Trust Yourself: How to Confidently Trust You in Dating and Relationship

The moment you decide you need to trust yourself your life will pivot in important ways. Until then you’ll experience life with mediocrity at best. This happens because when we don’t trust ourselves, we make substandard decisions that keep us from experiencing our best lives. If we know life could be better, and we know that we, ourselves, sit at the helm of our life journey, then over time, when things don’t turn out well, we may begin to question our ability and capacity to trust ourselves. As you question and doubt yourself, a poor decision-making cycle perpetuates itself, turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy that validates the belief that you can’t trust yourself.

Ironically, we often stop trusting ourselves at a time when, in hindsight, we regret a particular decision we have made. In our reflection, we believe we should have known better or that the choice we made was in fact wrong. Yet, as you’ll see, one of the steps in rebuilding your ability to trust yourself requires you to reconsider your interpretation of past events. In reality, the cruelest and even most catastrophic thing you could do is to use 20/20 hindsight to interpret a past decision with self judgment or condemnation. 

In learning to trust yourself again you will come to realize that we always make the best decisions we can with the resources and information we have at the time. We obviously get more information and insight as we start to walk the path forward from our decision. We cannot expect to have known that information before we made our decision. This is why our self judgment is so unfair. Even if you sensed that your choice might be a mistake when you made it, a bigger part of you thought it was the right choice. Otherwise, you simply would not have made it. 

Regardless of why you might have decided not to trust yourself, the greatest gift that you can now give to you is to recover that belief in yourself. Here we’ll explore more deeply what it means to trust yourself and why it matters so much in dating, relationships, and intimacy. We will then look specifically at how to build trust in yourself so that you always carry that presence with you into every situation.

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What does it mean to trust yourself?

Knowing how to trust yourself is one of the most important skills you could ever develop in support of not just having deep and extraordinary relationships, but also having a wildly happy and successful life. When we don’t trust ourselves we move from a place of fear and doubt, and this always causes suboptimal results. When you trust yourself, completely aware that you are imperfect and will make mistakes, you make better choices and set better boundaries, both of which lead to a happier and more profound life.

Your capacity to trust yourself does not require you to be perfect, quite the opposite in fact. Part of trusting yourself is believing in your ability to navigate circumstances and situations in your life even when they don’t go well, or as planned. More specifically, trusting yourself means you believe in your ability to respond to life, imperfectly, but well. You trust in your capacity to recognize and discern what’s best for you given the information at hand. That does not mean that with more information you might not change your mind or make a new choice. Of course you might. That’s what happens as we walk through life in trust..

To fully understand what it means to trust yourself, we must acknowledge that each step we take in life, each decision we make, is just one in a long series of relatively small choices that when combined make up our life experience. Through this lens we see that even making big life decisions — jobs, marriage, where to live, what to invest in — is simply a merging or amalgamation of several smaller decisions. Trusting yourself means that you’re willing to confidently walk through your own series of life decisions — whether big or small — step-by-step, moment-by-moment, adjusting as you go.

Again, recognizing that you will make mistakes, to trust yourself also means that you willingly forgive yourself when something doesn’t go well. Having trust in yourself means that you approach situations that didn’t go as planned with an open mind, with an innocence and a curiosity, that allows you to learn from what happened rather than judge yourself for not having done better. Self forgiveness lies at the heart of this capacity to see the bigger picture with trust.

In its simplest definition, to trust yourself means that you know that you’ll be OK, in an overall sense, no matter what happens. 

“To trust yourself means that you know that you’ll be OK, in an overall sense, no matter what happens.”

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Why it matters in dating and relationships

In relationships when you don’t trust yourself you will find it difficult to advocate for yourself. While all relationships need mutual love, care, and respect, our ability to offer that love to another depends wholly on our capacity to offer that attention to ourselves first. In the absence of self trust and its accompanying self honor, we develop habits that inevitably harm ourselves, and sabotage our relationships.

We know that self abandonment harms relationships and if we don’t trust ourselves we’re more likely to abandon ourselves. A lack of self honor and self expression, in turn leads to resentment, which always erodes love – sometimes until it doesn’t exist anymore.

