SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Assertiveness training aids self expression

Press, 5 October 1977, Page 33

SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Assertiveness training aids self expression

Assertive training is learning to stand up for your basic rights without inI fringing on the rights of other people, according to Sue Rawlinson.

“Self assertion is not about winning at all costs. ■The main goal is expression and not bottling it all up,” she says. So for the last year, Miss Rawlinson has been running courses ip assertive training for groups of women who very often have been “bottling it up” and failing to assert themselves in situations they could not handle or resolve. Housewives, teachers, secretaries, students, nurses and businesswomen are in the groups who go to the Narana centre, in Rozelle, to sit in a comfortable living room, and, under the guidance of Miss Rawlinson, a Sydney psychologist, learn to deal with these things. Some of the first things they learn are how to give and receive compliments, how to refuse requests, how to deal with being put down. They also discuss situations in their own lives that they cannot handle. Volunteers from the group act out these situations, sometimes several times, until the woman concerned is sure she is saying what she wants to say, the way she wants to say it, according to Miss Rawlinson.

“Then I suggest she goes out and handles that situation within the next two or three days although there is no pressure on people to go out and conquer the world. They are' encouraged to take ' their own time and develop their own speed.” For instance there was the secretary irritated because her boss would not use the intercom, but shouted orders at her from his office — and never said'“please.” i

After a discussion at one session she decided to go right in, sit down and tell him how she felt and ask him not to do it again. “And it worked,” Miss ; Rawlinson says. “Another young woman ported back that someone had rung her and asked her to go out with him that night.

“But I was determined I wanted to be on my own and I just told him the truth,” she says. “What is amazing is that we are usually expected to give a reason why we want to be on our own so we invent a white lie.”

But a city is all kinds of people and Sydney has many to whom “being on your own” is nothing very special. Being on their own is in fact their problem and a problem they cannot solve on their own — loneliness. So at the other side of Sydney, at the Wayside Chapel, in Kings Cross, a start has been made at helping them with a new club, known, appropriately, as the Icebreakers.

It was set up about two months ago by the chapel and the School of Community Psychology at the University of New South Wales as a place where lonely people between the ages of 18 and 30 could go for help.

Bill Crews, director of the Wayside Chapel’s Crisis Centre is one of the five people behind it. The others are psychology students who have worked as counsellors at the chapel. : Already 20 people have graduated from the first Icebreakers Club and gone on, befriended and no longer lonely, to join other clubs or, as 23-year-old Susy Baranski has done, to a different and sociable way of ilife.