Why You Don’t Trust Yourself: How It Impacts Your Relationships (Ep #15 Relationship Series)

Why you don’t trust yourself - and how it affects your relationships.

In this episode of the Pure Possibilities Podcast Relationship Series, we explore the foundation of self-trust and how self-abandonment quietly shapes your life, your decisions, and your relationships.

If you’ve ever felt like:

•  you don’t know what you want 
•  you second-guess your decisions 
•  you struggle to trust others 

…it may not be that you lack clarity.  It may be that you’ve stopped trusting yourself.

In this episode, I share how patterns like people-pleasing, wanting to be liked, and overriding your own needs slowly erode self-trust - and how that impacts every relationship in your life.

You’ll also be guided through a simple body-based check-in practice to help you reconnect with yourself and begin rebuilding trust from within.

Download your FREE  5-Minute Body Check-In Guide to start reconnecting with your body and rebuilding trust with yourself:
🔗 Click Here To Download 5-Minute Body Check-in

✨ Reflection Questions✨

1. Where am I choosing being liked over being honest?
2. Where have I been overriding my own knowing?
3. What is one small way I can follow through on myself this week?

Trust isn’t something you either have or don’t have.  It’s something you build - moment by moment, choice by choice.

Transcript

Welcome And Relationship Series Context

Shannon 0:00

Welcome back. You're listening to the Pure Possibilities podcast, and I'm your host, Shannon. We have been exploring a lot in the relationship series, and I have been loving it. I hope you have been too. We've talked about our relationship with time, what we avoid, and what's really important is what's happening underneath our behaviors. And today I want to move into something that does sit at the foundation of all of it: your relationship with trust. And we're not just talking about trusting other people, but actually trusting yourself. Because a lot of the time we say we don't know what we want. And I would challenge that. It's not that we don't know what we want, it's that we don't trust ourselves to choose it or to follow through with it or to really hold that decision once we've made it. Before we go any further, I want to invite you to do a really simple body check-in with me. This is something that you can do in just a few minutes, and it's a really powerful way to start rebuilding trust with yourself. Wherever you are, if it feels safe and comfortable, go ahead and close your eyes, take a deep breath in and release. First, just notice what's happening in your body right now. Is there tension, heaviness, ease? Anywhere, just gently scan your body from your head to your toes. There's no need to change anything, just notice. Then pause. Take a couple of slow breaths in and out. Again, in and out, and allow yourself to be truly here in the present moment. Then begin to reconnect and ask yourself, what am I feeling right now? And what might my body need? Not what your mind thinks you should do, but what your body is actually asking for. And from that place, you can begin to respond in a way that actually supports you, even if it's something small. This is one of the simplest ways to start building or rebuilding trust with yourself again. I have created a five-minute body check-in guide, and in that guide, I walk you through this a little more step by step, but this is the core of what I teach: learning to notice, reconnect, and then respond differently. You can download a copy using the link in the show description, and you'll immediately get it, and it'll be sent right to your inbox. So, something that I have been reflecting on recently is the idea of wanting to be liked. And I think a lot of us can relate to that. There was definitely a version of me that really wanted people to like me. And then I found that I shifted, and then there was a version of me that swung in the completely opposite direction where I was like, I don't care what anybody thinks. But what I've come to realize is that neither of those is fully true. So stick with me on this because there are people in your life whose opinions you probably deeply, deeply care about. People you respect, people you love, people whose perspectives really matter to you. And then there are other people where, if you're being really honest, you don't actually care what they think. You don't care what they think about what you're doing on a daily basis, you don't care what they think about what you're doing with your life, you just, you just don't care. And so I believe that that's really normal that some people's opinions of us are going to carry a heavier weight than others. But what becomes really important here isn't do I care what people think? The actual question is am I betraying or abandoning myself to be liked or even loved? Because that's where the shift happens. That's where you can start to see: am I saying yes when I mean no? Am I holding back what I really truly feel deep in my being? Am I adjusting myself to fit into a space or into a connection that doesn't actually feel aligned with me? And so that's where the disconnect happens. It's not that one person's opinion matters necessarily more than the other, but am I abandoning myself or betraying myself to be in that space or in that connection? Every time you abandon or betray yourself, you're overriding yourself. You're overriding your thoughts, feelings, and opinions, you're overriding what feels good to you. And as you do that over and over again, you start to reduce the amount of trust that you have in yourself. And it doesn't, this doesn't happen overnight. It's something that just kind of like you start chipping away at that trust. And if you think about it, if you don't trust yourself and you don't trust your decisions, how are you going to trust other people if you don't even have a deep trust in yourself? If you don't honor and respect how you feel, what would make you think that other people would honor and respect how you feel? And I know that sounds really harsh, but it's really true. If I'm doing things on a daily basis that chip away at my confidence, my trust in myself, how I feel about myself, then not only am I diminishing that relationship I have with myself, I'm also kind of putting it out into the world that it's okay to treat me a certain way because I treat myself that way. So why wouldn't I just expect that other people would treat me the same way? So it's the small, subtle ways where you say you're gonna do something and you don't, you feel something and you dismiss it, you know something and you talk yourself out of it. And that's where I say, like, we like to say that we don't know, but we really, really do. And over time, that creates a disconnect. Because why would you trust yourself if you keep overriding yourself? You're consistently reminding yourself that your wants, needs, and desires don't matter. And if they don't matter to you, why would they matter to anyone else? Sit with that for a second. If they don't matter to you, why would they matter to anyone else? So then that takes us to like, how does that