A Client’s Story: How to Say No

Learning How To Say No

Hello. I’m Emily. I used to be an extremely kind people-pleaser. I lived by the rule my parents taught me: “Be good to others, and others will be good to you.” More often than not, I wronged myself to be good to other people. It wasn’t until I had been schemed against again and again, drained by malice, and sunk into depression that I finally understood: kindness was never meant to be a knife turned against myself.

The person I am today is no longer afraid to refuse others. I defend my boundaries, and I say what I think. And I’d like to share my story with you, so I can tell you this: if you want to be someone who is both “not to be messed with” and genuinely well-liked, you only need to learn one sentence — swap “Anything is fine with me” for “I want…”.​ Any relationship you can only reach by bending down low was never a relationship worth having.

When Kindness Became the Knife I Turned on Myself

If you don’t learn how to say no, your kindness will become a knife that cuts you.

My three years of graduate school felt like living in hell, with depression’s grip closing tight around my throat. The most direct cause was the betrayal and helplessness I experienced in my relationships.

The first was L — someone I believed was a good friend and who was also my roommate. At first, I thought she was a simple, kind person. As it turned out, I had read her completely wrong. I was almost the exact opposite: her mind ran on competition, and she was forever scheming. To her, not getting the better end of a deal was the same as being taken advantage of.

For three years, she nickel-and-dimed me over the smallest things. She never bought a hair dryer and just used mine. When she cooked something, the rice, oil, and salt all came from my shelf. When she was hungry, she’d ask me for food, and if I didn’t hand it over, she’d act as though I owed her… And yet she wouldn’t even lend me a charging cable for a lamp. None of these things cost much, so I let them go. Even when I felt she’d gone too far and got a little annoyed, I’d talk myself down: after all, we’re friends.

But tolerance only ever invites escalation. Whenever a third person was around, L would bring up my age and my height — putting me down over things I cannot change, just to make herself feel significant. Once, when a roommate’s boyfriend treated our dorm to dinner and conversation ran dry, she used my age as filler, calling me a “leftover woman,” the oldest in the dorm and still single. In reality, I was only six months older than her.

Her malice would catch me off guard again and again, and each time I’d immediately soothe myself: maybe she’s just emotionally clumsy and doesn’t know where the line is. Besides, it was technically true. If I pushed back or let my displeasure show, I’d look petty. Looking back now, L was simply picking on the softest target. She never dared behave that way with our other roommates — her “low EQ” was selective, and I was the one it was aimed at.

All of it made my one-sided sincerity and my search for a clown’s performance constantly squeezed dry, and still delivering myself to her door as a blood supply.

The second source of pain was my advisor. Apart from L, the misery of those three years came from her.

Throughout my master’s, she exploited me. I did piles of grunt work for her — fudging reimbursements to move grant money around, for instance — while she occupied my time endlessly with undergraduate teaching. I had already finished writing my thesis; I even privately gave her several gifts worth hundreds of yuan, purely so she would do the thesis supervision that was her job in the first place. And still, she shelved it and withheld any feedback. After dragging it out for an entire semester, all I got back was advice on the table of contents and a few punctuation marks. In her eyes, I was a servant with no temper, someone who could be ordered around at will. Three years of my youth were hijacked to do chores that had nothing to do with my own future.

More shameless still: half a year after I graduated, she sent me a long voice message from on high, telling me to adjust the formatting of my thesis, put her name on it, and help her meet a project deadline. The moment I finally lost my patience and refused, she deleted me on WeChat on the spot, erasing all my earlier effort and contribution as if it had never existed.

So yes — three years of graduate school, accumulating traumatic memory upon traumatic memory. I was in agony. And there was nowhere to turn for help.

After graduating, I talked about all this with the other people from my dorm. A few expressed understanding. Most thought I was being thin-skinned and oversensitive — that it had happened so long ago and I was still holding on to it. I was already depleted, and hearing that made me feel even more ashamed. Maybe I just had too much free time, I thought, to be fixating on useless old stories. But the harder I forced myself to be magnanimous, to forgive and forget, the more frequently those memories surfaced, steadily eating away at my psychological energy.

In the end, it was my mom who helped. She saw the state I was in, and it broke her heart; she booked me a counseling session. That was when the pain was finally seen, and change finally became possible.

Don’t Sand Down Your Edges to Be a Good Person

My counselor was a woman of real professionalism — crisp and efficient, and gentle too. At our first session, I told her about my three years as a master’s student and poured out all the resentment and regret I’d been carrying. Then I asked her: “It’s all in the past, and I’m still brooding over it. Am I wrong to be so petty?”

She shook her head gently and told me firmly: “There’s no should or shouldn’t. Your feelings matter most. The fact that you’ve carried these feelings all this way means they need to be properly seen and properly laid to rest.”

That sentence was like a pair of warm hands, smoothing the creases in my heart.

