You're Not Soft, You're Afraid to Say No

You said yes. Again.

You didn't want to work late, yet out came "sure, no problem." You'd been longing for a quiet weekend, but the moment a friend asked, you heard yourself say "yeah, I'll come." Inside, something was already protesting — and your mouth kept smiling and nodding.

Afterwards you blame yourself: am I just too soft?

But if you pay close attention, what you felt in that moment wasn't generosity, wasn't warmth — it was a faint flicker of fear: afraid of letting the other person down, afraid of leaving a crack in the relationship, afraid of being seen as selfish.

This isn't a soft heart. This is a fear response you learnt.

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"People-pleasing" isn't a personality — it's a survival strategy

In his work on Complex PTSD, psychotherapist Pete Walker expanded the familiar trio of threat responses — fight, flight, freeze — to four, adding one that is often overlooked: fawn.

At the heart of the fawn response is abandoning your own needs in order to accommodate someone else, in exchange for a sense of safety. Walker describes a hidden rule running through people like this: "The price of admission to any relationship is the forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences and boundaries."

This is not innate gentleness. Walker points out that the fawn response usually takes shape in childhood — when a child discovers that pushing back invites harsher punishment, and that voicing displeasure gets them ignored or shamed, they learn one thing: as long as I'm obedient, useful and cooperative, I'll be all right.

In adulthood, this survival strategy doesn't simply disappear. It turns into the habit of always saying yes at work, the tendency to always give way in your relationships, the full-body flinch when you hear the words "you're so selfish."

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You're not "too kind" — you're silencing yourself

In 1992, psychologists Dana Jack and Diana Dill developed the Silencing the Self Scale, designed to measure how much a person suppresses their true feelings within a relationship. The scale breaks down into four dimensions:

Seeing yourself through others' eyes — you judge whether you're good or not not by how you feel, but by how others react. Your boss frowns once, and you spend the whole day wondering whether you did something wrong.

Mistaking self-sacrifice for care — you believe that real love means putting the other person first. Even thinking about your own needs makes you feel guilty.

Swallowing your true voice — to avoid conflict, you choose not to speak. Not because you don't care, but because you're too afraid of what you might lose if you did.

A divided self — all smiles on the outside, exhausted within. You've become an "external version" of yourself, while the real you is tucked away somewhere very, very deep.

Jack and Dill found a clear link between these four tendencies and depression. A later meta-analysis pooling 42 studies and over ten thousand people offered further evidence: there is a moderate positive correlation between self-silencing and depression (Marchetti et al., 2021). In other words, people who habitually swallow their own voice do tend to struggle more emotionally — but this is a finding from correlational research.

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The people most afraid of rejection are the ones most afraid to reject others

Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy and a psychiatrist, proposed the concept of "sociotropy" — people of this type place special value on approval and acceptance in their relationships, and care deeply about what others think of them (Beck, 1983). Sociotropy has several facets, and one of them is a fear of criticism and rejection.

A study that followed 159 university students over two and a half years turned up an interesting result: a fear of criticism on its own wasn't enough to predict depression, but when that fear collided with life stress — surprisingly, achievement-related stress (for example, failing an exam or falling short at work) rather than interpersonal conflict — it predicted longer and more severe bouts of depression (Iacoviello et al., 2009). Worth noting: these participants were selected on the basis of cognitive risk, so they don't necessarily represent everyone.

But the finding is intriguing: people who fear rejection are also especially vulnerable in the realm of "performance." Perhaps because, for them, not being good enough = not being worthy of love. Every time they agree to something they don't want to do, they're really trying to avoid having that equation confirmed.

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In Hong Kong, saying no is a "risky" business

If you grew up in Hong Kong, you can probably double every point made above.

In Hong Kong culture, "face," respect for elders and seniority, and "knowing how to behave" are norms we absorb from a young age. Saying a flat "no" is, in many situations, read as disrespect — turn down your boss's request to stay late and it might cost you a promotion; turn down a family arrangement and you might be called unfilial; turn down a friend's invitation and you might be told you're not much of a friend. "Don't be so selfish" — how many times have you heard that line?

