Do you notice old patterns creeping back in when you start dating someone new, even after making real progress on your thoughts? In this Coaching Hotline episode, I answer a listener who finds herself feeling needy and seeking validation in new relationships. We unpack why this happens, why it’s completely normal, and how understanding what’s going on in your thoughts can help you navigate these familiar patterns without judgment.
Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.
Welcome to this week’s Coaching Hotline episode where I answer real questions from real listeners and coach you from afar. If you want to submit your question for consideration, go to unfuckyourbrain.com/coachinghotline, all one word, or text your email to +1 347-997-1784. And when you get prompted for the code word, it’s coaching hotline, all one word. Let’s get into this week’s questions.
Here’s our listener question. “I’ve been doing so much thought work on my dating patterns and I’ve had real wins, but I’ve started seeing someone I’m latching onto and I can feel myself spiraling back to feeling needy and wanting him to do certain things so I can feel OK. Am I supposed to feel completely neutral when I date someone? How do I stop going to one extreme or the other?”
So no, you don’t need to feel completely neutral when you date someone. That would probably be weird, right? Then why would we bother? But this is normal. It makes sense. I want to explain to you what’s happening. When we start creating new thought patterns, especially around dating, where a lot of it has to do with like our beliefs about our own value, our own worth, and the way that we want other people to validate those or like prove to us that we’re good enough or worthy, it starts and it’s easier when we don’t really know someone that well or aren’t that attached to them.
So we can start to develop these better thought patterns. We stop getting so fixated on what like some guy named Johnny, whose last name we don’t even know, hasn’t texted us back. But then once we start actually dating someone and like the stakes feel higher, all those old thought patterns wake up. So that is normal. It happens in every area of life.
You do the work on your self-esteem in one job, but then you get a promotion and those old thought patterns kind of wake like the kraken, right? And come back up. It’s normal. It doesn’t mean that the work you did didn’t count or didn’t work or whatever. It’s just that you now need to transfer that skill over to this new scenario. So there really isn’t a different thing to do.
It’s like whatever thoughts you were practicing when you were in very early dating or it was for people you weren’t attached to, those same thoughts are going to be relevant now. It’s just a matter of understanding that this is a normal thing that happens and that the solution is just to return to those thoughts that worked for you. Make sure you’re still practicing them. Maybe you need to tweak them a little, but don’t stop practicing the thoughts you were practicing around dating just because now maybe you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a partner or whatever. That’s not a reason to stop doing that work. You’re going to need to keep doing that work in this new context.