How To Deal With Domineering Women

One of the challenges of growing up with a domineering mother who routinely disrespected our boundaries as an infant or adolescent, is that we can become hypersensitive to boundary violations with women as an adult. This can make domineering women particularly difficult to deal with when we encounter them in our daily lives. However, being assertive with such women can help us heal our wounded inner child when we stand up to them powerfully in a way that wasn’t safe for us as a child to stand up to our mother.

This leaves us feeling more confident and powerful in our interactions with other people generally; especially those who remind us unconsciously of our domineering mother.

To illustrate, here is a recent example from my own life as a music student at a local college. As tends to happen in any reasonably sized group of people, one of the students in our class reminds me of my domineering mother. Let’s call her Jane. In the past I have often felt nervous around Jane because I sense that she doesn’t respect other people’s boundaries: she openly criticizes other people, engages in conflict destructively and offers unsolicited advice. Even when she is trying to be helpful, I have a sense that she’s not really attuned to the needs of the other person involved and as a result the advice that she gives is often misguided or inappropriate.

Jane is the walking personification of my inner critic.

There is a theory that the universe sends challenging people like Jane to us so that we can heal our old wounds from the past by negotiating new and better ways of relating to them. Another way of looking at it is that our nervous system wants to heal and resolve our historical trauma and we attract such people into our orbit in order to help us do so. Being hypersensitive to criticism after growing up with a critical mother who lacked good boundaries made me quite sensitive to Jane’s behavior.

Whichever way you look at it, we need to learn to deal with domineering people when they inevitably cross our path.

One of the things I’ve noticed about domineering women is that they tend to feel particularly resentful towards powerful, confident men. Whenever I hear my mother say that she really likes a particular man, it’s invariably one who lacks self-confidence. I suspect this is because men who lack confidence are easier to dominate and manipulate than men who are confident and self-determined. Confident men aren’t so susceptible to emotional manipulation by domineering women. I’ve noticed that as my own self-confidence has grown over the years, so has the resentment towards me that I sometimes encounter from women such as Jane when I stand up to their boundary-violating behavior. Emotionally mature, self-aware women, on the other hand tend to find a man that is able to stand up for himself highly attractive.

My strategy for dealing with Jane so far has been to set a firm boundary between us in my mind and simply stay away from her. There are plenty of other students in the class who I find much easier to be around, so I hang out with them instead. Jane plays saxophone in a band with some students in the class and although the group is very talented, I have no desire to join that band because I don’t enjoy the energy of being around someone who reminds me of my critical mother. Instead, I’ve formed a band (a couple in fact) with other students who are also very talented and much more fun for me to play with. My life coach also made me a custom meditative guided visualization which I use to mentally rehearse protecting myself from Jane’s negative energy before class.

This had been working well until recently when I volunteered to play drums on a song that Jane had suggested we play at our end of term concert. Initially I didn’t know that the song in question was her suggestion, or I probably wouldn’t have volunteered. Since Jane plays saxophone and another student is singing the song, I had mistakenly assumed that it was the other student’s choice.

One day in class Jane complained “You’re too loud!” when I was playing drums. The way she said it didn’t feel good to me, but I was happy to switch to the brushes so I would be a bit quieter. Playing drums softly can be challenging as it’s not my primary instrument, especially when I’m nervous because I sense a critical energy coming my way. Later in the same lesson one of the teachers said: “Switch to the sticks Graham, you need to really hit that snare”. Another teacher also came up to me and said “You’re doing really well; just try hitting the high-hat a bit straighter”; both of these ways of giving me feedback were much easier for me to receive.

A couple of weeks later I stayed after class to practice the drum parts for a couple of songs, including Jane’s. She had come up to me during the class and said that I had played another song well, and said something mildly critical about something else that I had done. As the other students left the room and I sat down at the drum kit, Jane came up to me and started telling me how she wanted the song played.

