91: Why Do I Date Bad Men?: Feeling Naive & The Importance of Empathy

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Feb 28

Many women experience feeling naive throughout their life and one way this happens is through dating abusive and harmful men. In this episode, we are going to explore how and why women can end up in a pattern of dating “bad” men and not even know why it is happening. Today I am answering a question from a listener who grew up without a male role model and now finds herself in a pattern of dating men who hurt her. My intention for this episode is to help you to see that there’s nothing wrong with you, why you should have love and empathy for yourself, why many women feel naive, and how to start changing the pattern so you can attract good partners.

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Recommended Episodes 🎙️

Book Recommendation 📚

Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by: Clarissa Pinkola Estes
How to Be the Love You Seek by: Dr. Nicole Lepera
Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by: Brene Brown

Timestamps ⏱️

Introduction: 00:14
Question: 01:12
Outro: 22:39

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This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool called Castmagic. Please forgive any typos or errors.
Amanda Durocher [00:00:01]:
Welcome to New View Advice. I'm your host, Amanda Durocher, and I invite you to join me here each week as I offer advice on how to move through whatever problem or trauma is holding you back from living life to the fullest. Let's get started. Hey, beautiful soul. Welcome back to new view advice. If you're new here, this is a healing centered advice podcast where I offer guidance for the healing journey. It's not my intention to give you all the answers. I believe you have all the answers you seek.
Amanda Durocher [00:00:24]:
You just may need a new view and a little help along the way. Thank you so much for joining me for today's episode. Today, I'm answering a question from a listener who grew up without a male role model and now finds herself in a pattern of dating abusive men. In this episode, we are going to explore how and why women can end up in a pattern of dating abusive men and not even know why it is happening. My intention for this episode is to help you to see that there's nothing wrong with you, why you should have love and empathy for yourself, and how to start changing the patterns so you can attract good partners. And before we jump into the question, I just wanted to mention that if you haven't visited my website yet, you can check it out at newbie advice .com for more free resources, including journal prompts, meditations, blog posts, podcast episodes, and more about the healing journey. You can also find today's show notes at newviewadvice.com/91. I haven't really had a male figure to look up to as my birth mom, who I was living with until I was 6, would bring guys home and do drugs with them.
Amanda Durocher [00:01:18]:
I witnessed sexual abuse and assault as well as they would verbally abuse me and my sister. I feel like I am drawn to men who end up being bad people. I trust easily and get attached to these horrible guys who manipulate me and eventually end up assaulting me. Is this just a phase? How do I break it? Thank you for this question. 1st off, I am so sorry for all that you have experienced. It sounds like you've had some really challenging experiences throughout your life, and you do not deserve any of those experiences. No one does. So I just wanna say I'm so sorry for the pain you have experienced.
Amanda Durocher [00:01:48]:
I think you're incredibly strong. It sounds like you've been through a lot, and you're still looking to heal and to grow and to change your life, which is commendable and incredibly strong of you. Many don't choose the path of healing. So I just want to mention right here that I admire your strength and courage to heal. It takes so much strength to do the inner work. Thank you for this question. You're definitely not alone in this experience. I think, unfortunately, so many people can relate to ending up with men who don't treat them well.
Amanda Durocher [00:02:11]:
I know I can relate. My 1st boyfriend in high school was abusive, manipulative, and very, very harmful to me and my self esteem. I would say I was quite broken at the end of that relationship, but the truth is I was broken when I met him as well. And it just wasn't a good situation all around. So I just wanna honor these relationships you've been through because they leave scars on our heart. It's not easy to put ourselves out there looking for love and to be hurt time and time again. So I just honor all these experiences you've had. So when I'm approaching this question, I wanna take it from a very empathetic point of view.
Amanda Durocher [00:02:43]:
I love your self awareness. I think self awareness is often the 1st step to healing and to change. But sometimes self awareness can lead to self blame where we think it's our fault for some of the horrible and traumatic situations that happen in our life. And I wanna remove that blame here. I don't know if you blame yourself, but for anyone who does, it's not your fault. Looking at the things that have happened in our life that have caused us pain, heartbreak, and that have created negative beliefs about ourselves and have created patterns that have been harmful to us, it requires a lot of strength and courage. So I really just wanna honor you here because when we're developing self awareness, there's a fine line between being curious about our patterns and being judgmental with ourselves. We wanna bring awareness to our patterns and our childhood wounding and our wounding throughout our adult years as well, but we do not wanna judge ourselves.
