Women: what helps someone unlearn negative beliefs caused by past experiences?”?

[Brandon_1998_Wright]

I’m not really sure how to word this perfectly, so sorry if it comes out a little messy, but I’ve been trying to understand something about myself.

For a long time I honestly thought I was a misogynist. Not because I wanted to be, but because almost every major negative experience in my life seemed to involve women, starting with my mom who was a drug addict. Then a couple of my girl cousins, who I was super close with growing up, suddenly cut me out in middle school because I “wasn’t cool enough” for their new friend group.

As I got older it felt like the pattern kept repeating. Girls pretending to like me just to make fun of me afterwards. Trying to befriend women and open up, only for them to use things I shared in confidence to start drama or sabotage my relationships. A few abusive long-term relationships. Getting cheated on. Falling for a girl who made me think she was the love of my life, only to find out she was using me as a rebound and basically strung me along for six years as a situationship but would never actually date me.

I’ve also been falsely accused of sexual assault more than once. I’ve had women ghost me, slash my tires, key my car, and spread lies about me. And after enough experiences like that, I started seeing women as “dangerous,” or like I was always one step away from rejection, cruelty, or heartbreak.

But after 5 years of therapy and a lot of self-reflection, I’m starting to realize: I don’t actually hate women. I’m just really damaged, and I’ve unintentionally connected “women” with all these painful things that happened to me. I know there are women who’ve gone through horrible things with men too. I know every gender has good and bad people in it.

I don’t want to go through life feeling like this. I want to understand women better and stop carrying this knot of fear and negativity around. If anyone has advice, perspective, or even just wants to share how they overcame something similar but from the other side.

[CupcakeTheDestroyer]

Something that helped me when I was in a less than healthy mental space was a couple of facts:
1. The very first thought you have about anything in any given situation is what you have been TAUGHT to think, it’s not your actual stream of consciousness
2. These thoughts can be corrected until they no longer happen
3. If you have an emotional response to something, meaning seeing or experiencing something produces a specific feeling in you, that isn’t something you can control.
4. While you can’t control how you feel, you CAN control how you respond to that thing that made you feel in the first place.


So, for the first two, when you experience those knee-jerk reactions that you’re able to recognize as misogynistic, you can correct them. For example, if you saw someone wearing an ugly dress and your immediate thought was “They look hideous in that” and follow it up with “but it’s their body, they can do whatever they want with it.” That’s a solid correction. With enough time and conscious effort, you can reteach your brain and have those instinctive thoughts be something a bit closer to how you actually think and who you want to be.

[Brandon_1998_Wright]

my issue isn’t knee-jerk reactionsl or small internal judgments about women appearance. The concerns I outlined come from a long history of trauma, manipulation, and patterns of abuse that I’ve lived through and watched affect the men around me. So this isn’t about correcting quick thoughts — it’s about understanding deeper relational wounds

You were describing implicit bias, and recommending a form of cognitive behavioral therapy

This doesn't apply to me because I haven't thoughts like:

"I saw a woman and had a rude internal thought."

It's more like:

I’ve repeatedly been harmed by female authority figures, girlfriends, caretakers, and manipulative women, and I’m worried my son, friends, and loved ones might fall into similar patterns.

That is not something you "correct" with:
"Let me think a nicer thought now."

[CupcakeTheDestroyer]

I knew I was forgetting something in my answer

[CupcakeTheDestroyer]

Essentially, the idea of correcting your thoughts can apply to the things that you know come from trauma. The fear of being hurt can be corrected in your mind alongside finding appropriate emotional outlets

[Nikki1989]

You are not ready to date right now. The pressure to win someone over is too high. Instead, follow through on building platonic and professional relationships with women.

[Brandon_1998_Wright]

I'm married to a women lol

[beenherebefore]

By trying to understand why those past experiences affected you so negatively.

[Brandon_1998_Wright]

How could they not affect me negatively? Did you read anything that I posted?

[beenherebefore]

No, it's a really long post.

[Brandon_1998_Wright]

It’s not really helpful to tell me to ‘reflect’ when I already laid out in detail how these experiences shaped me. The post is long because the trauma spans years, not one event. I was hoping for insight based on what I actually wrote, not generic advice.