Years ago I taught a course on how to be assertive to a group of women who had escaped abusive relationships. I always made sure to emphasize that just because you can be assertive, does not mean you have to be. Outside of the obvious concerns about safety, the whole issue of whether it was always necessary to assert yourself was not addressed by the course materials. To clarify the issue, I’d present this scenario:
Let’s say you are visiting your Auntie and she offers you a cup of coffee. You decline, but she gives you one anyway. Are you going to tell her how you feel about her not respecting your decision, or are you going to sip the coffee and enjoy the visit?
Some years later, I became familiar with the Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) approach to interpersonal communication. DBT looks at interpersonal effectiveness as more than assertiveness and gives us a choices about balancing our needs and wants in any interpersonal interaction. By breaking interpersonal effectiveness into components, we are able to decide our priorities and determine the behaviours that will help us meet our needs. These components are:
Objectives Effectiveness
The objective or goal of an interaction is the reason for the interaction in the first place. Possible objectives may include getting a person to do something or stop doing something, standing up for your rights, refusing a request, or getting your opinion taken seriously. The question to ask is: what specific result or change do I want from this interaction?
Relationship Effectiveness
Relationship effectiveness means maintaining or enhancing the relationship, whether or not one’s objective is met in an interaction. The question here is: how do I want the other person to feel about me when this interaction is over?
Self-respect Effectiveness
This means maintaining or improving your respect for yourself and your values and beliefs during and after an interaction. This question is: how do I want to feel about myself after this interaction is over?
Weighing Effectiveness Priorities
In any interaction all these facets of effectiveness are present but typically one is the priority. In the example above, coffee with Auntie, the relationship is probably the priority. In fact, the “objective” of the interaction may be to enjoy the visit (maintain or enhance the relationship). So accepting a coffee without complaint after refusing it when offered, causes no self-respect injury because the quality of the relationship is the goal.
Different situations call for different priorities. For example, let’s say I’m trying to return a defective item to the store. My objective is to get a replacement or a refund. If the clerk is not someone I know, I would have little concern about the impact of our interaction on our relationship. Hopefully, however, my values around treating others with respect would guide me as I worked to reach my objective.
Clearly then, from a DBT perspective, clarifying priorities in any interaction is the first step in achieving interpersonal effectiveness. This requires thinking through your wants and needs from several perspectives which sounds (and is) complicated. As with most DBT skills though, with practice it requires less mental energy and becomes nearly intuitive. DBT skills training gives us the tools to evaluate interpersonal situations, and make rational decisions on how to proceed. Just because we can be assertive, doesn’t mean we have to be.