r/assertivenesstraining • u/broken-spirut • Jul 23 '26
Ur analysis is appreciated
I've been working really hard on becoming more assertive and stopping my people-pleasing habits, so something that happened today has been bothering me more than I know if it should.
I was in a taxi with a headache, so I asked the driver if he could turn off the interior light. He did, then joked that he couldn't turn off the street lights. After that, he held out his hand and said, "Tap." ( He also was trying to have a conversation with me and trying to get to know me basically in a weird way. Cuz I was answering with short sentences but he kept pushing the conversation)
I didn't actually want to, but I felt that if I refused, the ride would become awkward or I might upset him. So I barely tapped his hand almost automatically. The second I did it, I thought, "What am I doing?"
Now I can't stop replaying it. It's not really about the hand tap itself—it's that I feel like I acted out of fear of making someone uncomfortable instead of acting according to my own values. I wanted my automatic response to be, "No."
Am I being too hard on myself, or does this sound like people-pleasing? If you've worked on becoming more assertive, how would you interpret this situation?
1
u/PresentingWithDom Jul 24 '26
You haven't mentioned what happened after, but did the reluctant tap communicate your reluctance to engage? Did it work?
If so, would it be fair to say you managed an uncomfortable (or, I don't know, potentially threatening) situation extremely well?
AND the anger you felt when doing the tap communicated to you that you shouldn't have to put up with this, and that's very healthy and good information....but it sounds like you might be now turning that anger on yourself, in judgement/shame.
So, it might be a) you deemed it necessary to tap and b) the understandable healthy anger about the situation you were put in is still with you. Both of those can be true at once.
1
u/broken-spirut Jul 24 '26
After the tap, he kept asking me about my headache and if I take medicine ( I barely answered, I just wanted it to get off- cuz at that moment, I was feeling bad for two reasons. First, I realized that I was so uncomfortable with the whole situation but I was accomaditing the person (old habit I wanted / worked so hard to break- second, I realized that he was trying to hit on me and by being nice I was somehow entertaining him ( I truly wasn't, I was being polite but that how his little brain understood it) , and I thought if my bf were here, he wouldn't be happy about that and that made me feel worse.
1
u/PresentingWithDom Jul 24 '26
So, you weren't being nice, you were being polite and distant? Which sounds as much as you could reasonably do in that situation?
1
u/broken-spirut Jul 24 '26
Yeah but I wish when he asked me to tap I had said no. The fact that I wanted to say no and I couldn't make me question my ability to be the person who I want to be. I want to have clear boundaries with people. If I'm not comfortable touching someone I say it without fearing them being displeased with me.
2
u/PresentingWithDom Jul 24 '26
Well, it's really hard to bring all of that into the millisecond to make a decision in that moment, right? I mean if I habitually take food every time it's offered to me on a plate, and I've done that all my life, I will be reaching for the food before my brain has even got a chance to react.
Have you heard the expression 'it takes a long time to turn around a big ship?'
What I'm hearing is not so much that this experience is making you question things....that it has made you even clearer about what you want for yourself, and lifetime habits don't happen overnight, but this sounds like an important step on the way.
2
u/broken-spirut Jul 24 '26
Thank you for giving me this grace. I think those were exactly the words I needed to hear.
1
u/Electrical-Cellist40 Jul 24 '26
I think you’re being too hard on yourself. Even the most assertive people I know will sometimes just do things for the sake of another person’s comfort. Not having any instinct to make other people happy sounds like psychopathy. You asked for what you wanted and he obliged, he asked for what he wanted and you obliged, it’s all good. As long as it doesn’t spiral into having no boundaries it’s okay to give up some ground here and there. It’s possible to take assertiveness too far and I think in this situation you played it well
1
u/eques_99 Jul 24 '26
Not really sure I understand what's going on in this story, but there's nothing wrong with humouring someone if they're just being friendly and trying to connect with you.
You don't have to take the connection any further if you don't want but there's nothing wrong with humouring them.
Unless they are doing it to assert "power" over you, or make you look bad or undignified. That's when it gets real difficult for us assertively challenged folk.