Something Nobody Warned You About

You got out. Maybe it ended badly. Maybe it ended with relief. Maybe both. But somewhere along the way (a few weeks later, a few months later, sometimes longer) you noticed something.

Your confidence was gone.

Not just your confidence in relationships. Your sexual confidence. The ease you used to feel in your own skin. The sense that you knew who you were in the bedroom, what you wanted, how to be present with another person. That’s the thing that quietly disappeared, and nobody warned you it might happen.

This article is about why it happens, and more importantly, what it actually takes to get it back.

What a Toxic Relationship Does to Your Sense of Self

Before we talk about sexual confidence specifically, we need to talk about what toxic relationships do to men’s sense of self more broadly, because the two are inseparable.

A critical review published in Trauma, Violence, & Abuse examined the existing research on men’s experiences of intimate partner violence and found something that cuts against almost everything the culture assumes about men and relationships. The most common form of intimate partner violence experienced by men is not physical; it’s psychological (Scott-Storey et al., 2023). Jealousy, verbal abuse, humiliation, and controlling behavior were the dominant patterns. And the research confirmed what many men already know but rarely say out loud: psychological abuse does real, lasting damage to men’s health and wellbeing.

That damage lives somewhere specific. It lives in your sense of who you are. Your confidence. Your self-worth. Your belief that you are someone worth being with, worth listening to, worth wanting.

And when your sense of self takes a hit that significant, your sexuality doesn’t get to stay intact. It absorbs the impact right along with everything else.

Why Sexual Confidence Is the First Thing to Go

Here’s what I’ve observed working with men in this situation. Sexual confidence isn’t just about performance. It isn’t just about technique or experience. At its core, sexual confidence is about feeling safe enough to be fully present with another person: to want what you want, to express it, to be seen.

Toxic relationships systematically dismantle that safety. Not all at once, and not always obviously. It happens gradually, through small humiliations, through desires that get used as leverage, through the slow erosion of feeling like your needs matter. Over time, the bedroom stops being a place of connection and starts being another place where you might get it wrong.

Research on sexual self-esteem (how we appraise ourselves as sexual beings) shows that low sexual self-esteem is consistently associated with avoidance of emotional intimacy and difficulty with relational connection (Benali et al., 2025). In other words, when a relationship chips away at how you see yourself sexually, the effects don’t stay confined to sex. They spread into how close you’re willing to let anyone get.

And men tend to carry this in silence. A study in Psychology of Men & Masculinity confirmed that men experiencing controlling and psychologically abusive relationships are particularly vulnerable to PTSD symptoms, and the absence of help-seeking is itself a pattern, driven by stigma, shame, and the cultural expectation that men simply handle things (Hines & Douglas, 2011). So men don’t just lose their sexual confidence. They lose it alone, without telling anyone, often without even naming what they lost.

What It Actually Looks Like

Sexual confidence doesn’t disappear with a label on it. It shows up in ways that are easy to misread.

You’re in your head during sex. You’re watching yourself instead of being present. You’re anticipating judgment before it happens, managing your performance instead of experiencing the moment. This is hypervigilance (a trauma response) showing up in the most intimate space in your life.

You stop initiating. The risk of rejection starts to feel unbearable in a way it didn’t before. Because in your last relationship, rejection was not just rejection; it was a verdict on your worth as a person. Your nervous system hasn’t updated that equation yet.

You don’t know what you want anymore. Some of what you wanted was shamed out of you. Some of it was used against you. And some of it got buried under so many layers of just trying to get things right in the relationship that you genuinely lost track of what you actually liked.

You question whether a new partner really wants you. Genuine interest from someone safe feels suspicious. Compliments land strangely. You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop because in your experience, warmth was often a setup.

None of these are character flaws. All of them are learned responses to a situation that taught you that intimacy isn’t safe. The problem isn’t who you are. It’s what you learned.

How You Get It Back

Recovery from this isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t usually come from a single breakthrough moment. It comes from a series of deliberate, sometimes uncomfortable, choices to show up differently.

Start by understanding what actually happened. The research is clear that psychological abuse causes real clinical harm: to men’s mental health, their sense of self, their relationships (Scott-Storey et al., 2023). This wasn’t just a hard breakup. Something was done to you. Naming that accurately is not about victimhood; it’s about having an honest starting point.

Get curious about what you actually want. Not what you were told to want. Not what felt safe to express in your last relationship. What do you actually want from intimacy? This question sounds simple and often feels surprisingly hard to answer. That difficulty is information. Sit with it.

Let trust build at its own pace. If you’re in a new relationship, or thinking about one, resist the pressure, whether internal or external, to be fully available before you’re ready. Your nervous system needs time and repeated evidence of safety before it will stop treating intimacy as a threat zone. That’s not dysfunction. That’s how nervous systems work.

Rebuild the connection between sex and pleasure. For many men coming out of toxic relationships, sex became associated with performance, judgment, or obligation. Rebuilding the association with pleasure, with something that actually feels good and safe, is real, necessary work. It doesn’t happen by pushing through. It happens by paying attention to what actually feels right.

Talk to someone. Not because talking fixes everything, but because carrying this in silence is what keeps it stuck. A therapist who understands male survivors of relational trauma can help you make sense of what happened, identify the patterns that are still running in the background, and build a roadmap back to yourself. The research on sexual self-esteem consistently shows that it is malleable (it can be rebuilt) and that relational support is one of the most significant factors in that process (Benali et al., 2025).

The Part That’s Worth Saying Clearly

Sexual confidence, once lost, can feel like it was never there, like what you had before was not real, or like whoever that person was is not coming back.

That’s not true. What you had before was real. What happened to it was real. And recovery, genuine recovery, is also real.

The men I’ve worked with who’ve come through this don’t come back as exactly who they were before. They usually come back as something closer to who they actually are: clearer about what they want, more grounded in their own sense of themselves, less willing to abandon that self for the sake of keeping someone else comfortable.

That version of you is worth working toward.

Recovery from this doesn’t start with a grand gesture. It starts with deciding that what you lost matters enough to go looking for it.

That’s enough to begin.

About the Author

Gregory Harmeling, Psy.D., LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in men’s sexual health, narcissistic abuse recovery, and travel therapy. He works with men who are done being confused about why they feel the way they do — and are ready to do something about it. Learn more at fenixtherapeuticservices.com.

References

Benali, Y., El-Sayed, M., & El Amrani, Y. (2025). Impact of sexual self-esteem on emotional connection mediated by interpersonal vulnerability. Research and Practice in Couple Therapy, 3(2), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.61838/rpct.3.2.4

Hines, D. A., & Douglas, E. M. (2011). Symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder in men who sustain intimate partner violence: A study of helpseeking and community samples. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 12(2), 112–127. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022983

Scott-Storey, K., O’Donnell, S., Ford-Gilboe, M., Varcoe, C., Wathen, N., Malcolm, J., & Vincent, C. (2023). What about the men? A critical review of men’s experiences of intimate partner violence. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 24(2), 858–872. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380211043827

Text © Gregory Harmeling