Date: May 6, 2008 5:20:42 PM EDT
To: inyc@timeoutny.com
Subject: Question and Suggestion

I had an incident this morning walking with my three-year-old son down the street. My son hit himself on the forehead; I was soothing him when a mature man dramatically came over, held his head and caressed it repeatedly. Then, as he was leaving, he wanted to take a picture of my son “for the report” using his cell phone. Of course I said no, and he went away (reluctantly). The guy made me deeply uncomfortable, yet I did not say, “Don’t touch my son,” “Go away,” or, “I’m going to report you to the police,” which is what I wish I had done. Is there anyone you can refer me to for an assertiveness workshop in the city?

Lisa Tam*, Queens

You can speak up without sounding like a bitch. Dr. Robert H. Reiner, an Upper East Side clinical psychologist with 28 years’ experience, says being assertive is “more about being straightforward than it is about getting your way.” Though it can take some clients years of attending Reiner’s one-on-one or group-assertiveness workshops to become confident, we snuck reader Lisa in for an hour-long crash course—and picked up a few tips for standing up to the neighborhood creep.

HASH it out
Reiner begins by talking with a patient to discover when passive behavior pops up. “Assertiveness is a situation-specific behavior,” he says. Explains Lisa, “I’m fine with my family. But with strangers I can’t respond, and I think, How could this happen to me?” To get started, Reiner recommends Manuel J. Smith’s When I Say No, I Feel Guilty, a 1970s self-help book.

OKAY, COMPUTER?
Science has created a way to measure how and when we freak out. Reiner hooked our reader’s fingers into a biofeedback machine—lie-detector-style with Velcro and gooey conductive gel—to gauge her galvanic skin response and heartbeat. While role-playing in “anxious” situations, blips are indicative of a rising heart rate. And it’s helpful to know that being yelled at wigs you out more than, say, being whistled at. Says Lisa, “It’s useful in the same way a mirror is to a dancer.”

CURTAIN UP
Part-time teacher Lisa says she is tired of her students taking advantage of her, so Reiner pretends to be a student turning in a late paper. The make-believe feels silly at first, but it still takes Lisa a few tries to put the pupil in his place. This is called cognitive-behavior therapy. “CBT is about what you think, what you feel and what you do,” says Reiner, and you have to work on all three in order to be assertive. Using “I” statements, as in “I don’t like that” instead of “You’re an idiot,” also helps. (Even if that person is an idiot.)

GET REAL
Reiner takes his patients on real-world field trips to show them how to handle criticism from strangers. “Anxiety is the fear of not being able to handle what happens in the future,” he says. To bring his patients into the here and now, he sets them up to get negative reactions, e.g., standing outside a department store and hollering out a weather report every five minutes. “If you can stay on task when people mock or criticize you, it’s really something,” says Reiner. Lisa, however, is still wary: “That sounds stressful to me—to the point I almost feel sick.”

*Name changed to keep creepballs at bay

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