444 - Assert Yourself Without Being an Asshole
Different communication styles
For decades, psychologists have tried to understand different communication techniques and rate their efficacy. From a general consensus, this has resulted in the following four or five general types of communication:
Submissive/Passive: Prioritizing others' needs and desires over one's own, often to avoid conflict or seek approval.
Aggressive: Expressing oneself in a dominating manner, often at the expense of others' feelings or rights.
Passive Aggressive: Indirectly showing resentment or opposition through subtle actions or comments, rather than open communication.
Manipulative (this one is not always included): Influencing others to one's advantage through cunning, deceit, or emotional coercion.
Assertive: Clearly and respectfully expressing one's thoughts, feelings, and boundaries without infringing on the rights of others.
Submissive/Passive
Individuals who utilize this style often avoid expressing their feelings or needs, aiming to please others or avoid conflict. This can lead to feeling disregarded or used by others, and they might harbor resentment over time. Basically, conflict-avoidance and people-pleasing.
This often stems from a belief that they either aren’t qualified enough or an internalized belief that others have more rights than them.
Communicating in this style makes it difficult to take responsibility or to make decisions.
Aggressive
This style involves expressing oneself in a way that disregards or overrides the rights and feelings of others. Individuals using this approach may be seen as bullying or domineering, often resorting to blaming, shouting, or being condescending.
A key piece of aggressive behavior is that the focus is on winning, no matter the cost to others. It prioritizes your rights/boundaries/desires over others and is based in a belief that your point of view is the only valid and factually correct way to see things.
This is not always being physically aggressive or loud (though it certainly can include those) and can be effective in the short term since most people want to avoid conflict and will capitulate to the aggressive person. But long-term people become antagonistic, hurt, humiliated, or afraid and will avoid or resist the aggressor, even becoming aggressive themselves.
Passive-Aggressive
This is a covert way of communicating wherein an individual might say one thing but mean another, acting out their aggression in subtle, indirect ways. Examples include giving someone the silent treatment, spreading rumors, or being sarcastic.
This style in particular tends to show up when we feel like we have no power in a situation. For example, it’s been observed that prisoners of war will adopt this communication style as a form of resistance.
The challenge is that passive-aggressive behaviors come from resentment and the effort to hurt or undermine the other person often results in hurt to the person doing it as well.
Manipulative
This category is not always included and wasn’t in the original four. That said, it has been around a long time, since at least the 60’s and is still referenced in the literature.
Individuals using this style will often attempt to control or influence others by playing on their emotions, using guilt trips, or being cunning to get what they want. Their actions often don't match their words, making it hard to trust or understand them.
Playing on others’ guilt is the primary tactic here. This may include using sad “hang-dog” expressions to make it hard to say no to them, artificial tears, or other indirect means to get what they want, disregarding the wellbeing or desires of others.
While the word manipulative has a negative and intentional connotation, this is often an unconscious choice and, similar to passive-aggression, comes from a place of feeling disempowered or that any direct requests would be denied.
Assertive
This is considered the healthiest and most effective communication style. It involves expressing one's thoughts, feelings, and needs in an open and honest manner, without infringing on the rights of others. Assertive communicators are good at setting boundaries and advocating for themselves while still showing respect and consideration for others.
Assertiveness can be thought of as the middle path between passive or passive aggressive on one side and aggressive or hostile on the other.
Some ways we can practice assertive communication:
First, work on your self-talk. We don’t always get what we want and others don’t always cooperate, but we can work on how we talk to ourselves. Remember that you deserve to have your voice heard and that your desires are valid. Spend some time journaling or just thinking about what you actually do want that you aren’t communicating.
A lot of assertiveness interventions focus on verbal face-to-face communication, including posture, eye contact, volume, etc. but there are many other ways to communicate. If those modes of communication are difficult, consider writing or phone calls as well. (We often suggest doing this in conflict with a partner if being face to face is too intense)
Really try to internalize that “No.” is a complete sentence and an acceptable answer. It can be helpful to empathize but you don’t need to compromise on the “no.” For example, “I know you really need help, but I’m already out for the day. I can take a look with you tomorrow.”
The “Broken Record” technique is commonly taught as a way to deal with others who simply disregard your requests or who change the subject.
Continue to repeat the thing that it is you want, acknowledge what the person says, but then come back to your request so that you don’t get steamrolled by others.
Example:
“When you canceled our date last-minute it hurt my feelings and I want to be sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“You know how busy I’ve been lately and John has been having a hard time lately”
“I understand that but it still hurts me when you cancel last-minute.”
Note: Be careful to use this one for good. It is a simple and effective tool to avoid letting other people distract you or ignore your concerns but it can also be form of bullying if used too extensively. The purpose of it is to make sure your concerns are heard and acknowledged, not necessarily that you will get your way completely.“Fogging” is another interesting technique to avoid getting confrontational or defensive in the face of disagreement or criticism. The idea is that you find part of the other person’s statement you can agree with, even if you don’t agree with the entire statement.
Example:
“You’re always late for our dates.”
“You’re right, I was late the last couple of times. I agree our dates are important and I’ll make sure to set aside more commute time next time. If we can move our usual time back by half an hour that would help.”Combining Fogging and Broken Record:
Example:
“I want to find some time for us to do a relationship checkin like a RADAR.”
“Is there a problem?”
