240. How to Change Your Dating Patterns After Divorce

You did the therapy. You read the books. You know your childhood patterns. So why do you keep running into the same toxic situations?

Here's what I've discovered after six years of coaching divorced women: the awareness you need goes deeper than you think.

Yes, you know your family-of-origin patterns. But there's a second layer most women miss—the conditioning around how women "should" behave in relationships with men.

Think about it. You match with someone on an app, and the moment he shows interest, something shifts inside you. You feel pressure to prove your loyalty. To respond on his timeline. To show gratitude that he chose you.

That's not your childhood trauma. That's decades of programming about what women owe men.

This conditioning affects how you see your body, how you feel about dating multiple people, and how you respond when a man expects access to your time and attention.

The path forward? Notice without judgment. Slow down. Observe your knee-jerk reactions. Ask yourself: what belief drives this behavior?

Then decide what works for you—not what society dictates.

Self-compassion matters here. Shame will surface. That's okay. Love yourself through it. Adjust without beating yourself up.

You hold the power to create new patterns that lead you to the right person.

Ready to break free from the patterns that hold you back?

Schedule a dating consultation call with me and let's map out your path to a relationship that works for you.

Transcript

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Dating After Divorce podcast. I'm your host, Sade Curry. I wanted to talk today about healing patterns, or changing patterns, shifting patterns. I know this is on the minds of most women who are dating after divorce, because one thing we don't want to do is repeat the last marriage that wasn't ideal—that wasn't what we wanted, in whatever case that looks like for you.

I wanted to update my thoughts on what it takes to shift patterns. After, gosh, at this point, six years of working day in and day out with women who are divorced, who are dating after a divorce, rebuilding their lives, creating something extraordinary—like a business or writing a book or whatever their own personal project is—I have some new thoughts around it.

One of the thoughts is that the level of awareness we need around what our patterns are is higher than I previously thought. It's higher than I think a lot of my clients come in thinking they’re going to need.

One of the first realizations a lot of my clients already have is that, "Oh my goodness, I had a lot of patterns in my first marriage. There was a way that I engaged in the marriage. There was a way that I dated that moved me to choose this person." They're very aware of their childhood narratives and potential trauma—things that caused dating anxiety or codependency, things that made them move in a certain way that led them to that first marriage. They want to shift those patterns and are in the process of doing so.

But what ends up happening while they’re dating is this moment of confusion. “What’s going on? I thought I had healed all my patterns. I thought I had changed everything. I've done so much therapy. Why am I still encountering these kinds of toxic people? Why am I still meeting narcissists? Why was I in a relationship with a narcissist for three months?”

They come to me saying, “I did all this work. Can you explain to me what is happening?” And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Patterns, or conditioned behavior, go beyond just our behavior in dating. I have a certification in advanced feminist coaching, which takes into consideration the way the world responds specifically to women—the way women have been conditioned internally to engage in this world, and the way other people—men, authorities, governments, law enforcement—have been conditioned to respond differently to men versus women, to people of color versus white people.

There are two levels of patterns happening here—actually more than two, but I’ll keep it simple.

First, our internal patterns. These are the patterns that come from childhood, from your family of origin. You can see them when you look at your parents’ marriage or the way you relate to your mother or father. You might think, “Yeah, I tend to do this. This tends to happen. My family always did things this way.” These are the patterns my clients are usually aware of and actively working on.

The second set of patterns—those they’re not fully aware of—are patterns around heterosexual relationships. Specifically, how we’ve been conditioned in relationships between men and women. If you are a heterosexual woman and socialized as a woman, the information given to you came with the assumption that you should behave a certain way. That information went deep, and it was constant. We are more conditioned to believe that narrative than we think.

We exist in a system that says women should behave in a certain way. A lot of what we think is inherent to women is actually not. There are biological differences based on our organs, sure—but far less than we think. The nature of relationships with men—the leadership of men, loyalty to men, caretaking of men, emotional labor for men—those things are not inherent. But because we’ve been conditioned to believe they are, we go into dating programmed in a certain way. That often messes with our ability to see things clearly, to see men clearly, to see ourselves clearly.

That’s one reason I got the certification. My clients were running into the same issues, and I needed the language to explain these patterns to them. I’d tell a client, “You’re on the dating app. You’re talking to three to five people. This is great. Let’s give it time to see who you really like.” And the response I might get is, “What if the one I really like gets mad that I’m still talking to other guys?”

