Why Can’t I Trust My Own Decisions? How Trauma and Gaslighting Create Chronic Self-Doubt
Why Can’t I Trust My Own Decisions? How Trauma and Gaslighting Create Chronic Self-Doubt
Why can’t you trust your own decisions? Learn how trauma, gaslighting, PTSD, and nervous system dysregulation create chronic self-doubt and how to rebuild self-trust, confidence, and personal agency.
Have you ever made a decision, felt confident about it for five minutes, and then immediately started questioning yourself?
What if I’m overreacting? What if I misunderstood? What if I make the wrong choice? Maybe I’m being too sensitive. Maybe they’re right, and I’m the problem.
For people with a history of trauma, emotional abuse, gaslighting, or chronically invalidating relationships, decision-making can become surprisingly painful. Even relatively ordinary choices can trigger anxiety, overthinking, reassurance-seeking, or a nearly paralyzing fear of getting it wrong. You may know intellectually that you are capable of making decisions, yet something inside you does not trustyour own perception.
That disconnect is important. Chronic self-doubt is not necessarily a lack of intelligence, insight, or competence. Sometimes, it reflects a nervous system that learned that trusting yourself was unsafe.
How Trauma Can Make You Stop Trusting Yourself
Trauma does more than create painful memories. It can change the way the brain evaluates threat, uncertainty, reward, and risk. Research has found associations between PTSD symptoms and altered decision-making under uncertainty. For example, people with PTSD may show greater aversion to ambiguous situations, particularly when potential loss is involved. More recent research has also found that greater PTSD symptom severity can be associated with giving disproportionate weight to negative experiences when making uncertain decisions (Ruderman et al., 2016; Verfaellie et al., 2025).
In everyday life, that can sound like:
What if I regret this?
What if something goes wrong?
What if I disappoint someone?
What if I missed something important?
When your nervous system has learned to anticipate danger, uncertainty itself can begin to feel threatening. Instead of asking, “What do I want?” you may automatically ask, “Which choice is least likely to cause something bad to happen?” Those are very different ways of moving through the world.
Gaslighting Can Create an Internal Argument With Yourself
Gaslighting adds another layer. Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which someone repeatedly challenges, dismisses, or distorts another person's perception of reality. You may hear statements such as:
“You’re remembering it wrong.”
“You’re too sensitive.”
“That never happened.”
“You always exaggerate.”
“You’re making something out of nothing.”
Over time, the external gaslighter can become an internalized voice of self-doubt. Recent experimental research examining gaslighting-like interpersonal dynamics found that pressure from close partners increased acceptance of misinformation and decreased confidence in people's recollections (Andrews et al., 2025).
In other words, repeatedly having your reality challenged can affect not only what you believe happened, but also how confidently you trust your own memory. Eventually, you may no longer need someone else to question you. You do it yourself.
The Neuroscience of Chronic Self-Doubt
Decision-making depends on communication among multiple brain systems involved in memory, emotion, threat detection, reward processing, interoception, and executive functioning. The prefrontal cortex helps us evaluate information, inhibit automaticresponses, consider consequences, and make flexible decisions. The amygdala and related threat networks help detect potential danger. The hippocampus contributes contextual memory, while reward-related regions help us estimate whether something is worth pursuing.
Traumatic stress can disrupt the balance among these systems. Research suggests that traumatic stress may increase the influence of automatic threat-based learning on decision-making, making flexible, goal-directed choices more difficult under certain conditions (Ousdal et al., 2018). PTSD has also been associated with differences in neural systems involved in evaluating rewards, losses, and uncertain outcomes.
This helps explain why someone can be exceptionally competent at work yet become overwhelmed when deciding whether to end a relationship, establish a boundary, confront someone, move, date again, or say no.
The issue may not be “I don’t know what to do.”
It may be “My nervous system does not feel safe trusting what I know.”
Trauma Can Disconnect You From Your “Gut”
There is another fascinating piece of the self-trust puzzle: interoception. Interoception is your brain's ability to perceive and interpret signals coming from inside your body, including heartbeat, breathing, muscle tension, hunger, discomfort, arousal, and other internal sensations. These signals contribute to emotional awareness and intuitive decision-making.
