Don't Be a Doormat

I am often struck by how many women are pleasers or doormats. Pleasers are afraid of conflict, so they try to avoid it at all costs. Pleasers don't stand up for themselves, what they need or want, in order to keep the harmony. It often comes at a high price. Doormats lay down and allow people to walk on them. I don't recommend either.

As women, we are raised and socialized to reflect the feminine archetype: nurturing, kind, comforting, and compassionate. While all of these qualities are very valuable, I see women get hurt all the time in business and in personal relationships by not speaking up enough. It's almost like some of our greatest strengths can cause us great harm if they aren't balanced with assertiveness, honesty, self-respect, and the ability to say our own truth when we need to.

A respectful relationship with a partner requires that you BOTH respect and listen deeply to the other person's feelings, viewpoint and expressed needs. Keeping the peace and withholding your own needs can make you sad, depressed, angry, hurt, lonely, overeat, overuse alcohol, and hold resentment. It can grow to feel like you are in the wrong relationship. The relationship may be peaceful, but you might feel dead inside. I rarely run into either men or women who are glad they picked this route to happiness.

In your relationship with your child or children, you also need to be an active parent and not use a doormat style of parenting. You are not your child's friend. You are the parent. You need to be loving, but also have reasonable and consistent limits. You must be brave enough to speak up and take action, whether your child has a learning disability, a bad attitude, is sinking academically, not making developmental passages, or is possibly drinking or using drugs. Peace at all costs is a poor plan for parenting your child successfully and into launching towards adulthood.

The workplace is another area of your life where you need limits and boundaries as well as a good work ethic. You are not volunteering at work. You need to have your time respected. You need to not be codependent with being yelled at, taken advantage of, or mistreated in the workplace as well. You need to think of yourself as a professional, act for the job you ultimately want, and command respect.

How can you avoid becoming a pleaser or doormat?

1. Don't automatically say yes to everything you are asked to do by others.

2. Realize there is power in being able to say no. It makes your yes more meaningful.

3.Consider your own needs as well as those of others.

4. Remember that you are responsible for teaching other people how you want to be treated.

5. Have limits. There are some behaviors that you NEVER have to accept from other people, including: screaming, yelling, physical threats or violence, verbal abuse, swearing, bullying, intimidation, etc.

6. Don't dish out or accept disrespectful behavior. Mutual respect is the keystone of all healthy relationships.

7. Speak up.

8. Be direct.

9. Don't hang out and stay in relationships that dishonor you or in which you are being treated badly. Get professional counseling.

10.  Set your boundaries and enforce them consistently and calmly.

There is value to being a nurturer and caring deeply about others. For people who learned growing up to be pleasers, such as people who grew up in an alcoholic home, it's critically important to grow strong enough to balance your compassion for others with your concern for yourself. You matter, too.
Just because you want to be loved or cared for by others, it's not fair to you to make everyone else's needs or keeping the peace a higher value than your own self-respect. Don't be a doormat; you deserve better, but you need to act as if you do.

While we're at it, let's update the feminine archetype as well, to a woman who is loving and kind but not a martyr or self-sacrificial. The feminine ideal needs to be both gentle and strong, loving but also having limits.

What If Your Partner Doesn't Meet All Your Needs?

Contrary to  the movies, popular culture and the Bachelor/Bachelorette TV franchise, having a happy life requires more than a loving relationship with a partner. Putting all your relationship eggs in one basket may put too many expectations and too much pressure on your love relationship.

I like the Buddhist saying, "before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." The same is true about life before and after finding a life partner. Both before and after, we need friends, hobbies and passions, interests of our own, work that is meaningful, an exercise and self-care plan, a spiritual life, and the ability to spend some time alone.

When people are dating, they often are looking for someone who will make them happy and fulfilled. When people fall in love, their world often revolves around the beloved for some time. At some point, a few months or a year or two into the relationship, most people realize that they will suffocate each other if they don't also balance the couples time with time with other friends and activities. The truth is that even happy couples don't stay perpetually "in love." Over the course of a long-term relationship, couples often go through phases of feeling "in love" and not. That's normal.

Happy people realize that being in love or happily partnered doesn't mean to demand or extract your happiness from that other person. You are still responsible for your own happiness, sense of purpose,  developing yourself, and keeping connected to healthy friends. As it turns out, some separate activities and interests can keep things interesting. (Think Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who were happily married despite his passion for car racing, and her love for ballet. They were happily married over 50 years before Newman's death.)

Maybe happily ever after looks more multi-faceted than we were led to believe. Readjusting expectations of marriage and couples' relationships is healthy. Developing a healthy, sustainable love relationship is just a part of the bigger picture of building a happier life.

Are You a Clean Communicator?

When I watch the Monty Python skit "The Argument Clinic," it always crystalizes for me why some people are much easier to communicate with than others. Like the person behind the desk at the argument clinic, sometimes it’s just too frustrating to be understood. What if each person took responsibility for being a clean communicator? Couldn't we make life easier, make communicating more satisfying, and end some drama that happens with dirty communication? I think so.

