The Doormat-Bulldog Cycle Part II

Hi, welcome to Sex Love Power. I'm your host Michelle Lizenberry Christensen. I'm a relationship and sex coach who's worked for 24 years with executives and business founders and by popular demand I've focused on their intimate relationships for the last dozen or so years as they sought my coaching to push the envelope on how good they could have it in life and in 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 convene the conversations about love and sex that help every listener create those same world class results in their relationships. If you or your partner is nice, nice, nice, almost too nice, and then periodically explodes with out of the blue anger, this episode is for you. Or if that person doesn't ever explode, but there's a way that their nice, nice niceness doesn't feel quite authentic or it seems forced. We're going to talk about that too. This is part two of a two part series with episode 25. In the last episode we talked about the doormat bulldog cycle and how trauma reactions feed it. If you haven't heard that episode yet or haven't listened to it recently, go now and pick that one up. It's just 17 minutes and it'll get you ready to dip into today's goodness. What I'm up to in this episode is talking about what to do about your own tendency to go into a doormat mode and then if you do, to swing into a bulldog mode and then with great shame and consternation, back again, only to repeat the whole cycle over. We'll break it down so that you can untangle that reactionary cycle. And if the doormat, the bulldog, or both is your partner or someone else in your life, I'm going to share some effective ways to help them start to see that and to ask them to begin to heal it. I want to help you understand why this sometimes baffling dynamic happens in otherwise good relationships and what you can do about it so that you can have the connection, the communication and the amazing sex that you deserve. That's what this episode will help with, especially if any version of this doormat bulldog cycle is at play for you. So let's dive in now as a micro summary of what we talked about in episode 25. The doormat bulldog cycle happens when somebody careens from a trauma response of being overly nice, which is also known as a fawning response to a different one, which might be characterized as A fight response. And then they often go into shame about having blown up and revert back to the fawning or doormatting and begin the cycle all over again. So whether it's you or your partner or both of you, who's too nice and then too nasty or too withdrawn, which would be a flee response in vagal response terms, you probably want to know how to get off this merry go round, right? Okay, so we need to do two things to break the cycle. First, learn to create internal and external boundaries. We have to learn what we need and what we want and how to ask for those in direct ways so that we're not a doormat. We also need to learn what's reasonable to express and how it's reasonable to express it with other people. That stops us from being a bulldog. The second piece that helps us break the cycle is understanding it through the lens of our nervous system and trauma reactions. Our nervous systems, when they're flooded, go to some very specific ways of fight. Flight, freeze, or fawn. You probably know about fight and flight and freeze as nervous system responses to overwhelming or threatening stimuli. All animal bodies use these approaches to deal with threats in their environment. Our body's first resort is a flight response. Most animals will run away or retreat if they think they can get away from the threat safely. A cat or a mouse or a bird that flees quickly when it hears a sound is a great example of this. Now, in a human, this is the impulse to ignore what was said, to retreat into ourselves, to change the subject, to get away from the person, to avoid the conversation. That's flight. The second line of defense against an overwhelming stimulus is to fight or attempt to show that we could in a sufficiently intimidating way to back the threat down. If we can't get away or sidestep, we'll ask, can I fight this? Can I fight this threat? Can I scare it? And if the answer is yes, we'll start threatening, posturing, or actually fighting. We can easily call the mind a bear on its back legs fighting, endeavoring to look and sound threatening. Or even a frog or a fish puffing up to look formidable to a foe. The emotional response of rage or anger is the body's way of mobilizing a fight reaction. Now, a body that thinks it can neither get away from the threat nor dominate in a fight might shut down. This is the freeze reaction. We're unable to choose a direction at all when we're in this mode. Opossum or a rabbit that plays dead, that goes catatonic is freezing Or a partner in an argument who's at a loss for words. Also freezing. There's a fourth response to threat, though. Fawning isn't talked about as much, but it's a very common reaction to a number of different situations and it has different manifestations. Fawning is when we try to make nice. We try to charm and disarm. How can I navigate around another person I feel is a threat? At least right now, I can feel their displeasure or their dysregulation, and