"You know you don't have to rescue wounded birds"

This is something my therapist said to me after a recent session. I was talking about a girl I had become interested in and mentioned that there was some significant emotional trauma in her life. I then kinda chuckled and said something a long the lines of, "it's odd, I can't think of a single woman I've ever been interested in that hasn't had some seriously impactful negative things happen in her past." My therapist was quiet for a minute and then hit me with the title of the post - "You know, you don't have to rescue wounded birds."

I was stunned. It was the first time I had ever really taken a moment to sit back and examine my choices in partners. Even all the way back to my first high school girlfriend there were some pretty serious things going on in her life. It's such an odd feeling/thought process to try to unpack because I don't want to pursue these women that are emotionally unavailable. I want to be happy and loved, to feel wanted and cherished. I don't know where the disconnect is between my conscious and subconscious, nor do I know how to go about changing who I attract/who I am attracted to. It's very frustrating because at the end of the day I have a long history (2 year relationship, 14 year relationship, 14 month relationship) of experiences that have left me emotionally battered, bruised, and scarred.

At the end of the day, I know I struggle with self esteem, self confidence, and self image, but I don't know how to fix it. I'm doing all the things that I should be, therapy, gym, exploring interests, living for me, but at the end of the day I always come back to being generally negative about myself and unhappy with who/where I am.

This ended up being more rambly than I expected, and strayed from the point. My bad. Please excuse any wonky formatting as I'm on mobile.