How To Build Self-Trust (After A Lifetime Of Self-Abandonment)

hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here today on this channel we're talking about a topic that I am very excited about and this is the topic of how to build self-trust I believe that self-trust is at the absolute core of any sort of healing work until we believe that we can trust ourselves to do what we said we would do and to show up for ourselves in a way that is going to make our lives healthier happier more expansive it's going to be really

difficult to get any hard self work done and so I believe that fostering self-trust needs to be a foundational piece of the attachment healing process but it can also be a kind of intimidating thing to think about for those of us who have spent a lot of our lives self-abandoning so if you don't know what I mean when I use that term I did film a video all about the term self-abandonment I will link it in the description of this video and you can go there to check out whether that term applies to you but

most of us who did not grow up securely attached have somewhat of a pattern of self-abanding in different circumstances and therefore not being able to trust ourselves to follow through on exactly what it is that we want to do with our lives in this video we're going to talk about how to start working towards that follow-through and how to build yourself into a person over time who you can look up to have respect for and Trust to do what you said you would do for yourself and for whatever reason it felt the most intuitive to

me to present five kind of tools or strategies you could use First in their inverse form so we're going to talk about what makes it difficult to trust ourselves and then we're going to talk about how to do the opposite of that thing so rather than over explaining what I mean by that we'll just dive into number one so number one it is very hard to trust yourself if you are continuously making promises to yourself that you don't keep so if you're the kind of person who is constantly making plans for the future that you

get really excited about and then do not follow through on or who is always telling yourself tomorrow I'm going to start operating differently what you are doing is continuously breaking the trust of your inner child right there's a very young very innocent part of you that gets really excited every time you make these big plans for your future and that part of yourself is getting continuously let down every time you get emotionally invested in a plan and then don't follow through on it now there are Myriad reasons why someone might do this sometimes what we're

doing when we make grandiose plans and then fail to follow through on them is that we're actually using the idea of that fantasy future as a means of self-regulating through a difficult moment so I think that a lot of the time when people have this sense of I just lack follow-through what's actually going on is that they're using visions of a fantasy future which they never ever truly intended to work towards as a means of calming themselves down or avoiding some sort of pain in the moment and that can get really confusing if you're always

telling yourself I'm going to work towards this goal or that goal and then you're never actually taking action on it and in this case it can be helpful to just recognize those who are never necessarily plans to begin with just like a child whose trust you have continuously broken you need to have an action plan for winning your own self-trust back and in order to win yourself trust back you have to start treating the relationship you have with your inner child the way you would treat a relationship with someone else unless you're also very flaky

with other people but you get what I'm saying sometimes when we make a plan with someone else we want to do that plan in the moment and then when it gets closer to we don't want to do it anymore but we still show up because we said we would and we want other people to think of us as trustworthy and as people who do what they said they would do because then those people want to form closer relationships with us and the same is true of ourselves sometimes we make a plan and as we get

closer to that plan we don't want to do it anymore but if we care about the relationship we have with ourselves we need to be following through on the plans that we made with the young innocent excitable part of ourselves in order to prove to them I am a trustworthy person I do what I say that I will do and the more that you do this the more you refuse to bail on the plans that you made for yourself the more you're going to start developing discernment about which plans you want to commit to in

the first place but to get started on this what you want to do is start making very small goals that you follow through on solely for the sake of following through on them not because there's a particular outcome you want that is really big not because you want to hold yourself accountable to somebody else just pick one small thing that you can commit to doing for the next 30 days in a row that will make your life genuinely better in some small way every day and then do that thing solely because you said you would

do it even if there's a day where it does not make sense to do it or it's annoying to do it do it that day solely because you said you would do it and I really do recommend making this a small thing don't make it something you hate don't make it something you know in advance you're going to feel extreme resistance to make it something very manageable maybe it's every morning for 30 mornings I'm going to take 10 minutes where I sit out on my porch and drink my coffee with my phone turned off maybe

