O.Z.,

I’d like to try to help, and first I’d like to point out how difficult you are being on yourself. You can’t change another persons actions, or inactions (not quitting porn), in this case. Other peoples actions in this world don’t reflect upon you, it reflects upon them. By which I mean, your ex’s unwillingness to accommodate doesn’t say that you are undesirable, its says that he is insensitive.

Second is the real problem underlying all the envy, fear, and red hot rage, and by my reckoning is your self esteem. You already know this, but what you may not know is that the more you truly love and appreciate yourself, the more all that negative stuff goes away. This piece of information is powerful because it means that the porn, and the cheerleaders, and the ex, are not what made you feel badly. They are symptoms of what made you feel badly. You made you feel badly, and all those other things were just triggers.

Example:
“I remember asking him about why it had its appeal when I was here, a real girl and a real human being who loved him, and he told me about how he’d come across something “really f__ing sexy” and how he /had/ to act upon those sexual feelings whenever he felt like it. I felt horrible about myself, as I do not have the body of a porn star and I never will. I would never be sexy enough to satisfy him, and I was replaced by fake and exaggerated images on a screen.”

In the first part, he identifies that HE found something and HE needed to act. But in part two, you translate that into your own words as you not being sexy enough to satisfy him. YOU said that to yourself, YOU hurt you. And O.Z., if you can hurt yourself with your own words you can help yourself with your own words. I’ll say it again because it’s really, really important. If you can hurt yourself with your own words you can help yourself with your own words.

How we speak to ourselves is so important. Our internal voices are the only voices we hear all the time, and if the voice says negative things, you will generally tend to behave negatively in the world. Really listen to your own voice, and the next time you pop off at the mouth to yourself, correct it. Listen for keywords in your internal dialogue, ‘I never’ ‘I hate’, are great examples of what not to say to yourself. When you catch your internal speech talking bad, pause, and rephrase in a positive light. I’ve always battled with my weight, so for me it was to myself ‘I can’t believe you ate that whole damn ___! No wonder you’re so fat’. I rephrase to myself ‘Yea, you ate the whole damn ___. How can I do better? What triggered me to eat the whole damn ___, and how can I avoid it?’. So after a while, months of hard work actually, I would only get as far as ‘I can’t believe…stop…calm down…’ and then I would rephrase to a positive and kind way.

Just be nicer to yourself girl. Be truly kind to yourself. You deserve better then to be spoken to in a mean fashion. Particularly by someone as close to you as yourself.

As for general help with self esteem there are plenty of articles and exercises here on TB that can aid you. Just do a keyword search for self esteem and there is oodles of material on the subject.

And for practical help a book that really helped me with my negative self esteem is called The Self-Esteem Workbook by Glenn R. Schiraldi. I got mine through Amazon, and it was equal to years of therapy, easily the best $15 I spent that year.

Be excellent to yourself,

~BB