There is a difference between learning to suppress what you feel and learning to doubt whether what you feel is real in the first place. The first is painful. The second is destabilizing in a way that can last a lifetime.
Most of us can remember moments when we were told not to cry, not to be angry, not to make a scene. Those moments taught us that certain feelings were unwelcome. But there is another kind of moment, more subtle and insidious, when we were told that what we were experiencing was not actually happening at all.
That didn’t hurt.
You’re not really tired.
You’re being too sensitive.
That’s not what happened.
These are instructions to distrust your own perception of reality, not just to suppress what you feel. And once that seed is planted, it grows in ways that are hard to see and even harder to uproot.
I work with people in their thirties, forties, and fifties who still struggle to trust their own experience. They feel something clearly, and their first instinct is to check with someone else to see if they are allowed to feel it. They sense that something is wrong in a relationship or a job, and instead of listening to that sense, they look for evidence that will convince them they are overreacting. When I ask where this pattern started, the answer is almost always the same. It started early. Long before they had language to name what was happening.
A child reaches for their parent and is told they are being clingy. They say they are hungry and are told it is not time to eat yet. They describe something that happened and are corrected about the details until they are no longer sure what they remember. Each of these moments, on its own, might seem minor. But they accumulate. And what they teach, over time, is that your internal experience is not a reliable source of information about the world.
This is different from the lessons we covered in earlier weeks. It is not just that your body was responding to threat before you had words for it, or that your feelings were dismissed as inconvenient. This is the moment when you began to learn that your perception itself might be wrong.
That you might be making things up.
That you might be too much, too sensitive, too dramatic, too needy.
That the problem is not what happened, but how you interpreted what happened.
This is a particularly effective form of control, because it does not require force. It only requires repetition. If a child is told enough times that their experience is not accurate, they will eventually stop trusting it. And once they stop trusting it, they will look outside themselves for confirmation of what is real. This is how self-doubt becomes wired into the nervous system.
For children growing up with adults who are inconsistent, emotionally volatile, or unable to validate the child’s reality, this pattern becomes especially pronounced. The child learns that their perceptions are unreliable. This happens because the adults around them cannot afford to let the child’s perceptions be true, not because the child actually lacks the capacity to perceive accurately.
If the child says they are scared, and the parent responds with irritation or dismissal, the child learns that their fear is not valid. If the child says something hurt, and the adult minimizes it or tells them they are overreacting, the child learns that their sense of pain cannot be trusted. And here is where it gets complicated: sometimes the adults are not intentionally gaslighting the child. Sometimes they are simply overwhelmed, or operating from their own unprocessed pain, or repeating patterns they learned in their own childhoods. But the impact on the child is the same. The message lands regardless of intent.
What you are experiencing is not real. What you think happened did not happen. What you feel is too much. You are the problem.
This shows up in therapy constantly. Someone will describe a situation that is clearly harmful, and then immediately follow it with a qualification. “But maybe I’m being too sensitive.” “But maybe I misunderstood.” “But maybe it wasn’t that bad.” They are asking me to tell them whether they are allowed to trust their experience, not to confirm it. And the question itself reveals the depth of the wound. Because somewhere, early on, they learned that their own perception was not enough. That their feelings, their sensations, their memories could all be wrong. That the safest thing to do was to defer to someone else’s version of reality.
This goes beyond being open-minded or considering other perspectives. This is a deep mistrust of your own ability to know what is true for you. And it does not go away just because you grow up.
Even as adults, many of us are still asking for permission to trust our own experience. We feel exhausted in a relationship and wonder if we are being ungrateful. We sense that someone is lying to us and tell ourselves we are being paranoid. We notice that our body tenses around a certain person and rationalize it as our own issue. We have learned to override what we know in favor of what we think we should believe. And the cost of that is staggering.
Because when you cannot trust your own perception, you cannot trust yourself to make decisions, set boundaries with confidence, or leave situations that are harming you. You are never quite sure if the harm is real or if you are just being difficult. You become reliant on external validation to know what is true. And that reliance makes you vulnerable to anyone willing to tell you that your experience does not matter.
This is why gaslighting is so effective. It does not require convincing you of an entirely new reality. It only requires planting enough doubt that you stop trusting the reality you already know. And if that doubt was planted early enough, the gaslighter does not even have to work that hard. You will do the work for them. You will question yourself before they even have to question you.
The first time you learned to doubt yourself might have felt insignificant at the time. Maybe it was a small correction, a gentle dismissal, or a look that said you were making too much of something. But it taught you that your internal world was not a safe place to orient from. That the signals your body was sending, the feelings you were having, the perceptions you were forming, all of it was suspect. And once you learned that lesson, it became the lens through which you interpreted everything else.
When your body tells you something is wrong, you wonder if you are being dramatic. When your feelings show up, you question whether they are justified. When your instincts pull you away from something, you override them in favor of what seems rational or expected. You have been trained to distrust the very systems that were designed to keep you safe, connected, and whole.
Relearning how to trust yourself means restoring a relationship with your own experience that allows you to use it as one source of valid information about your life. This doesn’t require finding certainty or never doubting or never questioning. It is about recognizing that what you feel, sense, and perceive matters, that your body’s signals are worth listening to, and that your interpretation of your own life has value even when it conflicts with someone else’s version.
This does not mean you are always right. It means you are allowed to trust that your experience is real, even when others tell you it is not. And that trust, once restored, changes everything. Because when you can trust your own perception, you can trust yourself to navigate uncertainty. You can set boundaries without needing someone else to confirm that the boundary is reasonable. You can leave situations that are harming you without needing permission or proof that the harm was bad enough to justify leaving. You can begin to live from the inside out, rather than constantly checking the outside to see if your inside is acceptable.
The first time you learned to doubt yourself may have happened decades ago, but that moment does not get to write the rest of the story. You can begin to trust yourself again. The work is slow and often uncomfortable, but it matters more than almost anything else you will do.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: Adaptation Is Not a Character Flaw
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
