How Do I Know If I’m Just Bad With Women?

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

Dear Dr. NerdLove:

About a year and a half ago, I lost my job. I loved the work, or at least the idea of the work, but I couldn’t get along with my boss, and eventually she fired me.

Then, about 8 months ago, as I was finally finding work again, my wife said she wanted a divorce; that was really painful, and I wanted to try counseling, but she didn’t. Now the divorce is almost complete, and I was talking with my therapist about some irritation in how we’re handling the specifics of that divorce, and I just felt like my therapist was taking my wife’s side instead of hearing my pain and helping me with that, and I said so. I thought we might adjust and continue the session, but instead, she said, yes, she was experiencing some kind of counter transference, and felt she wasn’t and couldn’t offer me the support and therapy I deserved. Then she said she couldn’t work with me anymore, and it just felt like I was getting dumped yet again…

So, I habitually blame myself for all my misfortunes, earned and unearned alike, and I’m trying to sort out if I’m having a simple streak of bad luck or if there’s something I need to fix about myself. Given they’re all women, I worry it might be something about how I interact with women specifically, or it might be that I’m some kind of jerk in general, or it might just be that relationships of all kinds just end sometimes, for various reasons, and I just need to move on and keep trying my best in new relationships as they come along.

My therapist and I had talked about rejection-sensitive dysphoria as a possible symptom of neurodivergence in my case, and that resonates with me because I do take things hard sometimes, but I’m not sure I fit all the criteria for ADHD or any other kind of neurodivergence, per se. I can say that all of this has been really painful, and I do feel like I’m wandering around in a foreign country sometimes trying to talk to folks, so I’m not ruling it out, either…

So, I guess my question is, is there something I need to address in myself? If not, how can I stop getting painfully dumped all the time?

signed,

Third Time’s NOT a Charm

Ok, TTNC, there’s a lot to unpack here.

We’ll start with the easiest: go see about getting tested for ADHD. Don’t worry if you fit “all the criteria”;  as I can tell you from personal experience, a lot of people who have ADHD didn’t get a diagnosis in part because they didn’t recognize the symptoms. ADHD and other forms of neurodivergence don’t always look like what we think they do, and so a lot of us never realize we have it until much later. And – again, speaking from personal experience – just getting rejection-sensitive dysphoria under control is like a goddamn miracle. Even if you just turn it from an 11 to a 3, that’s a significant improvement.

As for the rest of this…

It’s good that you’re recognizing that there’s an issue here, and you’re trying to zero in on what’s going on.

One of the things I tell people is that when you’ve got a recurring issue – such as if your relationships always fall apart at a certain point – then one of the things you want to do is to see what those relationships have in common.

Now, the common followup to this is “sometimes the common denominator is you“. I still hold to that; you are the only common denominator in all your relationships, and it’s clear that you’re aware that you may well be the problem. And I’m gonna be honest: yeah, it does seem that this may be the case.

However, you don’t want to just say “well clearly I’m the asshole here,” in part because that’s not helpful. Even if you don’t intend it that way, it’s kind of self-pitying and a way of excusing yourself from doing any further self-reflection. Once you’ve decided that You – the holistic totality that makes up Third Time’s Not The Charm – are the problem, it’s very easy to go to “so what’s the point of even trying?” instead of actually resolving the issue. Especially if that’s what you want to do.

This is why, even if you ultimately are the sole source of your own misery, you want to look at things with an eye towards nuance and circumstance. If you want to fix things, then it’s not just enough to find the what but the why and the how. What are the reasons for it, what are the contributing factors, are you behaving in this way because of specific triggers and traumas, from learned behavior, from internalized beliefs? It’s easy (especially for others) to say “well maybe you’re just a woman-hating asshole” and call it a day. But that doesn’t actually help people to fix things or figure out how to change those aspects.

Think of it like a car engine. OK, the engine is fucked. What part of it’s fucked, how do you unfuck it and how did it get fucked in the first place? Same thing applies to, well, you. If you want to change some part of yourself that’s causing problems, knowing why its causing those problems is important.

Going by your letter, one of the things I notice is that there’s a sense of resentment towards all three of the women you mention – your boss, your wife and your therapist. You couldn’t get along with your boss, you felt resentment towards your wife over the way the divorce was being handled and that your therapist didn’t understand you or wasn’t helping you. Ok, there’s our starting point. It’s easy to say “well, you dislike women” or “you have an issue with women in positions of authority”, but, again, I think that’s both simplistic and not helpful. It’s worth digging in to exactly why you were feeling the way you were feeling in each of these relationships.

Now, all of these are complicated by the fact that you don’t give us much to go on here. So you’re going to have to be the one to actually dig in, apply as much self-awareness as you possibly can and answer the hard question of “why”

Why did you not get along with your boss? Was it as simple as a personality conflict? Was it that you couldn’t respect her as an authority, especially as someone who was in a position to judge your work or the effort you put in? Did you have issues communicating with her – she didn’t seem to understand what you were trying to say, or you never understood what she was asking from you? Did you have similar problems with other employers or managers, and if so, were they also women? Or is this the first time you’ve had this issue… that also corresponds to being the first time your boss was a woman?

