I used to second-guess myself over everything—from the way I worded a text message to the gut feeling I had about someone who later broke my heart. I silenced my instincts, buried my truth under politeness, and handed out benefit-of-the-doubt passes like candy on Halloween. And for what? To avoid conflict. To be liked. To feel safe. Spoiler alert: I didn’t end up feeling safe. I ended up lost. Disconnected from the one person I needed the most—me.
If you’re reading this, maybe you know what that feels like. The quiet betrayal of yourself, over and over again, until your own voice becomes just background noise in your life.
Rebuilding self-trust isn’t glamorous. There’s no checklist, no magic mantra. It’s gritty. It’s messy. It looks like standing in front of the mirror and finally admitting that you abandoned yourself trying to keep the peace. It feels like waking up and realizing you don’t recognize the person you’ve been performing as.
But here’s the thing: you’re not broken. You’re just bruised. And bruises heal.
Let me be clear—I’m not writing this from a mountaintop. I’m still in the process, still learning how to listen to myself without needing a second or third opinion. Still learning to sit with the discomfort of saying “No” without explaining why. Still practicing choosing myself, even when it’s terrifying.
Rebuilding self-trust means you stop asking people for directions to a place they’ve never been—your life. It means rewriting the narrative in your head that says you're too emotional, too much, too sensitive, too difficult. Because the truth? You were probably just intuitive. And you were gaslit out of it.
So, how do you start?
You start small.
You honor the small yeses and the sacred no’s. You keep promises to yourself—especially the tiny ones. You stop shrinking to fit into rooms you’ve outgrown. You learn to sit in silence and ask, “What do I want?”—and actually wait for the answer.
You stop justifying your boundaries like they’re negotiable. You let people be disappointed. You let them walk. And you stop chasing them, because what you’re chasing isn’t them—it’s validation. And validation doesn’t live in other people. It lives in you. But you have to be still enough, honest enough, raw enough to hear it.
Here’s something nobody tells you: trusting yourself again isn’t about becoming perfect. It’s about becoming honest. It’s about being able to say, “I was wrong there,” without spiraling into shame. It’s about forgiving yourself for not knowing better when you didn’t. And now? Now you know better. That means something.
Let the new version of you be louder than the one who was silenced. Let her be bold. Let her be inconvenient. Let her make mistakes and still hold her head high.
Because rebuilding self-trust doesn’t mean you never fall—it means you stop abandoning yourself when you do.
And that? That’s power.