it reduces my feeling of safety. I don't feel like I can get away or fight them effectively or I need them and I need them in good shape so that I can feel good. How do I take care of their state so that I can feel safer? How do I sort of smooth over the icing here? How can I appease them so they're more comfortable so I can feel comfortable? Now, all of these ways of being handled by another person can feel really dysregulating to the person on the receiving end of them. Right? We don't want to be appeased. We don't want to be managed. We want to be met. So the fawning response often has a dysregulating effect on the other person and can actually exacerbate the very anxiety that the fauna was responding to in the first place. If someone's been traumatized in relationships early in life, or even more recently, or if their thoughts about what it is to be married are all about feeling threatened or scrutinized by a partner, they may fawn. It's a fake niceness and you can smell it a mile away. You might not be able to put your finger on it. Hmm, he's being really nice. Why doesn't it feel good? Why does it feel so icky? I don't know. What's my problem? Do I have a receiving problem? Why don't I trust him? He hasn't done anything overtly untrustworthy. Well, don't second guess yourself here. Your mistrust and unease make sense. It's because your partner is fawning. And if your partner fawns, it means a couple of different things. One, he's going into a trauma response. This is not true self expression. It's physiological regulation seeking. This is just an animal level response. And that's why it doesn't ring true. Even if on the very surface of it, it looks like he's doing nice things or he's being caring or kind or generous. I put all those in quotes. They aren't real. And that's why they don't nourish you, because he's managing something in order to try to feel emotionally safe. The second thing going on is that every time they fawn, someone puts a false front forward to try to manage the other person. And when they do that, they're violating their own authenticity. So over time, there's a loyal part of the fawner that hates that and it builds up anger and it wants to express the authentic feelings that they're pushing aside every time they fawn. So as long as we doormat, the bulldog wants to come out, the third thing happening is that we're working hard to try to regulate ourselves when we're in this doormat or fawning kind of place. And if we are a fawner, we are probably also a fighter or a fleer at times. We careen from one trigger to the other. And it's a certain loyalty to ourselves that has us do that. We know it's not right that we cater to someone else's perceived preferences at the expense of our own authenticity and our well being. So that loyal part of us wants to rear up and right the balance. But it often does so in an extreme way that overcorrects and lands us in the opposite ditch. And the other difficult part about this is that our partner probably never demanded that we abandon our own authenticity in order to appease them. That's something our trauma response cooked up. So resentment toward our partner is misplaced. And that's why this can be so painful and so destructive when it's happening. Because the partner rightfully feels self righteous and defensive against the bulldog that comes out after too much fawning. They didn't ask their partner to abandon themselves. So how do we stop the cycle in ourselves or in our partners? How do we catch it while it's happening? And how do we get underneath the pattern and tear it up from its roots and untangle the reactions that drive it? So first I'm going to talk about you so that you can hear if you're someone who's too, too nice and then too harsh and you want to break that cycle. There are five keys to hitting the pause button on your own doormat bulldog. Cycle key number one is baseline regulation and grounding. So this is the first thing that I work on with every client and it's the thing we have to return to if you get bent out of your own natural shape, if you can't stay centered, whatever else is going on, that's the only Place to focus, because from a centered place we can be resourceful. And when we get dysregulated, nothing good can come from our interactions. We can't get what we need from our partner, even if they show up with it, because we can't receive it. So your baseline regulation means that you're cultivating equanimity, peace and neurological regulation in yourself. So the previous podcast episodes that I did called the self regulation Toolkit, I think it's episodes five and six give you a lot of tools for building this regulation toolkit and I encourage you to go back and listen to those. But in essence, what I keep handy for myself is daily meditation, breathing, practice, and a willingness to pause. And for me it's prayer to really say, give me strength. You know, I call it God or the universe or life or the divine, Father, Mother, God. And for you, you know, you might just say, calgon, take me away. You know, it can be however you want to think about it, but just inviting in grounding and resourcefulness is always the first step. The second key to hitting the pause button on your doormat bulldog cycle is finding a healthy I and