Standing Up For Yourself

I had a client once who was struggling with assertiveness issues. Itwas difficult for her to say no to people when they wanted her to dosomething she didn't want to do. It had been that way for as long asshe could remember. We would talk about situations she'd be in with herboyfriend. The guy was sort of self-centered so far as I could tell;not violent, but not sensitive either. I was interested to see hertense up while talking about one of her interactions with this fellow.Though removed from that feared interaction in a fairly safe therapyenvironment, the threatening interaction was recreated in simulation inthe form of her voice going soft, her body posture going submissive andanxious. She wasn't merely recounting what had happened to herself somuch as she was re-experiencing it.I had been reading some of the old Gestalt Therapy experientialliterature at the time, and it hit me that an experiential sort ofintervention might prove helpful. So I asked my client to explicitlyimagine her boyfriend sitting there with her: What did he look like?What was he saying? How was he standing? She became quieter still,reported that she felt small, and took hold of her knees with her armsso as to become smaller in her chair. I interrupted her reverie after afew moments, calling her attention back to our therapeutic interactionand asked her if she liked feeling small. "No", she said. "You know", Isaid in response, "you can stand up if you like – you can stand up foryourself". And a neat thing happened. She unfolded herself, stood upout of her chair and got into a sort of joking caricature of a boxer'sstance. A slight grin came across her face. It maybe had never occurredto her that she could literally stand up to her relationship partnerand that things could go differently between them.No particular magic occurred in that moment – no lasting change wasnecessarily created, and certainly no magical technique was on display.However, a little flash of insight was created in that moment thatwould hopefully later prove useful to this woman. The insight for myclient was twofold; abstract and quite literal at the same time. Theabstract point was that she didn't have to be satisfied with beingpassive – that it was okay for her to assert and defend herself -- thather own desires and wishes were important and need not be submergedbeneath the desires of her boyfriend. The literal point I was makingwas that she was literally not standing up for herself. Herpassive and frightened attitude was quite literally reflected in herposture. Hopefully she had learned (at least for that moment) that shecould become aware of her feelings and gain the perspective she neededto change them by paying attention to her posture. By changing herphysical posture, she could help herself to change her emotional andbehavioral one as well. Today's little essay, then, is about posture. How the way we carryourselves tends to mirror and express how we feel about ourselves inrelation to other people. And also how the way we learn to carryourselves in relation to people we've known can end up limiting how werelate to new people we meet. Posture has to do with how you hold yourself up. Generally, itrefers to your physical body; how you stand or sit. As I'm using theterm today, however, it can also double as a reference to how youregard yourself; to the state of your self-image. Sometimes there isactually a correspondence between how you stand and how you feel aboutyourself. Someone who understood this correspondence was probablyresponsible for coming up with the popular phrase, "Stand up foryourself".