Saying "No" Is Often How We Learn Who Our Real Friends Are



Many codependent relationships are built on the shaky ground of people-pleasing. We codependents find it hard to say "No" to people because we are so anxious about winning, or earning, their love and appreciation. People-pleasing often leads us into care-taking others, or doing for them what they should be doing for themselves. We start living the other person's life, instead of living our own life.
I first learned the power of saying "No" back in 1998. A friend, who I was blindly people-pleasing and care-taking, finally made a fatal mistake. He had asked me to pick him up at the airport, missed his flight, and failed to call me and notify me. So I showed up at the airport to be his chauffeur, only to learn from an airline rep that he had missed his flight and was scheduled to return to Chicago on the next available flight. 

Suddenly, the codependent scales fell off my eyes and I realized that I had been taking care of all of his issues, bending over backwards to please him, and living his life instead of mine-- and that he really didn't care about me at all. He only cared about what I did for him.

To test this theory, I waited for him to call me and apologize for missing his flight and not showing me enough respect to call me and tell me before I went rushing off to the airport. I waited two weeks for that call. When he did call me, he didn't even mention the missed flight, much less apologize for it.

Instead, he told me that in the two weeks he'd been back in Chicago, he'd become overly addicted to medicating with TV and he wanted to know if he could bring his TV over to my house and leave it with me. I immediately responded with "No, sorry, but you can't."

He retorted back "What? I thought you were my friend. What kind of friend are you to say 'No' when I need help?" I said "What kind of friend are you to miss your flight and to fail to call me and warn me after you'd asked me to pick you up at the airport?"

There was a long silence and then the conversation abruptly ended. I had proven my theory. The first time I ever said "No" to this "friend," his response was to attempt to shame me into doing what he wanted and to make me the bad person. In the past, I would have buckled under the self-imposed pressure to people-please for the sake of his acceptance, but not this time. I had finally gained some self-respect and I was not going to be abused anymore-- not by myself or him.

I didn't hear back from this "friend" for weeks. Suddenly on Thanksgiving Day of 1998, I received a call from him. He was all sweetness and politeness and feigned concern for how I was doing, but I knew it was a ruse. The call wasn't about me. I knew it was really about him, and so I waited for the punchline. 

Sure enough, the conversation turned to the fact that the person who usually invited him to Thanksgiving dinner every year hadn't extended the invitation this particular year. Now I knew the real reason for the call: He wanted me to rescue him from his disappointment and sadness over being rejected by this other person. I had no intention of doing so.

Again, I knew he was only calling me for his sake, not mine. He wanted to be rescued from the pain he needed to face and I wasn't going to do that. To have rescued him would have enabled his own codependency as well as mine. And it would have been self-abuse on my part, since I knew his concern wasn't about me. It was ONLY about him.

Yes. It's very true. You find out if a person is truly your friend, or not, when you develop the courage to say "No" to them. And when your purpose for saying "No" is to protect yourself as well as to protect them from codependent care-taking and people-pleasing.

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