thou kind of self esteem and other esteem. So my mentor Terry Real talks about self esteem in this way. He says we may want to go one up or one down. And the key to healthy self esteem is to be one to one, equal to equal. I'm me flawed and precious, and you are you flawed and precious. So when your partner is doing something that displeases you, when you perceive them as a threat, when you think that you have to appease them to stay safe, and you're in your doormatting cycle, don't go one down like, oh, I have to screw and get it right and they're disapproving of me and I've got to earn their approval so that I can be safe. And don't go self righteous like, how dare they? Why are they always scrutinizing me? Why are they always looking down on me? Getting superior yourself. So begin to develop a vocabulary with yourself to notice when you're going a little one up, a little withdrawn and superior. And when you're going a little one down, feeling badly about yourself, putting your partner on a higher ground than you, seeking their approval, as if that's what you need. Just notice what your self esteem looks like. And I know that's not how most people talk about self esteem, but I've found it really useful to recognize like, oh yeah, how like if it's a set of stairs we need to be standing on the same step, not have one of us down the stairs from the other one. And in marriage in particular, and particularly the kind of people that I work with who are super self aware, super smart, hard working, it can be really easy for people like us, myself included, to feel superior, to go up a step or three and say, well, I've got a lot more awareness about what's going on here than you do. And you need to catch a clue, you know, and we wouldn't use those words because those aren't polite enough, but we can get really in our heads about it. And from two rungs higher on, two steps higher on the stairs, you can't have the kind of relationship you actually want. You've got to come down and meet your partner where they are, even if their behavior lately has really frustrated you. You've got to treat them like a partner to have a partner. So the third key is mindfulness of your thoughts. And there are a couple of tools that are really helpful for me in this. One of them is Byron Katie's the Work. So being able to identify what are you thinking? What are you thinking about your partner? What are you thinking about yourself? How much have you gotten into your head with the whole situation? And how much are you thinking that? You are effective at reading your partner's mind. Now, we are better at reading our partners than they like to admit. But when we get stuck in, well, he does this because he and we get into a whole narrative about our partner, we short circuit our own emotional response and we get stuck. So I want you to be able to inventory your thoughts. And using this key means being able to recognize, oh, there's a thought that I'm holding on to. And when I think that thought, here's what it creates for me. Key number four takes that to the next level, which is surfacing your own fears and anxieties. Until you get your thoughts out of the way, it's difficult to actually feel your own fears and anxieties. But once you do, it's really useful to begin to pull up what you're afraid of. I help my clients write fear inventories where we surface our deepest fears that are underneath the behaviors and the ways that we're thinking about particular situations. And what we run into is the basic existential fears that we all share that sound totally crazy to us. When they come up, we go, gosh, what kind of basket case am I being afraid like this? But the bottom line is we've always been afraid like this. And most People are walking around afraid like this and bringing it to the surface is what sets us free from it. So bring up your fears. I'm afraid she's not gonna love me. I'm afraid she's gonna leave me. I'm afraid that he doesn't really want me. I'm afraid that I'll never be seen. I'm afraid I'll never be met. Those kinds of fears, those are ours. And we can get really stuck in thinking that our partner is doing us wrong because they don't meet us or they don't see us. And those things may also be true. But when we can come into relationship with our deepest fears, then we can really own that and then recognize, oh, the reason it's so impactful for me when you drop me in the very human understandable. Any partner would sometimes drop me like this. Ways we can see like, oh, that just bumps into my particular unique bruise that has me really get hurt and upset by that. And we can begin to heal those bottom line fears and learn to walk through a world that is really, through the lens of fear is really dangerous. We can become much more fearless warriors with these tender, vulnerable hearts by bringing our vulnerability to the surface. And then key number five builds on that. It's interpersonal transparency and that is the ability to say, oh, right now I can feel my fawn response coming up. I'm so scared, scared of you right now. I'm feeling like I can't, I'm not going to be able to win here. I'm making up that you're going to think this. I'm making up that you're going to say that I want to avoid this. You know, we can, we can speak the