it's every day for 30 days I'm going to eat something that I cooked or baked myself maybe it's every day for 30 days I'm going to meditate or exercise for one minute write these tiny micro goals that we know will make our day a little bit more positive but we're also sure we can hold ourselves accountable to maintaining start that process of building self-trust if every day in at least one instance you're giving yourself the feeling of I'm a person who is consistent and trustworthy to myself you're beginning to build a positive self relationship so

this is the process of just beginning to strengthen and train the muscle of self-accountability and self-reliability and just like when it comes to training in any other capacity we want to start small but be consistent if we want our progress to be long lasting so step one to combat the problem of not trusting yourself because you continuously do not do what you say you will do you want to pick something that you are sure you can count on yourself to follow through on for 30 days and do that thing only because you said you would

so no getting out if you hate it halfway through if you find a better idea halfway through if your schedule changes and you get annoyed it doesn't matter because the purpose of this is not to make make you happy it is to make you trust yourself do it only because you said you would second thing that gets in the way of self trust it is very difficult to trust yourself if you don't understand why you are doing the things that you are doing so this step is all about being present and compassionate with yourself as

you unpack things like trauma responses or patterns of self-abandoning behavior that you previously have not understood so for most of us we go into most situations thinking I'm going to be well boundaried I'm going to be clear about what I want to need I'm not going to jump ship on myself in this situation and then most of us especially most of us who end up watching videos like this and who may have a history of trauma end up in a situation where we find ourselves Frozen maybe fawning over another person feeling totally disconnected from ourselves

and being willing to do almost anything to get out of the situation without getting into some sort of conflict and if we are not aware of the fact that responses like this might come online for us it's going to be very difficult for us to make plans that we can say we are certain we will follow through on even if we make those plans with the best of intentions we have to account for the situations in which we will or are highly likely to get emotionally hijacked buyer triggers or buyer attachment systems and we have

to develop plans for what we will do in those situations so if my body is frozen if I'm feeling terrified or if I'm feeling overcome with anger and adrenaline what will I do in that situation knowing that I will not be thinking clearly and might just need to completely disconnect from it in order to have a response that I'm proud of what will I do when things go wrong when I get triggered when I am not feeling like I am myself when I'm tired or overwhelmed or grumpy being willing to look at how we normally

behave in those States and make contingency plans for when those States crop up is going to go a really long way in the process of building self-trust there is a long period of my life where every day at the end of the day I would Journal out just some Reflections on the day like what did I do really well what am I proud of myself for today and what could I have done better and something I noticed myself consistently journaling about was that there were many days where what I could have done better was just

recognize like four hours earlier than I had that I was not going to be my normal level of productive that day or my normal level of friendly that day or my normal level of calm and able to work through issues interpersonally that day because I was feeling some sort of Trigger or some sort of upset or some level of dissociation and had I realized that earlier in the day and just accepted it and instead of trying to force myself to have the day that I had planned which I was not emotionally regulated enough to go

through with authentically the day would have gone a lot better if I'd just recognize sooner that this is a day where I need to now have a different plan because my system is not reacting the way that I thought it would be reacting when I made this plan and if you have a trauma history this I believe is one of the kindest and most compassionate things you can learn to do for yourself to recognize in the moment when you're dysregulated when you're dissociating when something is feeling off or wrong in your system and allowing yourself

the grace of adjusting your expectations for what you are going to do that day or how you're going to interact with yourself or other people until you've found a way to resolve or move past that feeling because when we are in those triggered States this is where we are most prone to entering self-abandonment territory it's really hard to behave the way that we hope we would behave when our fight flight freeze or fond defenses are coming up to the surface and it can be really helpful in the process of building self-trust to just notice when