With her analysis, I gradually came to understand: I kept returning to the old stories because they had never been properly dealt with. Every time I swallowed my grievance and chose peace, I was choosing escape at the exact moment I should have refused and pushed back. The aggression I should have directed outward, years later with no target left to find, turned inward on me instead. Under that relentless self-attack, I burned through my strength and fell into depression.

Then we began to explore, in session, how exactly one should treat other people. I asked her: “Books and my parents both say to be kind to others. But that only benefits other people — and it comes at the cost of my own feelings and my own interests. So was everything I was taught as a child a lie?”

She answered patiently: “Taking the initiative to be good to others is what strong and brave people do — because offering kindness first will very likely get you nothing in return, or even get you hurt. So when you first meet someone, show a little kindness through small things, and then watch how they respond. Do they treat it as their due? Or do they reciprocate? Observe the character of someone first; only then can you decide whether to keep being kind or to walk away. If you don’t discriminate between people, you get hurt easily.”

Looking back, that is exactly right. After all the times L made her snide remarks, I never once told myself to keep my distance from this person. After all the times my advisor swallowed my precious hours for her errands, I never insisted on voicing how hard it was for me. Human nature probes for the bottom line and then pushes further; it was my own weakness that licensed others to mistreat me.

Take L. I kept showing her kindness, and she kept showing me disrespect — because my kindness actually made her uncomfortable. As the recipient, she felt pressure, and that turned into resentment toward me, the source of that pressure. She’d get irritated just seeing me. On top of that, so much of the malice between people comes from envy. My giving, my not keeping score, only threw her further off balance; she decided I should be the one always paying. And only by hurting me and getting under my skin could she draw energy from me and restore her own psychological equilibrium.

That relationship was pure depletion for me. What I should have done back then was hold my boundary and cut her off, decisively. Because if you want respect, if you want a relationship to grow in a healthy, lasting direction, the answer is not to sand off your edges and become a yes-person who agrees to everything. Giving without cost will only be seen as cheap.

There were so many more traumatic memories from those three years, and they spun me into a vortex of self-doubt and self-attack. But in counseling, my counselor affirmed me with total conviction: “You treat people kindly, and you like to think the best of them. That is your goodness, and there is nothing wrong with it.” And she reminded me again and again: “This world is full of gray areas. Reciprocity is an idealized scenario. When you find someone who values your kindness, move closer to people like that. Don’t cling to every relationship; don’t treat everyone at the same distance. Next time you meet someone like that, push back bravely. Let them see your framework and your principles the very first time — that’s how you earn their respect.”

I’m truly grateful to my counselor. She let me see, from a professional vantage point, the faulty beliefs underneath my behavior, and she shared with me all kinds of ways to set boundaries and process emotion. At the same time, her own was so kind and so strong — accepting and affirming me again and again, steadily pulling me out of the fog.

Being a “Formidable” Good Person

And so, in counseling, I rebuilt the story of those three years. With my counselor guiding me, the two of us stood at a third-person vantage point and sorted through the painful past more objectively. I gained a wider lens for seeing people and things, and I learned how to protect myself and push back against malice.

In the past, my pattern was always this: I’d be bullied, I’d keep enduring, and I wouldn’t explode until the other person had escalated far past the line — which is devastating to your mental and physical health. I could absolutely respond to people’s compliance tests and attacks in a way that is both gentle and firm. For example, when a boss interrupts me repeatedly, I use what I learned in session to state my boundary in even language: “This is the third time you’ve interrupted me (fact). It makes me feel disrespected (feeling). Could you wait until I’m finished before responding (request)?”

Change like that isn’t easy. Following my counselor’s advice, I started by training myself on small things. Low-stakes scenarios: declining small talk with colleagues, turning down get-togethers that don’t matter. And when refusing, don’t over-explain — just state the outcome. “I really can’t make it today; I’ve got things to do.” Through that process, I gradually got used to the anxiety that comes with saying no.

If the other person keeps crossing the line, I protect myself with physical distance — leaving the room, ending the conversation. “I’ve got something to handle; let’s talk later.”

Then I started an “incident log” for the people who have already hurt or offended me. I record it: when did this person offend me, and how did I feel? Writing my feelings down clearly helps me accurately recognize next time that yes, I am genuinely being crossed — instead of assuming I’m just too sensitive.

The gains from that deliberate practice and that written record have been enormous. I’m no longer attacking myself, calling myself weak, incompetent, an idiot who can’t protect herself. I take good care of my kindness now, and I save it for people who deserve it. At work and in life, I clearly refuse freeloaders and the dumping of snide, malicious remarks.

As I set up personal boundaries, I stopped being permanently braced for impact in my relationships, and I learned to take good care of myself. And something strange happened: once I started drawing clear lines, I ended up with more friends, not fewer.

Looking at it now, the reason I was able to shake off the role of the “people-pleaser” and become someone kind but not to be trifled with — all of it is that I pushed open that door and walked into a counseling room. That’s what let all the change happen.

So, dear friend: if you are struggling with something like what I went through, try pushing open that door too. Give yourself the chance at a rebirth.