While there isn't yet research focused specifically on people-pleasing tendencies among Hongkongers, there's plenty of relevant data on how East Asian collectivist cultures shape refusal behaviour. One study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences compared Chinese and American participants and found that, in ambiguous situations, Chinese participants were five times as likely as their American counterparts to read a companion's goodwill as a potential threat (Liu et al., 2019). A separate 2025 study of more than 2,000 Chinese university students found that close to half fell into the "moderate people-pleasing" range, with around 3.5% in the "severe people-pleasing" range — and the stronger the people-pleasing tendency, the higher the levels of neuroticism, social avoidance and loneliness (Kuang et al., 2025).

These studies looked at university students in mainland China, and can't be transplanted directly to Hong Kong. But Hong Kong is shaped just as deeply by Confucian culture and collectivist values — prizing harmony, avoiding conflict, caring about others' judgements — and this cultural soil amplifies a person's fear of rejection. Your reluctance to say no isn't just a personal psychological tendency; it's also a response your cultural environment has spent years training into you.

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So what can I do?

Let's clear one thing up first: learning to say no doesn't mean becoming a cold, detached person. It means letting your "yes" come from choice rather than fear.

Notice your body's signals. Next time someone makes a request, don't rush to answer. Pay attention to the feeling in your chest, your throat, your shoulders. If you sense a wave of tightness or sinking, that may not be "I want to help" — it may be "I don't dare not to help."

Practise delaying your reply. "Let me think about it and get back to you." That sentence isn't a refusal in itself, but it breaks the automatic reflex of "say yes immediately." Giving yourself time creates the space to hear what you actually want to say.

Start with small things. You don't have to begin by refusing overtime to your boss's face. Start practising in low-risk situations — turning down a dinner you don't want to go to, saying no to a salesperson. Every tiny "no" is retraining your nervous system: after the refusal, the sky didn't fall in.

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In closing

You may have spent a long time assuming that "not knowing how to say no" is your weakness, or telling yourself it just means you're kind. But perhaps it's only a line a much younger you learnt a very long time ago — still playing on automatic now.

The problem isn't that you're "too soft." The problem is that you were never allowed to be anything else.

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Learning to say no starts with knowing where your own boundaries lie

Refusal is hard, often, not because you don't know how to say it, but because you're not sure where your boundaries are.

TreeholeHK's "Setting Personal Boundaries" workshop helps you, in a safe environment, work out what is genuinely your need and what is a habitual giving-in — and then, step by step, practise drawing that line in a way that feels right to you.

Find out more about the workshop

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Key takeaways

Not knowing how to say no isn't a personality flaw; it's a learnt fear response — most of the time, one rooted in childhood experience and cultural conditioning. The first step towards change isn't forcing yourself to say "no," but giving yourself a few seconds, each time you're about to say yes, to tell the difference: is this something I'm willing to do, or something I'm afraid not to?

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Further reading

If you'd like to learn about setting boundaries more systematically — from the psychological research to the practical methods — this complete guide will help: A psychology guide to boundaries — from not knowing how to refuse to protecting yourself without harming the relationship

Many people don't dare set boundaries because a voice inside says "doing this is selfish." But is that really true? "Setting boundaries is selfish"? How long has that line had you fooled?

References

Iacoviello, B. M., Grant, D. A., Alloy, L. B., & Abramson, L. Y. (2009). Cognitive personality characteristics impact the course of depression: A prospective test of sociotropy, autonomy and domain-specific life events. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 33(2), 187–198. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-008-9197-7

Jack, D. C., & Dill, D. (1992). The Silencing the Self Scale: Schemas of intimacy associated with depression in women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 16(1), 97–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1992.tb00242.x

Kuang, X., Li, H., Luo, W., Zhu, J., & Ren, F. (2025). The mental health implications of people-pleasing: Psychometric properties and latent profiles of the Chinese People-Pleasing Questionnaire. PsyCh Journal, 14(4), 500–512. https://doi.org/10.1002/pchj.70016

Liu, S. S., Morris, M. W., Talhelm, T., & Yang, Q. (2019). Ingroup vigilance in collectivistic cultures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(29), 14538–14546. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1817588116

Marchetti, I., et al. (2021). The relationship between self-silencing and depression: A meta-analysis. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 40(4), 333–368. https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.2021.40.4.333

Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving. Azure Coyote.