those responses are online what's the best possible way we could move through those situations without making things worse for ourselves by completely self-abandoning by saying okay I'm just going to agree to whatever this person is saying to me without checking in with myself on whether or not I truly agree to it because right now I feel fro Chosen and terrified without starting an argument and going into Attack Mode the moment I feel disrespected what can I do to stay aware of which types of situations tend to trigger me how can I notice when I am

in a triggered State and then what can I do to get myself out of the situation before I self-abandon in some way and then come back to it when I am more regulated this process takes a long time to master it's not simple but if you can get a decent handle on it it goes an incredibly long way towards building self-trust and self-accountability because you now know that if you find yourself in a significantly different emotional state than the one that you were in when you made the plan of what you wanted to do with

a given day or a given situation you know that you will be able to navigate through it without self-abanding because you have an inherent trust in who you are when you're regulated and you also can slowly begin to trust yourself to notice when you are not regulated and leave the difficult problem solving up to the version of you who later on will be feeling more calm and clear-headed and in touch with themselves issue number three that tends to interfere with a lot of our abilities to trust ourselves it's very difficult to trust yourself if you

do not feel as though you are handling your relationships with other people with integrity and honesty the reason why it's really difficult to trust yourself if you are constantly being flaky or dishonest towards other people is because that is likely to result in a lot of feelings of guilt and self-judgment and when we are operating from a place of guilt and self-judgment it's hard to make decisions that factor in our authentic wants and needs because we are trying to even a score instead of actually think about what is important to us so what a lot

of us who have trauma responses or insecure attachment systems are prone to doing is over-promising saying yes to a lot of things that we don't necessarily actually want to say yes to and then bailing on them last minute or ghosting our way out of them and this functions to keep us feeling good in the moment that we are standing in front of another person saying yes I will do that yes I will help with that we get that hit of ooh they like me right and then if we are not having to turn them down

to their face if we just send them a text message later saying I'm not going or if we just never let them know that we're not going we never actually have to feel the full embodied consequence of our actions and so what I suggest to counteract this is for a period of at least 30 days if not indefinitely start keeping every single commitment you agree to Bar some sort of extreme emergency and the reason I recommend doing this is because you will start to develop a sense for what it is that you really do not

want to do when we are just thinking in the moment of whether or not we want someone to like us for saying yes or no or whether or not we want to avoid conflict by saying yes or no what we are not thinking about in that moment is what do I like what do I want which things make me feel excited and enthusiastic and like I want to run towards them and which things do I feel like I don't so much want to do like it would be restrictive or uncomfortable for me to say yes

to that thing if we are not really checking in with ourselves because we know without a shadow of a doubt that if we say yes we are going to actually do that thing it's really easy to just over promise and under deliver chronically and when we are chronically over promising and under delivering again guilt and anxiety starts to rule our decision-making process and then when once again that is prime self-abandonment territory however the more we start showing up and doing what we say we will do and showing genuine care and respect towards the people in

our lives the more we're going to start to develop a sense of respect for ourselves and the more we respect ourselves the easier it is to set boundaries and say no to situations that we truly don't want to engage with because we feel as though we deserve to we feel as though we are fair and rational people and so the limits and boundaries we set are by extension also fair and rational so there is a point in my own attachment healing process where I became very aware that I had a tendency to ghost my way

out of relationships that I didn't want to be in I didn't like to raise issues it felt too vulnerable so if an issue came up in a relationship I would generally just stop speaking to the person slowly over time and after my last long-term relationship ended I went you know what I don't want to give myself the option to do that anymore so I'm going to make a rule for myself that now I am only allowed to date people who are within my social network the reason why I'm only going to allow myself to date

people inside of my own social network is because my friends and the people I'm close to all know that I'm working on being a more accountable person who does what they say that they will do for other people so if I start seeing someone who they introduce me to they are going to know and they are going to be able to call me out on if I am not doing that and this ended up being a pretty good Fail-Safe for two reasons one it helped me externally accountable to not being on my own BS and

