Yes Man
Funny film, but not what this post is about.
I have been thinking about the replies I got to my post about Blame.
Thank you to the wonderful people who left them. I had expected people to say it wasn’t the child’s fault. Of course, anyone would say that right? Even me.
But I looked at what each person had said and tried to see it how they did. Of the biggest fingers that are pointing to blame, there is one that says, I never said no. I chose to go to my father or whoever my mother thought I should.
I have to ask myself why? Was it for love? Its part of it, I am sure. But also, there is rejection and that is one of my biggest fears.
I have to look at many sides of this and they all come down to that same thing. Rejection.
I was trained to never say no. If I said no I was going to be rejected. But, I wonder if it could be that simple. I see it in my actions now. I am talking to someone in a Facebook chat, but I’m dying to go to bed, or to go off and write, but I don’t. I’m afraid to say, I’ve got to go. It feels like saying no to them. I am telling them they cannot have my time right now and this will make them not want to talk to me later. This is my logic- it’s inbuilt.
I think back to the days when I was taking drugs. I took more and more. I played around. I tested. I did not fear death. I also didn’t want to say no. I might lose my friends if I wasn’t jabbing a needle in my arm and being that person they wanted.
When I was into that life, people wanted me around. I was the guy with the bike, the drugs, the money and women. I didn’t care. When I was a person I thought they wanted me to be, they wouldn’t reject me.
I see it in relationships too. I was a terrible cheat, never faithful to anyone. I look at why I was. I didn’t really care for half the women. Some, I couldn’t tell you their names.
So, why did I go ahead and get intimate with them?
Fear. Fear that if I didn’t give myself over, in one way or another, I would get rejected.
I see this ‘yes-man’ in so many things and in so many times when I have been hurt.
The Yes-Man was at the helm.
I wonder if that is the reason I never said no to my parents.
Perhaps the times I chose to go to my father willingly, it wasn’t that it was my choice outright. Maybe I was being who he wanted me to be so I didn’t get rejected.
My father trained me to give myself physically and mentally in order to hold onto people.
He created Yes-man.
JD Stockholm. 
This makes perfect sense to me. So many of your actions were in perfect alignment with how you were trained and created to be. And I know when you reach conclusions for yourself, it makes your convictions much more stable and built on a solid foundation of the truths you discover. 🙂 Wraps my arms around you.
thought i commented on this. Must’ve done it in chat, but I’m super proud at the dots you’ve connected. We’re all connecting dots with you, really. There are so many things I’m learning just from knowing you.
This was amazing. Full of insight and self-awareness. Although sad issues are still raised here, reading this made me happy… if that makes any sense 🙂
Very good, JD. 🙂 We were taught to be yes-men, too – Army dad, US military – mom. You simply did NOT say NO to them. A request was an order to be immediately followed by obedience – or punishment – or both (that happened lots of times).
The fear of rejection is what caused us to hole up later on, and a LOT – a whole lot. So much ‘we’ built a personality around that sort of thing. Of course later on it failed (no life, no love – something like that).
But what is rejection? Why was the child seeking ‘acceptance’? Basic psychology says that to be “rejected by the tribe” (or familial unit) is like committing suicide, especially when you are a child. Who is going to feed you, cloth you, take care of you? Those thoughts may not have occurred, but on a primal level you understood: surviving meant ‘accepting this’ so that YOU could be accepted and loved (or feel loved) – for after all, doesn’t every child want this? Isn’t it vital to his (or her) happiness? That feeling of “acceptance into the tribe”?
So there your child was seeking acceptance, fearing rejection (for the threat to survival it was). Just like ours was. And being taught “yes” all the time – well, darned if later on that makes it hard when it comes time to draw those ‘boundaries’ – around yourself, your time, your finances, your emotional investments in certain things – all that kind of stuff us survivors find so hard sometimes.
Yes-man is a very good title for this. LOL. We started a post on Matthew’s blog sometimes about the penalties of not being able to say no. It had something to do with our uncle. You can guess the rest. (wry smile – or is it a frown?) Either way we’re “good with it” since we have come around to accepting our own selves. That helps a lot.