unspeakable. We can begin to bring forward the mess that is within us, not acting it out. So when we get messy with each other, unconsciously we're acting out all of this mess inside us. What I'm pointing to here in interpersonal transparency is bringing the mess to the surface and owning it, being consciously aware of it. And in so doing, we can hold it at arm's length. It doesn't have to damage us or our partners when we use it in that way. So those are the five keys to stepping outside the doormat bulldog cycle yourself. And this is what I help clients with with in my Legacy Love program. But what if it's your partner? How do we ask someone else to become aware of their doormat bulldog cycle? Well, as you can tell, I've just done two podcast episodes about what the Dormant bulldog cycle is and what you can do about it. So if they heard this, that's one thing that might help them. But I want you to step back from first and really let go of getting them to change for a minute and look at why you have engaged in this cycle with them to date. Look with gentleness and kindness to yourself and them and recognize the payoff that you get from them doormatting. Recognize where them appeasing you all the time may have been rewarding on some level or convenient. I know that for me, some of the things I recognized in my marriage, my husband's sort of inattention or appeasing me that let me spend in ways that I wouldn't have if he hadn't been doing that. It let me make choices independently because he and I weren't really engaging on them. I got to be more self indulgent. And having him check in more as opposed to being checked out meant I lost some freedoms in a certain way in gaining intimacy. So the first step is really seeing where we're going to lose something when they stop doormatting and giving ourselves space to grieve. Begin to grieve what you'll lose when they stop. Then get some clarity about the dance you two do together. Write out what you see about the dynamic between the two of you. You can draw flow charts, you can use sticky notes. Just take some time to get a clear understanding and get objective outside input so that you really understand your role in the cycle. This cycle is like an elaborate dance. So what steps are you doing in it? Because when you recognize your steps, you can begin to change the steps that you take and the whole dance changes. Maybe you take your partner for granted and you don't give them as much attention or support or connection as you know they need. Or maybe you thrive on drama so when they do blow up, it gives you a little charge. That's kind of cool on one level, even if it's painful on another level. Just look at what your role might be. This is a spot where it can be really useful to have a coach or a therapist or a skilled friend to look at this with you. And next, before you talk with your partner a whole lot about what you're seeing. Invite them to listen to episodes 25 and 26, that's this one. And ask them what their reflections are. What do these ideas bring up for you about our relationship? That's a neutral way to open a deeper conversation. And you may be surprised at what you hear. But what they observe about you and themselves. Now, I want to give you three steps to talking about this cycle between the two of you in a clear way that has some potential to get positive results. Of course, your mileage may vary, but people have gotten a lot of good results from using these steps. And when we just blurt out all of our thoughts about how our partner does this, that kind of rant seldom helps them change. So I want to give you a little bit of structure so that you can be productive in it. So first, say what you see about the dance. Depending on how your partner responds to listening to the podcast episodes, you might eventually say something like, I thought I saw us reflected in this dynamic. One of the things I notice that's most impactful for me is when and tell them something that happens between you, I wind up feeling. So you've described what happens, and now tell them how you feel. And then tell them because I need. So there's the formula. I notice that when this thing happens, I feel this way because I need this thing. Talk about your feelings and the needs underneath your feelings that drive those feelings. So this comes from Marshall Rosenberg's nonviolent communication. And I think that that way of communicating is, you know, there are people who are really, really gung ho on it. And I have found those tools to be particularly helpful when we're wanting to talk responsibly about one particular piece of how something impacts us. Then I invite you to put a stake in the ground with kindness and clarity about how you're going to change the dance on your end. This isn't a threat. You're not going to punish them. You're just going to take better care of yourself. You're letting them know your plan B. This is called making an enforceable statement. Here's how I'm going to change my behavior. If you do this thing, then I can do this. If you, on the other hand, do this thing, I'm going to need to do this. And this is something that I've used in my own marriage. When I got to a place where I realized I couldn't stand a particular dynamic between us and I didn't know how to get out