“I think it’s important for us any relationships and I want us to have a regular time to check in on things and work together to improve our relationship”
“Why do you always have to make everything so serious? Can’t we be organic?”
“Yeah, I do take our relationships seriously, which is why I want us to be intentional about it. This is important to me.”
You can also check out some communication worksheets here that might be useful. Being a more assertive communicator and learning how to be respectful while being one as well has shown to have positive effects on depression and anxiety. At the very least, it can’t hurt any of us to work towards being better communicators!
Transcript
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Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we are discussing five communication styles to help us identify some of the healthy and unhealthy ways that we might be expressing ourselves in relationships and in the workplace. Learning to assert ourselves in a respectful and compassionate way can not only improve the quality of our relationships, but has even been shown to help with depression, anxiety, and overall wellbeing.
In the second half of this episode, we're going to cover some techniques and interventions that we can all start using to help improve the quality of our communication. If you're interested in learning about some of our fundamental communication tools that we reference on this show, you can check out our book, Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships, which covers some of our most-used communication tools for all types of relationships.
You can find links to buy it at multiamory.com/book or wherever fine books are sold. Alternatively, the first nine episodes of this podcast also cover some of our most widely used and shared communication tools. All right. A couple of weeks ago I was having a conversation with my therapist, and he mentioned just kind of offhandedly, "Oh, well, there's five types of communication," kind of suggesting that I should be aware of that.
I said, "Wait, what? What are you talking about?" He told me about these five types of communication. When I asked him where is this from, because I love a good list of things, that sounds like a great Multiamory episode, he's like, "I don't know, it's something we talked about in school, but I actually don't know where it's from originally." That of course sent me down a research rabbit hole trying to figure this out, and it actually is a little bit complicated. It's a long history.
Emily: Well, right off the bat I was like, "Oh, we need to redo our book and not just talk about external and internal processors, but all of these five different types of communication," or maybe this will be in our next book. We'll have to see what happens.
Dedeker: Yes, we'll put it on the list for the next book. Jase, well, first of all, let's give a shout out to your therapist. Secondarily, what was the context in which this came up? Was he like, "Jase, you got to communicate in five different ways. You're not using enough different types of communication, Jase."
Jase: This was having to do with a conversation I was having about work and some frustrations I was having at work and how different people communicate, like my manager and myself and things like that. It was in that context of just kind of being aware of being clearer in communication. That's something that actually is worth mentioning as you joked to Emily about us needing to go back and change our book.
This, I think, falls into a different overlapping category. In our book, we talk about internal and external processors, which is more about how we come up with our ideas and how we process our emotions and our thoughts. Then we have the Triforce of Communication, which is about what's the purpose of this communication. This is more about how do we go about trying to get what we want, is what these five types of communication are about. They can all overlap. You could be having a Triforce three communication as an external processor and then using one of these five communication styles to do it. They're all kind of supplemental to each other rather than a replacement or an alternative.
Emily: Yes, this is just again reminding me that there's so many different ways to talk about communication, and communication is so many different things, like how you process your own thoughts and emotions, how it is that you want your partner or whomever you're talking to, to reflect back to you what it is that you need. In this case, how you would get what you want? That's really cool. I love that we're diving into something like this today because right off the bat of looking at it, all three of us were like, "That one is me, and that one is this person that I know" and stuff like that. That was really interesting.
Dedeker: Well, let's lay out some groundwork here. Going all the way back to the '50s, even earlier, psychologists and researchers have been trying to understand the different techniques that people use when they're communicating and to see how effective they are. Out of this, most studies have landed on a list of four or five communication types. Now, before we get into this, we have to clarify that this isn't a personality type, it's not something that necessarily pervades all of your life. It may change in different contexts.
As we go through these five different communication styles, you may notice certain styles that you use more often than others. Also note that there has been a lot of research and a lot of development in the past about using training or different interventions to shift our communication style in a more positive and more effective direction. To a certain extent, that's a major theme of this entire show, so don't be discouraged that if you recognize maybe a less-effective communication style, it doesn't mean you're ruined, it doesn't mean your partner is ruined. It's just good to be aware of this.
Jase: And that you can be proactive and learn how to communicate differently. Of these communication styles, I mentioned there were five. In the original research, there were four communication styles, and over time, some people added a fifth one, some people include it, some don't. We'll go over all of them, but basically just keep that in mind. The first type here is sometimes called submissive and sometimes called passive. Basically, this is prioritizing others' needs and desires over your own, often to avoid conflict or seek approval.
The second one is aggressive, which is expressing oneself in a dominating manner, often at the expense of other people's feelings or rights. Then we have passive-aggressive, which is indirectly showing resentment or opposition through subtle actions or comments rather than clear open communication. Then the fourth one is manipulative. That's the one that's not always included. It was added later. Manipulative includes influencing others to one's advantage through some kind of deceit or trickery or emotional coercion or guilt-tripping, stuff like that.
Then the fifth one is the goal, and that is assertive communication. All of those first four are things that we do, and we'll get into this in more detail as we go through each of them. There are good reasons why we might have started doing them, but ideally, we want to move our communication to be more assertive. That means communication that is clearly and respectfully expressing your thoughts, feelings, and boundaries without infringing upon the rights of others or wanting them to just submit to your own desires. That's the goal, is to move toward that one. First, let's start by going through each of those first four so we can understand a little better why we might be using those.
