assertiveness

How To Turn Your Anger Into Assertiveness

I’ve noticed a consistent pattern among myself and my coaching clients: we all have a history of not standing up for ourselves when other people behave in ways that we don’t feel good to us. Most of us had parents who weren’t willing or able to teach us how to deal with our emotions, to self-soothe our nervous system when we were in distress, or to stand up for ourselves when our emotional or physical boundaries were being violated. Often the person we most needed to stand up to was one or both of our parents themselves, and that rarely goes well when you’re a distressed child trying to stand up to an adult who is being unreasonable because their wounded inner child is running the show.

Turn Your Anger Into Assertiveness

Turn Your Anger Into Assertiveness

All of this is a recipe for ever-increasing anger, resentment and frustration. We end up overcompensating in a desperate attempt to get our needs met. Internalise that toxic cocktail and it’s no wonder we end up anxious, depressed and lacking self-confidence.

Behavior patterns learned as a child tend to stick even if they never really worked well, and coping strategies learned as a child rarely work well in the adult world. If nobody shows us a better way, we tend to continue behaving in ways that increase our internal store of resentment and frustration long into adulthood with no way of releasing the emotional pressure cooker.

After a while we end up bitter and resentful towards a hostile world that just won’t seem to give us what we need or want.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Recover From Childhood Bullying

I was bullied mercilessly at my all boys high school. Turning up to Year 8 English class was a routine nightmare: Often one boy in the class would stake out the door waiting for the teacher while another group would hoist me up on top of a high cupboard against my will. As the teacher arrived, the scout at the door would give the signal for everyone to return to their desks so that at the precise moment that the teacher walked into the room everything looked normal in the class; except that Graham was up on top of the cupboard. The teacher was too stupid to work out what was going on, and I’d end up getting sent to the principal for more even punishment.

Childhood bullying is insidious because it can leave long-lasting scars on your mental psyche. This is a critical time of development of our brains, and if your experience of childhood or adolescence is one of powerlessness and victimization, it can program deep unconscious patterns into our minds that set us up for debilitating anxiety and depression later in life.

Childhood bullying can affect you long into your adult life.

Childhood bullying can leave mental scars that affect you long into your adult life.

Fortunately though we can recover. There’s enough neural plasticity in our brains to undo the damage that bullying does, provided we’re willing to face the emotions that we were forced to suppress when the bullying occurred. Here’s how to recover from childhood bullying: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Overcome The Fear Of Conflict

I developed an intense fear of conflict when I was young, and it has hung around with me for a long time. The fear evolved as a series of things led to each other: I used to find the fights between my parents very frightening as a kid, and never experienced any of their conflicts actually being resolved. Conflict was scary, and never seemed to have a positive outcome. My parent’s anger during conflict always felt out of control and destructive to me, so I decided that anger was a bad emotion to be suppressed at all costs. Plus my religion taught me to “turn the other cheek” rather than to stand up for myself when I was being treated in ways that I didn’t like. As an awkward, sensitive boy I was bullied mercilessly at my sport-oriented all-boys high school.

When we are afraid of conflict, other people can treat us like this.

When we are afraid of conflict, other people can treat us like this.

So the message I internalised was that conflict was scary and often led to me getting hurt. I developed an intense fear of conflict: Any time I was under threat or being criticised, I would collapse into sadness or be overwhelmed with fear. I didn’t know how to utilise my anger to stand up for myself in times of conflict, nor had I been taught the communication skills to resolve conflict in a win/win manner that left me feeling empowered.

Once we’ve internalised negative experiences of conflict in our nervous systems, our default programming around conflict can be to run away from it, and it can be a challenge to reprogram our brain and nervous system to step up in the face of conflict, instead of fleeing from it.

Standing up for ourselves in the face of conflict is how we overcome the fear of it.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Deal With Angry Women

I was brought up in a household where anger wasn’t dealt with well, and this caused me to afraid both of other people’s anger, and my own. My parents in particular had long-running arguments which I found frightening to be around and one reason these arguments perpetuated for so long was that they never expressed their anger cleanly. Instead, they let resentment build until it came out as an explosion of verbal abuse and/or physical violence. Learning to manage anger, both my own and other people’s, without shutting down in fear, continues to be a work in progress for me.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Manage Anger Constructively

I grew up in a home where anger wasn’t handled well. Let me take you back there:

Do Other People Push Your Anger Button?

