What Happens When We Finally Trust Ourselves?

Photo by Wanda DuJour

I have been thinking a lot about self-trust lately, mostly because I’ve realised how easy it is to believe that we trust ourselves when things are going well.

It is relatively easy to stand behind a decision when the outcome appears to vindicate it; when the relationship works, the opportunity pays off, the risk leads somewhere beautiful, or somebody we respect reassures us that we did the right thing. It becomes much more interesting when it doesn’t...

What happens when you follow what you genuinely believed was right for you and it leads somewhere painful? When you misread a situation, change your mind, disappoint somebody you love, or discover that the thing you were so sure was intuition, now looks, with the uncomfortable clarity of hindsight, suspiciously like fear?

Or, perhaps even more poignantly - what happens when we are triggered by something we thought we had healed long ago?

Do we still trust ourselves then?

I think this is where my understanding of self-trust has begun to change. For a long time, I associated it with certainty: knowing your boundaries, knowing what you want, listening to your intuition and developing enough conviction to make a decision without continuously looking over your shoulder.

There is truth in all of that, but lately I’m much more interested in what happens after making the decision, because I don't think that self-trust is ultimately about becoming exceptionally good at predicting the trajectory of your own life. I think it is about learning how to participate in it, without requiring certainty as the price of admission.

It is the ability to form a decision with the knowledge, feelings and awareness available to you at the time, while remaining awake enough to notice what that decision actually creates afterwards.

You can realise you were wrong, apologise and change direction. You can discover that something you desperately wanted is not - in reality - particularly good for you, or that something you were terrified of contained exactly the confrontation you needed. You can fuck something up quite spectacularly and still find something valuable in the wreckage.

None of this necessarily means you shouldn't have trusted yourself. Perhaps it is more about how you learn to trust going forward. Maybe it is more about understanding the somatic signals enough to be able to make a different decision the next time you face a similar situation.

The silent seduction of outsourcing ourselves

I notice how frequently we look for someone - or something - to provide the final answer.

We ask friends, partners, therapists and practitioners. We consult Google, astrology, Tarot, Human Design and ChatGPT. Sometimes all of them in the space of an afternoon.

I am absolutely not excluding myself from this.

Perspective is valuable, of course. There are moments when another person can see the architecture of a situation far more clearly because they are not trapped inside of it with us. 

We are not objective observers of our own lives, nor should we pretend to be - and I don't particularly subscribe to the idea that all of the answers are already hidden perfectly somewhere inside of us waiting to be retrieved.

Sometimes we genuinely don't know. Sometimes we never will. 

But, there is a subtle threshold where seeking perspective becomes seeking permission, and where the gathering of information is no longer opening our perception, but protecting us from the vulnerability of having to choose.

We keep asking until someone gives us the answer we wanted, or until a sufficient number of people agree with us so that we feel insulated from the possibility of being “wrong.”

This is, in my opinion, precisely, where guidance can sometimes become an abdication of authority.

And it’s not because asking for help is ‘weak’, but because there is no amount of consensus which can remove the fact that ultimately, we are the ones who have to inhabit our choices. 

Other people may advise us, warn us, support us, witness us or challenge us, but they cannot live the interior consequences of our decisions on our behalf.

Eventually, there is always a return back to the person who has to decide. You. Me. Them. Us.

And what does “listen to your body” actually mean?

This is something that I think about constantly through my work, because “listen to your body” is beautiful advice but, when taken literally, it is also incomplete.

Our bodies hold an extraordinary amount of information, but they also hold history. Trauma. Fascial remembrance, if you will - or more accurately - as I like to call it.

A racing heart could mean excitement, danger, attraction or anxiety. It could mean an old relational wound has been touched. It could mean that your nervous system has recognised a pattern long before your conscious mind has caught up.

Or it could mean that you drank three coffees and forgot to eat lunch.

A feeling of contraction is not automatically a cosmic "no," just as a feeling of openness is not necessarily evidence that something is ‘right’ for us. 

Sometimes, the things that become deeply nourishing to us are initially uncomfortable because they ask us to move beyond what is familiar, while the things that feel immediately magnetic can do so precisely because they reproduce something our system already knows; even if what it knows is chaos, avoidance or pain.

This is where the language of intuition can become slippery.

Fear can be extraordinarily convincing. Desire can masquerade as knowing. Familiarity can feel like destiny. Hypervigilance can call itself discernment, and avoidance can acquire remarkably sophisticated spiritual vocabulary if we give it enough time (think we can all recall at least one person here... ahem).

So, I don't believe that self-trust means treating every internal sensation as an instruction. I believe that it means developing a sufficiently nuanced relationship with ourselves so that we become more capable of interpreting what we encounter in the depths of our being.

What does fear feel like for me, and how is that different from the signal that something is genuinely wrong? What happens in my body when I am saying "yes" because I don't want to disappoint somebody? How do I behave when I am trying to intellectualise my way out of something that I already know the felt answer to deep down? Or, what does an honest boundary feel like before I have constructed an argument to justify it against somebody?

There is no universal lexicon for any of this.

We develop what I can only describe as a kind of somatic literacy, and rather inconveniently, I think much of it is learned through experience rather than theory. We misinterpret ourselves, notice, recalibrate and begin to understand our own internal language with slightly more fluency than we did before. But the first step to this is actually becoming present with ourselves. Slowing down. Listening. Understanding what our own nervous systems are doing, what they are communicating to us, and not just signalling. 

