Dear Jessica:

It is okay to be “nice and helpful”- you can stay nice and helpful. And be assertive at the same time. Being assertive does not mean … being mean. When you are assertive with others it not only helps you, it helps them.

When you don’t assert yourself with others, if you keep interacting with them long enough, and you let them walk all over you (knowingly or unknowingly), you will build up anger and they will suffer for it. Assert yourself- no anger, no passive aggressive expressions of anger.

You wrote that if If people treat you badly now, when you are nice to them, then they will treat you worse when you are assertive. This may have been your experience as a child (?). It was definitely mine. And so, I too am still scared being assertive.

But I was wrong. Being unassertive, that is passive, caused me lots of harm. And being assertive protects me. It is uncomfortable, still, to practice assertiveness, because I learned it is dangerous to do so. But it is not. What I learned was wrong.

Try it and you will see, experiment in small ways, being assertive and you will learn anew that assertiveness is helpful to you… and to others.

anita