What Self-Trust Means
Self-trust is your capacity and ability to trust in your decisions, intuition, and observations. Self-trust doesn’t mean you’re always perfect at making decisions, but it does mean that you trust yourself to navigate wherever your decisions lead you.
Self-trust is essential for your emotional wellbeing because a life without self-trust involves frequent second-guessing, self-criticism, and an inability to have healthy, balanced relationships with other people.
How Religious Trauma Can Undermine Self-Trust
If you’ve experienced religious trauma, you may experience particular challenges with building self-trust. High-control religions and abusive religious environments undermine self-trust and make it difficult to have a healthy relationship with yourself.
Often this lack of self-trust comes from religious teachings that prioritize obedience to authority and perfectionism around avoiding sin. People in religiously traumatizing environments often learn to look towards people in charge for validation, rather than learning to trust their own instincts and experience.
When You Learn to Distrust Your Own Thoughts
Religious trauma survivors can come to distrust their own thoughts, and struggle to make confident decisions about their life. If you’ve experienced high-control religion, you may have been told that you can’t trust yourself through messages about how everyone is prone to being tempted into sin. This leads to viewing yourself through a punitive lens of wrongdoing, rather than building up trust that you can make positive decisions for your life.
When you leave this environment, you may no longer believe these harmful teachings, but you may still have internalized a relationship with yourself that’s based on mistrust and questioning yourself.
Signs You May Be Struggling With Self-Trust
You can start to recognize signs of a lack of self-trust by observing your behaviors and the way you relate to yourself. A few signs that you’re struggling with self-trust are:
- Having difficulty making decisions, even over minor issues in your life
- Chronically seeking reassurance from others
- Being perfectionistic in how you approach tasks
- Feeling preoccupied by fear of making the wrong choice
- Difficulty identifying personal values that might help guide your decisions
Rebuilding Confidence After Religious Trauma
Religious trauma may have diminished your self-trust, but self-trust can be rebuilt. Start by focusing on building self-compassion. You can practice self-compassion by treating yourself with the same kindness you would treat a beloved friend, a child, or an animal.
Growing self-trust also requires that you clarify your values. People who lack self-trust often try to make the perfect decision, or the decision that will be approved by people in authority. As a result, they lose touch with their values. Start to explore what you want out of life and how you’d like to move forward.
And finally, building self-trust requires learning to tolerate uncertainty and mistakes. People with strong self-trust aren’t perfect, but they understand that life is more meaningful when you make choices and try things out. Start small by picking areas of your life where you can practice being more decisive in your decision-making.
How Therapy Can Help
If you’re navigating building self-trust after religious trauma, therapy can help you process shame and guilt, develop a better sense of autonomy, and strengthen trust in your own judgment. Your therapist will work with you to grieve the impact of authoritarian religious practices that caused you to lose self-trust, and rebuild your relationship with yourself into one that is kinder and more supportive.
If you’re in Texas, I’m a licensed professional counselor specializing in helping people build self-trust after religious trauma. I offer virtual sessions for people throughout Texas and in-person sessions in my Houston office. If you’re interested in working with me, schedule a free consultation call at the link below.