of it, I was escalating when it happened, I would get really riled up and continue going, and it would get worse. We would get into a big fight, and I would behave in ways I didn't like, and he would behave in ways I didn't like, and. And I'd wind up with an emotional hangover. So I learned to say, oops, you know, I had a conversation with him outside the situation and said, I noticed this dynamic happens between us and I'm going to do things differently. If I notice that you're getting really riled up and it's feeling yucky for me, I'm going to point it out. I'm going to say, I can see that you're really in a negative space. Can you please calm down? If you can, then we can keep going. And if you can't, then I'm going to need to leave. I'm going to need to step out of the situation. And I would give him. I told him, I will say it once. If you can respond then and calm down, then great. If not, I'll say it again. I'll say, oops, I'm telling you that it's not working for me. And I hear you pushing back. I don't hear you getting it, that I need it to change, so I'm gonna have to leave. If you can't calm down now, you know, sort of second warning. And then if he didn't get centered, then I would go for three hours. I would leave the house. And we had. Cooper was little, and so we had a small child. And I never felt like he was in danger. I wouldn't have left him if I felt like his dad was going to hurt him in any way. And it wasn't that. It was just like this. This negativity that was really intense, partly because of my level of sensitivity. And I would just go away. So he would lose my services, I would lose the connection. And that's part of what had me in the dance is I couldn't stand for us not to be together, even if it was negative, even if we were fighting. It scared me to be apart from her. And so it was actually very good for me to leave because I didn't want to. And it really got his attention. Oh, whoops, if I behave that way, I lose her. And it only took a couple of times. I might have left for a couple of hours, three times over a period of maybe a month after I started this. And then Kurt really understood. Of course, I was doing things differently, and he started to do things differently. And we haven't had that same. Like, it felt like a smoke bomb went off in the house, you know, that same toxic blow up over some frustration that he was encountering. We haven't had that in that same way since then. So that's how you use the enforceable statement. If you do this, then I can, you know, if you can calm down, then I can stay. If you can't calm down, I'll need to take a break for a couple of hours. And then finally after you've sort of told them and remember going back to the top, told them how the cycle affects you. So the first thing we do is here's what I notice we both do. Tell them about the dynamic. Second, describe the impact on you when you do this. I feel this way because I need and I see my part in this cycle. I tend to do this and I know it has that impact on you. So really owning it and then finally putting a stake in the ground, letting them know your plan B with an enforceable statement. If you then I can. But on the other hand, if you then I'll need to so they're just really clear, oh, you're predictable. I know what you're going to do. So that's how we want to be. Then just stop talking. Give them space to metabolize the conversation. Don't press for resolution. Don't ask them what they're going to do. Don't try to extract promises from them or anything at all in particular. Just ask to talk about it again later. Arrange a time and circle back at that time. Give them room. You've done a lot of thinking about it and they haven't yet. So this will have the best chance of being successful if you give them room to do their own processing instead of you continuing to process it. So that's how you get started with dismantling the Doormat Bulldog cycle in your marriage. Whether it's you or your partner or both of you who goes to Doormat and perhaps back to Bulldog or to a Stone Wall. I wish for you all of the ease and intimacy and pleasure in the world. I hope that you take these tools and you go use them and deepen your relationship today. Now, does this all bring up questions or stories from your own life? I hope it does. The Conscious couples circle@society.lizenberry.com is a great place to ask your questions, to share your experiences, and to join the conversation about creating the love and sex that you you deeply desire in ways that evolve you both. That's all happening@society.lizenberry.com the link is in the show notes@lizenberry.com episode 026. Now if this is thought provoking or powerful or helpful for you, please drop us a review wherever you listen because reviews are a huge help in finding new listeners and growing the positive impact the conversations can have. So please go leave a review right now with a few words about what the show gives you. I would 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 that you always get notifications of new episodes each week. Thank you so much for listening. I am Michelle Lisenberry Christensen. This has been Sex, Love Podcast Power. I'll be back here next week with the next episode. Until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.