no have a turn.
You do not have to learn to say no all at once. You have to learn to delay the yes long enough for the no to arrive. Once the no can arrive, it usually does.
From the work
You do not have to learn to say no all at once. You have to learn to delay the yes long enough for the no to arrive.From She Was Not Low Maintenance, She Was Trained by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in She Was Not Low Maintenance, She Was Trained — available on Amazon.