Perhaps discernment is not simply the ability to hear one infallible inner voice, but the capacity to recognise that there is, in fact, an entire conversation happening inside us. 

Perhaps it is more about becoming increasingly skilled at knowing who is speaking and when and in which order.

Maybe we have self-trust backwards...

We tend to imagine self-trust as something that we acquire first:

"Once I am confident enough, I will make the decision."

"Once I have healed enough, I will set the boundary."

"Once I trust myself, I will finally know what to do."

But I wonder whether the sequence is actually almost exactly the reverse...

We make the decision while uncertainty is still sitting beside us. We have the conversation while our voice shakes. We leave something, stay somewhere, take the risk, decline the invitation, begin the project, say "no" when part of us would still rather be liked, or say "yes" and discover three weeks later that we actually meant "no," or open a whole new part of ourselves through that “yes” - fuck around and find out, so to speak. 

In any case, we have to live inside what follows from our decision.

And somewhere in this process, we begin accumulating evidence. And I don't mean evidence that we make ‘consistently brilliant decisions’, because nobody does, but we gather evidence that we are capable of responding to our own lives. 

That distinction feels important.

If self-trust depends upon being correct, then it is extraordinarily brittle. One mistake can easily become evidence that we should never have listened to ourselves in the first place, and uncertainty can become something that we must eradicate before we are allowed to move forward.

Perhaps mature self-trust contains a degree of epistemic humility in the sense and the recognition that I can know myself intimately and still misunderstand a situation; that I can listen carefully and still be influenced by fear; that I can make a choice from a sincere place and later discover information I did not yet possess at the time of making that choice.

Trust, then, becomes less about infallibility and more about responsiveness.

"Can I remain present enough to revise my understanding, when reality contradicts the story I had constructed before?"

"Can I change course without interpreting that change as failure?"

"Can I allow experience to teach me something I did not already know?"

If I can, then perhaps even the mistakes become part of the architecture of self-trust rather than evidence against it.

Self-trust without accountability is just another form of avoidance

There is another part of this conversation that I think is often neglected, particularly in spaces where language around intuition, boundaries and “honouring yourself” is used freely.

Our choices do not (and should not) exist in a vacuum.

We are relational beings. What we do reverberates through friendships, partnerships, families, communities and the lives of people who have placed their trust in us. Sometimes following our own desires will disappoint somebody. Sometimes setting a necessary boundary will hurt. And sometimes, we are not ‘nobly’ choosing ourselves at all; we are simply behaving in ways that cause harm and finding prettier language with which to explain it.

“I have to do what is right for me” can be true.

But it can also be an extraordinarily convenient sentence to justify your actions or beliefs.

Trusting yourself does not exempt you from examining yourself and, if anything, I think genuine self-trust asks for a greater capacity to do so. 

If my sense of self collapses every time somebody tells me I have hurt them, then I am not really standing in self-trust; I am still dependent upon remaining innocent in the eyes of other people.

There is something much harder, and perhaps much more mature, in being able to say: I understand why I made that choice, and I can also see what it cost you and the pain it caused you.

Can I stand behind my needs without pretending they have no consequences? Can I receive another person's pain without immediately surrendering my own perspective? Can I take responsibility without transforming that responsibility into shame, and can I change my mind without retrospectively rearranging the story so that I was secretly right all along?

Can I tolerate the possibility that two apparently contradictory things may be true at once? 

That I had a right to choose something, and somebody else had a right to be hurt by it.

That I acted with the awareness I had then, and I would choose differently with the awareness I have now.

That I can forgive myself without absolving myself of responsibility...

Perhaps maturity has less to do with becoming unwavering and more to do with becoming increasingly capable of complexity.

So, what happens when we finally trust ourselves?

I don't think that we become fearless, and I don't think the doubt disappears. Unfortunately, I also don't think we unlock some ‘premium version’ of intuition in which every decision becomes suddenly illuminated and obvious.

I think something more subtle happens: Life becomes a little more honest.

We spend less time trying to engineer absolute certainty before allowing ourselves to move forward. We become more attentive to the difference between seeking advice and seeking permission, and perhaps slightly less willing to hand the authorship of our lives to whoever happens to sound most convincing in any given moment.

We begin to recognise our patterns, although never perfectly. We make decisions, observe what those decisions create, revise our understanding, and try again.

And gradually, we build a relationship with ourselves that is not entirely contingent upon getting things right.

Maybe that is the part that I have misunderstood for a long time.

Self-trust is not the belief that I will always know what to do; it is the confidence that when I don't know, or when I choose badly, or change, or stumble, or hurt somebody, or learn something uncomfortable, or find myself standing in circumstances I never anticipated.. 

I do not have to immediately turn against myself.

I can stay curious without becoming evasive. I can be compassionate without becoming self-indulgent. I can take responsibility without deciding that one poor decision makes me fundamentally broken.

And perhaps, more than anything, I can continue participating in my own life rather than standing perpetually at its edges, waiting for certainty to give me permission to enter it.

Maybe self-trust is not the moment when the questions disappear.

Maybe it is the moment that we stop requiring their disappearance before we allow ourselves to live authentically.

Peace & love,

Clare xoxo