There was a stretch of my life when I didn’t trust my own judgment about anything.
It started after a relationship that went bad. Not just bad, but bad in a way that made me question everything I thought I understood. How did I miss it? How did I ignore so many warning signs? How was I so certain about something that turned out to be so completely wrong?
After that, I second-guessed everything. Every decision felt risky. Every instinct felt unreliable. If I could be that wrong before, how was I supposed to trust myself to get anything right? The ground I’d been standing on had given way and I couldn’t figure out how to find my footing again.
If you’ve lost trust in yourself, whether it’s because someone hurt you, or you made choices you regret, or life just slowly chipped away at your confidence, I want you to know this can be rebuilt. It takes time. It takes intention. But self-trust isn’t something you either have or you don’t. It’s something you can grow back. Piece by piece.
It helps to understand how you ended up here. Self-trust usually doesn’t break all at once. It wears away, often through things like these.
Someone you trusted completely betrayed you. A partner, a friend, someone in your family. Someone you let all the way in. And when they hurt you, the damage went further than just what they did. It made you question whether you could judge anyone at all. If you were wrong about them, suddenly your own perception became the problem.
You made decisions that led somewhere painful. The job that turned out to be toxic. Staying when you should’ve walked away. Walking away when maybe you should’ve stayed. Trusting the wrong person, ignoring your gut, overriding what you knew. And now you look back thinking: I did this to myself.
Your confidence got worn down slowly. Maybe by a parent who criticized everything. A partner who controlled you. A workplace that was toxic. Over months or years you learned to doubt yourself. Your opinions got dismissed, your feelings got invalidated, your judgment got questioned until eventually you started questioning it too.
You were gaslit. Someone made you feel like you were losing your mind for seeing what you were seeing. They told you your reality wasn’t real. That you were too sensitive. That you were remembering wrong. And even after you got away from them, that voice stuck around. Making you wonder if you could trust your own mind.
Enough things just went wrong. Not one big failure but this accumulation of losses. Enough plans falling apart, enough hopes that didn’t work out, and somewhere in there you stopped believing you could navigate your own life.
None of this makes you broken. It makes you someone who went through something hard. And the lost self-trust? That’s a wound. Wounds heal.
Before we get into rebuilding, it helps to know what we’re actually rebuilding.
Self-trust isn’t believing you’ll never mess up. It’s not thinking you have all the answers or that you’ll always make the right call. That’s not trust. That’s a fantasy.
Real self-trust is knowing you can handle whatever comes. That even if you choose wrong, you’ll figure it out. That you can listen to yourself and take your own perceptions seriously. That you’ll show up for yourself when it counts.
It’s also about trusting your worth. Believing you deserve good things. That your needs matter. That you’re allowed to take up space and have opinions and make decisions about your own life.
Self-trust doesn’t mean you’ll never have doubts. It means you won’t abandon yourself inside the doubt. You’ll stay. Even when it’s hard. Even when you’re uncertain.
Here’s the thing about rebuilding self-trust: it happens through doing, not through talking yourself into it. You can’t just decide to trust yourself again. You have to give yourself reasons.
This isn’t about big dramatic gestures or proving yourself through major decisions. It’s about small, consistent actions that slowly put the foundation back together.
Keep tiny promises to yourself. This is the most basic thing. Say you’re going to do something, then do it. Start ridiculously small. “I’m going to have a glass of water when I get up.” “I’m going to walk around the block.” “I’m going to be in bed by eleven.” Then follow through. Every kept promise is a little deposit in the self-trust account.
Notice when you were actually right. Your judgment didn’t vanish entirely. There are moments when you sensed something true, when your gut was accurate, when a choice you made worked out. Start watching for those. Write them down if you need to. Balance out the mental reel of failures with actual evidence of your competence.
Practice taking your feelings seriously. When you feel something, don’t automatically dismiss it. If something feels off, acknowledge it. If something feels right, notice that. You don’t have to act on every feeling but you can treat them as information worth paying attention to. “I’m uncomfortable here.” “Something about this doesn’t sit right with me.” “I feel drawn to this.” Your inner signals mean something.
Make small decisions and let them stand. Part of lost self-trust is that constant loop of second-guessing. To rebuild, practice choosing something and not immediately undoing it. Pick where to eat. Decide what to watch. Choose how to spend your afternoon. Then let the choice be made. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be yours.
Forgive the past version of you. This is hard but it matters. The you who made the bad decision? They were doing what they could with what they knew. They were probably dealing with pressures and blind spots you can see now but couldn’t see then. They weren’t stupid. They weren’t worthless. They were human. Can you offer them some compassion?
Rebuilding self-trust takes longer than you want it to. There will be setbacks. Days when all the old doubts come flooding back. Moments when you freeze up, unable to trust what you’re seeing.
That’s okay. That’s part of this.
Think of it like physical therapy after an injury. You don’t go from hurt to healed in a straight line. Some days are better than others. Progress feels impossibly slow. There are times you wonder if you’re making any headway at all.
But underneath, if you’re doing the work, something is mending. The muscle is getting stronger even when you can’t feel it happening.
Same goes for self-trust. Every small promise you keep, every time you take your feelings seriously, every decision you let yourself own. It all adds up. The foundation is being rebuilt, even on the days it doesn’t seem like it.
I want to share a few things that made a real difference for me. In case any of them land.
I started asking what I actually wanted. Not what I thought I should want. Not what would make someone else happy. Not what seemed safest. What did I want? At first I genuinely had no idea. I’d spent so long doubting myself that I’d lost track of my own preferences entirely. So I started tiny. What did I want for dinner? What did I want to do this weekend? Just reconnecting with my own desires helped me reconnect with myself.
I stopped polling everyone for their opinions. I used to crowd-source every choice, partly because I wanted input and partly because I didn’t trust my own. I started practicing decisions without surveying all my friends first. It was uncomfortable. But it helped.
I paid attention to when I felt most like myself. There were certain activities, certain people, certain places where I felt more solid. More real. More like someone I recognized. I tried to spend more time there. Those became little testing grounds for rebuilding.
I let myself be wrong sometimes. Sounds backwards but it actually helped. I made decisions. Some didn’t work out. And I noticed that I survived. That I could adjust course. That being wrong wasn’t the disaster I’d made it out to be. Paradoxically, that made me trust myself more. Because I knew I could handle it.
If you’ve lost trust in yourself, I want you to know something. The you that you used to trust? That person isn’t gone. They’re just buried under hurt and doubt and walls you built to protect yourself.
You haven’t been permanently broken. You’ve been wounded. And wounds can heal with time and care.
The self-trust you’re searching for isn’t something you need to build from scratch. It’s something you’re uncovering. Coming back to. Remembering.
Start small. Be patient with yourself. Keep showing up for you, even in the tiniest ways. And slowly, bit by bit, the ground will start feeling solid again.
You can learn to trust yourself again. Not because everything will turn out perfectly. But because you’ll know, somewhere deep down, that whatever happens you’ll be there for yourself.
That’s what trust actually is. And you can have it back.