Immediately, you see the pattern. “If a man even hints that he wants to choose me, I must respond. I must respond on his timeline. I must prove I’m loyal. I must prove I’m delighted he’s chosen me.” The belief is: something bad will happen if I don’t respond the way he wants. Not being chosen becomes something bad. That’s part of the narrative.

This is a very layered, insidious narrative. As a woman, you are constantly running into your own conditioning. That’s why dating can feel so confusing—because you’re bumping into knee-jerk reactions driven by programming instead of unlearning and choosing what works for you.

These internal patterns are everywhere. For example, the way women think about their bodies and attractiveness. I’ve talked to women who won’t date until they lose 20 pounds because “men don’t like this” or “no one will choose me if I’m curvy.” And unfortunately, they’re not wrong. There’s an external pattern—people with larger bodies are often treated differently.

But then there’s also the internal pattern where you believe those negative beliefs are true. That’s internalized misogyny, internalized self-doubt, internalized inadequacy—not through any fault of your own, but through decades of conditioning.

What else were we going to do? We weren’t given the opportunity to make a different choice. Nobody told us, “Hey, you don’t have to go after a relationship by a certain age.” We were told to chase the relationship, so we did.

Divorce gives us the opportunity to redo things in a way that actually works. But if you still carry the internalized patterns that led to your first relationship, dating becomes stressful. There’s conflict: you kind of know you don’t have to do certain things, but you still feel like you should. That’s the internalized conditioning.

And then there’s the external conditioning—the way people respond to you when you date differently. If you’re dating three to five people at once, some will think you’re a “slut.” That’s the conditioning. Even if you decide not to believe it, people—your friends, your parents, even strangers—might judge you for it. That can be hard, especially when your new beliefs are still developing.

I had a client who was dating three men early on in the process. I went on vacation for two weeks, and when I got back, she had gone on a girls' night with old friends from church. They asked about dating, and when she told them, they were horrified. They gave her “wise counsel” to pick just one. So she did. She dropped the other two, even though she wasn’t even sleeping with anyone—just meeting for coffee.

Within a week, the guy she picked had come to her home, and a whole drama unfolded—breakup, emotional turmoil, even calling the police. All in less than two weeks. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t her friends’ fault. It was the programming. That same programming that men on the apps will also come at you with.

I remember a guy I went on one date with. I told him, “No hugs.” I didn’t want that. We were strangers. He was baffled—he couldn’t understand. Why couldn’t he hug me? Because he’d been conditioned to believe access to my body was a given.

So there are your own internalized patterns. Then there are other people’s patterns that you will encounter. You have to understand both.

Here’s how to do that:

1. Start to notice. Slow down. Observe what’s happening. What are you doing? What are others doing? What beliefs are underneath those actions?
   
   
   
2. Do this without judgment. One reason people don’t do this work is because judgment and shame show up first. Shame that you didn’t notice it before. Shame that you’re still in this pattern. But shame is just a feeling—and you need to learn to process it.
   
   
   

Part of this journey is learning self-compassion. Shame may come up. That’s okay. Don’t attack yourself for feeling it. Love yourself through it.

Once you’ve done that, you can decide what’s actually effective for you. That’s what I did when I was dating. I decided early romance clouded my ability to really see a person, so I didn’t want it. For some people, early romance is great. There are no rules—just what works for you.

So you notice your own patterns, your desires, your actions. You notice how others approach you, and you ask: what’s the thinking behind that? Then decide what’s effective for you. What new patterns do you want to build? What patterns do you want to shed? You need to name those patterns and understand how they’ve affected you.

If you tend to overshare on dates and focus more on being liked than actually evaluating the other person, notice that. Where does it come from? What’s the new pattern you want to create?

Naming the problem isn’t enough. You need to decide what’s effective and do the work to shift the pattern. And then tweak it as you go. Learn from your experience. Adjust without beating yourself up.

When you have self-compassion, you can correct without overcorrecting. You won’t exhaust yourself emotionally. You can use this to create your own path toward meeting someone who is right for you.

I hope this was helpful in understanding why the same patterns keep showing up in dating. These are patterns—your patterns, society’s patterns, patterns of thinking. And the way to change them is to take a step back and observe how they’re impacting you.

Thank you for your time and attention today. I’ll see you next time.