Reconnecting With Yourself: When Did We Stop Trusting Ourselves?

Reconnecting With Yourself in a World That Values Proof

I was watching a video on social media recently about vibration and frequency. The creator was talking about how everything in the universe is energy, and how science is increasingly discovering things that many ancient traditions have taught for centuries. It was one of those videos that people tend to have strong opinions about. Some will immediately dismiss it, while others will nod along because it confirms something they have always felt to be true.

What struck me wasn’t actually the content of the video itself. It was a conversation I’d had the day before with a friend.

We were talking about how fascinating it is that science seems to be catching up with some of the things that many people have instinctively known for years.

Meditation, mindfulness, breathwork, the impact of stress on the body, the connection between emotional wellbeing and physical health; increasingly, research is emerging that validates experiences people have been talking about for decades.

And while that is undoubtedly interesting, I found myself wondering about something else entirely.

Why do we need science to tell us something is true before we’re willing to trust our own experience?

Please don’t misunderstand me. This isn’t an argument against science. Science has transformed our understanding of the world. It saves lives every single day, and I am incredibly grateful for that. If I need surgery, I want a surgeon. If I break a bone, I want modern medicine. Research, evidence and discovery all have an important place.

What fascinates me about these moments when science catches up isn’t that they prove anyone was right or wrong. It’s that they raise questions about how we decide what is true in the first place. Why are we so willing to trust information that comes from outside ourselves, yet so quick to doubt our own experiences? Why do some forms of knowing seem to require external validation before we’re prepared to take them seriously?

The more I sat with it, the more I realised that the science wasn’t actually the interesting part of the conversation for me. The interesting part was what it revealed about us. About how often we look outside ourselves for answers. About how readily we trust external authority, while questioning our own experience. And about how easy it can be to lose touch with that quieter part of ourselves that already knows.

Not believes. But is our inner knowing. Because to me, those two things are very different.

Belief suggests accepting something as true. Knowing feels deeper. It is that feeling you get when something resonates so strongly that you recognise it before you fully understand it. It’s the sense that something is true for you, even if you can’t yet explain why.

Most of us have experienced moments like that. We’ve met someone and felt instantly at ease in their company. We’ve walked into a situation and felt uncomfortable despite having no logical reason to. We’ve known a job wasn’t right, even though it looked perfect on paper. We’ve sensed a relationship changing long before any words were spoken.

When we look back on those moments, many of us can identify a quiet inner knowing that was present all along. The question is whether we listened.

How We Learn to Distrust Ourselves

The more I reflected on this, the more I realised that I don’t believe we’re born disconnected from ourselves. In fact, I think quite the opposite is true.

Children arrive in the world naturally curious. They explore, observe, question and experiment. They are connected to their senses, their emotions and their instincts. They don’t spend hours analysing whether they are interested in something. They simply are. They follow what fascinates them. They notice things. They ask questions that adults have often forgotten to ask.

Then, gradually, life begins layering expectations on top of that natural curiosity.

Some of those expectations are useful. They help us learn how to live alongside other people, how to stay safe, how to navigate relationships and responsibilities. But alongside those practical lessons come countless other messages about who we ‘should’ be and how we ‘should’ move through the world.

Oh, how I dislike the word “should”.

We learn what behaviour is rewarded and what behaviour isn’t. We learn what success is supposed to look like. We learn what is considered sensible, realistic and acceptable. We learn how to fit in.

For many people, these lessons begin so early and are repeated so consistently that they become almost invisible. We don’t even realise we’re absorbing them. They come from family, school, friends, workplaces, social media, culture and society itself.

The Weight of Other People’s Expectations

As women especially, the list can feel endless. Be kind, but not a pushover. Be confident, but not intimidating. Be successful, but don’t neglect everyone else. Be attractive, but don’t care too much about your appearance. Be nurturing, productive, selfless, ambitious, available and accommodating… often all at the same time.

Small wonder so many women end up wondering who they are beneath everyone else’s expectations.

