Healing from the "Bad Boy" Attraction
Reclaiming your worth and breaking free from toxic patterns through self-love
I’ve dated my fair share of “bad boys”.
Certain guys really caught my attention when I was younger. They typically couldn’t have cared if I was around. I was there to inflate their ego. I made myself available for sex when they wanted. I felt used by these men and my self-esteem took a massive hit every time I engaged with a “bad boy”.
So, why do we go for these types of men? What’s the attraction? What’s the reflection?
I want to feel chosen by someone, but most men I have dated have been afraid of commitment, avoidant, or emotionally unavailable—sometimes, all three. They’re usually living in their shadow self and I meet them when something has shaken my sense of self, leading me down the tunnel to my shadow self.
What I mean by “shadow self” is engaging in bad habits, unhealthy coping mechanisms, and negative self-talk—put simply—not valuing or loving myself, and not seeing my worth.
Major life transitions tend to take me to this place, which makes perfect sense. When we go through a big change, some sense of our identity is shaken. Jumping into the dating pool during transition is never a good idea. Almost every relationship I’ve started from this place has not been fulfilling. The relationships I entered into after focusing on loving myself were really beautiful and expansive.
I’m always in a transition when I meet these men, so I am seeking a sense of security, something to ground me into my new reality. This is meant to be internal work.
How can we provide this for ourselves? I feel like a daily routine is the best way to feel grounded. I’ve often felt that traveling around so much has been a detriment to my “success”, in the wider world scope. I have ADHD and am highly sensitive, so change is more challenging. I’m more affected by external energies, I get easily overwhelmed and thus, I need a lot of downtime in a nurturing container. So, in a state of transition, of overwhelm, I have looked for a man to provide that nurturing container, which wasn’t his to hold.
These men need nurturing too. They are “bad” because the world, and circumstances, hardened them.
They were likely taught that expressing their emotions made them a “pussy”. They probably weren’t taught how to love themselves, so they don’t know how to love someone else. They were also often hurt by a woman and so they learned to protect themselves by taking on an “I don’t give a f*ck” attitude and avoiding commitment so they wouldn’t get hurt again.
Have you ever felt like you could love a “bad boy” into being softer? Yea, me too.
This isn’t our job, just as it was never their job to help me feel safe during transition. It’s personal work—to be done with a therapist, a coach, a support group—most importantly, with God. I’ve made these men my god in the past. I’ve worshipped them, laying flowers at their feet, begging them to love me—but we can only love others to the extent that we can love ourselves. So, of course my “love tank” felt empty in these relationships.
Theirs was empty and I was looking to them to fill mine.
There’s the reflection—what they are mirroring back to me. They have been ignoring the parts of them that desperately need attention and love, just as parts of me need presence as I learn who I am in these new places. We both need gentleness, to grieve, to love every part of us that shows up. Self-compassion, self-kindness, self-love are the foundation for this.
I first read Self-Compassion by Kristen Neff for the first time about seven years ago.
It was a completely foreign concept to me—all I knew was being hard on myself. It seemed like the only way to push myself to “be better”, that’s what I was taught. While I understood self-compassion intellectually, I still struggled to see how anyone could elicit change in their lives without putting on the pressure. So while I preached self-compassion to clients for years, I recently realized I was considering myself the exception to the rule—everyone else needed gentleness, but I still needed to be hard on myself.
So how do we provide ourselves with the love we need?
Self-awareness is key in recognizing thought patterns that are unkind. However, I’m a wildly self-aware person, and I was still so hard on myself. I was really experiencing this with my recent fight with my mom because it brought out the worst version of me. I was lying in bed a couple of nights later and I felt God wrap his arms around me and say, “You aren’t strong enough alone to change this, but I can take away your pain”.
I’ve been turning self-compassion into a practice—asking the Holy Spirit to remove unloving thoughts, declaring that “I only allow loving thoughts for myself to exist in my mind.
I banish all unkind thoughts”, and then building myself up with statements like—“I am a good person”, “I have a big heart”, “I am doing an amazing job”, “I am easy to love”, etc. While doing this, I either look in the mirror or I do it in a more meditative state, connecting to the energy of my heart space and feeling it expand as I speak love over myself.
As far as dating—if you’ve read my recent posts, I’ve been doing a masculine cleanse—I’m deep in transition right now, so I know it’s time to be more inward as I discover the new woman I am becoming.
I’ve been connecting back in with the depth of my value and worth. I can say with certainty, for the first time in my life, that I will never date another “bad boy”. I’ve tasted the “nice guys” and let me tell you, their nectar is much sweeter—that was not meant to be a sexual innuendo. Haha! But really, it’s a world of difference.
This will be a post for another time, but a huge aspect of being able to even feel attracted to “nice guys” came from doing a lot of work to calm my own nervous system and make that my new normal. “Bad boys” create chaos in my nervous system. When that was all I knew, while it felt painful, it was also familiar and there was comfort in that.
Let’s make nice guys the new normal!
If you’ve felt worthless from dating a bad boy, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. Begin with a self-compassion practice to forgive yourself for dating men who didn’t deserve you. You are worthy of love, respect, honor, and cherishing.
Love Always,
Becca