I was conscious that feedback delivered the way Jane does it has the potential to undermine my self-confidence by triggering my inner critic, and at that point I just wanted to focus on the structure of the song and how the drums were played on the original recording. Once I knew what I was doing and felt confident that I could play it, it would be easy to vary according to her desires later. The person who suggests each song is responsible for arranging it, so it was reasonable for Jane to let me know how she would like it played; but the feedback I’d had from her previously hadn’t landed well and I wasn’t ready for any more potential criticism from her just yet.

“I’m not asking for feedback right now Jane”, I responded.

“I know but I’m telling you anyway”, she said.

To me, this was a clear boundary violation and I started to feel angry.

“I said I’m not asking for feedback right now Jane”, I replied.

Again, she persisted: “I know but it’s my song…”

“I’m still not asking for feedback right now”, I repeated using the broken record technique.

“I know but it’s my song and I’m telling you…”

“I’m not asking for feedback right now”, I reiterated more loudly

“Well it sounds like shit!”, she screamed

Again, I replied: “I’M NOT ASKING FOR FEEDBACK RIGHT NOW!”

After a few rounds of this we were both yelling loudly, each feeling that the other person wasn’t listening. In my case, I wasn’t listening because I had explicitly said that I didn’t want to listen right now. I can’t speak for Jane, but it seemed that she had no respect for my desire to hear her feedback at a later date.

Heated arguments are rarely a case of two adults communicating effectively with each other. When conflict arises, often what you end up with is two wounded inner children going head to head and playing out their inner trauma together. I have no idea what has happened to Jane in the past to make her behave the way she does towards other people, but the likelihood of someone like me meeting her needs willingly is extremely low given the way that she expresses herself. This is an example of how trauma from past relationships keeps playing out in our interactions with other people until we get it healed.

To help heal my own residual trauma at the hands of my domineering mother, bullies at school and adult authority figures who told me that I was doing something wrong when I wasn’t, I knew I needed to stand up to Jane. How did I know? Because I could feel the anger at how I was being treated. My emotions were telling me: “It’s time to stand up for yourself!” with a voice too loud to ignore.

I was too triggered to contemplate using empathy to calm her down and it was clear that she wasn’t prepared to respect my desire not to have feedback at the time. As the situation escalated I knew I needed to something to diffuse it, so I used what I had at hand to defend myself from Jane’s verbal onslaught.

I started hitting the crash cymbal as loudly as I could while repeatedly shouting:

“I DON’T WANT FEEDBACK FROM YOU RIGHT NOW!”

A little juvenile perhaps, but it was the best my wounded inner child could come up with at the time to protect myself from internalizing Jane’s criticism.

Fortunately, it worked. Jane backed off. In fact, she stormed off in a huff; probably feeling self-righteous and oblivious to the fact that her own behavior had created the conflict.

In an ideal world, Jane and I would both have the skills to navigate conflict like this more effectively, or at least to clean it up and get complete about it later when we had both calmed down. Since that interaction I have thought long and hard about whether to talk it over with her to resolve what was really going on between us. However, my hunch is that what is really going on for her is the same thing that is going on for me: past trauma being triggered. In order to heal trauma, you need to feel safe. Given that the core issue in the conflict for me was about my boundaries not being respected, I didn’t feel safe discussing what happened with Jane later. I know that she is probably still angry with me and the lesson here is to let other people take responsibility for self-regulating their own feelings; especially when I don’t feel safe co-regulating my feelings with them.

After talking the whole scenario over with one of the teachers who witnessed the interaction and empathized with where I’m coming from, I decided to withdraw from playing drums on Jane’s song. A much more proficient drummer has joined our class since I took it on and I’m sure he’ll have no trouble playing it. That also frees up my energy (not to mention my practice time) for things that are more important to me, like working on songs for my first album. I am also enjoying collaborating with other students who I feel much safer around and as a result enjoy playing with a lot more.

Having strong boundaries means knowing when to stand up for yourself, and when to walk away.