Amanda Durocher [00:03:33]:
We wanna be kind and compassionate and understanding with ourselves. We really wanna be empathetic with ourselves about what we've been through. We are humans, and we're always learning. And so many of us lacked mature and healthy role models growing up, so we've had to figure things out. And sometimes that looks really messy, and sometimes it's painful. Right? I'm seeing, like, a kid learning to walk for the 1st time, and they fall, and they scrape their knee. That is what it can be like to be human, especially when we didn't have role models as we're discussing in this question here, how you didn't really grow up with parental role models. So I've been reading this book, women who run with wolves, myths and stories of the wild woman archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.
Amanda Durocher [00:04:12]:
And it's an older book that talks a lot about the female experience, and this book is over 30 years old and still so relevant today. It's not a quick read. It's quite dense, but I have found it so helpful to see that so many of my experience are part of the female experience in a sexist and patriarchal culture and aren't because there is anything wrong with me or anything wrong with me for being a woman and the wild woman who lives within all of us. I mentioned this because there's a section in the book on naive women and the experience of being a naive woman and how that experience is actually universal for women. So all women experience it at some point, and we wanna learn from that naive experience or those naive experiences and gain wisdom. But sometimes we get stuck in that naive woman's cycle, and this sounds a bit like what you may be experiencing. So the hope is that women before us or our mothers, our grandmothers, the women who take care of us will help us to see men who are harmful, partners who are harmful, humans who wish us harm. It's naive to think that everyone has good intentions.
Amanda Durocher [00:05:16]:
They don't. The book talks about how there are predators seeking out the naive women as prey. I'd never heard it put this bluntly, but yes. Yes, there are predators out there. There are people out there who do not have your best interest at heart. They have selfish motives. They're driven by things like lust, greed, and unhealthy power. Many of us experience being naive, and we blame ourselves for this experience.
Amanda Durocher [00:05:39]:
We can't believe we were tricked by a wolf in disguise. How could we get tricked again? How could we fall for that pattern? How could we fall for that again? But the truth is that we are taught to ignore our instincts, especially as women. We are taught to trust too easily. We are taught that the opposite sex will fill that void within us, that void that screens for love, attention, and validation. I believe this is why so many of us can get trapped in a cycle of naivete. We don't know how to get out of it because no one has taught us or truly reminded us that we have the power to choose differently. No one taught us to trust ourselves. We have become so disconnected from ourselves.
Amanda Durocher [00:06:20]:
As the book discusses, we have become disconnected from the wild woman within, so we end up playing out these painful patterns. I am so sorry you didn't have a male or what it sounds like a female role model growing up and how that must have been so hard, and I want you to know you're not alone. I talked about this recently in my self esteem episode, episode 89, where I discussed that I think so many of us struggle with low self esteem because we did not have a mentor growing up. We did not have somebody to guide us. So it's like we've been thrown out into the wilderness, and we have to figure it out on our own. And I have found that to be incredibly painful. And I have experienced being a naive woman. I wanna say one too many times, but the truth is probably the perfect amount of times for me.
Amanda Durocher [00:07:05]:
But the hope is that our mothers will teach us how to look for the wolves in disguise, how to look for those who are predators. But many of us don't get that guidance, and the truth is many of our mothers didn't get that guidance. You mentioned trusting too easily. So many women are taught to trust too easily, to ignore their instincts, to ignore the red flags. We're taught to be nice, to be easygoing, to make others comfortable, to not be too loud, to not rock the boat. And the truth is a lot of this can play into how then we end up being naive. Because when we ignore red flags, when we trust too easily, and when we put niceness and comfortability ahead of our intuition, we sometimes end up in situations that end up being harmful for us. So for you, I wouldn't even call this a phase.
Amanda Durocher [00:07:57]:
I would say it's a pattern that you have experienced and that you're healing and learning how to trust yourself and how to use discernment. As you said, you trust easily. I don't think you have to just stop trusting everyone, but trust isn't just given away. I recommend my episode on trust, episode 67, where I really describe that trust is built over time. The best metaphor for trust that I have heard is from Brene Brown, who is a critically acclaimed author, and she says that trust is like filling a marble jar. The marble jar represents trust. And with each trustworthy act, we put a marble in the jar, And over time, the jar can become full, and we develop deeper trust. We don't just give someone a full jar when we meet them.