Research suggests that childhood trauma can interfere with the ability to process, integrate, and trust bodily signals associated with emotions and needs. Research on PTSD and interoception similarly suggests that disrupted interpretation of internal signals may contribute to difficulty trusting one's instincts and making decisions.
If you spent years learning to override your discomfort because someone told you that you were “dramatic,” ignore your boundaries to keep another person happy, or distrust your instincts because they were repeatedly questioned, you may eventually lose access to an important internal compass.
You stop asking, “What am I noticing?”
And start asking, “What am I supposed to think?”
Signs You May Have Lost Trust in Your Own Judgment
Chronic self-doubt can show up in subtle ways. You may:
— Ask multiple people what they think before making decisions
— Replay conversations looking for evidence that you did something wrong
— Over-explain your choices
— Apologize excessively
— Change your mind when someone becomes disappointed or angry
— Struggle to identify what you actually want
— Assume other people's perceptions are more accurate than yours
— Stay in relationships long after your body is telling you something feels wrong
— Feel intense anxiety after setting a boundary
— Research choices endlessly because you are terrified of making a mistake
Ironically, the harder you try to achieve absolute certainty, the less confident you may feel. Self-trust does not come from never making the wrong decision. It comes from knowing that you can remain connected to yourself even when a decision does not turn out exactly as you hoped.
Rebuilding Self-Trust and Personal Agency
Rebuilding agency after trauma or gaslighting is often less about becoming more certain and more about becoming more connected to yourself. Start with smaller decisions. Ask yourself what you prefer before asking anyone else.
Notice your first response before analyzing it. Pay attention to sensations of expansion, tension, relief, hesitation, or discomfort without automatically treating them as instructions. Then practice tolerating the uncertainty that follows a decision.
You might tell yourself:
I made the best decision I could with the information available to me.
This is very different from demanding that you prove your decision was objectively correct. Trauma therapy can also help people differentiate between present-day intuition and old threat responses. Somatic therapy, EMDR, mindfulness-based approaches, attachment-focused therapy, and other trauma-informed modalities can support nervous system regulation while helping clients reconnect with emotions, bodily cues, boundaries, preferences, and values.
Self-Trust Is Built Through Relationship With Yourself
At Embodied Wellness and Recovery, we understand that chronic self-doubt often cannot be resolved through positive thinking alone.
Our work integrates trauma treatment, neuroscience, nervous system repair, somatic awareness, attachment, relationships, sexuality, and intimacy to help people understand not only what they think, but what their bodies have learned to expect. For someone who has survived gaslighting, relational trauma, betrayal, or chronic invalidation, rebuilding self-trust can be profound.
The goal is not to become a person who never questions yourself. Healthy self-reflection matters. The goal is to stop automatically assuming that everyone else's interpretation deserves more authority than your own.
With practice, the question can gradually shift from:
“How do I know I’m making the right decision?”
to:
“Can I listen to myself, make a thoughtful choice, and trust myself to respond to whatever happens next?”
That is personal agency. And that is where self-trust begins.
Reach out to schedule a complimentary 20-minute consultation with our team of therapists, trauma specialists, somatic practitioners, or relationship experts, and start working towards integrative, embodied healing today.
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References
1) Andrews, S. J., Ellison, S., Shaw, H., & Gabbert, F. (2025). Gaslighting and memory: The effects of partner-led challenges on recall and self-perception. Memory.
2) Ousdal, O. T., Huys, Q. J. M., Milde, A. M., Craven, A. R., Ersland, L., Endestad, T., Melinder, A., Hugdahl, K., & Dolan, R. J. (2018). The impact of traumatic stress on Pavlovian biases. Psychological Medicine, 48(2), 327–336.
3) Ruderman, L., Ehrlich, D. B., Roy, A., Pietrzak, R. H., Harpaz-Rotem, I., & Levy, I. (2016). Posttraumatic stress symptoms and aversion to ambiguous losses in combat veterans. Depression and Anxiety, 33(7), 606–613.
4) Verfaellie, M., Patt, V., Lafleche, G., Jones, D., & Vasterling, J. J. (2025). Choosing certainty over risk: Associations of PTSD symptom severity with memory sampling during experiential decision making. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 110, 102979.