Michele Christensen 0:07
Hi! Welcome to Sex.Love.Power. I'm your host, Michelle Lisenbury Christensen, I'm a relationship and sex coach who's worked for 23 years with executives and business founders. And by popular demand, I focused on their intimate relationships for the past dozen or so years. As they sought my coaching to push the envelope on how good they could have it in life and love and sex. My extraordinary high-performance clients have blessed me with a wealth of knowledge about how to create relationships that are not just successful, but truly great. This podcast is where I can be in the conversations about love and sex that help every listener create those same world-class results in your relationship. If you or your partner is nice, nice, nice, almost too nice and then periodically you explode with out-of-the-blue anger, this episode is for you. Or if the person doesn't ever explode but there's a way they're nice, nice, niceness, does it feel quite authentic or seems forced? We're gonna talk about that to. The dynamics we're discussing today, I get it, you're not alone. Today's episode is going to help no matter how the Doormat Bulldog Cycle has affected your relationship, because I'm going to break down how leadership was the first place I saw and named this dynamic. And I'm going to share what I've learned about its roots since that time more than 15 years ago. I'll tell you what drives this seesaw between being overly accommodating and one extreme and being harsh, critical or aggressive and the other. We'll talk about how to begin to detect the cycle and what its components are in yourself and how to untangle the reactions that drive it. And in the next episode, we'll talk about how to unravel the Bulldog Doormat Cycle in yourself and how to ask someone else to become aware of their own Bulldog doormat cycle. Understanding this cycle and the physiological, not personal, not intentional, purely physiological threat response mechanism that underlies it, has helped many of my clients and students to immediately begin to experience their relationships and their lives in a more harmonious and way less painful way. I want great communication, deep connection and loving ease for you and your partner. And if any version of this Bulldog doormat cycle is at play for you, I am confident that this episode will help move you in that direction. So let's dive in. First, let's talk about the two nice then blow up dynamic that i've come to call the Doormat to Bulldog cycle. As a highly capable, gifted and ambitious woman myself, I've been attracting as clients, many women, who needed a thought partner who could keep up with them cognitively, and match their firepower energetically for more than 20 years. As a result, my female clients are just as I described my audience for this podcast. They're powerful women. So i'll start talking about this Doormat Bulldog Dynamic by talking about men who have it because that's often where it shows up in my Relationship Coaching. Few of my strong female clients can relate to being doormats very often, but when they're heterosexual their husbands more often can. There's this dynamic where a powerful woman gets partnered with an equally powerful man but his power shows up in this good guy package. He's nice and accommodating, and gentle, and kind. And she might sometimes say he's too nice, but he doesn't really handle her the way she'd wish or he has squishy boundaries with other people and that gets expensive in a number of ways. Or she wants him to stand up to her more and what makes it worse when she's thinking, I wish he'd grow a spine, is that he'll sometimes get tired of being so, so, so, very nice. And he'll turn on her like a junkyard dog all along it is looked like he didn't have any needs or wants and he was just there for her. And he was super sweet and patient and kind and then all of a sudden, he blows up and he's a complete asshole and all the stuff that he's been shoving under the rug, he has completely tripped over and he's taking her down with him. Now if you're his wife, it feels really vicious and shocking. And you think where's
Unknown Speaker 4:21
this? Where's this all
Unknown Speaker 4:21
come from?
