Why Can’t I Trust Myself?
We often keep ourselves down. We know the right thing, or the thing we want, but we can’t bring ourselves to believe it. What’s stopping us from intuiting our way through the world?
Social Media
More recently, social media has affected our ability to trust ourselves. We used to gauge ourselves and our actions by the group in which we found ourselves every day. Just fifteen years ago, our world wasn’t this big. This is not a judgement of social media, but an observation that our minds haven’t yet adapted to the lightning fast evolution of technology. There’s an assumption that we have to be doing/feeling/thinking what everyone in our group is doing/feeling/thinking. We can’t be “in” with everyone. It’s impossible. It’s too many people and it’s overwhelmingly loud— so loud that sometimes we need to dissociate from the images we’re viewing. Then what happens? These messages get inside of us; unconsciously, and potentially cause an even deeper confusion. Lots of people come to therapy asking, “what do I want? Who am I?” And although this seems like the industrial-age-old-question, it feels even more true in the present.
Messages from Caregivers:
There’s a good chance that the things we were told and the behaviors that were modeled for us when we were little are affecting us today. There’s a spectrum of experience that can contribute to this effect.
Watching the way caregivers move about the world— we may not be directly told the way to live, but seeing, hearing, and feeling our caregivers as they live their lives certainly has an impact on the way we live our lives. If they let others dictate how they live their lives, there’s a good chance that our (as children) response will either be to rebel against that or comply with that image (whether or not it’s conscious).
If we had a caregiver that was always telling us how to do things, when to do things, what things to do, etc… it makes it difficult for us to feel secure enough in ourselves to feel that we have inherent ability to make our own decisions or that we are capable of performing at a level that is “enough” for ourselves or the world.
There is a straight line between physical, sexual, emotional abuse or witnessing domestic violence in childhood, and not being able to trust our caregivers. Distrust of the abusive caregiver is often too much to bear as caregivers are the number one people to trust. This distrust is often internalized in young children and turned in on the child as self-doubt is more bearable than doubting safety around primary caregivers.
What we give meaning (thoughts, feelings, actions):
As discussed here, we are meaning making machines. When we have a thought, we may believe that we are that thought, which in turn, makes it hard to trust ourselves. Beliefs about ourselves can cloud our intuition around decision-making or feeling grounded in what-we-want or who-we-are. In fact, the bearing our thoughts and feelings have on us is only dependent on the amount of weight we give them. Our thoughts and feelings live inside our minds and are not a threat. We get to choose what we listen to, which takes a good deal of self-trust; to believe that we will not be led astray by ourselves and our will.
It’s a complicated thought exercise. Let’s have a dialogue.