Recovery for ME, is possible.

I work in sales at a 21+ shop (v@pe store) so I'm always interacting with the public and we get some really beautiful ladies who stop by. As you can imagine my self esteem and confidence has been stomped into the ground from his p0rn use so usually when I see a woman I find attractive or know he would find attractive my brain is just full of comparisons, resentment, and feeling weird, misplaced animosity towards these beautiful women for simply being beautiful 😅

Recently I've decided when those feelings start to show up I'm gonna try to redirect my energy and use it to compliment the women instead.

I've been too nervous to do it but today a lady came in and she was genuinely gorgeous, and all I could think about is how beautiful she was and how I could never look like her and I felt the jealousy creeping in. So as we're finishing the transaction I finally just say "Also, you are so pretty", and she put her hand on her heart and makes a 🥹 face, and to my surprise...guess what? The animosity I had felt even moments prior was suddenly gone. Completely non existent. For the rest of my shift although I didn't build up the guts to compliment anyone else, there wasn't a single time I saw a beautiful woman and started comparing myself to her. Instead, my brain automatically defaulted to "wow, she is so pretty". After that I ended up scrolling on social media during my break, and I even left some nice comments on photos of beautiful women (instead of scrolling past or hiding it from my feed which is what I would normally do), I feel like this is all such a step in the right direction for my healing and I'm really proud of myself.