Learning to Trust Yourself Again

By Brea Segger

Someone asked me recently how they could learn to trust themselves again.

For the first part of our conversation, we talked about a decision. Whether to leave a relationship. Whether to move. Whether it was time to step away from work that no longer felt quite right.

The conversation felt familiar. I've had versions of it many times over the years. The details are always different, but the questions are remarkably similar.

"Should I stay?"

"Should I leave?"

"How do I know what's right?"

The decision usually isn't where the conversation ends.

Before long, we're talking about something else.

The search for an answer often begins before we've spent much time listening to the question.

Before we know what comes next, we often need to acknowledge what is no longer true.

By the time someone reaches out to me, they've often been living with that truth for quite a while. They know which relationship has quietly changed. They know when work no longer feels the way it once did. They know which version of themselves they're continuing to perform, even though it stopped feeling true a long time ago.

What they can't yet see is what happens after they admit it.

I've watched people arrive with pages of notes, lists of pros and cons, and advice from people they trust. They can explain every possible outcome in remarkable detail. They know what their partner thinks, what their friends think, and what makes sense on paper.

Somewhere in the conversation, those lists begin to matter a little less.

What they've known all along begins to matter a little more.

I've heard enough versions of that conversation to know it rarely reaches that point straight away.

It usually arrives after every reason for staying has been carefully laid out.

After every reason for leaving has been weighed just as carefully.

After every possible future has been imagined.

The decision hasn't changed.

The future is no more certain.

But they're no longer arguing with what they already know.

Every so often, someone writes to me months later.

They rarely tell me the decision was easy.

They rarely tell me everything worked out exactly as they hoped.

More often, they tell me that once they finally acknowledged what they'd known for a long time, something became unexpectedly quiet.

The grief was still there.

The uncertainty was still there.

The difficult conversations still had to happen.

The confusion wasn't.