two once I started really internalizing the fact that if I go out on a date with someone and I don't like them I'm going to have to tell them to their face that I feel like we're not compatible and we should go our separate ways a thought that terrifies me I'm now going to be way more choosy about who I say yes to a date to I'm not just gonna go out on a date because I'm bored one night if I know that at the end of the date if I'm not feeling it I'm going

to have to tell them that so my yeses and no's and my critical thinking about which decisions I wanted to make interpersonally had to be way more online way earlier on in the process I couldn't just self-abandon temporarily for a hit and then not suffer any of the consequences and this is what happens when we start doing what we said we would do there's another situation I think back to quite a bit where I got invited to a weekend at someone's Cottage and at the time that I was invited I really wanted to go and

then I learned some additional details about that weekend that made me go oh that's actually really inconvenient for me I kind of wish I hadn't said yes to this now that I know how far away it is how much of a time and financial commitment it's going to be but because I was following through on things I went anyways and I learned through that process I need to be asking more details up front before I commit to a lot of things so all of this helps us really hone in on the moments in which we

haven't historically thought to ask more questions or to get more curious about a given experience early on and to make sure that when we are saying yes or no we know what we are saying yes or no to and knowing that we are the kind of people who will be deliberate and intentional about doing our homework before we commit to any plan goes a really long way in building self-trust we all naturally place our trust in people who we believe do their homework and ask the right questions from the get-go before making a decision and

the same is absolutely true of ourselves so by forcing ourselves to experience the consequences of the times when we don't do our research and when we are too quick to commit to something we are going to train ourselves to do all of that much earlier on than we normally would and that can go a long way enforcing ourselves in to becoming someone we trust now thing number four that tends to keep a lot of us away from that feeling of self-trust and this is in my opinion maybe the single biggest one you will not trust

yourself if you cannot trust yourself to say no when you mean no it is almost impossible to trust ourselves if we do not know where our limits and boundaries are and we do not trust ourselves to enforce them a lot of what we've been talking about up until this point directly connects to this right the more we do what we said we would do the more we force ourselves to experience the consequences of our own choices the more we are going to start learning where our limits lie what we do and don't want which boundaries

we want to have in place with other people and in order to start trusting ourselves we have to be willing to enforce those boundaries in the moment that they come up this is a really difficult step but a really important one if you can learn to identify and respect your own boundaries your own nose you are going to be able to start taking infinitely more emotional risks because you're not going to have to worry about other people's behavior you're not going to have to get fixated on how other people are treating you if you know

how you are fine with and not fine with being treated everyone else can behave however they would like and you can remain calm and centered because you know where your own limits are so there's one point in my own healing process where I was having a conversation with someone I was close to and both of us had a history of being incredibly flaky and I was like okay I'm going to try out this vulnerability thing and I told them I really want to be close to you and I want us to stay in each other's

lives in a very consistent way but I have trouble trusting you because you often don't do what you say you will do and they looked at me and they said I have the exact same problem with you and so we made an agreement in that moment that anytime either of us had an issue in the relationship we're feeling uncomfortable had a moment where what we would normally do is disconnect and take space without communicating it to the other person we would instead show up and in a compassionate way let the other person know what was

going on for us and see if we could work together to find a solution for that thing and choosing to adhere to that promise absolutely revolutionized my experience of what a close relationship could be because I started learning that almost every time I was inclined to pull away what was happening for me when I stopped and stayed present with it was that something in the relationship felt like a no something felt like a boundary being crossed that I didn't want crossed and so I had to by virtue of the agreement that I was dedicated to

sticking to show up and say what that thing was and in that process I learned my own boundaries and the more I figured out where those no's where those boundaries lay for myself the more I began to make those boundaries clear with other people way earlier on in my relationships just so you know this is how I prefer to operate this is a boundary for me in this area are you cool with that and the act of being aware of as well as learning how to compassionately phrase my own boundaries gave me back so much