Think about who you want to speak with when you are frustrated, upset, sad or churned up inside. What qualities do you look for in someone you can open up to? Most people prefer people who listen well, ask questions to deepen their understanding, are non-judgmental, emotionally available, not distracted, direct, honest, not lecturing, and who care and listen from the heart.

Clean communication is clear and direct. If you have a concern or a grievance with someone, you have the courage to talk with them directly, not passive aggressively complain about them to a third party.

Being a clean communicator means you don't use sarcasm, or try to operate like you are "one up." You operate from a base of mutual respect and value the other person.

Clean communicators manage their own stress level. They exercise, meditate, pray, and do their own self-care. They don't make you the verbal punching bag for every speed bump in their daily life.

Clean communicators mean what they say, and say what they mean. Therapists call this congruency.
You keep your commitments, and are impeccable with your word.

Skilled communicators deliver whole communications, as in "when you did x (their behavior), I felt y (your feeling), and next time I would like z (their behavior)."

Good communicators can set boundaries with others. They can say "no." They try not to do things just out of obligation or guilt.

When clean communicators are unhappy with the way an important relationship is going, they don't start an emotional or sexual affair with someone else. They set up a time to honestly talk with their partner directly about their concerns, and see whether they can each take some responsibility for getting things back on track.

Clean communicators avoid saying "always" and "never." They choose "I-statements," rather than blaming "you-statements."

It's dirty communication to label other people, judge them, and blame them. (This is not your job!)

Dirty communication drags out the past in every disagreement and can't let go of it and move on.

Threats are the favorite ammunition of dirty communicators. They threaten to leave, to divorce, to break up with you. This dirty communication style is called being an emotional bully.

Dirty communicators attack and denigrate the other person in any disagreement. They refuse to accept that the other person may have their own perspective, and that that's often okay and healthy. We therapists call this differentiation, and it means you accept the differences between your view of the world and someone else's. Dirty communicators can't do it.

Clean communicators keep their non-verbal cues warm. This includes facial expression, tone of voice, and body language. Dirty communicators do non-verbal leakage that is cold, judgmental, and tight. Warm non-verbal cues make you want to open up. Cold ones make you want to shut down.

My theory is that everyone can look emotionally pretty healthy alone, but it is in close relationships that our insecurities and fears pop out. It gets harder to assert yourself about personal things, and with those that you care most about. The stakes are so much higher than when you assert yourself with a stranger.

For a nice review on these concepts of healthy and clean communication skills, check out the classic book Couple Skills by McKay, Fanning, and Paleg (New Harbinger Publications, 2006).

The good news on communicating cleanly and effectively is that it's entirely learnable. It's our choice every day to choose dirty communication that hurts our relationships and makes people feel they have paid a visit to the argument clinic, or healthy, clean, and open communication.

Stop Expecting Mind-Reading

When we are young and idealize falling in love, many of us imagined a perfect partner who reads our mind and intuits our needs and wants. Later, the mature person of any age begins to realize that if you are going to have any success in relationships with other people, that's really NOT a healthy or realistic expectation to have. We need to grow up emotionally and make an internal shift on this point.

In emotionally healthy adult relationships, each person needs to be able to reflect and sort out what they are feeling, and what they want to request of the other people in their life. Nobody is ever going to read your mind telepathically and deliver your unstated needs to you by UPS. It doesn't work like that. The sooner you can learn to reduce your expectations of others in this area, the happier you can become. You need to voice your own needs, as well as listen to those of the people who matter to you.

Even the right sensitive, caring partner is not feeling exactly what you are feeling, or understanding the nuances of what you need unless you express it. Sometimes in couples counseling, I find one partner with distorted or "magical" thinking about this, and holding onto childhood fantasies that their perfect partner will know them without any effort on their part. Sorry, but I can pretty much guarantee you that isn't going to happen.

I sometimes find it helpful to think about it being our individual job to identify what we are feeling, and teach others how we want to be loved. We are each different, and you may have a very different love language from your partners'. Neither of you is wrong, but as you accept and learn about the differences between you and your partner----in terms of childhood experiences, unmet needs, unique feelings, and expressed desires---you can actually grow much closer.

As it turns out, assumptions are dangerous in relationships are quite dangerous. For example, here are a few bad ones:

1.      I don't have to tell my partner what I need. They should know. ( A set-up for much disappointment.)

2.      I know everything about my partner. (Watch out! This one could come back to bite you. An attitude of openness and curiosity is actually much more helpful. People change all their lives, hopefully, as we keep living, learning, and evolving.)

3.      My happiness is totally dependent on somebody else making me happy. (Wait! Where's your responsibility for bringing some happiness and sharing it with your partner?)

4.      My partner should always be the one to court me, or reach out to me. (Actually, everyone likes to feel that your partner initiates time and positive contact with you. This shouldn't be one directional.)

Let's put that myth to rest that an ideal, mythical partner will read your mind, understand your feelings without any effort on your part, and meet all your needs. The good news is that you will be a better person and a better role model for your children if you are a grown-up who takes grown-up sized responsibility for sorting out your own upset feelings and asserting yourself in a healthy, appropriate way. That's the grown-up adaptation of that childhood wish, well resolved.