Many people find it challenging to trust themselves especially when you come from a dysfunctional family. As you begin to build self-trust you may be surprised to discover how much it impacts everything you do.

For instance, not trusting yourself to make good decisions, you may feel paralyzed with self-doubt. You struggle to express opinions that differ from others.

Advocating for yourself in personal and professional relationships creates anxiety. Assuming your thoughts and feelings are not worth considering is a common pitfall.

The reverse is also true: when trusting yourself, you can listen and honor your own feelings and experiences. You take all of them into account when making decisions. Over time, this practice builds your self-confidence.

Building self-trust also helps you to speak out and express yourself at work and at home, even when others disagree with you.

While building trust in yourself will not fix every problem, it is a critical component for successful, healthy relationships with yourself and with others.

Building self-trust can be simple but it does take commitment and a willingness to keep practicing it imperfectly.

In this blog you will learn 3 simple strategies for how to build self-trust the right way!

What Is Self-Trust?

When you talk about self-trust, what does it mean?

At the core, trusting yourself is about honoring your own thoughts, feelings, and experiences without constantly questioning them or needing validation from others.

One of the ways to talk about self-trust is to talk about what it isn’t, that is, what it looks like when someone does not trust her or himself. Think about these examples:

• Emma has trouble believing her opinions are important. When a coworker makes inappropriate jokes at her expense, Emma doesn’t say anything because she is afraid she’s being too sensitive. Emma continues to worry about this situation.

• At home, Oliver cooks and cleans while his partner does outside chores in the yard. Oliver does not challenge this or even try to discuss it, even though he would really prefer to work in the yard. Even though he acts like everything is fine, Oliver feels more and more resentful every time he does the dishes.

• Evan’s brother frequently visits them on short notice. When his brother arrives, he expects Evan to drop everything and spend time with him. Evan prefers to plan things ahead of time but he is afraid to tell his brother the truth and hurt his feelings.

In each circumstance, the person can’t voice and trust their own opinion: Emma doubts her feelings about her coworker’s behavior, so she stays silent. Oliver avoids expressing his true feelings, even though it causes him frustration. Evan doesn’t voice his preference so he now dreads his brother’s visits.

Building Self-Trust and Relationships

Without building self-trust, it isn’t hard to see that Emma, Olivia and Evan will probably have problems in these specific situations. However, without work on self-trust, they may experience other challenges, including problems with relationships, as well as with their health and stress levels.

Without self-trust, the consequences show up in your relationships and cause problems. For instance:

• If Emma can’t trust her feelings about her coworker’s behavior, she may find herself less likely to trust her feelings if that behavior escalates to unwanted advances.

• If Oliver can’t express a preference for which routine chores he does, he may be less able to find a way to discuss other imbalances in his relationship with his partner such as control of finances.

• If Evan can’t protect his boundaries about his brother’s intrusive visits, they may not be able to maintain a loving relationship.

These are some ways that self-trust can affect relationships with others.

Building Self-Trust and Your Health

When you don’t trust yourself, you may feel more anxious or stressed. This happens because it takes a lot of energy to deny emotions and constantly question everything you do. Unexpressed feelings get stored in the body as stress.

Simple tasks and everyday decisions become more difficult and can leave you feeling overwhelmed. Eventually, this can even lead to stress-related illness, stomach aches, and headaches.

What Makes Self-Trust Difficult?

Often, people who struggle with self-trust can trace this difficulty back to childhood. Children learn to deny or avoid difficult feelings when their caregivers don't have the skills to manage their own feelings, let alone teach a child how to manage theirs.

Some experienced severe criticism or ridicule for expressing emotions such as crying or getting angry. The child learns to keep quiet and avoid painful feelings. As a result, these children learn to distrust their feelings, instead of using them as a guide.

In trying to escape the pain of childhood, we deny our feelings, our thoughts, and our experiences.

By invalidating what we have gone through, we abandon ourselves and learn to seek our answers in others. (This is the beginning of codependency. You can read more in my blog post “Healing from Codependency: Where To Start.”)

3 Easy Steps to Building Self-trust

So how do we build self-trust? Like worthwhile relationships, building a relationship with yourself takes time. But there are things you can do to help.

1. Identify and address negative thoughts and beliefs.

When we want to change any behavior, we need to start with the identifying your thoughts. When you were a child, what did you believe about yourself and how trustworthy you were then? What do you believe about yourself now? Are those thoughts more positive or negative?

Here are a few examples:

• I’m just not that smart.

• I have always been way too sensitive.

• I’m sure just about anyone knows more about that than I do.

• I’ll never get this right.

Once you start looking at how you see yourself in the big picture, pay attention to how you think about yourself. This is often called “self-talk,” which consists of your private thoughts that don’t get spoken out loud. When these thoughts are mostly negative, they can have a major impact on our mood and self-trust.

Addressing self-talk is not about denying actual problems in your life, but instead, learning to talk to yourself as you would talk to a close friend: with compassion and encouragement.

Improve Your Self-Talk

Changing the quality of your self-talk starts by confronting these negative thoughts and transforming them into encouragement. This takes practice but this is a powerful way to build self-trust.

For instance, instead of focusing on negative messages that make you doubt yourself, focus your attention what’s positive about you and build around that.

Thoughts like, “I have always been such a mess,” can become, “I am enough exactly as I am.”

For more on changing read my blog What You Should Know About Self-talk.

2. Develop your intuition no matter what it looks like.

When we struggle with self-trust, we can stop believing that we have the ability to notice and interpret information that’s coming from the outside world, particularly if we don’t have practice at it.

But the human brain is pretty amazing at picking up and transmitting subtle cues as intuition, even when we don’t consciously think about those cues.

Even better: we can get better at recognizing those cues and our responses to them. We all receive information from the world around us every minute of every day. Some people get a “gut feeling,” while others experience an inner voice urging them to pay attention. When you interact with others, try to notice what you are thinking and feeling. How are you reacting?

3. Pay attention and acknowledge your progress.

Most of us have heard the advice that we should always try to learn from your mistakes, but even in old sayings, there are important truths.

While you are working to listen to your intuition, pay attention to those times that you miss the mark and what the results were…but be sure to pay attention gently.

Everyone makes mistakes (another of those old sayings, but so true!). Don’t beat yourself up for being human. Try to remember that the old habit took time to form. It is natural that it will take time to break.

And while you are paying attention to your mistakes, be sure to pay attention to your successes. When you DO listen to yourself, what are the results?

You will be more motivated to follow your feelings when you see what it does for you!

Final Thoughts

When we can make a habit of trusting ourselves, we can find the strength to know that our thoughts, our experiences, and our lives have value, regardless of the happenings in the world or the people around us.

We can trust ourselves enough to know that we deserve to be in safe and genuine relationships with caring people who encourage and support us, and allow us to encourage and support them. When we practice self-trust, we can be our own best allies and our own best advocates.