When We Stop Trusting Ourselves…

A solitary figure sits in quiet contemplation on a wooden jetty, surrounded by the tranquil beauty of a forest-lined lake.

How Difficult Experiences Change the Relationship We Have with Ourselves - Trauma recovery and Rebuilding Self-Trust

Over the past few weeks, a few different themes have kept finding their way into my writing.

I wrote about the pressure we place on ourselves to "be over it by now". Then I wrote about shame, and the way it can become so familiar that we mistake it for truth. Most recently, I found myself thinking about self-doubt and whether it might be less about lacking confidence than learning, at some point in our lives, that questioning ourselves felt safer than trusting ourselves.

At first, those felt like separate conversations. The more I sat with them, though, the more I realised they were all really circling the same idea and asking the same question...

What happens to the relationship we have with ourselves after we've lived through something difficult and/or traumatic?

As a trauma-recovery counsellor, that's a question I come back to often. I spend a lot of time listening to people's stories. Every story is different, but over time I've noticed that what brings someone to counselling isn't always the whole story.

People seek counselling for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it's because of a traumatic event they’ve never spoken about before. Sometimes it's grief, burnout, anxiety, relationship struggles, depression, or a challenging situation that has left them questioning themselves.

The circumstances are different, but I've noticed that the impact of what’s going on often reaches beyond the event itself.

What stays with us isn't always just what happened. It's the meaning we gradually make of what happened.

Over time, we begin organising those experiences into an understanding of ourselves and the world around us. We don't usually notice this happening as it generally doesn’t happen consciously. We simply adapt. We draw conclusions that help us make sense of our experiences and, before long, those conclusions become so familiar that we stop recognising them as something we learned. Eventually the story becomes so familiar that we stop recognising it as a story at all.

They begin to feel like facts and become simply the way we see ourselves.

How Do These Adaptions Manifest?

In a range of ways… For example;

Someone who has repeatedly felt dismissed may slowly come to believe their thoughts aren't worth sharing.

Someone who has spent years trying to keep the peace and avoid conflict may lose sight of what they need, because everyone else's needs have taken priority for so long.

Someone whose mistakes (even minor ones) were met with criticism, or ridicule may find themselves struggling with perfectionism because getting something “wrong” doesn’t feel emotionally safe.

None of those beliefs appear overnight. They develop through repeated experience and the attributions we assign to those experiences – the meaning making. Eventually, these beliefs ingratiate and influence the relationship we have with ourselves.

This is the part of trauma recovery that continues to fascinate me.

We often talk about recovering from what happened, and understandably so. Because when we talk about ‘recovery’, it's easy to focus on the event itself. The event is important and deserves our attention. Without question. At the same time, alongside that work, I'm increasingly interested in what those experiences came to mean for the person who lived through them. Not because the meaning we’ve attributed is "wrong". Because that meaning often made perfect sense at the time.

If questioning yourself once kept you safe and helped you avoid criticism… If staying quiet protected an important relationship… If putting everyone else's needs first reduced conflict...

Those responses weren’t random. They were adaptations. That is, they were ways of adjusting to the circumstances you were in. And many of them were pretty intelligent responses to those difficult circumstances.

The challenge is that adaptations don't automatically disappear when our circumstances change. We often continue carrying them into places where they no longer fit.  We carry them into new supportive relationships, new healthy workplaces, group spaces where opinions are welcome, all new stages of life...

We find ourselves responding to today's circumstances as though we're still living in the past. That isn't any type of sign that we've failed to move on. It's often a sign that our nervous system and our understanding of ourselves haven't yet caught up with the fact that life is different now.

For me, this fundamentally changes the way I think about and understand self-trust.

We're often encouraged to trust ourselves, but trust isn't something we can simply decide to have. Like every relationship, it's built through experience.

When thinking about our relationships with others; we come to trust another person because they show us, repeatedly, that they're secure, reliable and consistent. They respond in ways that help us feel psychologically safe. That’s ‘felt safety’ and we learn that through our continued interactions with them over time.

I think the relationship we have with ourselves develops in much the same way.

Every time we listen to our own needs instead of dismissing them, every time we recognise an old pattern before automatically acting on it, every time we make a decision that reflects our values rather than our fears, every time we refuse to allow someone’s perception of us alter our opinion of ourselves… We're creating a different experience of ourselves.

None of those individual moments might feel particularly significant. Yet over time we’re teaching ourselves something new and important. That our thoughts are worth considering.

That our needs matter. That we can experience uncertainty without the underlying sense of fear. That we can make mistakes without immediately turning against ourselves.

Those moments don't usually feel obvious or dramatic. In fact, they're often so ordinary that we overlook them. Yet they're the moments that gradually begin reshaping the relationship we have with ourselves.

And I wonder whether that's what self-trust actually is.

It’s not the absence of doubt and it’s not always feeling confident. It’s knowing that whatever life throws at us next, we don't have to abandon ourselves in order to get through it.

When I think about trauma recovery now, I don't think only about the event that brought someone into the counselling room. I think about the relationship they've had to develop with themselves in order to survive it. And I think about the possibilities of that relationship continuing to change and evolve.

Healing isn't about becoming the person we were before life became difficult and traumatic events reshaped our reality. It's about creating a relationship with our self that feels safer, steadier and more compassionate than the one our difficult experiences taught us to expect or believe.

For me, that sense of self-trust is what recovery is really about.

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