rebuilt my life after a traumatic breakup, but I still cannot be intimate with anyone. How do I move forward?

am 25(M), and I feel like I have lost the ability to be intimate with someone.

It has been a year and a half since my last relationship ended. Since then, I have had opportunities to date, meet people, and even be physically intimate. I genuinely like someone right now, and the attraction seems mutual. There is chemistry, there is flirting, and under normal circumstances I would have asked her out.

But I cannot.

Every time I think about becoming emotionally or physically intimate with someone, I start questioning myself.

What if I am not good enough? What if I am terrible in bed?What if everything she said about me was true?

The strange part is that I was never like this before. Before that relationship, I had dated other people and had a healthy sex life. I never doubted myself.

Over the last year and a half, I have rebuilt almost every other part of my life. I left a toxic job, joined a much better company, learned a lot, became healthier, and genuinely like the person I have become. My mother, friends, and even people who knew me before have noticed the change.

But this one thing has not changed.

I feel lonely, sexually frustrated, and emotionally stuck. At my lowest, that frustration even pushed me into situations that I never imagined I would put myself in because I was desperate to feel wanted again. Looking back, I realise I was not looking for sex. I was looking for proof that I was still worthy of intimacy.

I think it all goes back to how my previous relationship ended. We were together for four and a half years. For a long time, we genuinely loved each other and had a happy relationship. Eventually, things became unhealthy. We both became emotionally abusive in different ways, could not resolve our differences, and she ended the relationship.

The breakup itself was not what stayed with me.

Afterwards, she body shamed me, insulted my family, compared me to other men, told me they were better than I could ever be, and said that I would always be a loser and a pale shadow of my late father. I later found out that she had also spread lies about me towards the end of our relationship.

Looking back, I do not think those words just hurt me. I think I internalised them. Logically, I know they were said to hurt me. Emotionally, though, a part of me still believes them. That is the part I cannot seem to overcome.

I do not think this is even about sex anymore. I think it is about trusting myself enough to be vulnerable again and believing that I deserve intimacy despite everything that was said to me.

Has anyone else experienced something similar? If your confidence around intimacy was shattered after a breakup, how did you rebuild it? How did you stop carrying your ex's voice in your head? I am genuinely exhausted, and I do not want to keep living like this.