On one of these ordinary, but not bad days, I’m sitting and working. The sun is shining, there is tea and even a couple of sweets have been prepared and suddenly there is a call... and from a person who does not call very often and certainly not for the purpose of idle chat. I answer, a few greeting phrases and then my interlocutor gets down to business, and the point is a request to provide a service. While I’m listening to all this, I’m already beginning to vaguely understand that I don’t want to get involved in this, I don’t want to fulfill this request. I'm trying to fight back somehow, but I'm doing it sluggishly. In the end I agree. I AGREE!!! During the whole conversation I understand that I don’t want to do this, but I say YES! I’m sure I’m not the only one. Everyone in their life is faced with a similar absence of NO. For myself, I decided long ago that a direct refusal and immediately, without prevarication, is perceived more easily by the other side. Well, as a last resort, if I’m not sure or for some reason I can’t say NO, then there is a great way to take a break and answer what I think. Despite all this, cases periodically arise when it is impossible to say NO. Why? The simplest thing and what immediately comes to mind is the fear of spoiling your opinion of yourself, the fear of being bad. He refused, didn’t help, but he could have done the same. Everyone has a reasonable degree of concern for their reputation; that’s why they are human beings and subjects of culture. Without the other and his social assessments, a person cannot exist. This is understandable and completely obvious to myself. Another excuse for not saying NO that I have heard is the fear that when I need this person’s help, he will no longer help me. Although life experience says that I have never turned to this person for help, and sometimes it’s even difficult to imagine how he will suddenly be able to help. However, this ephemeral possibility of refusal of help sometimes seriously worries a person, forcing him to agree to completely unwanted things and requests. In the anxiety of such a NO, in such a situation, a small child’s anxiety of being abandoned, abandoned by an adult appears. There is one more, adjacent to the previous one, unspoken NO - this is a NO addressed to a person of higher status: real, for example, a manager at work or imaginary, to that person for whom, for some reason, there is a certain reverent fear or simply fear. In cases of confrontation with such a person, it is difficult to say NO, just as it was difficult (scary) to say NO to your parents in childhood. A person turns back into a child with a feeling of fear of authority. There is another unspoken NO, I think most have encountered it, and from both gender sides - this is when we cannot end a relationship or this relationship cannot end with us. Sometimes, when one of the couple has decided to end the relationship (of course, this applies to unmarried couples), instead of directly telling his partner “NO to this relationship,” he begins to avoid him, not answer phone calls and messages. This is done in the expectation that everything will end on its own, when the other side reaches the full meaning of these messages in the form of being ignored, despite the fact that it sometimes takes a long time for a person struck down by Cupid to get it. I think that behind such a lack of NO is not the desire to take responsibility for one’s actions, but rather the fear of accepting this responsibility. And the last unspoken NO, in its classic version, can be observed in the film “Autumn Marathon.” At first glance, it seems that everyone around Buzykin is using the main character for their own purposes, and he is just a nobly self-sacrificing person. I just want to follow the idea that these calculating women who surround him are to blame for everything. But stop! If you look at this whole situation through our NO, then everything turns out to be completely different. Buzykin is simply a chronic and absolute representative of the unspeakable NO and the consequence of this is absolutely the whole mess of his life. However, if you “take a closer look” at this image, it becomes clear that Buzykin is not just getting by…