Amanda Durocher [00:08:35]:
Trust is built. Trust is earned. And if someone is untrustworthy, we take a marble out of the marble jar. So in the future, I advise that you begin to practice discernment, which is the act of seeing things for what they are, not what we want them to be. It's seeing a situation clearly without denial and without expectations. At first, you may need to have more boundaries, be more guarded while you're learning discernment. Then over time, you can start to let that guard down because you all have learned how to use your intuition. You'll learn how to notice when your body is communicating to you those red flags.
Amanda Durocher [00:09:09]:
And I don't say any of this with judgment. Again, these are things we did not learn. I invite you to be really empathetic with yourself as you're building these new skills. That's what they are. So many of these things we wish or we think we should have learned when we were younger, but we didn't. And learning new skills, new ways of being, new beliefs about the world and ourselves takes time. It can be a messy process. There's nothing wrong with that.
Amanda Durocher [00:09:36]:
That's why life's a journey. It's really, really about the journey, not the destination. One reason we can give our trust away too easily is that we put our own often irrational expectations on someone else because we think that they will fill a need we have. For example, maybe you find yourself thinking he's the one or that his love will make you feel better about yourself, or he'll provide you the things you've been missing, or he'll fill that void that you feel inside that you don't even have words for. These expectations can blind us. They are like putting on rose colored glasses. When we expect others to fill that void, so when we have these expectations that this other person is going to complete us or they're going to fill that need or they're going to make us feel better, especially people that we don't really know. These are the type of things that can lead to us being disappointed because it is us who need to learn to love ourselves.
Amanda Durocher [00:10:30]:
The more we love ourselves, the more we can love others. But, also, the more we love ourselves, the more we can accept the love of others. So as long as you are running from loving yourself, you will struggle to find the love you are seeking. I know that this has been true in my own life. I always find it fascinating. The deeper the love becomes for myself, the deeper I feel the love of my partner. And he hasn't changed. You know? He hasn't changed much.
Amanda Durocher [00:10:57]:
He's just doing him. But I feel his love more, but truly whose love I felt more first was the love of myself. A book that may help you is Nicola Pera's new book. She is an author, and she's on Instagram at the holistic psychologist, and she has a really big following. And she has a book that just came out called how to be the love you seek. And in full transparency, I haven't finished it yet, but so far so good. And I think this could be a helpful book for you on your journey. I'm not sure of the abuse or assaults you have experienced, but I do wanna take a moment to say that violence is never the answer, and you have never done anything to deserve someone to put their hands on you in a way other than loving.
Amanda Durocher [00:11:35]:
Many of us who experience violence, we begin to internalize the violence. We justify it. Think it's proof that we're not enough or that we are bad or that we deserved it. It's none of those things. You are a beautiful soul who deserves to remember you are a beautiful soul. You do not deserve to be harmed. You do not deserve any violence you have experienced. You never did anything wrong to deserve it it even if somebody told you that you did.
Amanda Durocher [00:11:59]:
You never deserved the violence. You really did nothing wrong even when you judge yourself for your dating I would say the answer is self love, not self hate or self judgment. Life is a journey. It's filled with ups and downs. And what keeps us stuck is overly identifying with our experiences, the beliefs we create about them, and the pain of the past. It's also identifying as a victim. And the truth is it's a really hard mind pattern to get out of. I still find myself feeling like a victim.
Amanda Durocher [00:12:29]:
But the truth is for a lot of us who have experienced violence throughout our lives, we were a victim in that moment, and we have to process that. And we have to learn how to accept something that was unacceptable. It's hard for the mind to understand that, that something unacceptable can be accepted. But freedom, what I think we're seeking here at least that's what I'm seeking. Maybe you're seeking happiness. Maybe you're seeking joy. Maybe you're seeking creativity. Maybe you're seeking calmness.
