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for example.
    As I talked to her later it turned out that my analysis was correct. She was in the bind of having to be perfect, not to make mistakes, and above all not appear dumb to other people. As I like to describe it, she had set herself up in a “sucker’s play.” In trying to be perfect and a supermom to her daughter, she was an odds-on favorite to lose. Eventually she was going to have to break promises either because she could not or did not want to keep them. If she could drop her need to be perfect and her pretense that she was, she couldbreak a promise to her daughter in an assertive way that would minimize both their uncomfortable feelings. She could say, for example, “I know it’s dumb of me to make you a promise that I can’t keep, but we are going to put off going to Disneyland on Saturday. You didn’t do anything wrong and it’s not your fault. Let’s see when we can go again, okay?” With this assertive negative statement, she would be giving her daughter the message that even Mom does dumb things now and then, but even more important she serves as a model for her daughter, showing that if Mom doesn’t have to be perfect, neither does daughter. She models this important part of being human while she makes the reality clear: for whatever reason, Mom has decided that they will not go this time, and they are not going .
    In summary, you and I and most of the rest of the population are trained to be responsive to manipulative emotional control as soon as we are able to speak and understand what other people tell us. These psychological puppet strings that our parents attach to us through learned feelings of nervousness or anxiety, ignorance and guilt, control our childish assertiveness. They effectively and efficiently keep us out of real and imagined danger as children and make the lives of the adults around us a lot easier. These emotional strings, however, have an unfortunate side effect. As we grow into adults and are responsible for our own well-being, they do not magically disappear. We still have feelings of anxiety, ignorance, and guilt that can be and are used efficiently by other people to get us to do what they want irrespective of what we want for ourselves. The subject of this book is the reduction, at least if not the elimination of these learned emotions in coping with other people in the ordinary experiences of our lives. In particular, the following chapters deal with (1) the nonassertive beliefs we acquire because of our feelings of anxiety, ignorance, and guilt, and how these beliefs allow other people to manipulate us; (2) the rights we have as human beings to assertively stop the manipulation of our behavior by others; and (3) the systematic verbal skills easily learned in everyday situations thatallow us to enforce our human assertive rights with family members, relatives, parents, children, friends, fellow employees, employers, repairmen, gardeners, salesclerks, managers; in short, other human beings, no matter what their relationship to us is.

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Our prime assertive human right
—how other people violate it
    Each of us, at times, gets into situations that confuse us. A friend, for example, asks you to pick up his aunt flying in from Pascagoula at 6:00 P.M . The last thing in the world that you relish is fighting the traffic rush to the airport and then trying to make bumper-to-bumper conversation with someone you know zero about, without giving her the idea you wish she had stayed in Mississippi. You rationalize with: “Well, a friend’s a friend. He would do the same thing for me.” But other nagging thoughts intrude: “But I never asked him to pick up anybody for me. I always did it myself. Harry never told me why he couldn’t pick her up. How come his wife couldn’t do it?”
    In situations like this, all of us feel like saying: “When I say ‘No,’ I feel guilty, but if I say ‘Yes,’ I’ll hate myself.” When you say this to yourself, your real desires are