Learning to Trust Yourself: A Big Step Toward Healing

One of the biggest steps in healing—whether it’s emotional, relational, or spiritual, is learning to trust yourself again.

For many of us, somewhere along the way, we lost that trust. Maybe you grew up in an environment where your feelings were minimized or dismissed. Maybe you spent years in a relationship where your instincts were questioned, or your emotions were labeled "too much." Or maybe you’ve lived so long in survival mode that you don’t even know what your own voice sounds like anymore.

Wherever the fracture started, here's the good news: you can rebuild trust with yourself. And doing so is not just a nice idea, it’s absolutely essential for true, lasting healing.

Trusting Your Emotions Is Not Weakness, It’s Wisdom

Part of learning to trust yourself means recognizing that your emotions are valid. Not always factually correct, but valid, because they are real signals from within you trying to tell you something important.

Emotions are messengers, not enemies.

If you feel sadness, it’s signaling loss or unmet needs.
If you feel anger, it’s alerting you to a boundary violation or injustice.
If you feel fear, it’s pointing to danger—or perhaps to places where healing is needed.
If you feel joy, it’s telling you something good and right is happening.

When you start to see your emotions as helpful communication instead of something to hide, suppress, or bulldoze over, you begin to build a bridge back to yourself.

Instead of immediately judging, gaslighting, or doubting your own heart, you can pause and ask, “What is this emotion trying to tell me?”
You listen, you validate, and you allow the feeling to teach you. That’s the beginning of wisdom—and the beginning of empowerment.

Self Validation Leads to Empowerment

Self-validation is the practice of acknowledging and accepting your own inner experiences without needing someone else to confirm them first.

It sounds simple, but it’s a profound shift.

It means you no longer abandon yourself waiting for someone else to tell you:

• “You’re allowed to feel upset about that.”

• “You’re not overreacting.”

• “Your instincts are right.”

Instead, you tell yourself those things. You give yourself permission to feel, to know, and to act.

Self-validation doesn’t mean you become closed off to wise counsel or community—it simply means you no longer treat your own heart as untrustworthy by default. You move from a posture of self-rejection to self-respect.

And when you do that?
You start to heal in ways you didn’t even know were possible.

Empowerment grows from the inside out.
Confidence becomes less about what others think of you and more about staying rooted in what you know to be true, even when it’s hard.
You begin to set healthier boundaries, speak up for yourself, and make choices that honor your well-being.

You become the safe place you once searched for in others.

What Trusting Yourself Looks Like, Practically

Healing and self-trust are not vague, mystical ideas. They are lived out in real, everyday moments.

Here’s what it can look like:

• Pausing to check in with your body before making a decision. ("Do I feel peace about this, or is there a knot in my stomach?")

• Allowing yourself to feel your feelings fully without judgment or immediate action.

• Not gaslighting yourself when you’re hurt or uncomfortable, even if someone else tries to downplay it.

• Choosing to walk away from relationships, environments, or habits that consistently dishonor your worth.

• Listening to your intuition—that still, small voice inside you—and trusting it, even when it’s scary.

• Celebrating your small victories instead of minimizing them.

Every time you choose to listen to yourself, validate your experience, and honor your needs, you are reinforcing the message: I am trustworthy. I am worth protecting. I am safe with myself.

Healing Is a Return to Wholeness

At its core, healing is not about becoming someone new, it’s about coming home to who you really are.

It’s remembering that God designed you with intuition, emotions, needs, and instincts for a reason. They are not liabilities to be managed, they are sacred parts of being human, created in His image.

You don’t have to fear your heart.
You don’t have to second-guess your gut all the time.
You don’t have to earn your right to feel or to be.

You already have it.

The journey of trusting yourself again will be messy at times. It will stretch you. It will feel vulnerable. But it is also beautiful, life-giving work, and you are worth every courageous step it takes.

Healing begins when you stop abandoning yourself and start believing:
My emotions are valid.
My heart matters.
I am safe to trust myself again.

And as you practice trusting yourself day by day, you’ll find you are not nearly as lost as you once thought. You are already on your way home.

So for you and your healing journey. 

Peace, love and joy, 

Rebecca Jo