Amanda Durocher [00:12:58]:
Maybe you're seeking peace. Those things require us to take responsibility for our lives, to process the pain we have experienced, and to forgive ourselves. And when I say forgive ourselves, it's letting go of that, which was painful. Oprah defines forgiveness as giving up the hope that the past could have been any different. You know, along my journey, I've been sitting a lot with being raped throughout my life recently, and I forgive what happened to me. Do I necessarily forgive the people? I don't think I have to to feel free of this. These people don't want my forgiveness, so why would I give it? Why would I allow that to keep me stuck? The people who harmed me aren't seeking my forgiveness, so I'm not gonna allow that to keep me stuck, but I do forgive what happened to me. I do accept what happened to me even though it's an unacceptable act that happened to me.
Amanda Durocher [00:13:50]:
And I feel that way about everything you've survived. It's not acceptable, but I do know that throughout time, you will learn to accept it and to love yourself and to find peace around it and to understand that it's something that happened. It doesn't have to be something you live right now, but that's a journey. I'm still in that journey with you about my own life, so I honor the path you're on. Again, it takes incredible strength and courage to be here right now. So how do you break this pattern? 1st, I wanna acknowledge that it sounds like you were not only lacking a male role model, but it sounds like your mother wasn't able to model discernment and self love either. So I wanna honor that. That's something you will likely have to acknowledge along your journey of healing.
Amanda Durocher [00:14:31]:
I recommend listening to some of my past episodes where I really discuss these topics. I think the father wound episode, episode 66, the mother wound episode, episode 47, and my episode on trust, episode 67, and even episode 89 about generational trauma may be helpful for you and great places to start. I'll link these episodes in the show notes at newviaadvice. Com/91. But along with these episodes, I think that it's important for you to focus on a few things. So the first one is self love. I know it sounds cheesy, but it's really not. Learning to love ourselves is revolutionary in in a world where people do not love themselves and where people are hurting and where people are trying to sell you something to fix you at all times.
Amanda Durocher [00:15:13]:
It's revolutionary to love yourself and to know that you have everything you need inside you. The more you love yourself, the less you will give away your trust so easily. I also recommend my episode on self esteem that I mentioned because I talk about how the lack of a parental role model and the lack of a mentor and a role model really can leave these lasting effects on us. You know, I didn't learn about self love or self worth until my twenties. These weren't even words that were uttered in my childhood, and I never felt like anybody taught me how to love myself.
I was taught that I needed to love others. I needed to be kind to others. I needed to be respectful to others. I never learned about those things about myself. I never learned how to respect myself. I never learned how to know that I was enough. I never learned how to love myself. It was always something about other people, And it wasn't until my twenties that I realized those were things I was lacking, and those were things that I needed.
Amanda Durocher [00:16:07]:
My heart was hurting, and I had tried what I felt like everything outside of me. Oh my god. Did I search outside of me for all the acceptance, for all the love, for all the worthiness. In one day, it was probably many days and many times if I'm honest, but one day, it was like enough. Oh my god. How do I cultivate this myself? And it was through accepting that I had to start doing the inner work, I've now been on this decade long path of learning to love myself, and I would never change it. Oh my god. It makes life so much better to love ourselves and to not hate ourselves and not blame ourselves, not carry shame, and to understand that a lot of the world is backwards.
Amanda Durocher [00:16:50]:
We are not wrong for existing. We are not bad. If you are here, you are goodhearted. You are looking to heal and change. Just because there's bad people out there doesn't make you bad. Just because somebody may have made you feel bad does not make you a bad person. You and you alone have the power to change the way you view yourself. So many of us accept the belief of others and the way they view us as truth, but it is not truth.
Amanda Durocher [00:17:15]:
You have the power to choose how you view you, and that's the inner work. If you don't already, another piece of advice I have for you is to really lean into self care and to begin taking care of yourself in new ways. I don't know what your current self care looks like, but I invite you to choose either mind, emotion, body, or spirit and begin caring for one of these areas. If you feel like you really love yourself in 1 area, move on to another. Maybe you really take care of your body, but maybe your mind and your thoughts could use more attention. Or maybe you're really good at affirmations, but your emotions are feeling out of control, and they could use more of your attention. I invite you to really spend time on one of these areas. You can pick multiple areas, but for me, I found that I really focused on 1 area at a time.
Amanda Durocher [00:17:58]:
It wasn't even intentional, but I really began focusing on 1 area, and then I was able to move on to the next. For me, I first learned to care for my emotions, then my spirit, then my mind, and then my body, and now we're back to spirit. But they did not all happen at once. They would overlap throughout my journey, but it was really 1 area at a time. And it's not like I've mastered any of these areas. It was just I really gave 1 area attention, and then I was able to give another area attention. And now I'm back to giving other areas attention. I think self care is gonna be really important for you too because you have a lot of awareness, as you mentioned.
