I’m no expert or anything, but I’m not sure there really is an easy/universal/tested solution to this. What I would probably do in this position is just try to spend time with women and just get a greater volume of neutral-to-positive experiences with them than I ever had negative ones to form the subconscious resentment. You know, just be exposed to women enough to drill it in that women are just people, 99% of which mean you no harm.

I’ve also experienced a relationship with a female narcissist and it was awful. Fucked up my expectations about how relationships should work for a good 2-3 years. In that time I believe I perpetuated the cycle of emotional abuse by applying what I “learned” in that relationship to further relationships with other women. It took time to unlearn these harmful patterns, and that started by recognizing they were not normal and were harmful both to other people and to myself. To realize that actual good relationships are not characterized by wild emotional swings, but instead a basic calm contentment with the presence of another person you love.

It is good you have started to recognize your thought patterns for what they are. Emotional abuse reproduces itself and you need to understand that you are currently a vehicle for that. Though you cannot fully discharge your culpability, you are in some sense possessed by the ideology of emotional abuse that warps and interferes with your emotional responses. This is the lens you should take with you to therapy. Don’t tell your therapist that you are struggling with misogynistic thoughts. Tell them you are struggling to keep from reproducing the emotional abuse you experienced on others. That is much more in the therapists’ wheelhouse. It should be noted that the woman who abused me was herself emotionally abused by a man in the relationship prior to ours. Perhaps she learned to act that way in that relationship. Abuse echos throughout a community for years.

Also read the book Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. Despite the title and case studies all being men, it is a fairly gender-neutral book. It is very illuminating about how these thought processes work and can help you identify ones you have been infected with.

First I’ll say that I was in a similar but ultimately better situation that yourself; Coming out of highschool I had a lot of relationships where I didnt get anything i really wanted out of them. My mother was never really present in my life and my step mother is what i’d also call abusive, and my father nor anyone else was able to really tell me what to do or how to feel about a lot of what was happening in my life. Later I just straight up didnt get women’s romantic attention until years later i finally found someone that I feel like treats me right and even then its been a long road to get what I want out of relationships with women.

For a lot of that time I also harbored some really backwards ideas and never felt totally comfortable around women when all this time it felt like I needed to manipulate them to get what I want. It eventually came to me that “what good was this idea when it didnt get me anything?” What really worked best for me (poor so i couldnt afford therapy) was to just talk to the people i would meet in my life. I was got along better with women so i naturally formed a lot of relationships with them, especially women who had stable relationships but still were navigating there own problems with that, it gave me a really good sounding board to air out my feelings and learn how to talk about them. I was attending art classes at a community college at that point and could also kind of work out my emotions in crafts and art and talk to people for hours at a time if necessary.

I dont know if this helps much but if you want to talk to me about it I’m always here for a comrade

Kind of a hot take but I think it’s normal for men to have essentially mysoginstic thoughts to some extent, it’s an effect of the patriarchal system/culture and our relations towards women within that system, and also perhaps of the inherent antagonism in relationships. When I say it’s normal I mean it’s basically the default, the mode of thinking that we inherit from society, not that it’s necessarily a natural thing. But it’s something to work through, if your seeing women as somehow especially alien to yourself, or turning individual traumatic experiences into harmful generalisations. From your description it sounds more like a consequence of trauma rather than genuine belief. I would prioritise finding a therapist who doesn’t dismiss your concerns and can help you work through them.

I’m sorry, man. I don’t have any good advice for you but I hope you find the support and friends you need, comrade. My first serious girlfriend in high school was abusive in different ways, fucked me up for a while especially since I was so young. But everyone believed me though because she didn’t have enough shame to hide her behavior from anyone. Anyway, it’s not your fault but it isn’t the fault of women generally either. It’s easier said than done, but I hope you can prevent yourself from falling into that darkness of misogyny.

A lot of that’s probably some neural process resulting from evolution honestly, despite being able to recognize these things we do only have so many senses and mental buckets.

I’ve always had friends who were women/girls growing up, mostly through other friends. It’s possible otherwise I may have been susceptible to similar patterns of thinking after a relationship ending. I’d say the relationship with therapists and lawyers is still somewhat stressful, even if it gets you to a less stressful place ultimately, so I can see why it may leech into relationships like that…

So my input would be to try finding a hobby where you can be at ease around women, other people too you know what I mean probably. Maybe some kind of martial art or something easy like board games (there’s actually really good ones now).

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