Emily: The first one is the one that I think I definitely do the most. We all, I think, may oscillate between multiple ones, especially in certain situations. I found that when I looked at this entire list, I was like, "Well, I'm a little bit more assertive in my work life, but I can be more passive in my relationship." It's just interesting to see the differences there, especially with how comfortable you are with people, how I think good you feel about the situation that you're in or how much authority perhaps you feel like you have over the situation, like in a work context, for instance, or not.
Anyways, this submissive/passive one is individuals who utilize this style often avoid expressing their feelings or needs aiming to please others or avoid conflict. This can lead to feeling disregarded or used by others, and this person might feel resentment or harbor resentment over a period of time. Basically, this person might be someone who conflict-avoids or people-pleases. That's definitely something that I feel I do a lot. It also can sort of stem from this belief that they either aren't qualified enough or an internalized belief that others have more rights than them. That's an interesting way to put it, more rights. What do you think of that?
Jase: A theme actually that shows up a lot in the research, especially in the earlier days of this research, came largely through a focus on how do you assert your rights when other people tend to ignore those? We'll talk about this a little bit more as we get into assertive communication, but in the early feminist movement and civil rights movement, this was used quite a bit as ways to communicate your rights and how you expect to be treated and how you deserve to be treated in a way that's clear rather than resorting to this submissive-passive behavior of thinking, "Oh, well, I guess I don't deserve that, so I'm going to act in this more resentful way and feel more upset about this."
Dedeker: Yes, but it seems like that could show up on a macro level or a micro level. A macro-level sense where if you have internalized misogyny or some kind of internalized racism or some kind of internalized ableism or something like that, that can show up in maybe certain contexts where you default to being more passive or submissive because you want to, maybe because you don't want to.
Maybe that's just a matter of what you perceive is going to help you survive in that particular situation. It seems like it could be very easy on a macro level to fall into this style of communication as well as on the micro level where maybe if you're in a room of people that you perceive are all smarter than you, richer than you, more powerful than you, or you're in a relationship with someone where you perceive that that's the case, you perceive that they're so much better than you in some sort of way, and therefore maybe they just have more rights than I do, or more of a right to speak up or ask for what they want than I do.
Emily: Communicating in this style may make it difficult to take responsibility or to make decisions. That's really interesting because I do find sometimes if you don't exactly know what it is to do in a certain situation because you want to default to somebody else who you find maybe has more experience or just their idea or decision would be better than yours, it might make it really difficult for you to make a decision in the moment when you have to, you're the only one who's going to be able to make a decision right then. That's tough.
I think it can stem into different areas of your life, especially when you're not necessarily communicating with someone else, but you're even needing to communicate with yourself.
Jase: Yes, that's going to be a recurring theme through all of these, is that by communicating more in these ways, it also affects other parts of our internal thoughts and our decision-making and our anxieties and things like that. Yes, it's all interconnected with each other.
Dedeker: Let's move on to the polar opposite, which is aggressive. The aggressive communication style involves expressing oneself in a way that disregards or overrides the rights and feelings of others. Someone who uses this aggressive communication style, they could be seen as bullying or domineering. It could escalate to the point of them blaming, shouting, being condescending.
A key piece of the aggressive communication style is that the focus is on winning at all costs or making sure that you are able to say what you have to say, even if it comes at the cost of someone else not getting to say what they want to say or undercutting what somebody else wants to say. As the mirror image of the passive communication style, it prioritizes your own rights or your own boundaries or your own desires over somebody else's. It's based in the belief that your point of view is the only valid and factually correct way to see things. Now, with an aggressive communication style, it doesn't always mean that someone is being physically aggressive or audibly louder, although it can certainly include those.
The style, it can be effective in the short term because most people want to avoid conflict, and they're going to capitulate to the loudest person in the room or the most aggressive person in the room, but of course, over time, someone who's having to deal with someone who has a predominantly aggressive communication style may start to feel antagonistic or feel hurt, or humiliated, or they may feel afraid of the aggressor or want to avoid them, or they may even become aggressive themselves to kind of fight fire with fire as it were.
Jase: This is one that it's like if people realize that they've been too passive or submissive and they start learning that, they can sometimes skew too far the opposite direction, which is ending up aggressive, even if that wasn't their intent. They're just like, "Oh, I'm just trying to communicate clearly now," that it takes a little bit of adjusting, and so we can end up on that side, or you might be thinking right now of some people you know where you're like, "Hmm, yes, that aggressive style is very much my partner or my boss or my coworker or my mom, or whoever it is."
That idea of I know what's right and if you just listen to me, you'd be better off. It's a way I think about that. I know most of us don't think of ourselves quite so clearly as saying exactly that in our heads, but if we do some introspection, we might find there are times where we have come across that way of just, if you would only just listen to what I'm trying to tell you, it would be for your own good and it would help all of us, but it comes out as I want to assert my view onto you, and that can be problematic and not lead to good communication in the long term.
Emily: Again, I think all of us can lean in one way or another based on the people that we're with or just certain, probably, times in our lives too because, as you said, this can wax and wane or change over time, so we can all strive for that more assertive communication, even if we don't always do it with every single person in our life.
