Why You've Stopped Trusting Yourself (And How to Start Again)

Dr Marianne Trent (: 00:00

What if the person you've stopped trusting is yourself? Not because you're weak, not because you're incapable, but because somewhere along the way, someone or something taught you that your instincts couldn't be trusted. Maybe it was burnout, maybe it was an unhealthy relationship. Maybe years of criticism drowned out your own voice. Today, I want to explore what it really means to begin to trust yourself again. I'm Dr. Marianne Trent. Welcome to Inner Work. This week in the main episode, Psychology Actually, I'm chatting with Dr. Ellie all about her time on The Traitors and what trust is. But I thought we'd take a little look in Inner Work about what trusting yourself looks like, which can be a very different ball game than trusting or distrusting others, mainly because we are always with ourselves and that can make life quite tricky. One of my colleagues and psychologist trainers once said, "I think there's often a very good and important reason why this shows up for you, why this shows up for us." And that is certainly the case when it comes to feeling like you can't trust your own judgement .

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So let's take a look. So often when I'm working with adults who might report to me that they've had anxiety or depression showing up for them at different periods of their life, on and off, on and off, and they don't really know why, they'll be like, "Well, I've had a pretty good upbringing. My parents are all right. I came from a happy home. So I don't know, it's just me, isn't it? I'm the problem, it's me." And then over time, as we begin to take a little bit of a look about actually what their early experiences were like, we can often begin to piece together that actually maybe things in their development, their early years, their first 18 years, were not as calm, were not as consistent, were not as predictable, and were not as safe as they deserved for them to be. Not because they're a queen, not because they're a king, not because they're a princess, but because all of us, regardless of who we are, when we're born, when we grow, when we develop, we deserve to have a safe, good enough childhood where we are loved, where we are protected, where we are fed, where we are clothed, where there's consistency, where there's boundaries.

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And really, that might sound like very simple things that humans need, but that is really the bare bones about what helps us to thrive. So when we look back on people's lives sometimes and they're like, "Well, my parents were in a domestically violent relationship. One of my parents was lowly mood, depressed, and was thinking about suicide at one stage.

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Maybe someone in the household went to prison or maybe we were hit as children and I was really scared for my own safety or the safety of my siblings." Or maybe just that sense that your family didn't feel the same as other people's families, we begin to piece together a little bit of a presentation which might then explain why trusting ourselves and trusting other people might feel problematic. Because if we've always been told bad things about ourselves or that we haven't been raised in a way that makes us think we can achieve and we can produce an outcome that is something we're striving for and that it's okay for us to strive for things, then we are very quickly going to begin to undermine our own hopes, our own dreams. I really like the book by Simon Squibb called What's Your Dream because it really can get us to think if I took all of the expectations, all of the self-limitations off myself and just allowed myself to think, what would genuinely light me up?

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How could I trust myself to back myself, to get me where I would want to be if I took away all of that external noise or maybe sometimes even that internal noise. And I love it, his philosophy where he's like, "I'm going to give you this money to get you started to get you over this first hurdle because then who are we kidding? If we're not getting our dreams, if we're not backing ourselves because we've been saying this reason why I can't do it and then that reason is taken away, then I think we do then have to do the inner work. We have to be curious to think about why we are getting in our own way. And it might be an element of self-preservation, which is okay because doing new things does feel a bit scary, does feel a bit risky, but I think it is just holding it gently with curiosity and having a look at it and thinking, what is that about?

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Is that genuinely true or is this a decision that I'm making based on old information or information that I'm imagining might come to pass in the future?" So just be watchful. If you're getting in your own way or if it feels like other people will say things, just take a look, see what you think. I would love to know what you do think. What is this bringing up for you? What is your dream? Are you able to trust yourself with it so that you can achieve? I would love to know. Thank you so much for being here. The next episode of Inner Work is at 8:00 PM on Wednesday. And if you've enjoyed this episode, I think you'll really like this one on screen, which is about stopping waiting to be chosen and choosing yourself, controlling your own destiny. Thanks for being part of my world.

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I'll see you soon. Take care.