It’s exhausting when you stop and think about it.

The challenge is that when these expectations are repeated often enough, they begin to set like concrete. They become the lens through which we see ourselves and the world around us. Eventually, we stop questioning them. We assume they are ours.

Yet many of them aren’t. They are inherited stories. Stories about what makes us worthy. Stories about what makes us successful. Stories about what makes us lovable. Stories about what makes us acceptable. And the longer we live with those stories, the harder it can become to distinguish them from our own voice.

I think this is why so many people reach a point in their lives where everything appears fine on the surface, and yet something still feels missing.

They have followed the rules.

They have met expectations.

They have ticked the boxes.

They have done everything they were told would make them happy.

And yet there remains a quiet sense that something isn’t quite right.

And it’s not because they have failed, but because they have become disconnected from themselves.

Reconnecting With Your Authentic Self

This is where authenticity enters the conversation, and I don’t mean authenticity in the social media sense of the word. I mean the deeper, often messier process of separating who we genuinely are from who we have been taught to be.

That isn’t always comfortable work. Sometimes it means recognising that goals we’ve spent years pursuing don’t actually belong to us. Sometimes it means realising that decisions have been driven by approval rather than alignment. Sometimes it means discovering that what we’ve been hearing all these years isn’t intuition at all, but fear, obligation, guilt or the weight of expectations that were never ours to carry.

And this, I think, is where many healing journeys truly begin.

Healing, not because people need fixing and not because they are broken, but because they have become buried beneath layers of conditioning that make it difficult to hear themselves clearly.

Why Reconnecting With Yourself Can Feel So Difficult

When people talk about intuition, there is often an assumption that it is something mystical, or available only to a gifted few. My experience suggests otherwise.

I think intuition is part of being human.

The challenge isn’t developing it. The challenge is recognising it.

Most people know what anxiety feels like, and what fear feels like. Many of us are familiar with self doubt too. Increasingly, people are beginning to recognise people pleasing tendencies and the ways they influence our choices, often without us even realising it.

Intuition is a little different. It is often much quieter than all of those voices, which can make it difficult to recognise, especially when it has spent years buried beneath expectations, responsibilities, beliefs about who we ought to be, and the stories we’ve accumulated throughout our lives.

Learning to hear it again takes time. Learning its language takes patience. Building trust in it takes experience and practice.

Finding Your Way Back to Yourself

This is one of the reasons I believe the right practitioner can be so valuable. Not because they have all the answers, and certainly not because they know your truth better than you do. Their role is not to tell you who you are. Their role is to help you find your way back to yourself.

We are so close to our own stories that we often cannot see them clearly. The beliefs, habits and assumptions we carry can become so familiar that we stop questioning them altogether. We simply assume they are true because they have been with us for so long.

Sometimes we need someone to hold a mirror up, ask a different question or gently challenge a belief we’ve carried for years. Sometimes we simply need a safe space where all the noise quietens down enough for us to hear our own wisdom again.

In many ways, I think that is what healing work, coaching, therapy and personal development often have in common. Beneath the techniques, tools and modalities sits a simple desire: reconnecting with yourself.

Not to become somebody else. And certainly not to add another layer. But to uncover what has always been there.

Perhaps the Real Journey Is Simply Remembering

The more I sit with all of this, the more I wonder what the world would look like if we encouraged children to stay connected to that inner knowing rather than gradually teaching them to override it. What if curiosity remained just as important as certainty? What if paying attention to our instincts was valued alongside logic and reason? What if we grew up understanding that guidance from others is valuable, but that our own inner voice matters too?

Perhaps fewer adults would spend years trying to reconnect with themselves and rediscover what was never truly lost.

Because I don’t believe our deepest knowing disappears. I think it waits beneath the conditioning and the expectations, beneath the stories about who we are ‘supposed’ to be, waiting quietly for us to remember. And maybe that is the real journey.

Not becoming someone new or finding something outside ourselves, but uncovering the person we were before we learned not to trust our own voice.