Dedeker: It's hard to know because-- Okay, here I'm going to get maybe a little bit woo-woo philosophical with some of this. If I just think about the energy of passive and the energy of aggressive, like that dance, that push-pull, I think those are two steps in a dance that we actually need in day-to-day life, like we need to know when to submit and when to get out of the way, and we need to know when to stand up and when to push. I don't know, I think it's so hard.
Actually what comes to mind for me is thinking about the three of us in Multiamory meetings, the ways that we hash out ideas or the ways that we hash out ideas when we were writing the book together, where I feel like there was a lot of having to figure out that dance.
I know, Jase, something you've said is talking about having the ability to defend one's idea, for instance, or to really fight for one's idea if you really believe, "No, I really think this is a good choice for us to make," or "I really think we should do X, Y, and Z with the podcast" or things like that, how that can be a good thing, but also that can be domineering as well. It's always hard to know which is the right dance move to whip out at any given time, man.
Jase: Yes, and part of the skill of it you just touched on there, which is that it depends on context. In a certain context, like you said, if I have one group of friends where if I insist on my idea too much, everyone just capitulates to that, and then effectively I've been aggressive even if I didn't mean to be. In another situation where if I have some friends who are really going to-- we like to challenge each other and push back on ideas, if I didn't do that, I would end up being submissive or passive.
It does take this constant calibration based on the situation and the little microculture that you're in as well. In talking about that spectrum between passive and aggressive, that brings us to passive-aggressive.
Emily: The best of both worlds, or it it--
Jase: Passive-aggressive is described as a covert way of communicating where an individual might say one thing but mean another, or act out their aggression in these subtle indirect ways. An example of this is giving someone the silent treatment or spreading rumors or being sarcastic. I feel like sarcasm or little digs thrown in, in an otherwise passive seeming like, "Okay, sure, we'll do what you want. I guess you're always right" kind of a comment. Right? It's that little I'm being passive but I'm also jabbing at you at the same time.
This style, I think, we're all familiar with it. I'm sure we've all done it at some point in our lives. Where this tends to show up is in situations where we feel like we don't have any power in the situation. This has actually been observed as a common behavior for prisoners of war, for example. A situation where they quite literally don't have any power in that situation, and so as their last way to have any kind of resistance, will be to become more passive-aggressive and try to find these little ways to assert some kind of sense of control or to express their frustration or anger or dislike of the people that they do feel like have the power.
What's interesting about it is that these passive-aggressive behaviors often cause bad consequences for ourselves like that comment I made of, "Okay. We'll do it your way because I guess you're always right." I said that, and most likely whoever I said that to is going to be angry and they're going to be upset that I said that to them, because I was being a little bit of a jerk right there intentionally so. I'm being passive-aggressive. That's one of the interesting things is that it's, I want to find some way to express myself in a situation where I feel like I have no power, even if that means doing something that will cause worse consequences for myself.
Again, interesting to see that that shows up in that very serious prisoner-of-war type of context. The challenge here is that passive-aggressive behaviors often come from resentment and an effort to hurt or undermine the other person, which is where the kind of aggressive part comes. It's like I want to undermine you, I want to hurt you, and then end up hurting myself in the process as well.
Dedeker: Yes. I think it goes hand in hand with a passive communication style, because I'm interested to hear what the two of you think of this, but I'm of the opinion that, I don't think anyone on this planet has an endless capacity for suffering and resentment, like an endless capacity for feeling powerless. What that means is we find ways to communicate and to get across what we're feeling regardless.
I don't think any of us can just spend our days swallowing resentment or swallowing all our disappointments or swallowing the ways that we don't feel heard by somebody. It comes out eventually. I think unless you're like a superhuman, enlightened being, and even then maybe that's not very enlightened to just be absorbing all of that--
Emily: The Zenning in a way is what I thought .
Dedeker: The spiritual bypassing.
Jase: Yes.
Emily: Yes, exactly, but that's probably also going to potentially lead to things like resentment and stuff that we talked about here as well. I have a question, because many of these kind of discuss inflicting potential pain or hurt upon the other person, and that's something that for myself, I try to go away from that idea that we are doing that to one another, even though I know that it does happen, and sometimes that is the way in which we communicate when we are pissed off.
Yes, it did strike me that so many of these were kind of in the negative, and I know that the assertive is what we're going towards to try to, I guess, speak about what it is that we want, even if there are moments when we feel like maybe we're not going to get it, but still letting a person know, like, "Hey, I feel the responsibility to let you know exactly what it is that I need in this situation," and to be really direct about it and not inflict pain or harm in the process, if that's possible.
Dedeker: Well, maybe not intentional pain or harm.
Emily: The passive-aggressive is we're inflicting pain and harm because that's the way in which to get across something when we feel powerless, otherwise.
Jase: I think something worth noting is that I think culturally there's been this move toward if someone has caused me "harm," they are a bad, horrible person and need to be banished and sent to the depths of Sheol or whatever. I do think that's a really important point to bring up, to bring us away from that and to just acknowledge the fact that we do bump up against each other as humans all the time, and we do cause some harm and hurt to each other all the time, and that's just normal communication as we're trying to figure that out. Often it's unintentional, sometimes it is intentional. Like if we're just really annoyed with someone, we might lash out a little bit.
I don't want us to associate admitting that I've maybe communicated poorly with saying I'm a terrible person who goes around abusing people. There's a huge, gigantic chasm of middle ground between those that I think culturally we've learned to ignore, or people want to really be polarizing on this, and that's just not helpful. That's not going to make us better communicators. It's not going to make us better partners or better employees or better family members or friends. I think that's great that you brought up that point of, "Ooh, saying the word harm, that freaks me out a little bit," and yes, that is something we should think about.
