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| Taking NO |
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| ...for an Answer |
| ...and Accepting the Good |
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| that Comes Our Way |
Taking NO for an Answer... and Accepting
the Good that Comes Our Way
A new self-help book being written
by Dr. Karen Stephen (Doctor Flamingo)
New chapters will appear on
this website over the next few months.
An introduction...
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I have
been thinking for months of some way to connect my personal journey, my forty years as a therapist, and my dedication to Twelve
Step work into one book that would mark my exit from the working phase of life and my entrance into the retirement phase.
I’d been apprehensive about retirement in terms of finding meaningful activities, missing my patients and my
colleagues, pining for a regular paycheck, and now, without a partner to share my golden years, being relegated to the ranks
of lonely women who hold up the lines in the grocery store for a few fragments of conversation in an otherwise people-less
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What do women
do, I wondered, who are home Monday through Friday? I had gone to school—straight through from kindergarten
at age four to Ph.D. at age twenty-six—or worked every day of my life. Okay, I admit had three months
off with one baby and eleven months with the other. But as any new mother knows, that’s not really
time off.
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As I thought
through all the varieties of ways that NO presents itself in our lives, it occurred to me that the vast majority of the six
to eight thousand patients I had seen over forty years came to therapy because there had been a huge NO in their life.
NO to a normal childhood free from violence or neglect, NO to their aspirations, their dreams, NO to relationships
they craved and their partners discarded, NO to the hopes of good health, even NO to their tenuous grip on life itself.
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Therapy does
not attract those who have encountered YES in their lives. Therapy is the last resort—after pleading,
finagling, and hitting their heads against the brick walls—for those who have been beaten down by NO. I
mused about the time and energy I had spent over the years encouraging women to say NO with comparatively less attention
to taking NO for an answer. I also cautioned myself that I must not imply that taking NO for an
answer is the right solution in situations of discrimination or abuse. Of course, we must stand up for
ourselves. I stood up to my first NO on my very first day of graduate school back in 1965.
Our department chair blustered into our classroom and blurted out, with not so much as an introduction of himself or
a greeting, that if he had it his way there wouldn’t be any women there—as it was, there were only five of us
in a class of twenty-five—because all the University was going to do was waste its money educating us and we would be
going to go off to have children and never work. I suppose one of the activities I could do to fill my
retirement years is to go and spit on his grave.
I decided I would
first describe all the situations in life where we are forced—later on you will hear me say privileged—to
take NO for an answer. Then I would explore how to take YES as an answer; YES to an eclectic plethora of
positive, self-soothing, enlightening concepts and activities that lead to the acceptance of those NOs. One
line from my daily meditations had leapt out at me at the beginning of my journey and had embedded itself in my brain.
Contentment comes from accepting gratefully the good that comes to us, and not from raging at life because it is
not better.
Voila!
My title. Taking NO for and Answer and Accepting the Good that Comes Our Way.
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