Finding balance when socializing

 Heya ^-^

This post is a continuation to finding out how to maintain relationships and self-respect while being confident in asking for things or saying no.

In the book Marsha Linehan described that there are three goals for any social interaction: the objective, the relationship and the self-respect goal. At first I found it difficult to completely understand these, but asking questions helped me to get a grasp.

1. The objective or specific result that you want. For example an objective can be getting a person to do a thing, change how they behave, give information or say no to their request. I found it to be useful to answer the question: “What do I want/need?”.

2. The relationship itself can be a goal. For example, having another person think positively of you or feel warm. It felt easy to find this goal by asking: “How do I want the other person to feel about me?”.

3. The self-respect goal or how do you want to feel about yourself after the interaction, whether the other goals are met or not. This was maybe the hardest one to grasp for me. And that is possibly because it is the one that I have the most difficulty with. 

I became somewhat fixated on the self-respect goal. In the book there are two aspects of self-respect described. One where one loses self-respect because of how they treat others, and another where one loses self-respect because of how they let others treat themselves. I had never even thought that people who behave mean towards others could lose self-respect as a result of that! 

My problem is on the other end of the spectrum, I let others treat myself badly and I treat myself badly as well. It seems that I usually sacrifice my self-respect to get the objective or to maintain the relationship. Even if it is not a relationship I want nor need in my life. Not very s.m.a.r.t.! 

I tried to remember back if there was ever a point when I had felt good about myself as a result of interaction. There was one I really remember warmly. I wanted to add another supervisor to my thesis because she had basically done all the supervising. And I was really adamant about it too. And I argued calmly that this should be done as it was just. This is something that I am, to this day, really proud of. 

But which part of it though? Was it really fulfilling an objective goal or a self-respect goal? What would have made me not respect myself even if the goal was met? Or respect myself despite not getting the objective goal? I think it might have something to do with values, but it is not clear to me yet. So I did what any proper millennial would do. I googled it!

One of the answers I got was “Feel skillful, no matter what the outcome”. It was further described as feeling competent and effective as opposed to helpless. Now considering this, I think I would have lost self-respect if I gave up, or wavered in my belief that my cause was right and moral. And even if I had not obtained my objective goal, I would have been proud of myself if I calmly believed that what I was asking was justified. And if I was not affected by outside pressure. Or at least appeared not to be affected. I suppose this topic will remain in the clouds of confusion for now~