No, gracefully: Learning to Say No with Confidence: Taking Charge of Your Life Begins Here. Reclaim

Are you embroiled in relationships that you don't want? Do you fear the fallout that could come from refusing to grant favors or respecting your own boundaries, and then feel bitter, anxious, or guilty? Does your happiness depend on external sources? If your people-pleasing or codependent tendencies are negatively affecting you and those around you, you may need to implement completely new-and healthy-interpersonal boundaries.

Psychotherapist Nubia Santos, MS, MEd, LMHC, CST, offers you transformative principles that will help you understand the negative effects of people pleasing. Within these pages, you'll learn to

• Identify the connection between people pleasing-or "sociotropy"-and low self-esteem;
• break maladaptive habits that involve pleasing others; and
• get control of the impulse to be a subjective pleaser and instead become the objective creator of your own reality.

When you say yes but really mean no, you reject your own and infringe on others' autonomy. Simply put, you're trying to control something that's not yours to control. Drawing from general, developmental, and behavioral psychology, Santos offers real-world examples and reflective journal prompts to help you realign and enforce your personal boundaries.

You can change your relational style-if you let your yes be yes and your no be no.