self-trust it was incredible and the unexpected consequence of this that really surprised me in a positive way was how much other people began trusting me when I started consistently asserting my boundaries I think that most people with again any sort of enmeshment trauma any sort of attachment wounding have this fear that if I set my boundaries and I'm clear about them I will be abandoned and while this may be true if we are choosing to engage with other people who really fear and feel threatened by boundaries it is the absolute opposite of true once we

start having secure relationships in the world of secure attachment boundaries are the thing that make relationships work better not worse they are the healthy limits that allow us to show up without fear and trepidation inside of relationships it's kind of like having a fence around a playground you're going to feel a lot more comfortable letting your child play freely in an area where you know there are clear boundaries around what is safe and what is not not and I think a beautiful kind of example from the other side of this is that after I'd been

practicing this for some time I was having a situation with a close friend where our energy was kind of weird for a couple days there was some sort of resentment I could feel Building inside of me and when I finally became kind of consciously aware of what the problem was for me and I sat down with that person to have a talk with them about it I apologized and went look I recognized my Energy's been a little bit weird for the past couple days and you've probably been feeling that and they went oh that's okay

I trust you to bring things up and I know that when something kind of weird is going on within a couple of days you're definitely going to let me know what it is and we're gonna work through it and I think that to that person that seemed very simple to me that was a complete 180 from the way that I was used to people experiencing me but this is exactly what happens when we become aware of our own boundaries and limitations and yeses and no's and we live in integrity and in alignment with them other

people begin to trust us and that means that inside of all of our relationships everyone can breathe a lot easier when things feel weird or off because we have a track record of addressing things within a reasonable time frame when things feel weirder off and using boundaries and communication skills to let the people we care about know how we can go forward in a better way and the fifth and final thing I want to talk about today that tends to make it really difficult for us to trust ourselves is that it is very difficult to

consistently trust yourself if you are frequently zoned out or dissociated from your present moment experience and are therefore ignorant to what you are feeling in most moments now again do not beat yourself up if this is the case for you this is an Adaptive response for many of us who grew up in situations where not being particularly present with our emotional experience was what we needed to do to get by however if what we want to work on as adults is building a sense of deep self-trust we have to be able to trust ourselves to

show up and pay attention to what is and isn't working for us in a given moment if you are hiring a security guard to make sure that your building is safe you would not hire someone who you knew was going to be asleep on the job you would not trust that person to recognize and respond to threats appropriately and the same is true if you are trying to keep your yourself psychologically safe it's really hard to trust yourself if you are frequently dissociated into fantasy or zoned out from your inner experience or actively denying and

belittling your own emotional experience if any of those things are consistently the case it's going to be very difficult for you to appropriately recognize and respond to threats and if you cannot be trusted to appropriately recognize and respond to emotional threats it's going to be really difficult to trust yourself as well as to make wise decisions for yourself making wise internally congruent decisions means being able to align the way that you feel and what you want with the actions that you take in the world to do this we have to be willing to stay as

present as possible with ourselves in as many moments as possible and this is not an easy task this is a lifelong process that for many of us we will have to be refining and working on over the entire course of our lives however the more present we are with ourselves in every moment the more we are able to take congruent actions that allow us to actually align the person we are inside with the way that we are showing up in our outside lives and the more we Master this skill and the more comfortable we get

with using our present moment awareness to be Discerning about our choices and make wise holistic decisions for ourselves the more we are going to start naturally and instinctively trusting ourselves what kind of a night Watchman do you want to hire the one who knows which threats to watch out for who is present and alert to everything that is going on around them and who knows which steps are appropriate to take when in the name of protection and the same is true of protecting yourself alright that is all I have to say for today on this

topic of Building self trust however as always there is much more that could and will be said again in the future in the meantime let me know which thoughts feelings questions are popping up for you as you watch this video and feel free to leave them in the comments I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and your inner children and I will see you back here again really soon foreign [Music]