Emily: I appreciate that you said that because, yes, harm is going to happen, and we shouldn't necessarily be afraid of it. We should strive to do no harm, but that's probably not going to happen ultimately all the time, and that's okay. We shouldn't punish each other or ourselves as much as I think we often do when that does occur. Let's move on to the final one before assertive, which is manipulative. This wasn't in the original four; however, it has still been around for a long time, since at least the '60s, and it is still referenced in the literature about all of this.
Individuals using this style will often attempt to control or influence others by playing on their emotions using guilt trips or being cunning to get what they want. Their actions often don't match their words, making it hard to trust or understand them. That's a really interesting one. Playing on another's guilt is the primary tactic here. This may include doing things like using expressions to make it hard to say no to the person, or even things like artificial tears or other indirect means to get what they want. Basically, again, they're disregarding the wellbeing or desires of others.
Now, when we hear this word manipulative, I think for most of us immediately we have like a negative connotation to this word, and we have to, again, remember that often these things are unconscious choices similar to passive aggression, and it does come from this place of feeling disempowered and that any direct requests that are more assertive and more specific might be denied by the person who the manipulative one is talking to, for instance.
Jase: I've sometimes seen the aggressive behavior and manipulative kind of flow one into the other, where it's that I want to get what I want, I want you to do what I want, and I'm going to keep insisting it. I'm just going to say-- I raised my voice, maybe, get more intense, and if you're still saying no to me, then I might pivot into, "Oh, well, fine, I guess I don't ever get what I want" rather than passive-aggressive, which is more digs against you, this is more, oh, I'm going to talk about how put out and how much I'm suffering because of this so that you feel bad and then eventually capitulate to me.
It's like another tactic in that I really want to get what I want at any cost, which, again, this focus on winning is very common, and it's especially taught if you are in sales at all or any customer-facing role, a lot of times there's this emphasis on use whatever tactic necessary to get the person to do what you want. This trickles over into other things like pickup artists or kind of the opposite of the pickup artist, which is the how to get a man to commit kind of strategies. It doesn't have as succinct a name as pickup artistry, but that same thing of like, how can you manipulate your man into committing when men don't want to, or whatever it is.
Dedeker: Yes, I'm really chewing on this one because, again, it's so easy to hear the word manipulative, and we apply a subject to that, right? Like you manipulated me, or my partner is trying to manipulate me when-- Like you said, Jase, I don't think it's always a super conscious choice in the top of somebody's mind, "Okay, now I'm going to be like a super villain and drum my fingers together and manipulate this person into getting what I want."
I think especially zeroing in on the tactic of provoking guilt in someone, sure, we could do that intentionally, like I could very much at the forefront of my brain be very consciously thinking, "Okay, I'm going to make them feel guilty," but I think that most of the times, especially when I think about times that I've whipped out this tactic, and I'm talking like going all the way back into childhood and recent relationships, or times where I felt like this particular tactic was used on me, yes, I think it does come from a place of that feeling disempowered or feeling like my previous hurts have not been acknowledged, or I've known people where if they grew up in a family where forgiveness was never a big value, and so anything you did wrong is at any moment chances are high that someone could whip that out against you, like you adopt that tactic as well.
It's like if a partner raises a complaint against you, you can be very quick to be like, "Yes, but what about when you did this thing? Or what about when you did that thing? And I didn't say anything about it." Yes, again, I think this can be something that can be more knee-jerk and almost come from some sort of malfunctioning coping mechanism. Again, not to say that any of this is okay to do, but I'm just kind of trying to understand where it comes from, and again, always try to reiterate that it's not just someone being an evil person.
Jase: Manipulation is an interesting topic in general because there are some fields of research and communication and psychology that kind of come down on this line of we're always manipulating each other all the time, and that even just saying, "Hey, I want this," and someone saying, "Okay, cool, I'll accept that influence from you and do that thing," that that's a version of manipulating a person. That's just not how we use that term in normal conversation. We tend to have more of this negative overriding another person's desires, trying to sneakily get what we want.
With all of this, it's on a spectrum, that sometimes expressing "I'm hurt by the fact that you're not accepting my influence here, or you're not listening to me about this decision that I want to make or that I want you to make or how I want you to treat me." Expressing that that hurts you is not necessarily wrong, but it can verge into this territory of being manipulative. The idea with all of these isn't to say, oh, if you do a behavior that somehow can be described as fitting into one of these four categories, it's bad and no one needs to listen to you. If you have healthy relationships that have good intent for each other and have overall solid communication, you can slip into some of these styles, and it's fine.
You could get a little passive-aggressive and the person could go, "Ooh, gosh, okay. Geez, no, let's talk about it. I want to hear what you want. I didn't realize that you weren't feeling heard," or the same with manipulative doesn't have to be manipulative. It can just be, "Oh, yes, you're right. I do want to take your thoughts into account." We can get past all of these things if we have a healthy foundation, which is what we want to strive toward with assertive communication.
Let's get into that in the second half, but first, we want to take a quick break to talk about how you can support this show. If you value this information and if you like the fact that this is available to everyone out there every week for free through their podcast machine, then please take a moment, check out our sponsors, and go to multiamory.com/join so that you can join our communities there and help further support the show. We really appreciate it, and we will see you in a sec.