Amanda Durocher [00:18:30]:
You can see these childhood wounds likely impacting your present day situation. But self care is where we begin to create that safety to allow the feelings to come up with that awareness. So a lot of times, as I talked about earlier, we have self awareness around something, but we can end up judging ourselves when we get that self awareness. We can be like, oh my god. How did I not see that? Or, oh my god. That's all my fault. And that's not what self awareness is meant to do. Self awareness isn't meant to help us just become curious about why we act the way we do.
Amanda Durocher [00:19:01]:
And through self care and self awareness, we begin to create space around ourselves. I almost see it like a bubble forming around us. So those feelings we have buried, the sadness, the shame, the self blame, the guilt, the heartbreak, the anger can arise within us and can be moved out. People are always asking me, how do you feel your feelings? It's creating space. It's creating moments of stillness and presence. It's learning how to be present with yourself. So self care helps us to come back to the present moment because healing happens in the present moment. It happens in the here and now.
Amanda Durocher [00:19:41]:
Even if you're healing the past, it is because in this moment, part of you is asking for you to look at that here and now, and then it can be moved through you here and now. But when we are running so fast, we are often not in the present moment. We're often worried about the future or reliving the past. It's in the present that we can begin to process those feelings. So that's why self care is so important. I heard somebody yesterday in my writing class say that they hate when people ask them, what do you do for self care? I couldn't help but laugh because I was like, I ask people that question all the time. So if you're one of those people who's like, oh my god. I hate this question.
Amanda Durocher [00:20:15]:
I really just want you to take from this that self care is about creating space and about getting you into the present moment. And I know you might be thinking, I don't have the time for it. I'm guilty of that as well. But self care needs to become a priority for us because we need to become a priority for us. And especially as women, we're taught to put ourselves last. Take care of your husband first. Take care of the kids first. Take care of work first.
Amanda Durocher [00:20:39]:
Take care of the house first. Take care of that PTA meeting first. It is revolutionary to take care of you first. And I promise you, the more you take care of you first, the more other things in your life will begin to shift and align, and you'll begin to see more clearly what serves you and what doesn't. And you'll begin to trust yourself more. It's a practice, though. It's a practice. And my final piece of advice is to be kind to yourself.
Amanda Durocher [00:21:05]:
I say every week, but self compassion is of the most important parts of the healing journey. None of this is your fault, and you do not need to feel ashamed or blame yourself. We are not taught so much as children and as women and as young girls and as teen girls. We can all be naive at times. And, again, awareness and having your feelings is about learning to be curious and kind with yourself, not judgmental. There is so much out in the world that teaches women they are not enough. They are unworthy and not to trust themselves and that their intuition and feelings are wrong. I invite you to begin becoming curious about where you may feel that in your own life.
Amanda Durocher [00:21:46]:
I am here to tell you today that you have always been enough. You are incredibly worthy, and that your intuition is the compass of your heart. It is the voice of your soul. You have an ability to connect with yourself and to know what's best for you. It takes time to learn to trust yourself, though. And that same marble jar example applies to ourselves just as it applies to others. You have to build self trust with you 1 marble at a time. It does not happen overnight, especially if we have been ignoring ourselves and our intuition and the wild one within us for a long time.
Amanda Durocher [00:22:19]:
You have the power to heal and to love yourself. This pain, this experience, this pattern, this too shall pass. Nothing lasts forever. It's the mind that tells us it does. I am sending you so much love. Thank you for this question. Thank you for joining me for this episode and for joining me for this conversation about why women can be naive and why so many women can end up dating men who are harmful to them. So thank you so much for joining me.
Amanda Durocher [00:22:50]:
If you haven't already, I invite you to subscribe to the podcast and to leave a 5 star rating. Subscribers and ratings are so helpful and help to bring more people to the podcast and help me to continue creating more episodes and to continue having these conversations. So if you haven't done so already, I invite you to hit that plus button on your podcasting app and subscribe to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me for another episode of new video advice. As always, I'm so grateful to be here with you and to offer you a new view on whatever you may be going through. Send you all my love. See you next time.