Trusting ourselves

A short piece from 2020, revised for today

When we live with complex trauma it can be incredibly challenging to learn to trust ourselves. We can't always distinguish between our intuition, our deep inner knowing and a trauma response or activation.

It can be so hard to be sure of ourselves.

This can be compounded by "reality" or things appearing to point in a direction that would tell us what we think to be true in our bones is totally wrong.

Facts are facts, right? Gut feelings are unquantifiable and unsubstantiatable (I think I just made that word up. I do not care.)

That's the thing though, right? When we know something to be true in every fiber of our being, even when presented with facts that would tell us otherwise, that is our body, our deep inner knowing giving us information.

For many of us, our abusers were (or still are) considered great people, everyone loved them, they may have even been fine upstanding citizens. But our bodies, our experiences knew they had a dark side that caused almost irreparable harm.

Point being,…