Dedeker: All right. We're back. Let's talk about the communication style of the hour, assertive communication.
Emily: Woo.
Dedeker: I was going to call it the man of the hour, but then thought that might be a little weird and gendered for assertive communication.
Emily: Only men can be assertive.
Jase: Oh dear.
Dedeker: Well, we're going to unpack that a little bit. In the research, assertive communication is generally considered the most effective communication style. It involves expressing your thoughts, your feelings, your needs in an open and honest manner that doesn't infringe on the rights of others. Assertive communicators are pretty good at setting boundaries and advocating for themselves while still being able to maintain a sense of respect and consideration for others, so I do think it's meant to be sort of this perfect balancing act in the midst of all of this. It's this middle path between passive and passive-aggressive on one side, and then aggressive and hostility and manipulation on the other side.
If you're listening to this, chances are this is not the first time you've heard of assertive communication. In the '50s and '60s, assertiveness training started getting developed, and it was utilized quite a lot through the '60s and the '80s. It declined in popularity at least as far as being researched and being used in clinical work around the '80s due to shifts in funding priorities.
There are a couple of theories about why this happened, why there was sort of the decline of assertiveness training and a decline in popularity around this concept. One theory is that assertiveness training itself got a bad rap because of it being picked up by businesses and sales culture as yet another way to manipulate people and get what you want, which makes sense.
I think for some of you listening, if you're even feeling a little bit of wanting to eye roll at the idea of assertiveness training or assertive communication, this is probably why because I know when I hear it, I immediately associate with like, oh, yes, middle management is making us all go to assertiveness training so that we can learn to be better middle managers. Ironically, this is still one of the few fields where assertiveness is still being studied and developed, its applications within business.
There's another theory, maybe a slightly more conspiratorial theory, that in the '80s the field of psychology started moving away from psychosocial approaches to a more medical-focused approach, which was in part driven by pharmaceuticals, which are quite lucrative as well. That's another theory as well about why this isn't quite as popular as it once was.
Emily: Do people tend to look at things like assertiveness training only in America or in Western cultures?
Jase: No. Actually, there has been some really interesting studies in Japan, specifically with nursing practitioners in Japan there was a somewhat recent study from a few years ago doing assertiveness training and then looking at how that affected their willingness or desire to communicate their thoughts, which is especially interesting because Japan is a culture that's much less, I would say, aggressively assertive than we are in the United States. That's actually an interesting point here, is that what counts as assertive is not universal. We mentioned that before, depending on the group of friends you're in, but also it can depend on the culture that you're in.
In one culture, like in Japan, something that we in America might think of as just "I'm just stating clearly what it is that I want or what it is that I think, and you're free to accept it or reject it" might come across as extremely aggressive in Japanese culture, especially in a Japanese business culture, whereas on the flip side that their way of behaving might come across as very passive or even passive-aggressive to us in the United States, but within their culture in Japan, that's perfectly normal assertive way of communicating. The scale is not universal. It's not just do this type of communication and everything is good, and do this other one and everything is bad.
It does involve calibration based on the situation, but yes, this is definitely something that's been studied around the world, especially because it's been around since the '50s, so there has been plenty of time for researchers all over the place to do studies with it.
Emily: Very cool. Speaking of those studies, several studies from 1969 to 1973 showed that assertiveness training compared to placebo, which is interesting, I guess they just didn't do the assertiveness training and the placebo.
Dedeker: Do you have specifics on that of what the placebo was, Jase?
Jase: Usually with these studies, I don't remember what this specific one was because there were so many studies that I looked at, but generally with these, a placebo will often be some kind of other journaling exercise or something, so they feel like they've done something and they've spent the same amount of time thinking on the subject but haven't actually learned whatever the intervention is.
Dedeker: Right. Different from a control group where I think a control group would be they didn't do anything.
Emily: Yes.
Jase: Yes. There were also some of these studies, used a control group where what they did is they would have everyone take a survey to evaluate their wellbeing at the beginning and then would do this training and then take another survey at the end to see the difference, but in the control group, they would take that beginning survey and then just nothing would happen in between.
Then they would give them the after-survey to just see what natural changes might have happened during that six weeks or however long, and then would give them the training after that so they would all still get the training, but they provided a control group even within that so that they could get the results but also still provide the training to everybody.
Emily: Whoa. That's cool. They found that doing this assertiveness training decreased symptoms of depression and social anxiety in both men and women. Love that.
Jase: That blew my mind. The fact that this was actually conceptualized as that originally in 1958, Joseph Volpe, I think is how you say his name, came up with this as a treatment for anxiety and depression. I think especially when we think about that corporate-style assertiveness training, you think it's just about getting what you want or maybe it's about communicating better, maybe it's about better relationships, but actually, from way back, learning how to communicate this way was being proposed as a treatment for social anxiety and depression.
Emily: I think learning how to feel as though you actually have your rights and that they matter in the world. If you do feel empowered by this training, then, yes, I think that that could be huge in helping things like anxiety and depression. That's really cool. A meta-analysis in 2001 found that assertiveness training was effective in treating social anxiety along with other social skills trainings. Then in the '80s to 2000s, there were some more studies of CBT treatments that include assertiveness training which were effective in treating anxiety as well. Additionally, assertiveness training was used effectively in the feminist and civil rights movements, as you talked about before.
