I AM UNABLE TO SAY NO

Aug 17, 2025 Features / Columnists, News

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By Dr. Telford Layne Jr. PsyD, MSc. Postgrad, BSc.
Clinical and Developmental Psychologist – Psychoanalyst
Unwrapping Gift -Clinic

Kaieteur News – When we say yes to others, we are saying no to ourselves. Saying no is healthy and should be encouraged. Between birth and age 4, we say no to everyone with ease and comfort. This is the age humans begin to assert their independence and freedom of choice and preferences. Saying no to parents, relatives and friends at this age is a sign of psychological health and development in a child.

By age five, something begins to go wrong, and by late adolescence, we have a people pleaser. An adult who is unable to say no without feeling guilty and fearful for the rest of their lives, unless they get professional help from a psychologist. We say yes to events we don’t want to attend, favours we don’t want to do, nights out with people we aren’t sure we even like, food we don’t want, and jobs we hate… and the list goes on.

What happened between 5 and 18 is called childhood trauma in the form of poor parenting, emotional abuse and or neglect that altered their thinking about themselves and others. Feelings about themselves and others, and their behaviour towards themselves and others. This is not an alteration of positivity but an adverse interpersonal and intrapersonal relationship.

This childhood environment created by parents and caregivers made children feel they could get love simply by being themselves. Somehow, despite their very best intentions, our parents or caretakers left us feeling we had to conform or perform to ‘earn’ their affections.

Parental examples such as: Strict parenting where you were rewarded for meeting expectations and shown displeasure if you didn’t,  Mixed message parenting, lenient one moment then demanding the next, where the child decided it was best to conform over risk rejection,  Distracted parenting where your caretaker suffered with a difficult relationship, stress, or depression, and you learned to fit their needs over become another stress for them, Unresolved parenting where your parent has not solved their issues with their parents and thus played out their faulty dynamics with you, Insecure parenting where a parent doesn’t love themselves and uses their child to shore up their self-esteem, leaving you pressured to make your parent feel good

1. Fear of Rejection and Disapproval:

• Many people struggle to say no because they fear that declining a request will lead to rejection or disapproval from others.
• This fear is rooted in past experiences where saying no resulted in negative consequences or a lack of validation. Now you have been cultured.
• Some individuals may equate saying no with being selfish or uncaring, leading them to prioritise others’ needs over their own.

2. People-Pleasing Tendencies:

• People-pleasers often have a strong need to be liked and accepted, making it difficult to turn down requests, even when it’s detrimental to their well-being.
• Worrying that saying no will damage relationships or create conflict.
• This behaviour can be linked to a learned pattern of seeking approval and validation from others, often stemming from childhood experiences where love and acceptance were conditional.

3. Lack of Confidence and Boundary Setting: 

• Individuals with low self-esteem or a lack of confidence struggle to assert their needs and boundaries, making it hard to say no.
• Not feeling worthy of prioritising their needs or may be unsure of how to communicate their boundaries effectively.
• Setting boundaries is a crucial aspect of self-care and maintaining healthy relationships, and the inability to do so can lead to feeling overwhelmed and resentful.

The psychological cost of not saying NO

Bad relationships. It might seem to make your relationship better if you always say yes to the one you love or to good friends. But in the long run, whether you admit it to yourself or not, you are going to start to feel manipulated. And if you can’t say no, it’s not likely you are the sort to be honest with your partner about your real feelings (or even know what they are most of the time). Instead, you resort to passive-aggressive behaviour to ‘win back’ some of the energy you are letting your partner, friends and colleagues take. This might feel fair at first, but in the long run, it can leave you feeling bad about yourself and leave others losing their respect and interest in you.

Anxiety. As the time and energy to accomplish your own goals is surely and steadily eaten up by other people’s demands, you will begin to experience anxiety attacks. Anxiety happens because, on an unconscious level, you are aware that you are moving farther and farther away from achieving your personal goals and creating the life you secretly hope for.

Depression. Always giving in to the demands of others can make you secretly feel bad about yourself and lead to low self-esteem. And low self-esteem is one of the leading symptoms of depression, so much so that it’s still debated which one comes first. So if you are the type to give too much and feel tired no matter how much you sleep, have lost your libido, and/or are under- or overeating, you might be suffering from depression.

Lack of personal identity. If we don’t focus on what we really want and spend all of our time doing what others want, it is possible to eventually not even know what we want. You can become so numb from doing what others want and expect you to do that you don’t even know what you do and don’t like and who you even are. And not having a sense of self feeds right into the depression, anxiety and stress.

Breakup and divorce. Saying yes can seem to make you closer to a partner at first, but inevitably, it leads to fights as hidden resentments come to the surface. The fights might seem to be irrelevant and about ‘little things’, but really, they aren’t. There is nothing little about acting as a martyr and self-sacrifice. As mentioned, it’s often a deeply entrenched pattern that goes right back to childhood. And the more your partner demands from you, the more old memories are triggered, which leads to even more distance between you and disagreements. Burnout. Add up a few of the above, and at some point, you might just hit the proverbial wall. If you always have low-grade colds or flu, don’t sleep well, and feel tired often, ask yourself, am I over giving and headed to burnout?

Overcoming the Challenge requires psychodynamic therapy to:

• Developing the ability to say no, self-awareness, practice, and a shift in mindset.
• Some strategies for overcoming the difficulty of saying no include:

• Practising in low-stakes situations to build confidence.
• Learning to identify and articulate your needs and boundaries.
• Developing internal validation and self-compassion.
• Recognising that saying no is a form of self-care and boundary setting.
• Focusing on building healthy relationships based on mutual respect and understanding.

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• Dr. Telford Layne Jr., NO, Psychoanalyst, Psychologist, rejection

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