Welcome to Thomistic Womanhood. This is video number three on the truth series, we are going into the broader series of beauty, truth, and goodness, how to attract demand. And this is the section on truth, there is a certain truth and accuracy you have to have in dating. And this is where we talk about that. So this is video three we’re going to talk about to have a healthy and accurate self-image. In other words, you want to heal your trauma as a woman, you need a stable self-image.

And when you’re dating, because dating can be brutal, there’s rejection, there, often selfish men that will come across your way because us women have a lot of benefits. And I’m not even talking about sexual benefits. Even just on an emotional level we are we can be companions to men, we can be their confidence, we can sue their sorrows, we cook or we can cook them food, there’s a lot that a woman can add to a man, we can be their motivation, we can help them have children and leave a legacy we can help cheer them up on sad days. So having a woman in your life is a very big benefit. And oftentimes, the benefits of a woman are kind of downplayed by men who are trying to get something for nothing. So it is important to withstand the jerks that you’re going to come across because when you’re dating, there is an evaluation process, you have to kind of vet these men, and not every guy you come across is going to be a good person, there are men who are just not good for you, you’re just not compatible. And then some men are just not good for any woman. And they’re not healthy men psychologically or emotionally and physically.

So to go through that, you need to have a good self-image, you need to have self-respect, and you need to have certain stability to you. And that is hard to do when you’ve gone through some sort of trauma or heartbreak. And you haven’t healed from that. And so that’s why, when we’re talking about truth, you want to know the truth of what you’ve been through, you want to process that, unfortunately, it is very easy for women to have some sort of trauma and baggage nowadays, because, and it’s often not your fault, because our dating norms are so opposite to feminine nature, that it is very easy for us to go through very heart-rending breakups, and to be kind of it has become socially acceptable and normal to use women. And so for us women, it can be devastating when you are used in a certain way, the I don’t know, the dating norms are just really out of whack. And also as a society, we’ve left off etiquette and politeness and manners, that’s another thing that’s kind of gone by the wayside. There’s a lot of broken families, we have a few generations of parents that kind of don’t know how to be parents, like, I don’t want to be harsh, but raising children. And parenthood has been really downplayed, and look down on for the last few decades that a lot of people, maybe you haven’t gone through some heartbreak, but maybe your parents weren’t good to you. And that can leave scars. So as women, it’s important to heal from that.

Speaking of heartbreak, I saw an ad and I forget what it was for. It was one of those YouTube ads, and it was talking about statistics about women. And one of the statistics that I thought was so sad was they showed a woman just basically like ugly crying, and she was like, like, and they said, the average woman will experience a significant breakup three or four times in her life. And I was like, wow. And that is why this is partly because of what I think are unfair sexual expectations. In our society, it has become normal and accepted that you’re going to sleep with a man regardless of whether he’s like, committed to you, married you and feminine psychology doesn’t work that way. Obviously, some women are different. They like to have flings. I’m not saying it’s like this for every woman across the board. But in general, if you take a woman, especially when she’s younger, and she’s at the beginning of the dating process, she hasn’t had a chance to be used and hurt and become jaded. If you take a woman at her natural state when she’s most authentic. I think most women would agree that they don’t want to sleep with someone unless they’re in a permanent relationship. A lot of women think they’re in A permanent relationship and they do sleep with someone and break up ends, it can be devastating for women, and then they can go through these awful heartbreaks and have a lot of baggage from that. And that is, again, that’s an unfair expectation that we place on women, there’s a lot of people that they knock the religious people and say, like, Oh, you just don’t want to have fun, like you’re approved. And it’s like, no, we’re trying to prevent a problem here, it’s, it’s not fair of us to expect women to give ourselves to men over and over and over and just hope that one of them sticks around forever, that’s not a good strategy.

So this can cause a lot of baggage and pain. And especially, if you did not have a stable loving family on top of it, that’s a lot of stuff to deal with. So it is important to heal from the ways to heal from those therapists, you can get a therapist, you can talk it out with them, that’s often helpful. Sometimes it helps to have a third party’s perspective on what you went through. But you want to be careful that you don’t get a therapist that is in the Freudian school of thought, who thinks that all you’re just not sexually liberated or your repressed, like, that’s not going to help you. And there are some therapists that kind of make everything about sex. And that’s not beneficial. So get a good therapist, one that you trust, one that is skilled and knows what they’re doing. And it’s not something to be ashamed about. And I think also, sometimes when you’re in religious circles, sometimes people can be like, Oh, just pray about it, you’re just not spiritual enough, that’s not always the case you want to get a good therapist. And I think that attitude stems from the fact that sometimes you can get a very, like a not religious therapist, then they’ll kind of tell you weird sinful things to do, therapists get a bad rap in religious circles. Because of that, however, God works through human instruments, and he will often not heal you directly, sometimes he wants a human being to kind of be the instrument of that. And he will often use a competent, good therapist to do that.

