Too Nice: The Doormat-Bulldog Cycle in Relationship

Hi, welcome to Sex Love Power. I'm your host Michelle Lizenberry 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 convene 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 their nice, nice niceness doesn't feel quite authentic or seems forced, we're going to talk about that too. 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 over accommodating in one extreme and being harsh, critical or aggressive in 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 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 too 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, that 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 has 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, what is this? Where'd this all come from? I don't even want all this niceness. If you've been packing up the resentment like that, you know what? Do not bother because that niceness was not nice enough to compensate for this here nasty. Now if your husband does this, you know what I'm talking about. But this is a good place to back up 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 too nice and then too mean. 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 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 Mrs. 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, 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 in one extreme and being harsh, critical, or aggressive in the other extreme. What I've learned is that trauma is at the root of our too niceness and 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 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 as irritation with them for something they maybe feel a little guilty about, 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 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 fawning to describe this reaction. Isn't it handy how they're all Fs? Fawning 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. Fawning 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 fawning 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 too nice, more nice than is authentic, balanced or effective for them in meeting their own needs, they're enacting a trauma response. They're behaving against their own self interests, but they're nonetheless making perfect sense as they do it. They're compelled by their nervous system to fawn as surely as someone who goes into a freeze state is compelled to freeze. They're not at choice about it, not consciously. We fawn when our nervous system's 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 fawning or doormatting, 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 Fauna 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 doormatting or fawning erases any of the possible truth of these determinations. It's just that your own doormatting 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. It's true politically and it's true interpersonally, and it's true intrapersonally. 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 on 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. The sincere if 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 right 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 where they bring you an appetizer when you're seated, and then they bring you in a mouse bouche 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 fawn 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 careen to the other end of the pendulum and we start to bill for everything we've been over delivering. The other person is at best slightly befuddled during that doormat phase and maybe even turned off by all the over giving and the insincerity that they can detect, however subtly, in what the doormat's giving. And then when the bulldog phase hits, the partner's rightfully bewildered by the sudden shift in their almost too nice partner and they're rightfully defensive at being billed for deliveries they didn't order. So the newly emboldened bulldog never but ever gets a satisfying response from 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 explain 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, but the doormat's threat response system has picked a reaction pattern that has them be 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. In 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 have a doormat or a bulldog in your life, or if you sometimes see one 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 couples circle@society.lizenberry.com It's a great place to ask your questions, share your experiences, and join the conversation about creating the love and sexual you deeply desire in a way that evolves you both. That's all happening@society.lizenberry.com the link is in the show notes@lizenberry.com Episode 025 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 with 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 that you always get notifications of new episodes each week. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Michelle Isabrae 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 in them. Until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you. Sam.