When Did You Stop Trusting Yourself?

Oak and River Counseling ·  6 min read

I ask a version of this question in almost every first session: "What does your gut tell you about this situation?" And more often than not, I get the same response a pause, a slightly embarrassed laugh, and some version of, "Honestly, I have no idea."

Not because these women are indecisive. Most of them make dozens of decisions a day, competently, for other people. They know exactly what their kids need, what their team needs, what their partner needs. Ask them what they need, or what they think, or what they actually want and something goes quiet.

That quiet is worth paying attention to. It usually means somewhere along the way, the relationship with your own instincts got interrupted.

How the disconnect happens

Nobody wakes up one day and decides to stop trusting themselves. It happens gradually, usually for reasons that made sense at the time.

Maybe you were the kid who got told your feelings were too much, so you learned to double-check them against everyone else's reaction before believing them. Maybe you were in a relationship where your read on a situation was consistently questioned or dismissed, until eventually it was easier to just defer. Maybe you're simply someone who's spent years in roles mother, manager, caretaker, the responsible one where your job was to consider everyone else's needs first, and your own instincts became something you didn't have time to check.

Whatever the path, the result tends to look similar: a habit of looking outward for answers before looking inward. Googling instead of sitting with a question. Asking three friends what they'd do before asking yourself. Waiting for someone else to confirm a decision is right before you feel okay moving forward.

This isn't a lack of intelligence or capability. It's a learned habit which means it's also something that can be relearned.

Why self-doubt feels so convincing

Here's the tricky part about self-doubt: it doesn't feel like doubt. It feels like accuracy. It feels responsible. It feels like you're just being careful, just doing your due diligence, just making sure you don't get it wrong.

But there's a difference between genuine deliberation and reflexive self-distrust. Deliberation is weighing real information and arriving at a decision. Reflexive self-distrust is a loop gathering more and more input, never quite landing anywhere, because some part of you doesn't believe your own conclusion counts until someone else validates it.

If you find yourself endlessly researching a decision you've basically already made, or asking for opinions you don't actually need, that loop might be running. It's worth noticing, because it's exhausting in a way that's easy to mistake for thoroughness.

What self-trust is actually built from

Self-trust isn't a feeling that shows up out of nowhere. It's built the same way trust in any relationship is built through a track record. Specifically, a track record of making a decision, following through on it, and seeing what happens.

The problem is, if you've spent years outsourcing your decisions, you don't have much of that track record with yourself. So the first step isn't some big leap of faith. It's small, low-stakes reps: ordering something new at the coffee shop, how to spend an afternoon, whether to go to an event you're on the fence about, and noticing that you can trust your own read on it, even if it's not perfect.

This matters because self-trust isn't actually about always being right. It's about believing you can handle it if you're wrong. A lot of women I work with think self-trust means having perfect judgment. It doesn't. It means knowing that even if a decision doesn't work out, you're capable of dealing with the consequences and learning from them. That belief "I can handle whatever comes from this" is the real foundation. Not certainty. Capacity.

Listening to your own signals again

Part of rebuilding self-trust is simply practicing the pause. Before reaching for outside opinions, giving yourself a moment to notice what you actually think or feel first. Not to ignore other perspectives those still matter but to make sure your own voice gets heard before it gets drowned out.

It also helps to pay attention to your body, not just your thoughts. A lot of instinct shows up physically before it shows up as a clear thought a tightness, a lightness, a sense of dread or ease. Those signals are information. If you've spent years talking yourself out of them, it can take real practice to start taking them seriously again.

And it helps to be patient with the process. If you've been out of practice trusting yourself for years, it's not going to feel automatic after one good decision. It builds slowly, the same way any trust does one honored instinct at a time.

Coming back to yourself

The women I work with are, almost without exception, deeply competent people. They just got so used to being competent on everyone else's behalf that they lost track of their own inner compass along the way. Finding it again isn't about becoming someone new. It's about coming back to something that was always there, just quieted for a while.That process is slower than we'd like, and it's not always comfortable. But it is possible. And it starts with something as simple as asking yourself the question, and actually waiting for your own answer. "If this is a pattern you recognize in yourself, it's worth exploring what's underneath it. That's the kind of work I do with clients helping you find your way back to your own instincts."

If this is landing

You don't need things to fall apart to deserve a space to talk. If you've been quietly waiting for permission to reach out, this is it.

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