How You Learned to Stop Trusting Yourself

I was twenty-three when my oldest daughter was born, and like most first-time mothers, I was desperate to get things right.

She had colic and cried for hours. Some evenings it felt as though the whole house vibrated with her unhappiness. I carried her constantly. I paced the floor. I sang to her. I sat in the rocking chair long after my arms had gone numb. I was exhausted, but whenever she cried, every instinct I had told me to pick her up.

I’m on my own path now

Around that time, a woman at church suggested I needed to sleep train her. She was older than I was, more experienced, more confident. She handed me a book and assured me that if I followed its instructions, everything would improve.

The book told me to do the opposite of what felt natural. Put my baby down. Leave the room. Let her cry. Trust the process.

I remember sitting outside my daughter’s bedroom door listening to her sob. I can still picture the hallway where I spent those evenings. I remember crying myself because everything in me wanted to go to her. It wasn’t simply that I found it difficult. It felt wrong. My body knew it before I could explain it. Yet I stayed where I was because I believed the author of the book knew more than I did. The woman from church knew more than I did. Everyone seemed so certain, and certainty has a way of making us doubt ourselves.

Years later, when my second child was born, I threw the book away.

Looking back, I don’t spend much time wondering whether sleep training was objectively right or wrong. Reasonable parents can disagree about that. What stays with me is something else. I had been given a clear signal from my own heart, my own perception, my own experience of my child, and I treated that signal as less trustworthy than someone else’s authority.

That pattern would repeat itself more times than I care to admit.

I don’t think women are born distrusting themselves. I think most of us learn it gradually, through thousands of small lessons that seem harmless when taken one at a time.

Be nice. Don’t make a fuss. Be grateful. Be patient. Don’t be difficult. Don’t be emotional. Learn to get along. Learn to accommodate.

None of these are bad qualities. Most of them are virtues under the right circumstances. The trouble begins when preserving those virtues becomes more important than telling the truth about what we see.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that women often recognize something is wrong long before they have the language to explain it. They sense that a relationship has become unhealthy. They notice that a workplace operates by one set of rules for some people and another set for everyone else. A boundary is being crossed. A church teaching feels strained and unnatural, as though scripture is being forced to carry a burden it was never meant to bear.

The perception comes first.

But many women have been taught not to trust perception.

Before asking whether something is true, they ask whether they are allowed to think it.

Most women do not struggle because they lack a voice. They struggle because they have spent years being taught not to trust it.

One of the most damaging lessons many women learn is that their perception is less trustworthy than someone else’s authority. Over time, many of us become skilled at talking ourselves out of what we see. Discomfort gets explained away. Questions are treated as character flaws. Someone else’s confidence begins to carry more weight than our own experience, even when experience is standing right in front of us asking to be noticed.

The consequences reach far beyond a single decision. Distrusting ourselves affects who we become. It shapes the relationships we remain in, the opportunities we decline, the communities we stay loyal to, and the questions we never allow ourselves to ask. It keeps us explaining away what we know, sometimes for years. The cost is not simply confusion. The cost is the gradual erosion of our ability to recognize our own lives while we are living them.

I recognize this tendency because it shaped much of my adult life.

The version of evangelicalism that formed me placed enormous emphasis on authority. There was always another expert, another pastor, another author waiting to tell you what was true. I spent years sitting in pews with a Bible open on my lap and a notebook balanced against my knee, carefully writing down what someone else said God thought about a question. In church foyers and women’s Bible studies, I often heard the same warning repeated in different forms: be careful not to let your feelings lead you astray.

The highest virtue often seemed to be agreement. Questioning was treated with suspicion. Certainty was praised. Submission was spiritualized.

For years I tried to fit my experiences inside that world. When something didn’t make sense, I assumed the problem was me. When a teaching seemed harmful, I assumed I wasn’t understanding it correctly. When I encountered gifted women whose wisdom and leadership were obvious to anyone paying attention, I searched for explanations that would allow me to preserve what I had been taught rather than trust what I could plainly see.

Eventually that became impossible.

The turning points in my faith were rarely dramatic. They usually began as quiet recognitions. A thought I could no longer dismiss. A question that refused to go away. A truth that remained standing after every attempt to explain it away.

The older I get, the more I think spiritual maturity has less to do with certainty than with honesty. It requires the willingness to stop arguing with what is right in front of you.

These days I am far less interested in finding someone to tell me what to think. What I want is the courage to pay attention. To sit with a question long enough to hear what it is asking of me. To trust that God is not threatened by discernment. To believe that conscience, experience, observation, and wisdom are not obstacles to faith but part of the way faith is formed.

The voice was never gone. It was only buried beneath years of permission-seeking, people-pleasing, and second-guessing. The work now is learning to trust it. Perhaps that is where recovery begins.

Some days that comes naturally. Other days I still catch myself looking around the room for someone else to tell me what is true. Old habits do not disappear simply because we recognize them. They linger.

Still, I am beginning to understand that paying attention is not the enemy of faith. It is one of the ways faith grows.

And perhaps the question is not whether you have a voice.

Perhaps the question is when you stopped trusting it.

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With love,

Dawn

I write about story, faith, beauty, and the interior lives of women.

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