Additionally, every couple in a long-term relationship or marriage must work through difficult moments together. Couples will have to address times of conflict and challenge within their partnership. If you don’t trust yourself it’s easy to become, if even unconsciously, conflict avoidant. We sometimes resist conflict in an attempt to stay safe, maintain the peace, and prevent our partner from leaving. Yet those in the strongest relationships know that addressing upsets consciously serves only to strengthen and deepen the connection. In our programs, we like to say that those who have learned the art of conscious conflict turn challenges into connections and conflicts into communion. To that end, you cannot genuinely express yourself in an upset if you don’t trust yourself. It is the self trust that allows you to say the difficult things that sometimes must be said. 

Additionally in relationships, if you don’t know how to trust yourself, you’re more likely to judge yourself, and even imagine you won’t be loved. A lack of trust in ourselves, often combined with feelings of unworthiness, leads us to show up in ways that bring about the very experiences of feeling not good enough, rejection, or abandonment that we fear. On the other hand, when you trust yourself you have the confidence to relate in ways that ultimately garner respect, admiration, trust, and love from your partner.

To put it simply and directly, in order for a romantic relationship to sustain itself over time, both partners must trust themselves to navigate that relationship well. Then and only then can they truly trust each other. Only then can love flourish.

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How to build trust in yourself

Let’s now consider specific practices to help you learn how to build trust in yourself. You will want to take on these practices one at a time. When you slow down and do that you’ll quite quickly find yourself able to integrate the practices together, in a way that completely transforms your experience of life and love.

To build trust in yourself the first and most important thing you need is a strong relationship with yourself. Our society actually counter conditions us to this. It tells us frequently that we should put others first. It supports us in addictive patterns that numb our feelings and intuitions. Yet when you can’t feel yourself it becomes increasingly difficult to trust yourself. Therefore, you need to start by uncovering the truth about you. To trust yourself implicitly you must know your own needs, wants, desires, boundaries, turn ons, turn offs, yeses, and nos and be able to recognize when they shift. 

For many the thought of getting to know themselves feels scary if not terrifying. If you find yourself in fear or resistance to getting to know yourself, you are strongly encouraged to find a coach, therapist, or community where you feel supported and safe in this inner exploration. Building this solid relationship with you is the only way to set the necessary foundation needed to genuinely trust yourself.

As you make a commitment to get to know yourself authentically, next comes cultivating the capacity to have grace with yourself and your actions. Remember that no human being on the planet shows up perfectly. We all make mistakes and you do too. To trust yourself you must give yourself permission to be imperfect, which also means you must practice self forgiveness for decisions, past or present, that you might regret.

In reality many people find it difficult to trust themselves in decision making because they assume that every decision they make has forever implications. Yet when you remember that life is simply an ongoing series of decisions and choices, you can also give yourself permission to not get it right all the time. This takes the pressure off of you and as Diederick Wolsek says, “We can choose to choose again.” We could also lean on Gandhi’s wisdom. He said, “I’ve given up the need to be consistent.“ That means that he allowed himself the opportunity to make a new choice, or go a different way, as new information came to him. If you want to trust yourself, let yourself adjust your choices as you go.

Finally, when it comes to trusting yourself, you will find this becomes easier when you believe in a power beyond yourself. To think that we are in this world completely alone can feel overwhelming and arduous. In our experience, we cannot do this life by ourselves. Whether you believe in the Universe, God, the Divine, your higher self, or a higher power, leaning into a source of support beyond yourself will make it easier to trust yourself. Even better, when you trust in something beyond yourself, you will find it easier to hear the whispers and nudges of life and the universe that arise in the form of your intuition and gut feelings. When you trust yourself you’ll not only hear that inner wisdom clearly, you’ll respond to it and take action. That’s when life becomes magical and ecstatic.

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As you embark on this journey to trust yourself, start small. Take baby steps. Practice trusting yourself in the smallest decisions — what to eat for breakfast or which way to drive to work, for example. Yes, those are decisions, ones you can already trust yourself to make. As you see the small successes in your decision making, your ability to trust yourself will grow. Then you’ll find yourself being able to make more and more significant decisions with peace and confidence, seeing positive results quite quickly.

Of course remember that even when it seems like another choice could’ve been better, that you did the best that you could with the information you had at the time. Use these moments as learning opportunities. Sink into the nuances and discernment that perceived mistakes offer you. When you do, you’ll see your ability to trust yourself continue to grow.

Know that without a doubt you are trustworthy. You are trustworthy to you, you just may not know it yet.

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Since 2006, highly conscious men and women, with a commitment to extraordinary relationships, have chosen Ecstatic Intimacy to find and cultivate Soul Partnerships from their bedrooms to their boardrooms. Ecstatic Intimacy believes in coveted relationships, for all. 

You too, are invited…