Jase: Then there's also some extra complications when it comes to gender, and it's not always the way you would expect. Some of it is the stuff you'd expect about the way we socialize, men to be more, I guess, aggressive or more clear in their communication and women to be more passive. Yes, that's true, but there's also all sorts of layers of subtleties within the workplace depending on the genders of the majority of your team; is your department mostly same gender, different gender.
Of course, because these studies are from the '50s through the '80s or whatever, we're only talking about men and women in these studies. I think adding non-binary gender is a whole other interesting topic to look at here. One example of an interesting study was in 1986, a study by Matheson looked at workplace perceptions of assertive communication from women. They found in that study that men actually were the ones who reported positive perceptions of assertive communication from women, but that other women reported negative perceptions of more assertive behavior from women. There's all sorts of layers of complication there.
Emily: That's unfortunate.
Dedeker: I wonder how that would go down today. I wonder if it would be different.
Jase: That's a great question.
Emily: This is why all of us should go through assertive training so that we all can feel assertive in our own lives.
Jase: There we go.
Dedeker: Well, let's see if Multiamory can pull a real quick assertiveness training out of the air to give to you listeners.
Emily: Beautiful. All you have to do is listen to this episode and then you got it.
Dedeker: Yes. Easy. You're good. You're good. We're just going to look at a few interventions that we've pulled together to apply to our own lives to better hone our assertive communication skills which will allow us to communicate our desires, our rights, while also respecting the rights and boundaries of other people. Many people who newly discover assertiveness as a concept can take it too far and can take it as free license to go full-blown aggressive. Just be careful of the dosage.
Emily: Just don't.
Dedeker: As Emily just said, just don't. Careful of the dosage of assertiveness. Find a way to incorporate these interventions in a way that feels true to yourself and also lines up with your values and lines up with how you want to be showing up in your personal relationships. First things first, it is important to work on the stories that you tell yourself and to work on your self-talk.
We don't always get what we want. Other people don't always cooperate. There can be systems at play really hampering or putting in obstacles to getting what it is that you want or what it is that you have a right to have as a human being. Some of those things are not in our direct control, but what is in your direct control is the ability to change how you talk to yourself and the story that you tell yourself about those things. Remembering the fact that you deserve to have your voice heard and that your desires are valid, and this is an exercise that you can do on your own.
You can spend some time journaling or just reflecting about what it is that you actually do want that maybe you're not communicating. I think it's also helpful to share this with other people, to spend time with other people, especially if this is maybe a bigger macro-level issue. Maybe it does have to do with your gender or your race or your status in some way that connecting with other people who share that same identity with you can help to bolster that sense of like, "Oh no, I am a human being who does deserve X, Y, and Z, does deserve access to these particular rights." That's one piece of it to work on.
Another piece is that a lot of assertiveness interventions focus on verbal face-to-face communication, so including things like posture, eye contact, the volume of your voice, but there are many other ways to communicate and still be assertive. If verbal face-to-face communication is difficult for you, maybe it's difficult because of the person, because of the situation, because of your particular flavor of neurodivergence.
Again, consider writing things down or making a phone call with the video off or things like that. This is something that we suggest often if you're in conflict with a partner and being face-to-face is too intense, and it helps the more knowledge you have about yourself, if you know that you're someone where, "Oh, when I'm actually in the room with my partner, I tend to capitulate.
I tend to be much too passive, way too submissive, and I get too nervous, and I'm not able to say what I want," that that can be a clue to you to change the context, or if you know if I'm sitting in the car with my partner and I feel like I'm trapped and there's nowhere to go, that's when this fight or flight, kind of very aggressive side comes out of me and it's really hard for me to stuff that back down or to choose a healthier way to communicate.
That's really helpful knowledge to use. Just remember that changing up the context and changing up the way that you communicate can sometimes open up healthier pathways or more effective pathways for communicating. It doesn't have to necessarily be verbal face-to-face communication.
Emily: Another tactic that you can take is to internalize the word no and really use it to your advantage and believe it when you are able to say it, and make it be final, and know that the word no can be real and honest and that that's good enough. You don't need to compromise on your no. You can definitely empathize and be kind to people, but if you say no, you can actually mean it, and you don't have to be wishy-washy about it.
For example, you can say something kind by saying, "Hey, I know that you really need help, but I'm already out for the day. I can take a look at the thing that you're asking me about with you tomorrow," but essentially saying to the person, "I can't do it right now, and that's my final answer, and that's okay."
Jase: This is one of the ones that actually has come up with my therapist and working on that with work of getting messages or calls or texts after hours or on the weekend, things like that. Sometimes it's about saying it in the moment, but I've found for myself that some of it is communicating it once but in a clearer more general way. For example, there was this producer that I was working on a project with, and she would text me and call me and email me at all hours of the day, seven days a week, constantly, and at one point I finally was like, "Hey, I just want to let you know that I generally don't check my email or my texts or answer my phone after 5:00 PM on weekdays or at all on the weekends."
That wasn't totally true. That's a little bit of a lie. I do check my texts and things like that because other people text me, but just to kind of communicate, "This is not just a right-now thing, this is a general thing. I'm not going to do that." Then when I would still sometimes receive those texts or calls, I would then have to have that talk with myself of, "Okay, no, I'm not going to reply right now. I was about to, but I'm remembering, no, I'm not going to because then I'm setting a precedent that this is going to happen more."
