One weekend, a woman said to me, quite simply: "I don't trust myself enough."
I looked at her for a moment and said: "Hmm. And who's the one saying that? The one I'm speaking to right now? Because if I can't trust you, how do I know I can trust what you're telling me?"
She laughed, and then she went quiet, thinking about it. After a while she said: "You know what I mean. I've lost it somewhere along the line. That self-belief. I just don't trust myself the way I used to."
I did know what she meant. And I also knew that the little exchange we'd just had held the whole answer, if she could see it.
How do you trust yourself again?
You trust yourself again by noticing that your trust hasn't disappeared. It's been placed somewhere else: in a limiting belief about yourself, built from past hurt, disappointment or fear. When the charge from those old experiences is removed, the fear stops outvoting your inner knowing, and the self-trust that was always there becomes available again.
That's why the question "who's saying that?" matters so much. The voice that says I can't trust myself is itself something you're trusting.
Where does self-trust go?
It doesn't go anywhere. It gets overruled.
Somewhere deep in your core, trust in yourself isn't the problem. Confidence isn't the problem. What happens is that, over time, certain experiences teach you to listen to a different voice. A decision goes badly and you're blamed for it. You trust someone and they let you down. You follow your gut and it seems to lead you somewhere painful. Each experience leaves a small charge of fear or hurt behind, and a conclusion to go with it: my judgment isn't reliable.
Gradually, you begin to place your trust in that conclusion instead of in yourself. You don't stop trusting. You just start trusting the fear.
It's worth noticing how that shows up day to day. You ask three friends for their opinion before making a simple choice. You research a decision for weeks and still don't feel ready. You defer to people who seem more confident, even when something in you disagrees. You make a choice and then spend days doubting it. None of that means you've lost your judgment. It means your judgment has been sitting in the back row while fear does the talking. And because fear is loud and fast, it wins most of the arguments. Whether the fear was justified at the time or not, it becomes more dominant than your own wish to believe in yourself.
Why doesn't positive thinking restore it?
Because the thing that overrode your trust isn't a thought. It's a feeling.
You can tell yourself you're capable. You can list your achievements. You can repeat affirmations every morning. And then, the moment a real decision arrives, the old fear fires in your stomach, and you second-guess everything. The affirmation was in your head. The fear was in your body. The body won.
It's the same reason understanding your past doesn't change you. Your past experiences, and how you perceived them, set the stage for how you think and feel now, and therefore for what you expect from your future. If your past taught you to settle for less, or to avoid risk, you'll feel that in the present and project it forward. Changing that means working with the charge, not just the story.
What was your self-trust tuned for?
Somewhere back there, you tuned yourself to survive a particular weather. Tighter strings. Braced wood. A sound made for holding against wind. Maybe you learned early that your instincts got you into trouble. Maybe the adults around you were unpredictable, so you learned to watch them instead of listening to yourself. Maybe you were told so often that you'd got it wrong that you stopped trusting your own sense of right.
You played beautifully through that storm. Then the storm passed, and you kept the strings tight. Now every decision comes out strained, and you've started to believe the instrument is faulty.
It isn't. The wood is perfect. The maker's mark is still inside. You are not broken. You are buried, under a lifetime of learning not to listen to yourself.
How can I start hearing my inner knowing again?
Here's a practice for the next small decision you face. It takes less than a minute, and it works best on things that don't matter much.
Before you decide, pause and notice the very first response in your body. Not your thinking about it, the first sensation. A slight lean toward. A slight pulling away. A small yes or a small no, usually felt somewhere around the chest or stomach. It arrives before the reasoning does, and it's quiet.
Then notice what your thinking does next. Often it starts arguing, listing reasons, second-guessing.
For this one small decision, go with the first response. What to eat. Which route to walk. Whether to call someone back now or later. Then notice how it turns out.
Do this a few times a day for a week. You're not trying to become impulsive. You're rebuilding a connection that fear has been overriding for a long time. Each small decision you trust and act on is a message to yourself: I'm listening again.
As the connection strengthens, you can let it guide slightly bigger decisions. Keep noticing how things turn out. Most people are surprised by how often that first quiet response was right, and how often the second-guessing was just fear repeating an old conclusion. Some of the stories on our stories page describe exactly this kind of return to oneself.
What if I've made bad decisions before?
Everyone has. And it's worth looking at them closely.
Most of the decisions people regret weren't made from their inner knowing at all. They were made from fear, pressure, loneliness, or the wish to please someone. The gut said wait, and the fear said go. Or the gut said go, and the fear said stay. When people look back carefully, they often find that the part of them they're learning to trust actually warned them. They just weren't listening to it then.
So past mistakes aren't proof that you can't trust yourself. They're often proof of what happens when you don't. That's closely tied to fear of failure, which so often sits underneath lost self-belief.
What happens when self-trust returns?
Decisions get lighter, and life gets braver.
When the old charges of fear and hurt are removed, people often describe a strange sense of recognition. They don't feel they've learned to trust themselves. They feel they've remembered how. And sometimes it happens faster than anyone expected. One case I think of often is the teenager in severe depression and withdrawal who came through to full recovery in a single session. That's the outcome as the people involved reported it, and anyone in clinical care should keep working with their professional. I share it because it shows how quickly something that seemed lost can return when the work reaches the right level.
If you'd like help finding your way back to yourself, Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach, holds free mentoring sessions for exactly this. No pitch. Just a clear, kind conversation with someone who'll help you hear your own voice again.
So next time you catch yourself saying I don't trust myself, ask the question I asked her. Who's saying that? And why are you trusting them?
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.