Journaling is another good thing, you want to find a good self-help book that has journaling prompts, you sometimes you can just kind of look through, look through the Self Help section at the bookstore or on Amazon or wherever you buy your books. And,  sometimes you can just go through it and look at what’s interesting to you, what is the particular problem, an emotional problem that you’re dealing with? Did you have alcoholic parents? maybe find a book on that? Did you have parents that maybe there was a severe mental illness? One of your parents had that baby that’s a different book to read, did you have heartbreak? Did you date a narcissist, maybe find a self-help book that’s a little more tailored to the situation you’re in and look for maybe prompts writing prompts in the back of it, or see if it has like a workbook with it. And that can be very beneficial. Another thing, there are a couple of things that I think are good. Dr. Phil wrote a book. I know Dr. Phil’s a little I feel like sometimes he kind of jumped the shark a little bit. But one of his earlier books was really good. It was called self matters. And that is an excellent book for working through trauma.

What it does is because remember, the way to heal trauma is again, going back to this is why it’s under truth, the way partly why the way to heal it is to know the truth of what happened. Oftentimes, we have baggage because we have an inaccurate remembrance of what happened. And our body, on want to say on like a spiritual level, we are oriented for truth, we’re made for God, God is truth. And we’re made for truth. that’s why you get curious, and you’re like, Well, tell me what happened, and if that’s also why we get so offended when someone lies to us, everybody instinctively hates when someone lies to them. And it’s because we are oriented toward truth. And so when something terrible happens to us, and somebody lies to us about it, which often happens in trauma, if you have an abusive parent, or you had a bad boyfriend or something, they will often lie to you about what happened because it bothers their conscience. They don’t want to admit what they did. And so they’ll tell you, no, you’re making it up, or no, that’s not how it is. Or no, it’s your fault, because you’re bad or whatever. And so we will often remember it falsely. There is a falsehood there that gets caught up in it. And that’s why our body and our mind will kind of like to play that out again, psychology talks about like a repetition compulsion, they’ll say, this is why you keep attracting bad men, you’re trying to play out what happened. And in a sense, that’s true. But what it is, it knows that there’s something false there and it’s trying to get you to find the truth of it. And so what you need to do is you need to sit down and be very, very honest and truthful with you. This is why when you get a good therapist, this is why they can heal you. Because someone else can often see the truth of a situation better than you can. And they can tell you well, I think this is what I think this is really how you should view that, you were a child when that happened. As a child, you didn’t understand the truth of it. But this is what I think. And then you go, Oh, yeah, you’re right, that is the truth of what happened, and then kind of unlocks the pain, and you kind of get free of it. Because it’s the truth, truth is very psychologically healing.

That’s why our Lord said in the Bible, the truth will set you free. So if you feel like you have a lot of pain that’s kind of keeping you captive, like to the past, try to get to the truth of what happened. And then that can set you free. So again, that’s why I like Dr. Phil’s book, he has you list the 10 defining moments of your life or the seven pivotal choices, and five, I think it’s like the five pivotal people, seven crucial choices, things like that, but read that book, and go through the journaling exercises that he has you do about those moments, those people those choices, because what he has you do is write out the truth of what happened. And that’s very healing. Now, it can be very painful, you may need to take time off work, this is not the kind of stuff you can just do on a weekend and be like, whoo, I’m done, I’m fixed. Now. That’s not how that works, especially, depending on what happened to you, there can be a lot to unpack, there can be a lot of pain there. And that can take time. So try to do it over maybe a few weekends, it may take a few months. And like I said, you may need to take time off work, you may need a week off work. Or maybe you need to quit your job and take a month or two between another job in between jobs to work on this. Because as a woman, you need to get to the truth of what happened to you and get to the truth of your feelings, or else you’re not really going to live life to its fullest, and that’s going to impact your relationships. Because again, you’ll have that misunderstanding, and you’ll have kind of a wrong idea a little bit about men, and then the men that are in your life, you may not recognize the good or it’ll just mess things up. So that’s important. Another good thing. Dr. Jordan Peterson has something called past authoring, which again, he has you write out the truth of what happened. And then you can look at that. And again, it’s, it’s about the truth, you want to write out what really happened. And then sit back, any journaling? You do, you want to write out as accurately as possible, what happened to you, even if it’s painful if it makes you cry, if it’s awful, you write out the truth of what happened. Even if you’re broke, you don’t always need a book for this.