Michele Christensen 4:22
I don't have a what all this nicest if you've been packing up the resentment like that, you know what, do not bother. Because that nicest was not nice enough to compensate for this, you're nasty. Now if your husband does this, you know what I'm talking about. But this is a good place to backup because people of all genders do this. And I first saw this dynamic with everyone in my role as a leadership coach. It affected women, men, non-binary people, everyone. I first discovered this Doormat Bulldog cycle and described it in this way, this vacillation between two nice and then to me. Because so many people said, when I first became a manager, I really wanted to be an open door manager. I wanted to be so understanding for people, I wanted to have room for the whole person, make sure everyone had what they needed, had a work-life balance, could work at their own pace. I was welcoming, I was accommodating and I was so welcoming that I didn't have good boundaries. And people used me and they pissed me off, and they exhausted me and drained me and they didn't perform. And then I thought, you know what, no more Mr. Nice Guy. And then they'd swing over from doormat, to what I learned to call Bulldog, then they were reactive and less nice than average. So I got great results as an executive coach helping people see those two extremes, and then begin to ask for more of what they needed sooner. I helped them be less accommodating of others, to help them quit trying to mind read and anticipate what others wanted from them, and communicate in more direct ways about what they wanted, needed and expected. They became less reactive, less exhausted, but they were still nice managers and able to be available for the people around them, just in a more sustainable way. So that worked really well professionally. But since that initial discovery more than 15 years ago, now, I've learned a whole lot more about the roots of these dynamics and about why people seesaw between being over accommodating and one extreme, and being harsh, critical or aggressive and the other extreme. What I've learned is that trauma is at the root of our two niceness and our two meanness. Now, what is trauma? It's not just those intense adverse experiences like physical or sexual abuse, or being held up at gunpoint, or going through battle or through an earthquake. Those things are traumatic, they trigger trauma, but trauma itself is the body's response to experiences that overwhelm our capacity in that moment to cope with them. Okay, trauma is how the body responds. So a trauma triggering event could be large, like the ones I just named, or it could be small. And a traumatic reaction can occur short term, or it can repeat itself again and again, without our understanding that that's what it is, over years or even decades. When your spouse is late, and you don't know where they are, you can go into a trauma response. When a look crosses your face, that your partner interprets his irritation with them for something they maybe feel a little guilty about and a little defensive about, that can trigger a trauma response. When you forget to exchange an item before the return window closes, and the mean voice in your head starts to beat you up for quote-unquote wasting money, that can send your body into a trauma response. In all of these situations and countless others, the body is responding. Is its response reasonable? No, it's instinctual. Is it the same response the other partner would have? Likely not, it's personal. And trauma responses tend to take one of four forms. I did several episodes of this podcast about self regulation. And we talked a lot in those episodes about the freeze response in episode five and the flight and fight responses in episode six. But there's a fourth pattern of neurological reaction that people go into when a trauma response is triggered. Therapist, Pete Walker, coined the term bonding to describe this reaction. Isn't handing other all F's? Bonding is almost entirely synonymous with the more common term people pleasing, or the term codependent. It's this whole set of behaviors, that all boils down to trying to regulate the other person in order to keep ourselves safe, even if it costs us our own authenticity. Finding,
Michele Christensen 8:46
like fight, flight and freeze can be a very adaptive, effective response to a situation like all nervous system and interpersonal dynamics. It's nuanced, and it's subtle. So don't interpret my describing funding as a trauma reaction as me saying you shouldn't have manners or shouldn't be kind to others be of service or try to help them be comfortable or at ease. It's not black and white like that, learning about the fawning response deepened my understanding of the doormat Bulldog cycle, because I understood in a new way that people who are being quote too nice, more nice than is authentic, balanced or effective for them and meeting their own needs. They're enacting a trauma response. They're behaving against their own self-interest. But they're nonetheless making perfect sense as they do it. They're compelled by their nervous system to find as surely as someone who goes into a free state is compelled to freeze. They're not at choice about it, not consciously, we find when our nervous systems threat detection system ascertains that we're not safe. It might not be an accurate assessment, but it's nonetheless true for us inside. We agree verbally when we disagree internally. We make offers we can't truly afford to make good on, or we say things that are on the surface nice, but they aren't our authentic responses when we're fighting or doormat. We think we're being nice and we think other people should appreciate it. A sense of ourselves as virtuous and perhaps even long-suffering builds up. Along with that an expectation that other people should see how very good we are, should appreciate us more and should reciprocate our generosity and flexibility may grow. As more of these actions and thoughts and feelings stack up. The doormat or foreigner can begin to develop resentment. You might feel taken for granted. You might feel let down by your partner, you might feel better than them, like you're the more evolved or