[Jackiejdajda]

By pullback, I mean cutting them completely out of your life.

I have read in my books that cutting a person off does not work..this because when we do 'cut off' that person is still very much in our lives..
The guilt of having cut off or the worry that they may appear again.. Or the guilt that we did the cut off..

I looked through my books to find that reference about cut off.. and I ended up with John Bradshaw and his book Healing the Shame that Binds You.. page 161..

He wrote..

Each of us needs to create his own Bill of Rights.. We need to have total permission for our rights. Manual Smith sets forth the following Lists of Rights. You may add your own to these.

….. You have the right to judge your own behavior, thoughts, emotions, and to take responsibility for their initiation and consequences upon yourself.

….. You have the right to offer no reason or excuses for justifying your behavior.

….. You have the right to judge if you are responsible for judging other peoples problems.

….. You have the right to change your mind.

….. You have the right to make mistakes and be responsible for them.

….. You have the right to say, “I don’t know.”

….. You have the right to be independent of the goodwill of others before coping with them.

….. You have to the right to be illogical in making decisions.

….. You have the right to say, “I don’t understand.”

….. You have the right to say, “I don’t care.”


When I Say No, I Feel Guilty. (<title of book)

I went in search of this book and found this web site.. and this quote..

Smith, Manuel J., Ph.D. -- When I Say No, I Feel Guilty

(I hope this link is okay)

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 in conflict with your childhood training and you find yourself without cues that would prompt you in coping with this conflict. What can you say? If I say "No," will my friend feel hurt or rejected? Will he not like me anymore? Will he think I am self-centered, or at least not very nice? If I don't do it, am I an uncaring son of a *****? If I say "Yes," how come I'm always doing these things? Am I a patsy? Or is this the price I have to pay to live with other people?

These internal questions on how to cope are triggered by an external conflict between ourselves and another person. We want to do one thing, and our friend, neighbor, or relative assumes, hopes, expects, wishes, or even manipulates us into doing something else. The internal crisis comes about because you'd like to do what you want but are afraid that your friend may think what you want is wrong; you may be making a mistake; you may hurt his feelings and he may reject you because you did what you wanted; perhaps you fear that your reasons for doing what you want are not "reasonable" enough (you don't have a broken leg and the Feds aren't looking for you so why can't you go to the airport?). Consequently, when you try to do what you want, you also allow other people to make you feel ignorant, anxious, or guilty; the three fearful emotional states you were trained as a child to feel when you don't do what someone else wants you to do. The problem in resolving this conflict is that the trained manipulated part of us accepts without question that someone else "should" be able to control us psychologically by making us feel these ways. With the innately assertive part of us suppressed by our training in childhood, we respond by countermanipulation to the frustration of being manipulated. Manipulative coping, however, is an unproductive cycle. Manipulatively dealing with another adult is not like manipulatively dealing with a little child. If you manipulate adults through their emotions and beliefs, they can countermanipulate you in the same way. If you again countermanipulate, so can they, and so on.


When I Say No, I Feel Guilty
pages 24-25


Add reunion to this and you got problems.. IMO

Jackie