What is Self-Trust?
Self-trust is a deep belief in your own judgement and ability to handle life’s challenges. Instead of needing approval from others, it’s believing in your own instincts and decisions. It’s knowing deep down that you can survive failures, mistakes, and difficulty – that you’ll be OK, no matter what.
Why Is It So Important to Trust Yourself?
Self-trust means freedom. It encourages healthy risk taking, allowing you to grasp the opportunities life offers. Failing and floundering are viewed as part of the process rather than a damning verdict on who you are as a person.
Self-trust also reduces anxiety because you’re better able to tolerate uncertainty. The need for constant reassurance fades when you believe in your capacity to cope with any outcome. You can be guided by your inner compass, so decisions require less outside advice, and you stop sacrificing your needs for the approval of others.
Ultimately, trusting yourself means living a life more aligned with who you are and what you truly want. To me, that’s the definition of thriving!
What Does Life Look and Feel Like When You Have Self-Trust?
- You feel steadier, calmer, and more grounded.
- Decisions become easier.
- You are no longer scanning for danger because can depend on yourself and your ability to handle hard times.
- You are able to step into the unknown because you see the future as an adventure rather than a dangerous trap.
- When you fail, you may be sad and disappointed, but it doesn’t turn into an attack on your own character.
Why Do People Struggle with Self-Trust?
People often struggle with self-trust because their internal guidance system or inner compass has been overridden by past experiences, harsh self-criticism, and/or environment-driven adaptations.
For example, if a child repeatedly gets the message their emotional reality is wrong or a problem from caregivers or teachers, they learn they cannot trust their internal signals. ‘You’re too sensitive’, ‘Stop overreacting’, ‘You’re just making things up’.
If expressing an emotion, opinion, or preference triggers anger, conflict, or abandonment, the nervous system will adapt to prioritise peace, safety, and staying connected to primary caregivers over inner-experience and personal truth.
Unfortunately, this also happens when parents and caregivers are over-protective. In this situation, a child expressing sadness, anxiety or frustration can be so triggering for the adult, the child may learn that only showing certain emotions like happiness and being ok is acceptable.
Alternatively, caregivers may intervene too early, keeping the child away from situations that may be challenging, where they could struggle or experience rejection. The parent is no longer attuned to the child needs, they are parenting out of fear. Even if their intentions are good, it robs the child of important experience to develop their own identity and resilience.
Read Understanding the Emotional Weight of the Past to learn more.
The Patterns These Experiences Create
These experiences can give rise to life-long patterns of perfectionism, people-pleasing, avoidance, and emotional suppression which further erode self-trust. Let’s explore these in more detail…
Perfectionism
In many ways, perfectionism is completely at odds with trusting yourself. Believing you must do everything perfectly, make the right choices, and never mess up, gives rise to a lot of worry. Rather than trusting yourself to move forward in the face of uncertainty, you spend time imagining future related scenarios, anticipating all the ways in which something could go wrong.
This pattern is endless. It puts you in fight or flight mode, and making choices becomes paralysing because you’re no longer thinking creatively about the positive opportunities and outcomes that might exist.
People-Pleasing
People-pleasing often starts out as an understandable behaviour or adaptation that’s heavily rewarded and reinforced. Unfortunately, over time it teaches your brain that your own needs, feelings, and boundaries do not matter.
Constantly changing your opinions or behaviour to match the needs and preferences of whoever you’re with is confusing. Eventually, you lose touch with your inner-voice and internal signals, your own identity, and personal values which would ideally guide your decision making.
The doubt this creates becomes self-fulfilling. You prove to yourself over and over again that you cannot rely on yourself to make decisions in your best interests and to protect your own boundaries.
Avoidance
Avoidance gives short-term relief, but it amplifies fear. It teaches your brain that the avoided situation is actually dangerous – ensuring the fear grows larger in your mind.
It also erodes your sense of competence, keeping you stuck in a state of powerlessness because you’re not getting enough opportunities to build your skills and resilience. It trains you to doubt your ability to cope with discomfort, creating a growing internal gap between what you know you should do and what you actually do.
Emotional Suppression
Pushing feelings away makes it harder to know what you actually want or need. Emotions are like messengers. Regardless of whether they are positive or negative, they provide valuable information.
Habitually supressing your emotions disconnects you from your natural instincts and signals to your brain that your emotions are dangerous or wrong. You may even view your internal state as an emergency or flaw, forcing a calm exterior and being ‘strong’ while struggling on the inside.
How Can Therapy Help You Build Self-Trust?
If you struggle to trust yourself, therapy can help. It provides a structured and supportive environment to explore your experience of self-doubt, the patterns that are fuelling it, and how they came to exist in the first place.
Making sense of things understanding why certain patterns have been so difficult to change can be powerful in itself. It shifts you away from self-blame towards something wiser. You can see things more clearly and establish why this problem makes sense in the broader context of your life.
This shift begins to undermine the strength of your inner-critic. We can build on this using Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT), empowering you to experiment, take risks, and try new things because you’ll know you’ve got your own back regardless of the outcome. You’re allowed to make mistakes, you’re allowed to change your mind, and you’re allowed to give things a go without knowing how they’ll turn out.
In Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) we might come up with mini experiments designed to disprove some of your negative beliefs and provides opportunities to build evidence and self-trust. We can also use specific strategies like worry postponement exercises to help manage symptoms while you’re going through the process.
Schema Therapy can help you address deeply entrenched beliefs you have about yourself, and the patterns born out of your earliest experiences. EMDR Therapy can be utilised to target specific past experiences on a neurological level so triggering situations are no longer so triggering, and developing new responses becomes easier.
To learn more about the different modalities outlined above, read CFT, CBT, EMDR or Schema Therapy – Which is Right for You?
Meet Jo – Cognitive Behavioural Therapist and EMDR Therapist in Knutsford, Cheshire
With more than 18 years of experience in the field of mental health, I help people gain clarity and untangle themselves from the past so they can experience more fulfilment and joy. If you’re struggling with any of the things described in this article, please get in touch. You can also join me on Instagram for more mental health education.
