When I say to clients “Trust yourself,” clients often ask me, “What do you mean by that?” and I do my best to sincerely respond.
Let’s look at the very young person in the picture accompanying this post; they are with Mom, and their trust is total. Nothing can be wrong—and if something goes awry, love will correct it.
If we fast-forward a couple of decades, much has changed for this young person, now an adult. For one thing, their organic and whole-body sense of trusting ‘okayness’ has largely been replaced by a stream of thinking, a process of discernment which seemingly exists within their heads. Much of this thinking is critical; self-punishing, shaming, corrective-seeming—and, ultimately, hurtful. Nothing is wrong with this, and it is a stage that we grow through (coming up out of infancy, dependency on caregivers, and childhood). The parts of ourselves that try to control us through criticism are persistent, and often loud. These parts of us love us, just like our parents—and in action, they hurt.
I sometimes humorously say to clients, offering them an imagination that I find helpful, that I have discovered the handle of a cartridge-like device sticking out of my own head. When I pull the handle of it, and the cartridge comes out, I realize it contains ALL the self-critical thoughts I have ever had—and now it is no longer broadcasting commands to me, the resulting silence and peace is astonishing, and profound.
In this peace and silence, what would I do? What direction would my life go in next, and how? No longer solely navigating by the dictatorial self-judgment in the cartridge, amidst the relative peace and silence of my natural being, what do I want? And where might my next step land, naturally and organically?
This is the process of trusting ourselves. We listen, feel, take note of, discern, wait, and contemplate within ourselves. We trust the deepest signals we can notice—and give less attention to the shaming messages from within that hurt us, even if they say they are trying to help. This is in no way a hard-and-fast process. There are no fixed rules; although there is a kind of learning happening that lets us know we have grown, expanding ourselves naturally, following the flow of our own being, and increasingly settling in to trusting ourselves, and, eventually, trusting that we *can* trust ourselves.
