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Hi friends! As I’ve worked on feeling better about myself, one of my big challenges has been learning how to trust myself again. But what I discovered about self-trust might surprise you. Here’s the secret to trusting yourself again.

The Secret to Trusting Yourself Again

First of all, when you don’t trust yourself it can make life pretty difficult.

Personally, I found it hard to feel confident in my own decisions or goals because I wasn’t sure if I could trust myself.

So when I started trying to build trust myself, it was such a foreign concept. How could I build self-trust if I had never experienced it before?

What I discovered is the secret to learning to trust yourself again.

Identify Why You Don’t Trust Yourself

Before you can start building trust with yourself, you have to actually identify WHY you don’t trust yourself.

To illustrate this, here’s my background story about why my self-trust was so weak.

Since I grew up in a very codependent home, I was taught not to trust myself but to actually trust the other people around me more.

On top of that, my dad was emotionally abusive. So whenever I displayed any emotions, he would use that to control me.

He told me so many times, “I know you better than you know yourself.”

As you could imagine, that really messed with my head as a kid.

Also, I was brought up in strict Christian religion (specifically Mormonism), that taught me to ignore my intuition and follow a long set of rules instead.

While religion is amazing for some people, the rules I had to follow didn’t align with my personal values. Which contributed to breaking my own trust over and over again.

So, between the codependent home and the strict religious upbringing, my self trust was nowhere to be found.

If you don’t trust yourself, take time to identify the specific reasons in your own background that caused this. When did you stop trusting yourself? What upsetting events taught you not to trust yourself?

For example, maybe it was your upbringing, a bad relationship or an upsetting life event.

Once you start to understand where it comes from, then the healing can come.

Process It

After you identify where your lack of self-trust comes from, now it’s time to process those experiences.

But wait. What does ‘process it’ mean?

Well, if you need to process an experience that means you’ve been carrying it around in its unprocessed state.

And when we have unprocessed emotions, they become burdens that drain our energy.

For an example, let’s do a food analogy.

If you want to make tomato sauce, you put the tomatoes, onions and whatever else in the food processor. It breaks it down to what you really want: tomato sauce!

But if you just carry the whole ingredients around in your pocket, they’ll get squished and rotten.

So, if you don’t process your experiences then the emotions can get rotten in your mind.

On the other hand, if you’re able to think about them and process them down, then they will make sense for your brain. And they won’t be a mental, emotional burden anymore.

For me, since I experienced emotional abuse, I had to process my experiences in therapy. With the help of my therapist, I was able to uncover the reasons it was hard for me to trust myself. She helped me break down the experiences into something I could understand, then let go of.

Another way I processed my emotions blocking self trust was with different energy healers. Two of my favorites are my friend Chelsea and another named Natalie.

But if you want to process things on your own, you can do it in your journal or by sitting quietly with yourself in meditation.

If you tend to hate meditating, I wrote a blog post about how to do it without going crazy.

You could even talk to a friend about your experiences.

However you choose to do it, clearing your subconscious mind of the reasons you didn’t trust yourself in the past will help you trust yourself today.

Start Rebuilding Your Own Trust

Finally, now it’s time to start rebuilding trust with yourself. And the easiest way to do that is to start keeping teeny tiny promises to yourself every day.

Personally, I started by promising myself that no matter what, every single day I would say the Lord’s Prayer in my head at noon. No exceptions! I chose this because it was something inconsequential. Meaning, nothing bad would happen if I didn’t keep this promise.

I detail this exercise in an Instagram post here.

But as I started doing this every day, I was able to trust myself with bigger things!

So, whether you decide to write down what you’re grateful for every day, or choose to water your plants no matter what, or whatever the tiny promise is…keep it!

The Secret to Healing Your Self Trust Issues

Personally, I found that the secret to trusting yourself again is to heal the emotions behind why you don’t trust yourself in the first place.

While you’re doing that, keeping small promises to yourself on a daily basis will start building new trust.

The more I’ve healed my past experiences of breaking my own trust, the easier it is to trust myself now.

What about you? What’s helped you trust yourself again? Tell me in the comments.

If what you read helped you, pin it!