A chronic lack of self-trust is a hallmark of low self-esteem in many people.
“Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.”
– Suzy Kassem
“It’s like I can only make a decision if someone else makes it for me. If I want to do something, it’s like I need permission to do it!”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I just don’t know anymore. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to think or how I should feel about my life.”
Exchanges like this are common with chronically unsure clients.
Of course, some self-reflection, objective reasoning, and wider-context thinking is vital for a mature human. Just assuming immediately that I must be right, especially when I’m highly emotional, is kind of infantile – not to say narcissistic!
Extremely dogmatic, chronically opinionated people, the ones who always have to be right, aren’t just a pain to others but to themselves as well.
As with all things, balance is key.
At the other end of the self-surety spectrum we sometimes see clients who are chronically unsure of themselves.
Their own take on things is discounted because it’s their take, and they have a negative self-bias. They may find it hard to value anything that originates from themselves.
It’s no great leap to see that self-esteem is at the root of this.
The vicious self-esteem cycle
Chronic self-second-guessing is a persistent pattern of doubting one’s own decisions and ideas, values and perceptions.
The chronically self-doubting client may endlessly replay choices and feel weighed down by overanalysis of all and everything to do with their lives and those close to them.
This kind of low self-trust may stem from perfectionism and fear of failure, and can lead to decision paralysis and emotional exhaustion. Over time, it undermines confidence and disrupts personal growth.
So low self-esteem or confidence can both produce chronic self-doubt and also further lower that confidence and self-esteem.
Just as someone with low self-esteem may decry their own looks and achievements and other positive qualities, they’ll also doubt the validity and worth of their own ideas and perceptions.
Though they seldom make the leap that if their perceptions aren’t to be trusted, why are they so sure of their low self-estimation! So there is a paradox there.
A chronic lack of self-trust is a hallmark of low self-esteem in many people.
“I just don’t know!”
One client, Lucille, was too willing to try to see other people’s point of view, favouring their version of reality over her own.
Her boyfriend was abusive and clearly gaslighting her. She told me that he had “only” hit her “a few times” but quickly qualified that with “but he’s been under pressure at work; things are hard for him too!”
She told me a woeful account of how he put her down in front of her friends, told her nearly every day how lucky she was to have him and that she’d never find anyone else, and, in short, deployed the whole gamut of narcissistic strategies.
She was more concerned with his take on their relationship than her own, and when I asked her to tell me what she thought about the way he treated her she first looked confused then became tearful and finally shook her head and sobbed:
“I just don’t know!”
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One: Outline the problem
I asked Lucille, in what I hoped was as non-leading a way as possible, whether it might be possible that she just didn’t trust her own perceptions, her own take on things, as much as she might do.
She readily agreed – perhaps because the suggestion had come from me! I asked her whether she found it hard to trust her own decisions or whether she felt she needed permission from others before forming an opinion.
Again she replied that this was indeed the case. I wondered whether her agreement with me had to do with a kind of pathological agreeableness, but she did seem to expand on this idea and genuinely recognize it in herself.
Now we were having a conversation about this, together we outlined the problem in a bit more depth.
Two: Look at causes
It’s always worth looking at what might lurk beneath chronic self-doubt. We can see that both anxiety then habit drive self-uncertainty, which manifests as overthinking, indecision, and a greater focus on possible and imagined threat than potential rewards.
Having been badmouthed by others or continually put down, or having ideas and decisions regularly dismissed, can ‘train’ people to do the same to themselves. A kind of internalized bad treatment and undervaluation of themselves.
Lucille’s parents had often undermined her, though she was quick to defend them. Her older brother had been “the clever one” and her parents would often allude to their opinion that she was not capable. She she didn’t like to criticise them though as her criticism tended to be reserved for herself and not others. I could tell that her parents had mollycoddled her in some ways, but also controlled her. Her ideas were never encouraged and her decisions were dismissed, laughed at, or scorned.
She tended to choose men who would control her and put her down. This had deepened the emotional conditioning that had initially developed in her more formative years.
So we were beginning to see a potential pattern as to why chronic self-doubt may have become a part of her ongoing psychology. But of course, knowing why an emotional pattern may have emerged is seldom really enough.
Three: Overcome the effects of the past
If all your decisions and perspectives were derided and scorned when you were growing up, it would perhaps be strange if you didn’t develop ongoing self-doubt.
Some clients may have been originally self-assured and confident but had that ‘knocked out of them’ by spending too long in an abusive relationship. Likewise, a perfectly confident person may lose their self-assurance after having been bullied, perhaps in the workplace.
Whatever the cause, we need to ascertain to what extent past emotional conditioning is influencing our client’s psychology, their emotional patterns, in the present.
For example, we can take the worst memories someone has of perhaps being dominated or abused, verbally or even physically, and use our skills as practitioners to greatly lessen the emotional conditioning effects of those memories on their current psychology.
When we do, this pattern matching lessens and your client becomes much freer to express what they feel and think and to behave accordingly.
I describe here one way I did that with a filmed client on Uncommon Practitioners’ TV who had been greatly limited by her mentally ill mother when she’d been growing up.
So dealing with the effects of the past is vital, which can help the client be free to develop the self-compassion necessary to begin to become much more sure of themselves.
Four: Cultivate self-kindness
Self-compassion plays a vital role in maintaining mental wellbeing, yet many people grapple with self-criticism, especially when looking back on their past. Expecting ourselves to be perfect (and if we’re not perfect we’re ‘not enough‘), damning ourselves for making very human mistakes, is tantamount to self-bullying.
I asked Lucille to write herself a letter as though she were writing with care and compassion to someone else. The letter addressed, among other things, past choices she’d made which she now felt were bad decisions.
I told her that this letter was to be a message of respect from one part of herself to another. But she chose to share it with me the following week.
Lucille’s self-compassion letter
Dear Self,
I haven’t always been great to you, have I? But I want to make it up to you. Yes, you have made a few mistakes in your life, and who hasn’t? But actually, in many ways you are kind, decent, and have your head screwed on right.
I’m making a commitment to be kinder to you, to care about you and for you, and to take YOUR decisions seriously, because… you DO know right from wrong, and you DO have common sense as well as intuition. You are loved, and I want you to know that… always.
Yours with love and respect,
Me.
Hypnotically I encouraged Lucille to inwardly converse with herself gently and lovingly. To cradle and cherish the child she’d been and to encourage the person she is and will become.
Having unhooked many of the drivers of low self-trust from the past and encouraged a greater ongoing sense of self-trust through self-compassion, I now wanted to establish boldness and self-surety as an ongoing habit in Lucille.
Five: Develop the boldness habit
Lucille was never, thank goodness, going to be an obnoxiously opinionated ‘know-it-all’, but she had a lot of room to grow self-surety. Why?
Because she was a deep thinker who, when thinking about the world (less, historically, when it came to herself), could see things in the round, from different perspectives. She had wide and varied life experience and read deeply and thoughtfully. So why the heck shouldn’t she have an opinion?
In an age of shout-the-loudest opinions, I suggested, her opinions and ideas and decisions were at least as valuable as any others. And if she didn’t know much about something, she would learn.
During deep hypnosis in the ‘reality simulator’ of her mind, I encouraged Lucille to calmly rehearse and practise being more assertive and more self-assured generally in her decision making and point of view.
She ended the relationship with the emotionally manipulative man, started to see friends who helped her feel good, and generally began to have fun in life.
Eventually she told me she’d gotten all she needed from therapy with me.
I was impressed by her decisive certainty.
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About Mark Tyrrell
Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.
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