Sometimes, that deep dark thing that you don’t want to, there’s a sore spot that you don’t want to touch because you’re hitting a nerve, it’s tender, take that, write it out in as much detail and as much accuracy as possible. Then when it’s all done, and you’ve kind of gotten it out on the paper, then read through it and be like, Okay, what is the truth of what happened here? Have I been remembering it falsely? Have I been blaming myself for something that really wasn’t my fault? I know you’ll blame yourself. Like, let’s say something terrible happens with a guy and you’re like, well, if I hadn’t worn that outfit, that wouldn’t have happened. Or if I hadn’t gone to the party with him, that wouldn’t happen. Or if I hadn’t gotten into the car with him, that wouldn’t happen. And you kind of blame yourself. And there is a certain extent to where, yes, you made a choice. But at the same time, other people make choices too, and you’re not responsible for what other people do to you. And it’s important to remember that when you read over things because again, we can often be too hard on ourselves. I think as women especially, we tend to blame ourselves when something goes wrong. Men are the opposite. They tend to blame everything but themselves and then they don’t heal. Because again, that’s not accurate. Sometimes men do things that bring their problems, and then they don’t heal because they’re too busy hung up pointing fingers and everybody else. Women, I feel like oftentimes we’re the opposite, although we can be blamers as well. But oftentimes, something will happen and we’ll blame ourselves, we’ll give ourselves too much responsibility for what happened. And then we don’t heal because it’s not true.

Other people are responsible for their decisions. God is going to judge other people for what they did to you. I think you get what I mean when we’re talking about truth. That is something important to keep in mind. It is important to be accurate about what happened to you. And get it out on paper. It’s not something that you can just remember because sometimes they’ll see it well maybe if I think it out and then I can analyze it. We can often get stuck in this loop of analysis and ruminating, we can just want to sit there and think about it. And know, you got to get it on paper, there’s something about the act of writing it out that they’ve done studies writing something fires off different neurons and things like that. But you got to write it out and get it out on paper. And then that actually kind of, crystallizes it and allows you to step back and look at it, thoughts are ephemeral, they come and go, they’re not tangible. But when you get it on paper, it is healing to get it out on paper, get it as accurately and as completely as possible. And then that allows you to step back and analyze it. Having said that, that is a section on trauma, you need to deal with that. Also, sometimes girls will get stuck, all of us women will get stuck in this idea of Well, I’m going to find myself, I’m going to find myself before I find a man. And that’s not a bad idea. especially if you have some sort of baggage to work through, you got some heartbreak, maybe you came from an abusive family, maybe have some trauma there, it’s not a bad idea to find yourself by working through that stuff. But make sure if you’re going to take time out, because if you have significant trauma, or baggage, or heartbreak, whatever you want to call it, if you have that you want to work through it. Yeah, it is important to step back from dating, there are certain situations, if it’s significant enough, yeah, you shouldn’t be dating, you should focus on yourself to work through this. But make sure that if you’re going to step back from dating, that you are working on this because as women, I think sometimes we can almost kind of procrastinate on the dating process because it is so risky. And there’s the tendency for rejection, and it can be scary to undertake. There’s also not a lot of advice about how to do it well. And I think some of us, want to feel like we have a plan, like we kind of know what we’re getting into. And I think because of that it can be tempting to tell yourself, I’m finding myself, there’s kind of a common idea out there of like, well, a man will come along when you’re living your best life, and it’s like, Yeah, that’s true. when you’re, when you found yourself, he’ll find you. And there is some truth to that if what you mean by finding yourself means you’re dealing with this trauma, and you’re becoming more of who you are because you’re kind of processing that baggage and are healing. Yeah, in that sense. Yeah, that will help a man come into your life.

However, you can’t just use that as some vague, indefinite way to avoid a relationship because eventually, you’ll come to regret it as women we have, we only have so much time do you want to have children, our fertility kind of has a window. And you want to make sure that you’re being smart about it, so don’t let finding yourself turn into a kind of an excuse to avoid dating. Again, you need to take time out, by all means, do it’s important, but make sure that if you’re going to take time out of dating, that you really are working on stuff to heal yourself. So, anyway, having said that, that’s the section on healing trauma. I hope that was helpful. And yeah, leave a comment if you have a question.