When someone questions my admittedly bad dating history, I tend to challenge the assumption that I’m the problem. After all, why should I take responsibility for other people’s questionable behavior?

For a long time, I wondered why all these men couldn’t treat me right and I overlooked the obvious truth staring me right in the face.

The problem was not to love people well and be disappointed. I am not responsible for their actions.

However, I am responsible for myself. Why did you put up with that?

Accountability and recovery from trauma

It took hours of trauma therapy and diving into the deep inner work of healing before I realized why.

The coping strategies I once used to survive trauma left me with reactions and decisions that didn’t seem rational from the outside.

I had outgrown my need for these skills, but I didn’t realize how ingrained they were or how to replace them with new, healthier coping techniques that would allow me to thrive and not just survive.

It took me a long time to figure out how much trauma had crept into my life, my reactions, and my decisions. It will take longer to calm my nervous system and unlearn old habits to learn new ones.

The problem wasn’t what other people did to me; The problem was what I was allowing into my life.

The hard truth is that we cannot control others or make them behave the way we think they should behave. We cannot make lovers treat us right or even treat us with the same love and care that we show them.

Only we can decide what we will and will not allow and act accordingly.

I can hold others accountable for their behavior. I can take a hard look at the abuse, love bombing, stonewalling, abandonment, and anything else that is considered unhealthy and call it out.

But I also have to hold myself accountable for every time I’ve allowed this behavior in my life, even if my trauma history makes it understandable.

I can hold others accountable for their behavior and at the same time acknowledge the fact that I have not set or set appropriate boundaries in my relationships.

Accountability is not a one-way street. However, I have spent much of my life trying to figure out why I repeat this pattern without realizing that it is not about their behavior, but about my response to it.

Relationships change. They are beautiful, to begin with, otherwise we wouldn’t get into them. They don’t always stay that way.

When previously healthy relationships are no longer healthy, the self-loving action is to address the problems and find solutions, or if that is not possible, to let go.

What often happens to trauma survivors is that we cannot accept that the unhealthy changes we are experiencing are permanent.

We think of this new behavior as an anomaly and ignore the fact that we have likely fallen in love with the aspirational version of our partners that they initially showed us rather than their true selves.

The “best step forward” can mess us up. We don’t always realize that the first flush of a relationship might show us the best it could ever be when we date unhealthy people.

Reality will eventually set in, but we keep searching for the version that treated us right, wondering where that person went, what we did to make a change, and how we can fix it. Most of the time we don’t realize that this thinking is a direct result of unhealed trauma.

The right path and the wrong conclusion

Discovering that we have unhealthy relationship patterns puts us on the right track, but we often come to the wrong conclusions.

Sometimes we decide that men (or other genders) are the problem, that the problem is a toxic dating culture, or that we can’t trust our intuition to make good relationship decisions.

The facts don’t support these ideas. Let’s analyze it:

There is no good in men

We may assume that the people in our dating pool are not quality individuals. What we ignore is that trauma will make us attracted to people who are not necessarily healthy for us.

We ignore red flags. We excuse bad choices. We justify dating people who are not right for us.

The problem is not men, women, or another sexual identity.

The problem is that we often choose attraction and chemistry over personality and compatibility and then wonder why those relationships fall apart.

We are so focused on the wrongs done to us that we do not always look critically at our behavior to see why these patterns keep presenting themselves to us or what we might need to learn from them.

We want to say that the people we dated were the problem. However, it is not that we were good, and they were bad. This is an oversimplification.

The problem is that once new information becomes available we stay in the relationship because we value our feelings more than the facts.

Toxic dating culture

First of all, dating culture is toxic because it is full of unhealed people trying their best, which doesn’t always seem like the best when we don’t know their history. It’s also filled with a lot of bad advice and outdated gender norms.

With all that said, we can’t overlook the fact that we are part of this toxic dating culture — and that our contributions to it matter.

I had to ask myself how I was contributing to the toxic culture. As I healed from my trauma, I began to uncover small behaviors that added to the toxic environment such as negative dating profiles, complaining about an ex, or acting like online dating is the equivalent of searching the trash for treasure all the time with… Doubt the existence of treasure. Existing.

None of it made anything better but rather reinforced an unhealthy attitude that I didn’t realize existed because of my trauma history.

Instead of viewing the system as broken, I began to see and acknowledge how healing impacts behavior. It made me more empathetic to potential partners, but it also helped me take responsibility for the way I behaved within a turbulent system.

I stopped assuming that others made mistakes and started evaluating compatibility. I stopped prioritizing attraction and chemistry over personality indicators.

I began to take responsibility for my choices and became the change I wanted to see in dating.

Broken intuition

Another wrong conclusion we often come to is that we cannot trust ourselves.

A toxic dating history can make us doubt our ability to make good decisions. If we’re honest with ourselves, we can admit that the problem wasn’t that we didn’t have good intuition. We just ignored it.

Because we were alone. Or because we were attracted. Because our self-esteem was damaged, or we were afraid to wait for something better.

There are many reasons why we get good information from our intuition and choose to ignore it. The truth is that our intuition is good, but we ignore it until the problems become undeniable.

When we heal, we begin to trust that feeling that something is wrong.

We don’t wait and hope it goes away. We don’t ignore what we feel.

We consider all the facts and let them accumulate to form conclusions rather than trying to make them fit what we want to believe. We learn to trust ourselves because our intuition has always been good, but we haven’t always been good at listening to it.

How to become a course breaker

It’s time to break our toxic cycles and stop blaming everyone and everything else in our relationships.

Trauma is a factor we should not ignore, but it is not meant to merely shift blame. It is a sign that we need to do the remedial work necessary to become a cycle breaker.

Let’s be clear: a once-good relationship must end.

A person who once treated us well cannot hold space in our lives just because he or she once earned it. When a relationship changes and becomes unhealthy, we either find solutions with our partners to solve the problems, or we need to learn how to let go.

It’s easy to say, but the reality of healing from trauma is far from simple.

I have cried during many trauma therapy sessions. I’ve had to confront behaviors that made me uncomfortable to confront.

I apologized for the patterns I couldn’t see when my trauma didn’t heal. I’ve practiced setting boundaries and communicating better even when it felt impossible to express my wants and needs.

I sympathize with the version that made informed decisions because of trauma. Now, my decisions are informed by my recovery.

I no longer actively contributed to my pain by choosing or staying in relationships where the good went away.

I’ve learned to honor and love myself enough to choose what’s best for me even when it’s hard—even when it would be easier to make a different choice.

I don’t hold on to any anger from the past. I don’t blame dating culture, bad men, or faulty intuition for my unhealthy relationship history. I don’t blame or shame myself for doing my best when all I had were coping skills shaped by trauma.

Instead, I live my life as a cycle breaker because I know that my gut is good, that good partners exist, and that dating culture is only as toxic as I let it be.

When someone points out my long history of toxic relationships, I readily admit that I’ve made some mistakes along the way — and learned from them.

My history – of trauma and relationships – does not define me. My choices do.

Accountability and recovery from trauma

The right path and the wrong conclusion

How to become a course breaker

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