Do Other People Push Your Anger Button?

Now, don’t get me wrong. My mother lets her anger flow freely, but she rarely uses the actual words “I am angry”. Instead, her anger comes out as hurtful criticism, put-downs and emotional bullying.

My dad isn’t any better. He bottles his anger up so badly that he often seethes with resentment so loud that I can hear him muttering under his breath when I’m playing in the next room. It’s frightening.

All it takes is for mum to walk in and say, “What’s wrong with you, you stupid creature?” and, bang, next round of World War III is back on again.

What I learned from all this was the idea that anger was somehow a bad thing, that it was a bad emotion that I should never feel, because it always seemed to be expressed destructively around me.

As a result, I learned to push down my anger very hard, to suppress it. In fact, I pushed it down so hard that in the end I barely even felt it.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Ask Your Boss For A Raise

Hey there, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project with an idea for you and here’s something I never had the guts to do back before I worked for myself, but that’s okay. I can still suggest it. You might want to do it. And that is to be able to go and ask your boss for a raise.

This is particularly important if you feel that you’re not being paid your worth and you’re a hard-worker. You do a really great job and you just feel as though maybe you deserve a little bit more in your paycheck and you want to push your comfort zone, step outside and do something that’s a little bit challenging; then it’s a great idea to go and ask your boss for a raise.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Handle A Boyfriend Or Husband With A Controlling Mother: Part 2

The solution to this whole issue is for the man to man up and start stand up to his mother and saying what’s important to him whenever there’s some kind of conflict so that he can learn to side with you in the relationship rather than with his controlling mother.

There’s really nothing that you can do as a partner in terms of what his mother does, and the solution to the problem is not for the mother to change her behavior. You can’t expect other people to change, and we have really no control over other people’s behavior.

 

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Handle A Boyfriend Or Husband With A Controlling Mother: Part 1

Most of my advice is aimed at men, but today I have a video for you ladies out there on the topic of how to deal with a man who has a controlling mother. I’ve written a previous article on how to deal with a controlling mother, and I’m getting an increasing number of comments left by women in response to this article which was originally aimed at men. And the women are talking about their frustrations in having dealt with partners who had controlling mothers.

What I’ll cover here today is what you should if your boyfriend, husband or partner has a controlling mother and this is having some kind of impact – and it’s generally a negative impact – on your relationship with the guy.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

The Day I Finally Stood Up To My Critical Mother

My mother and father are still together after 50 years of marriage. They are good, church going people who are very community minded. They show love by acts of service and are often kind and generous to other people. But the way my critical mother treats my largely passive father is toxic, and I recently took the opportunity to stand up to their behaviour in order to reverse the negative effects it has had on my own life. Here’s how it panned out:

Standing Up To A Critical Mother

Standing Up To A Critical Mother

Recently my parents and I all attended my maternal aunt’s 90th birthday party, along with some extended family. We spent the weekend in a lovely guest house in the country and since it was a long drive for my aging parents, they asked me to give them a lift there and back. I am a little apprehensive because I know the way my parent’s behaviour often triggers me, but I see it as an opportunity to connect with them and spend some additional quality time together.

The two-hour drive to the guest house is relatively uneventful, with occasional friendly chatter and lunch at my parents’ favourite cafè on-route.

However, I am starting to notice the pattern in my parents relationship that often upsets me: my mother “corrects” everything my father says, in a way which sounds critical and belittling to me. His reaction is to withdraw and shut down in response to this criticism; a common trait I particularly dislike in myself.

Initially, I just witness what is happening and my internal reaction. But over the course of the weekend as I notice more and more incidents where my father says something that my mother thinks is foolish, wrong or otherwise in need of correction, I become increasingly agitated.

In my ideal world, all the years of therapy and emotional healing that I’ve had would insulate me from the effect of this and I’d be free to let them relate however they choose without me being triggered.

But in the real world, I’m not that enlightened. Not yet, anyway.

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By Graham Stoney, ago