Trusting yourself is the simplest thing, and yet so convoluted.
We’re born with innate trust in the world, in ourselves and in our instincts.
Over time, the inner voice and knowing gets inundated with other voices.
It starts very young, when our knowing contradicts that of what our caregiver wants from us, it feels safer to shut down our knowing than to live in contradiction to our caregiver’s version of the world.
And the disconnection starts with the body.
A really common example:
You’re eating dinner and your body is telling you that you’re full, but your parents force you to eat the whole plate — so you override your body’s signals in order to conform to their wishes.
The body disconnection is everywhere: in the shutting down of a child’s tantrum (a natural way to release emotion), forcing kids in school to ask permission every time they need to use the washroom, making kids sit for 7 hours a day, etc.
(P.S Not advocating for wasting food here. i.e you can honour both the food and your body’s signals by saving the food as leftovers.)
If you want to take the micro example of the family environment to the macro example of culture, you can look at the energetic body of Western culture:
Disassociated, stuck in its head, disconnected from the heart/gut down–which, as Tada Hozumi points out, is a traumatized energy signature. (And traumatized Western culture vomits it baggage onto other cultures, thereby traumatizing them as well.)
Another way this disconnection from ourselves can arise is if there was a lack of boundaries or any kind of enmeshment with a parent growing up, or if you experienced a lack of presence from your parents. In this case, your sense of self might not have gotten a chance to develop properly. This leads to a lack of ability to trust ourselves: a constant external-referencing instead of internal referencing.
After a lifetime of these subtle and maybe not-so-subtle moments of having to defer our truth and knowing, of course it gets difficult to access our knowing, and of course you might have a hard time trusting yourself.
Not to mention, not being able to trust our own truth gets exacerbated anytime you’re in relationship with someone who gaslights you.
So the process is as much about learning how to trust yourself, as it is releasing all of the external voices and conditioning that makes it hard for you to hear your own truth.
How to Trust Yourself:
– Release Conditioning
– Enlist Allies
– Release Judgement of Your Past Self, if applicable
– Practice Accessing Your Inner Knowing
⚡ Release Conditioning
Releasing conditioning is an individual journey. It requires diligence, a willingness to look at ourselves and our patterns, self-reflection, allies: the whole works.
Part of releasing conditioning is undoing the disconnection from our bodies we’ve been taught as a kid. Because the conditioning and voices we’ve picked up largely live in the mind, gaining a somatic awareness (interoception) is so crucial for learning to trust yourself. Something might look good on paper, or sound logical, but if that something makes your heart and/or gut contract, feel heavy, etc.–that’s something to take note of.
(Check out last week’s How to Find Your Purpose post on some types of conditioning to watch out for or Common Limiting Beliefs, and Methods of Releasing Old Grievances for how to release once you’ve gained awareness).
⚡ Enlist Allies
When we’re just starting the process of discerning our own truth, it’s also extremely helpful, necessary even, to enlist allies who can help us reflect back our truth (friends, therapists, coaches, etc.)
The way you can tell that they’re reflecting your knowing back to you is how you feel when their words land: do you feel lighter and validated, or do you feel worse about yourself? If you feel worse about yourself, they’re not the right reflector for you (👎)
You can also enlist non-human allies such as divination tools (i.e tarot) to help train you to discern your truth as you gain more confidence.
It’s not about giving your power away to the tools, but about meditating on what they’re saying and seeing if you feel a resonance.
⚡ Release Judgements of Your Past Self
Sometimes judgements of your past self get in the way of trusting your present self. You can judge your past behaviour as “wrong” and use that as a justification for not trusting yourself.
However, in these instances of judging our past selves, it’s always a case of not having enough information or context.
For example, I had serious judgement of my younger self (ages 19-21) for not being “practical”.
However, what I didn’t realize at the time is that I had grown up with a parentified child dynamic.
In effect, I grew up too fast and didn’t really get to feel like a kid–and this so-called impractical phase of my life that I was judging myself for, was actually me getting a much-needed developmental phase in.
(I had been previously told by my astrologer that I “grew up too fast”, but it didn’t click or make sense to me until I read and saw myself in Gabor Maté’s description of the parentified child dynamic in “When the Body Says No”. The dynamic can be subtle AF and hard to catch.)
Another example of judging yourself before you have enough information:
For example, if you have a history of getting into toxic relationships, you might judge yourself for choosing these situations (“I should’ve known better, etc. etc.”).
However, what you don’t know is that there’s a subconscious, younger aspect of your psyche that seeks these out because it feels familiar.
And until we integrate our subconscious aspects into our conscious self, they’re usually more powerful than our conscious knowledge and drives.
So, if you’re judging yourself for past mistakes: acknowledge there is a gap in your understanding of the full context, commit to releasing the judgement, and cultivate self-forgiveness.
⚡ Practice accessing your inner knowing.
Practice getting in touch with yourself. Get to know the different forms your inner knowing may come in.
Inner knowing / intuitive hits can come in a lot of different forms. It can come as a physical sensation, a thought, an auditory sensation, a visual image, a knowing, an emotion, etc.
An exercise you can try is asking yourself a question:
i.e “Would it be better to move to Westmount or Bonnie Doon?”
Then, get still and wait for the response. You might feel an expansion or contraction in your body, or you might hear something in your head, what-have-you.
When I first started practicing intuition, I always got tripped up over how I could trust whether the answer was from my mind or inner knowing. The thing is: the question itself of wondering if something is from mind or intuition, is from the mind.
What I’ve learned is you just gotta trust it and go with it– “faith” it til you make it, as Christine Hassler says. (Also, the moment of stillness after you ask the question is important, because it allows the quiet needed to be able to hear the inner knowing.)
The truth is, everyone has access to their intuition and inner knowing. But you can sharpen the tool by releasing conditioning, as mentioned above, or other specific modalities/trainings.
For example, a meditation that is focused on stilling the mind can help train you to discern between regular mind chatter and inner insights.
For me personally, because a lot of my intuition is body-based, doing the body awareness-based mediation of Vipassana super helped me hone my skills.
And doing the theta healer training ramped up my intuitive abilities tenfold, because it provided validation and confirmation for the insights I was getting, where before I might have doubted them.
Fun tip: you can use your horoscope to discern what kind of intuition you might have. Like fire-y charts might come as a lightning flash of sharp insight, for watery peeps like me, it can come in body sensations and emotions, for air nomads, it might come in a mental knowing, and earthbenders–I’m sorry, I don’t really know what earth correlation might be–maybe an instinctual, gut response? Feel free to comment below and enlighten me if you know lol.
In any case: play around, experiment, and practice honing your skills.
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In summary: to access your inner knowing, release conditioning so you can actually hear it better, enlist allies for validation, release judgement of your past self as “wrong”, and practice practice practice!
Good luck!
How to Trust Yourself