Just knowing, "Okay, no, I'm going to make a reminder for myself to do this on Monday or tomorrow morning, whenever it is, but I'm not going to do it now because I'm just furthering that and I'm ignoring my own no, my own boundary, and I'm not being clear," and it did lead to a lot of resentment. There's that.
Emily: We talked about that a bit on the Kitty Stryker episodes where we were discussing the fact that our society tells us we should be breaking our boundaries within the workplace, especially-- and that it's so powerful to be able to say no and stick to it with an employer or with somebody who is above you in some way or you're working on a project with.
It is so important to have those boundaries because I know for me, I take work calls all the time, or I'm not getting paid for it, and you two have been like, "No, you should not do that, or you should get paid for doing that." You're right. Now, the "Broken Record" technique is something that's commonly taught as a way to deal with others who simply disregard your requests or who change the subject. This is something that actually is taught within this assertiveness training.
What this means is basically you're continuing to be a broken record in terms of telling a person what it is that you want, and if they try to turn you in a different direction to come back and be like, "No, I want to tell you again, this is the thing that I need. I'm not going to be swayed by you moving us in a different direction or switch tracking," I'm going to come back and say, "No, this is really the thing that I want in this moment, and so I want you to hear that, and I want you to acknowledge it." An example of this is if you say, "When you canceled our date last minute, it hurt my feelings, and I want to be sure that it doesn't happen again."
If a person were to try to move away from that and say, "Oh, well, you know how busy I've been lately, and John has been having a hard time," you say, "Yes, okay, I understand that, but it still hurts me when you cancel last minute, so let's figure out some ways to not have that happen again. Let's collaborate here. I need you to acknowledge the thing that I'm speaking about because that's what we're talking about at this moment."
Now, we will say, "Be careful to use this one for good," I think is always, don't weaponize this shit, this is a really simple and effective tool to avoid letting other people distract you or ignore your concerns, but it can be kind of used as a form of bullying if it's used too extensively. The purpose of it is just to make sure that your concerns are heard and acknowledged, but it's not necessarily going to go your way completely, don't be an asshole about it.
Dedeker: Yes, I think you're definitely going to come across as an asshole if you have just a single-pointed focus of, "I'm not going to acknowledge anything that they said, or I'm going to dismiss it." Just be like,"Yes, yes, yes, I get it, but let me get back to my request." This does need to be a give and take, not just being aggressive, not just stepping all over the rights of the other person to also be heard, so we have to be careful with the Broken Record technique.
Jase: One way to think about it might be the purpose of it is to make sure that your concern or your request is heard and acknowledged rather than making sure that it's agreed with or followed. As long as they've actually acknowledged my request and have taken it seriously, then to keep repeating it then just becomes bullying or badgering or something like that to try to get your way.
Another of the two common techniques that come up in a lot of trainings is called fogging. I actually don't know where the name fogging comes from, but basically what this is, is a way to help yourself to avoid getting confrontational or defensive in the face of disagreement or criticism. The idea is that you find some part of the other person's statement that you can agree with, even if you don't agree with the entire statement.
An example of this would be something like, I guess kind of a little bit following along with our previous example, that this one would say, "You're always late for our dates." Now it can be easy to react defensively and go, "No, I'm not, that's not true." Then that's not a helpful conversation, but it's like you do these little pivots, a subtle little dance. They say, "You're always late for our dates," to say, "You're right. I was late the last couple times," as a way to accept some of what they said.
Then, "I agree, our dates are important, and I'll make sure to set more time aside for my commute or to wrap up work or whatever it is. Maybe it would help actually if we could move our dates back by half an hour." You've started from a place of acknowledging a piece of what they said so that then you can move toward a solution rather than jumping to defensiveness about their maybe exaggerated statement.
Now we can also take fogging and broken record and combine those together. An example of this is if you listen to our episode about RADAR or you've read our book and you really want to start doing that in your relationship, you might say to your partner, "I want to find some time for us to do a relationship check-in like a RADAR." Your partner might say, "Oh, Is there a problem?"
They've kind of changed the subject to something else, and to say that this is the broken record part, "I think it's important for us and any relationship, and I want us to have a regular time to check in on things and work together to improve our relationship." They say, "Why do you always have to make everything so serious? Can't we just be organic?" "Yes, I do take our relationship seriously, which is why I want to be intentional about it. This is important to me."
You keep coming back to the thing you're requesting so that you can actually have a conversation about that instead of all these other directions that it's sending them while also acknowledging their concerns and being understanding of that rather than getting defensive or argumentative or just trying to steamroll them.
Dedeker: This is an incomplete list of the ways that we can shift our communication to be more respectfully assertive. There are many other ways that we can improve that. There's a nice list of worksheets and exercises that you can check out that's on the positivepsychology.com website. We're going to drop in the specific link into the show notes so that you can find those, and there's many others out there as well.
Just remember that learning how to be respectfully assertive can help us to communicate more effectively, and it can improve our relationships as well, but it's also shown to have positive effects on depression and anxiety, so we hope that you can add this as yet another tool in your toolbox. Yes, I know the three of us are going to keep working on this as well.
Jase: Yes, a new thing to be aware of.
Emily: Always.
Dedeker: Always.