The Power Structures That Live in the Nervous System II
Why you say yes when you mean no — and the four patterns that take over when you do. Part II.
It was a quarter past eight, and after a long day Taryn had folded onto the couch with a glass of wine — the custom cream sofa, deep seats, wide arms — and pulled the brief she’d worked on all day back into her lap.
She began to reread what by now she nearly knew by heart, and her whole body tensed before she noticed it happening.
The brief was done. It had only confirmed what she’d been circling all day: the scope had grown, and she was going to have to go back to the client about the budget.
She opened her laptop. “Jim, Clarisse — can we do dinner tomorrow evening? 7 at The Grill, I’ll have my assistant make the arrangements.”
She pushed the laptop aside, irritated that she had to reopen a conversation about something she’d seen months ago and said nothing about.
Now she had to ask for another five hundred thousand dollars — because six months ago she said yes when she meant no.
Six months earlier. Winter, Manhattan, the deal closing.
They were settling the final details when something flagged her — something she knew would surface later. Jim worked the deal in front of him and never the cost downstream; he was three moves ahead on the board, and he'd have called that being good at his job, not rushing. Closing fast wasn't a tactic to him — it was simply how you won. An open question, any open question, was a kind of exposure he couldn't sit in.
They were settling the final details when something flagged her, something she knew would surface later. But Jim worked the deal in front of him and never the cost downstream; he was three moves ahead on the board, and he'd have called that being good at his job, not rushing. Closing fast wasn't a tactic to him — it was simply how you won. An open question, any open question, was a kind of exposure he couldn't sit in.
“There’s one thing that came up in my research,” Taryn said.
“Another thing? I thought you wrapped up your research weeks ago. We need to move on this.” Jim didn’t look up. “What could it possibly be now?”
“It’s fine, nothing,” coughed Taryn. She swallowed the resistance with the last sip of wine.
And now, the dead of summer, it was something after all. Like that winter, she swallowed the frustration.
Tonight it went down with a fresh-delivered cookie and a bottle of Cab.
When I sit with that swallowed “it’s fine, nothing,” I recognize the exact shape of it — maybe you do too.
Repeating a pattern you can see but can’t stop in the moment is its own particular pain. Something takes over — sometimes before you even catch it — and then, later that day, the sunken I did it again creeps in. Sometimes you watch it coming, and the fear of doing it differently wins, and you talk yourself out of yourself.
It tends to show up in a handful of moves. You will likely know at least one of them from the inside.
The freeze. You can feel it happening and something still takes the wheel. It’s the I don’t know, I couldn’t think of a thing to say, I couldn’t move — I just froze. It’s the question in the meeting you had an answer to, and the blank where the answer should have been. If you’ve lived inside that blank, hear this much: it isn’t a character flaw, and it isn’t your fault.
The fawn. This one is Taryn’s. It’s the moment you want to say no and something older answers instead — I have to be likeable. Agreeable. Pleasant. That’s how I stay safe. It’s the “happy to!” that quietly costs you your Saturday; the objection you felt in your chest and nodded through anyway. If you’ve people-pleased your way into leaving yourself behind, know that you were taking care of yourself the only way you’d been taught — agreeableness as safety.
The flight. This is a tricky one because it dresses up as self-care. It’s the moment things get hard and you leave — cut someone off, stop taking the calls. It’s I didn’t want the promotion anyway. I never liked that world. I can do better. And sometimes that’s all true. But it’s worth knowing where it’s coming from, because this is exactly how the conditioning slips past the self-sufficient and the ambitious — wearing the bow of I’m good. The gift of flight is that you can leave what doesn’t serve you. The cost is that you can just as easily leave the thing that only made you uncomfortable — and still had something to give you.
The fight. Jim’s move was the fight, and it’s what pulled Taryn into the fawn. On the surface, Jim won. Underneath, it bred confusion on the project; alignment exited and walking on eggshells entered. The fight can be the slowest to uncover, because for a while it looks like winning — and the world, for now, rewards it. But slowly, people stop telling you what they actually think. They drift, then disappear. And one day you’re in a meeting where nothing you planned got done, because everyone said yes when they meant no — a silent resistance, a quiet coup.
Whatever the move — the blindness, the fear, the freeze, the automatic yes — it ends in the same place: a ceiling on the impact you could have, and the one you actually want.
These self-limits settle into the body. The frequency, the idea, the conditioning may have been picked up somewhere else entirely, but it has moved in, and now it feels like the norm.
What if what you’ve accepted as the norm — as simply the way you are — was only a nervous response? And what if it could be changed?