The Key To Healthy Relationships Is Being Able to Say No

Have you ever felt guilty when people offered you help? It just happened to me today. I met my cousin for lunch, and then we came to my parents’ place and continued chatting with the rest of my family. At 8pm I told her I still needed to write this newsletter, and she volunteered to take care of my daughter while I do it. It made me pause, I wasn’t sure if she really wanted this, or if she only said it because she felt obliged to do so.

Maybe this is just my own insecurity speaking. I haven’t been historically great at saying no. Even when people didn’t directly ask me for help, I’d still offer to do whatever I thought they expected from me. I felt obliged to keep talking to people I didn’t really want to talk to, keep troubleshooting bugs no one else on my team cared about, or even stay at parties that didn’t feel enjoyable anymore. If there was the tiniest chance that someone might get upset, I’d try to guess what that might be and to avoid that scenario at all costs, and so did my mother and grandmother.

Sometimes volunteering to help genuinely made me happy. At other times I just felt like I had to do it. I either worried people would reject me if I didn’t, that I’d have to deal with their anger and aggression, or that they won’t be able to solve their problems otherwise. If I didn’t help them and they ended up in real trouble, wouldn’t this mean it was sort of my fault?

There were at least a few occasions where I made promises I had no intention of keeping just to make myself and the other person feel good at the moment. It was always easier to cancel later over text than to say face to face that I preferred to do something else. This was especially true when talking to someone who often reacted with anger, or even worse, felt deeply hurt and abandoned whenever I said no to them. I didn’t want to be the reason for anyone’s feeling hurt.

Knowing how many times I volunteered to help when I didn’t really want to, I was hesitant to accept my cousin’s help today. Will she feel resentful and regret having made that offer? Will she avoid hanging out with me so that she doesn’t feel pressured into helping me again? I know I did both at different times.

Only now I’m seeing that my irrational reactions were perfectly rational for my grandmother growing up. After her father died, she lived with a violent and abusive stepfather while her whole country was ravaged by Second World War. Facing real physical danger at home and having nowhere to run, she survived by trying to meet everyone’s needs before they even said anything. I am not in real danger, but some part of me might not have fully internalized this yet.

Luckily my cousin seems to know she’s not in danger. I trust her judgement more than I trust my own. When she says she wants to help, I know she’s not pretending. If she’d rather go back home, she’d tell me this with gentleness and grace.

I always knew setting good boundaries is the key to taking care of myself. Watching her made me realize it’s key to taking care of others too. Not just because you can’t give what you don’t already have yourself, but also because it is precisely knowing that you can say no at any time that allows you to say yes with eagerness and joy.

When you know that you can always say no, you don’t have to worry if saying yes to one thing will also lead to another. You don’t have to worry if you set up a precedent that will make you obliged to continue helping in this way. You don’t have to explain or justify yourself, or prove how tired or overwhelmed you are so that everyone finally leaves you alone. If you’re not in physical danger setting boundaries might feel unpleasant, but ultimately it leads to much healthier relationships. Nobody wants to feel like they’ve tricked you into helping them anyway.