The same with your wife. You don’t mention the cause for your divorce, just that you wanted to give counseling a try and that she didn’t. There’s a lot to unpack just in that portion alone – maybe things had been bad or getting bad for so long that she didn’t want to try to fix things. Had you two tried counseling before, but found that you kept having the same problems? If you did try counseling before, did you actually put the recommendations into consistent practice? I emphasize the word “consistent” here because one pattern I see frequently in relationships is one partner asking the other to do things differently, but the new behavior only lasts for a couple weeks before they fall back to old, bad behaviors. That could easily lead to someone saying “what’s the point, we’ve been on this ride before and I know where it goes already.”

The same thing applies to your resentment in how the divorce was being handled. What, precisely, were you having issues with? Did you feel like you were getting a raw deal and your lawyer wasn’t helping? Did it seem to you like you were being made out to be the bad guy and you didn’t like how that made you feel? Was it about the division of assets, about custody arrangements, decisions about who got what, alimony and spousal support payments and the rest?

With your therapist… this is where stuff gets a bit more complicated. Therapists are human, not Vulcans, and just being a therapist doesn’t mean you quit having thoughts, opinions or feelings. Countertransference – where the therapist’s own reactions, feelings and experiences start to influence how they interact with or respond to a particular client – is a known phenomena, and therapists are supposed to watch out for it. So it’s possible that this was a her issue and not a you issue.

But that’s a possibility, not the definite cause, and it doesn’t necessarily let you off the hook, either. This could still be the result of your behaviors, your expressed attitudes or the way you behaved during your sessions, especially towards the end.

If, for example, your behavior or your issues with your boss and your wife were similar to negative experiences she had with men, or if the way you were interacting with her was starting to trigger something and she realized she couldn’t ethically continue to treat you because of it? That’s right back to you being the problem and your issues starting to come across even with the person trying to fix them.

And – again – you leave out why you felt like your therapist was taking your wife’s side instead of trying to help you with your pain. Is it possible that, rather than taking her side, she was trying to get you to recognize something in your behavior? Was she telling you, definitively, that you were doing things wrong – which tends to be a no-no for certain types of therapy? Or was it that, in questioning your behaviors, actions or motivations, you were feeling judged?

Another thing to consider is how you felt in these situations. If you are neurodivergent in some way and you’re dealing with RSD, then it’s possible that you were feeling rejected or abandoned – or felt like you were about to be – and your behaviors with these women were almost like tantrums or lashing out in fear?

Yet another thing to consider: are these the only examples of issues you’ve had, or just the ones that are the most recent and the ones that stand out because they involved women? Is it possible that you’ve had similar issues with men, too, but hadn’t noticed because that felt more “normal” or “typical” to you? In some ways, it’s easier to latch onto issues with women because of how men are socialized to measure our value in our relationships to them. We’re more prone to notice if we’ve got problems maintaining relationships with women in part because we’re taught to see those relationships as being different or more significant to our sense of self. Relationships with men aren’t treated the same way or accorded the same sort of significance to our identity, and so we may not notice having similar problems with male friends or co-workers or bosses.

Recency bias is a thing. Confirmation bias is a thing. It’s worth double and triple checking whether these are patterns that go further back and are spread wider than you realize. Sometimes the issues we’ve only just noticed have been churning under the surface for quite some time. We only discover them because some other factor has changed… sort of like how many people got diagnosed with ADHD during the pandemic because the structures they relied on to function were no longer there.

So, as tempting as it may be for you (or others) to write this of as “you don’t like women, end of,” I think you should take this as an opportunity for some serious self-exploration. And, to be fair: this is going to be hard. Self-awareness isn’t easy under the best of circumstances; we’ve all got blind spots, prejudices and biases that get in the way. Nobody has perfect, 100% clear awareness of everything that they’re doing and why, no matter how sure they are of their own powers of objective observation. And be aware: it’s just as tempting to go the other way and assume the worst as it is to assume that, no, it’s the women who are wrong.

If you have friends who you can open up to and who you can trust to be honest with you – even if the answer is “I don’t know” – then you may want to reach out and get an outsider’s opinion from someone who at least has the context of knowing you.

But for now? Do that deep dive into yourself and your feelings to the best of your ability. Try to get into the context and nuance of your conflicts – what you felt, how it made you react, other times you’ve felt that way and what happened. I’d also recommend finding a different therapist – a male one, this time – and working with them to dial into these issues. You may not like what you find. It may be ugly. It may be unpleasant. It may say things about you that you are going to find hard to swallow. But if you really want to change and be a better person, not just having these conflicts? Then sometimes its worth going down into the muck.

Until you do, you can’t pull yourself all the way out of it.

Good luck.