Since maturing beyond a teenager over the past couple of years the feedback I’ve got from girls as well as male and female friends has been much more positive than I would have expected - girls are receptive and my friends seem to imply that their only assumption is that I must be very good with girls.

However my mind is stuck back in the past to when I was low status and bullied as a kid, so I find I can’t really catch up with the times and trust the new feedback i’m getting.

For example the feature that girls rate as my best asset these days, which is my unusual looking eyes, was a thing that I was bullied over as a kid - and even though I am fully aware of it being of positive value for girls now, I still find that my mind still sees it as something that makes me inferior and different.

So my problem is that I still have the self-esteem of the old me, and I want to know what I can do to basically force my mind to have a software update, and adjust to the massive change in reception that’s occured over the past few years?