Why do I feel guilty when I say no?
Have you ever said no to something and then spent the next few hours wondering whether you should have just said yes? Perhaps you replay the conversation in your head, wondering if you sounded rude or selfish, or whether the other person is upset with you. You might even find yourself wanting to message them again to explain yourself, soften what you said or change your mind completely.
When this happens, it can be easy to assume that the uncomfortable feeling means you’ve done something wrong. After all, guilt is usually something we associate with having behaved badly or hurt somebody. But feeling guilty after setting a boundary doesn’t necessarily mean the boundary was wrong. Sometimes it simply means that saying no, particularly to certain people, feels unfamiliar or uncomfortable.
Where do we learn to say yes?
We learn a lot about relationships long before we’re old enough to understand what we’re learning. As children, we gradually discover what happens when we disagree, say no, express an opinion, become angry, need something or disappoint someone. In some families, children are encouraged to have their own thoughts and feelings and can disagree while still feeling secure in the relationship. In others, keeping the peace might be more important.
Perhaps you learnt that being “good” meant being helpful, agreeable and easy. Maybe saying no led to anger, criticism, withdrawal or disappointment. Or perhaps nobody explicitly told you that you couldn’t say no, but you became very good at noticing how other people were feeling and adjusting yourself accordingly. These experiences don’t necessarily look dramatic from the outside and you may even look back and describe your childhood as perfectly normal. But the ways we learn to stay connected to other people when we’re young can quietly follow us into our adult relationships.
I often see this in people who find it much easier to recognise what everybody else needs than to recognise what they need themselves. You might stay late at work, agree to plans you don’t really want to attend, take responsibility for sorting out family problems or answer messages when what you actually need is some space. You might say yes before you’ve even had time to work out whether you want to say yes. Sometimes you may tolerate behaviour you’re uncomfortable with because speaking up somehow feels harder than putting up with it.
Eventually, this can become exhausting. You can find yourself feeling overwhelmed or resentful while simultaneously feeling guilty for wanting anything to change. And this is where I think boundaries can become misunderstood, because the difficulty isn’t always that you don’t know how to say no. You probably know the words. The more interesting question is what saying no means to you.
What does saying no mean to you?
If you’ve spent years learning, consciously or unconsciously, that someone being unhappy with you means you’ve done something wrong, setting a boundary can bring up all sorts of uncomfortable feelings. You might say, “I can’t do that today,” “I’m not comfortable with that,” or simply, “No, that doesn’t work for me,” and then find yourself feeling anxious as soon as the words have left your mouth.
If the other person is disappointed, that feeling can become even stronger. Suddenly you want to fix it. You might start explaining yourself, questioning whether you’re being unreasonable or wondering whether it would be easier to give in. But somebody being disappointed by your boundary doesn’t automatically mean you’ve done something wrong. Sometimes it simply means they wanted a different answer.
Those are two very different things.
You may also notice that saying no is much easier with some people than others. Perhaps you’re perfectly capable of setting boundaries at work but find it almost impossible with a parent. Maybe you can speak openly with friends but find yourself avoiding conflict in an intimate relationship. You might feel confident and capable in most areas of your life and then, around one particular person, suddenly feel like a much younger and less certain version of yourself.
Becoming curious about your boundaries
Rather than judging yourself for that, it can be much more useful to become curious about it. Instead of asking, “Why am I so bad at boundaries?” you might ask yourself, “What am I worried will happen if I set this boundary?”
Perhaps they’ll be angry. Perhaps they’ll withdraw or think badly of you. Maybe you’ll have to sit with their disappointment rather than rushing in to make everything okay again. Underneath all of that there can sometimes be a much deeper fear: if I stop being the person you want me to be, will our relationship still be okay?
When we begin looking at boundaries in this way, our reactions can start to make much more sense.
Healthy boundaries aren’t about becoming uncaring or refusing to consider other people’s feelings. Relationships naturally involve compromise. Sometimes you will choose to do something you don’t particularly want to do because you love someone. You’ll change your plans, help somebody out or temporarily put another person’s needs ahead of your own. The important part is that there is a choice.
When you’re used to people-pleasing, there can be very little room for that choice because the discomfort of disappointing somebody feels so strong that saying yes becomes almost automatic. You may only realise afterwards that you didn’t actually want to agree.
Learning to tolerate the discomfort of saying no
Learning to set boundaries can therefore feel uncomfortable at first. You may still feel guilty. You may still wonder whether you’ve upset someone. You may still have an overwhelming urge to explain why you’ve said no so the other person doesn’t think badly of you. The aim isn’t necessarily to reach a point where you never experience any of those feelings. It can simply be learning that you don’t have to immediately act on them.
Sometimes we think we need to feel confident before we can begin behaving differently, when quite often confidence comes afterwards. You can set a perfectly reasonable boundary and still feel uncomfortable. You can say no and still experience guilt. You can make a decision based on what you need and still worry about what somebody else thinks.
Over time, you may begin to discover that relationships don’t always fall apart because you’ve said no. Other people can cope with disappointment. You can disagree with somebody and remain connected to them. And you don’t have to continually abandon your own needs in order to be a kind or caring person.
Understanding where it began
If saying no feels disproportionately difficult, it can be worth becoming curious about where that feeling began. Because sometimes the problem isn’t that you need to become better at saying no.
It may be that somewhere along the way, you learnt that saying no wasn’t safe.
Therapy can offer you a space to explore where some of these patterns began and why they still feel so powerful now. It isn’t about blaming your childhood or the people in it for everything you struggle with as an adult. It’s about understanding your experiences, the ways you learnt to cope with them, and whether those ways of coping are still working for you today.
You may not want to become someone who says no to everything. You may still want to be kind, helpful, thoughtful and considerate of other people’s feelings. The difference is being able to include yourself in that consideration too.
And perhaps, eventually, saying no can become less about rejecting somebody else and more about recognising that your needs, feelings and limits are allowed to matter too.
To find out more about how counselling and hypnotherapy can help you. Please contact me tobook a free 15-minute Zoom/WhatsApp call.
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