generous or kind partner, like they're self-absorbed, or lazy or unloving. You might feel unappreciated or unseen. And it's not that your door matting or finding erases any of the possible truth of these determinations. It's just that your own door matting pattern guarantees that you'll feel those kind of ways, no matter what your partner does or feels. And you know, there's something really beautiful about the human spirit, in that no matter how unkind we are to ourselves, or how much we abandon ourselves. something in us is loyal to our own well-being that loyal part will rise to our defense at some point. I often tell clients, the only reasonable response to tyranny is rebellion is true politically, and it's true interpersonally and it's true interpersonally right inside us. The only reasonable response to tyranny is rebellion. So someone who's been laying down in the road to be walked all over for way too long, is eventually going to rise up angry. I see that as a good thing. It's progress for a doormat. But the problem comes when their partner didn't ask them to lie down the road did not require a doormat. Their partner may have liked some of the accommodations that resulted, but probably didn't like the inauthenticity that came along with it. They really do just want the true yes or no, the true compliment not the manufactured one this sincere is perhaps smaller assistance, not the self sacrificial, gigantic help. And now, now that the doormat has risen up teeth bared, snarling turned into a bulldog, determined to write the balance. While their partner feels wronged. They feel unfairly vilified for wrongs they didn't commit. I liken this whole thing to going to a restaurant or they bring you an appetizer when you're seated. And then they bring you in a moose boosh after the salads that you order. And then after your steaks, they bring a dessert, all without you requesting anything beyond the salads and the entrees. So maybe you ate them because they were brought, but you weren't really expecting to pay for them. And then the amount on your bill is twice what you expected because they're charging you for everything they delivered rather than just what you ordered and agreed to. This is what the doormat to Bulldog cycle creates. We find because our anxiety gets triggered we over-accommodate in some way and we have inadequate boundaries. And then after a time the imbalance becomes a bigger threat than the fear of the other person's response was in the first place. So our anxiety shifts around and we careened to the other end of the pendulum and we start to bill for everything we've been overdelivering. The other person is at best slightly befuddled during that doormat phase and maybe even turned off by all the overgiving and the insincerity that they can detect, however subtly in with the doormats giving, and then when the Bulldog face hits, the partners rightfully bewildered by the sudden shift in their almost too nice partner,
Michele Christensen 13:46
and they're rightfully defensive of being billed for deliveries they didn't order. So the newly emboldened Bulldog never, but ever gets a satisfying response for their partner. They are fed up with over-giving, and they're ready to extend some long overdue boundaries, damn it, but now their partner's pushing back. It can be really enraging. But that's why I explained it in detail from both sides to my clients. And now I'm sharing this whole story with you, because I hope you'll be able to see what I see. There is absolute innocence on both sides. Both parties inside the cycle are doing the best they can to navigate life and love with the doormats threat response system has picked a reaction pattern that hasn't been really nice, at least on the surface. And so it's hard for either partner to really put their finger on why conflict gets so out of hand with such a nice guy or nice woman. And the next episode, we'll talk about what we need to do to break the cycle if we're the one who doormats and then Bulldogs, and we'll talk about what we can do to help our partners see the cycle in themselves and how we can ask them to arrest it. I hope that just the naming and articulating of this cycle has been illuminating for you if you're a doormat or a bulldog in your life, or if you sometimes see what When you look in the mirror, these kinds of awareness of what's going on below the surface, and why are often life-changing for people in my legacy love program. And I hope that this can be the case for you, too. So, go reflect now on how this dynamic plays out in your relationships, or your friends or your colleagues. And if there's someone who needs to hear this, please share this episode. I'd love to hear about the symptoms of the Bulldog and doormat cycle in your world, and what questions you have about it, come join the conversation over on the conscious couple’s circle at society. dot lizard berry.com is a great place to ask your questions, share your experiences and join the conversation about creating the love and sex you deeply desire in a way that evolves you both. That's all happening at society got Liz and berry.com. The link is in the show notes at lizard berry.com slash episode slash zero to five. If you've enjoyed this or other episodes, what would help me and the podcast immensely is if you'd leave a review, particularly in Apple podcasts because those are a huge help in finding new listeners and growing the positive impact these conversations can have. So please go leave a review right now. Because a few words about what the show gives you. I would so so appreciate it. And Hey, have you subscribed to the podcast? You're gonna want to so you never miss an episode. Please go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and hit that subscribe button so you always get notifications of new episodes each week. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Michele Christensen. This has been sex love power. I'll be back here next week with the next episode which is part two of the Bulldog doormat cycle where we'll talk about how to know if you have it going on yourself and how to talk to your partner about it if you see it now. Until then, May the light within you illuminate the world around you.