actually show up in our relationships? Then we start to look outside of ourselves. We start questioning, can I trust them? What are they thinking? What does this mean? But sometimes, or most of the time, it's not actually about them. Sometimes it's that internal foundation that you've created and it doesn't feel steady because when you don't trust yourself, everything starts to feel uncertain. So I want to be kind of gentle with this, and I also want to be really honest because we do have a choice, not always in what's happening around us, but in how we respond to it. And I know that sometimes it doesn't feel like we have choice, but the moment that you become aware of something, it allows you access to a different choice, even if it's a small choice that you're making, even if it's just noticing, oh my gosh, I'm doing that thing again, because awareness without action doesn't actually create change. It keeps you in the same loop over and over again. What's interesting to me is that I recently discovered that a core wound of mine is not feeling chosen. And it goes, I'm not going to go into all the details about it, but it goes back to my childhood and it has continued to loop in my life over and over and over again. And I actually just recently recognized this. And so now it's allowing me the opportunity to choose different. When I pause and I'm like, oh, I'm starting to do this. I'm starting to maybe chase after someone. I'm being in a chasing energy. I want to be chosen. I want to be included. I want to feel part of something, or I so deeply want to be in someone's life. Now I check in with myself and I recognize that that wound goes back really far. But now that I have the awareness of that's what it actually is, it allows me the opportunity now to make a different choice when I recognize that that patterned behavior is coming up to the surface because it's all deeply rooted. These things are deeply rooted in our subconscious. And so once we become aware of them, we can make a different choice. And then that allows us to move out of that loop that's been going on probably a majority of your life. So rebuilding trust with yourself doesn't come from making big dramatic changes. I mean, honestly, none of this happens from a big change. Because if you think about it, if you've been living life this way for, I don't know, for me, 50 years of my life, that shift isn't going to happen overnight. I can't go from one behavior all the way to a different behavior just in the blink of an eye. It happens in the small moments every day where you notice, acknowledge, and move through whatever it is, and then you make a different choice. And then when you catch yourself, because none of us are perfect, like you can be on you can be doing this work in healing things from your past, and something is gonna come up, something's gonna activate you, something's gonna trigger you. And then because you're approaching it from a healthier space, it allows you the opportunity to make a different decision rather than staying, staying stuck because we all have choice. And I don't know about you, but for me, for the longest time I didn't recognize that I could actually change things in my life, but you can. So it comes from these, again, not big dramatic changes, but it's the small moments following through on something that you said you would do, listening when your body is asking for rest, speaking up when something just doesn't feel right. And it's not about being perfect, it's about being consistent. So we're gonna go ahead and move into the reflection questions. So go ahead and take a moment to check in. These will also be in the show description for you to come back to later if now isn't a good time. But if it feels comfortable, go ahead and close your eyes or soften your gaze and take a deep breath in and release. Reflection question number one: where am I choosing being liked over being honest? Just notice where that might be showing up in your current lived experience. Number two, where have I been overriding my own knowing? Not judging it, just witnessing it. And number three, what is one small way I can follow through for myself this week? Something simple, something doable, not something massively outlandish. So please come back to these questions if you don't have time right now. The answers that come to you can be very enlightening and informative. You know, this is just information. So, okay, we're gonna go ahead and move into a card pull. We're gonna pull from the magic of what if let's do volume one today. See what the message is for today. I'm gonna go ahead and shuffle the cards. Okay, today's card is what if I deeply and completely lean into trust? You know, you cannot make this stuff up. What if I deeply and completely lean into trust? I feel like I want to pull a card from deck two also. Um, but seriously, what if you lean into trust? Trusting yourself, trusting others. Sometimes it's just about being vulnerable with that trust and knowing, like knowing that you're gonna be okay. Because you will be, you always are, you've made it this far. What if I inspire others just by being me? What if I inspire others just by being me? You know, it's interesting. The more you can just be yourself and surround yourself with people that are open and loving and willing and accepting of you as you are, it's a huge like it's huge to not have to try and change and do things just the way other people, just the way you believe other people want you to do them, because you're not gonna be accepted or not gonna fit in. And, you know, again, self-abandonment. If you're acting like somebody else in hopes that people are gonna like you and want to be around you, you're not only are you abandoning yourself, they're not even getting to see the true version of you. And there's something to be said for that, because then it's kind of a lie, actually. Then the people that you're with, they don't even actually know who you really are. It's this version of you that you're putting on this show to be somebody completely different just because you you believe that you wouldn't be accepted if you were actually being yourself. Your relationship with yourself sets the tone for every relationship in your life. And trust isn't something you either have or you don't have, it's something that you build and rebuild within yourself, moment by moment, choice by choice. And sometimes it begins in the smallest ways. A pause, a breath, that moment that you get honest with yourself. You don't have to figure everything out today, but I truly invite you to start noticing because noticing when you're with yourself and with your not, when you're abandoning yourself or not, because that will help you begin to trust yourself and everything will start to shift. The five-minute body check-in that I created is a great way to start rebuilding trust with yourself and doing those check ins and starting to actually listen to your body talk to you because your body, the wisdom of your body, all of the answers are there when we start to listen. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening. I hope you have a beautiful, beautiful day and an amazing week. Much love.