she’s just acting upon them. She feels too unworthy to come out and ask
for your time, so she unconsciously relies on a threat to your perception of
yourself as a caring person to extort you into giving her what she wants: If
she were aware of what she was doing, it would count as asking you as much.
As she cringes at your rejection, Rachel actually believes that you’re
treating her like a burden because sheisone, that you’re only giving her
what she deserves. She feels hostility toward herself, but not toward you;
at least not consciously toward you. Never in a million years would Rachel
accuse you of being the sort of person who’d let a friend down. You have
to do that to yourself.
There’s only one way to keep from being sucked into this neurotic
morass. Take her absolutely literally.Let the analysts worry about the
unconscious meanings. What you want is a relationship with Rachel in
which she asks for what she wants and you’re free to say yes or no. Sanity
lies in playing by those rules yourself, even if you suspect she isn’t.
Think like a behaviorist: Giving Rachel what she asks for is the best
way to teach her to ask for what she wants.
FORGET THE WORDMANIPULATIVE. The concept of manipulation as
we use it today is a relic of the human potential movement, when an ado-
lescent view of healthy functioning was confused with morality. In that
simpler world in which we were not put to live up to other people’s expec-
tations, manipulation was a sin. It broke both the prohibitions on caring
what other people think and withholding your own authentic feelings. The
encounter groups may be gone, but the stigma is still there.
Manipulation used to be a more neutral term that described a con-
voluted interpersonal process. It is now merely a crime against mental
health. Manipulation is something parentsdo to us, not something we do
to others. If you think about it in the psychoanalytic sense, there can be
no first person form of the verb to manipulate. What then is the point in
accusing people of doing something that, by definition, they cannot be
aware of doing? It’s about as useless as telling them they’re in denial.
All they’ll hear is that you’re irritated with them, which you aren’t
really, since you’re only stating a fact.
To avoid this sort of senseless argument, erase the word manipulation
from your vocabulary. The way to be effective in the situation formerly
184 ❧Explosions into Sadness