Why You Can't Trust Yourself After Religious Trauma (And How to Fix It)—for Empaths, Sensitives, Intuitives, and People-Pleasers
SELF-TRUST, HSP, INTUITION, INNER WISDOM, PEOPLE-PLEASING, HEALING, ENMESHMENT, CODEPENDENCY, HIGH-CONTROL RELIGION
Key Points:
Obedience-driven religions teach you to distrust your own judgment and defer to external authority
Enmeshment and people-pleasing are survival strategies that help you avoid punishment and maintain connection
Recovery involves rebuilding trust in your own instincts, developing your identity, and learning healthy consent practices
Central to reclaiming your autonomy is this fundamental shift: from others claiming to know what's best for you, to trusting that you know what's best for yourself
For those of us raised in obedience-driven religions, one of the most profound losses we experience is trust in ourselves. We were systematically taught that our instincts were sinful, our desires were dangerous, and our judgment couldn't be trusted. The only safe path was obedience to external authority, whether that was God, scripture, church leaders, or parents.
This fundamental distrust of self creates fertile ground for enmeshment, codependency, and chronic people-pleasing. When you can't trust yourself, you must constantly look outside yourself for guidance, approval, and permission to exist.
The Roots of Self-Distrust
In high-control religious environments, autonomy isn't just discouraged; it's spiritualized as rebellion. You learned early that:
Your thoughts and feelings needed to be "taken captive" or "crucified"
Trusting your own judgment was prideful and idolatrous
Questioning authority was sinful and rebellious
Your value depended on compliance and conformity
"Dying to self" meant erasing your authentic desires, needs, and identity
This systematic dismantling of self-trust served a purpose: it kept you compliant, controllable, and dependent on the religious system for direction. It can be hard to face that truth, after being told for so long that it was God’s good purpose for you to obey. But the truth really can set you free.
Understanding Enmeshment in Religious Contexts
Enmeshment occurs when boundaries between individuals become so blurred that one person's emotional wellbeing becomes dependent on another's. In religious families, this often manifests as children feeling responsible for their parents' emotional or spiritual state.
The concept of enmeshment, introduced by Salvador Minuchin in the 1970s, describes family systems where personal boundaries are overly blurred, leading to excessive emotional fusion and a stifling of individual identity and autonomy.
High-control religions actively cultivate enmeshment while eradicating autonomy and personal agency. Without autonomy, it's impossible to develop healthy boundaries, especially with parents who see controlling their children's lives as a form of spiritual protection or guidance. Without personal agency, you can feel helpless in the world, dependent entirely on others (and expressly told to be dependent on God), and can search for any means to increase your sense of control and certainty in the world. All of these factors make you more vulnerable to exploitation from authoritarian leaders.
When your entire identity is wrapped up in meeting others' expectations, when your "ok-ness" is fundamentally tied to their "ok-ness," you lose access to your own internal compass. You learn to people-please as a survival strategy, constantly scanning for what others need from you rather than tuning into what you need for yourself.
The Consent/Closeness Matrix: A Framework for Healing
Understanding where you've been and where you're heading can be clarified through the Consent/Closeness Matrix. This framework maps four relational stances based on two axes: consent (low to high) and closeness (high distance to high warmth).
The Four Stances:
Paternalism (Low Consent, High Closeness): "I know what's best for you"
Characterized by helicopter parenting, patronizing behavior, and charity without dignity
Often uses Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) or conversion therapy approaches
Approach to pain: "Let me fix it for you" (aka "let me fix you")
This is where most obedience-driven religious parenting operates
Authoritarianism (Low Consent, High Distance): "I know what's best for you"
Characterized by domination, exploitation, extraction, and demands for loyalty
Approach to pain: Law and order, punishment and shame
The enforcement mechanism when paternalism doesn't produce compliance
Radical Acceptance (High Consent, High Closeness): "You know what's best for you"
Characterized by interdependence and valuing everyone's wellbeing
Approach to pain: Compassion, curiosity, and restorative justice
The goal for healthy, mutual relationships
Radical Autonomy (High Consent, High Distance): "You know what's best for you"
Characterized by healthy boundaries, self-agency, and self-determination
Approach to pain: Authenticity, curiosity, and natural consequences
An important developmental stage for those recovering from enmeshment
Most of us were raised in families that operated primarily in the Paternalism quadrant, with periodic moves into Authoritarianism when we stepped out of line. We were never trusted to know what was best for ourselves.
Being brought up in Paternalism and Authoritarianism inhibited our ability to act, except in prescribed roles, such as the rescued or rescuer, or the obedient servant of God. Part of our healing is moving to trusting ourselves and taking action in our lives.
The Three Pillars of Recovery: Trust, Know, Express
Recovery from religious enmeshment and people-pleasing involves three interconnected processes:
1. Learn to Trust Yourself
Trusting yourself means rebuilding confidence in your own perceptions, feelings, and judgment. This isn't a linear process with a clear beginning and end. Instead, it's cyclical and rhythmic, a labyrinthine path that mirrors the divine feminine way of growth—spiraling inward and outward, returning to the same themes at deeper levels, each time with greater wisdom and integration.
The journey to self-trust unfolds in five interconnected movements:
Reflect: Understanding What Led to Distrust
Begin by examining how self-distrust was cultivated in your life. What messages did you receive about your judgment, your instincts, your desires? How were autonomy and independent thinking framed as dangerous or sinful?
This reflection isn't about dwelling in the past, but about bringing conscious awareness to patterns that have been operating unconsciously. You cannot heal what you cannot see.
Release: Letting Go of What No Longer Serves You
Once you've identified the beliefs, behaviors, and relationships that undermine your self-trust, you can begin the process of release. This might mean:
Releasing the belief that your instincts are fundamentally flawed
Letting go of the need for external validation before trusting your experience
Releasing relationships or dynamics that continually question your perception of reality
Letting go of the idea that certainty is required before you can trust yourself
Release is not a one-time event but an ongoing practice of noticing what you're carrying that isn't yours to carry.
Reconnect: Returning to Your Inner Wisdom
Beneath the layers of conditioning lies your inner compass—your core self, your inner wisdom. This is the part of you that knows, the part that was always there before you were taught not to listen.
Reconnecting involves:
Recognizing your body's signals: Your body has wisdom that was suppressed. Anxiety, discomfort, excitement, and peace are all valuable information.
Honoring your instincts: That gut feeling that something isn't right deserves attention, not correction.
Validating your own experience: You don't need external confirmation to know what you experienced was real.
Sitting with silence and stillness: Creating space to hear your own voice beneath the noise of others' expectations.
This often requires moving through Radical Autonomy first. You may need some distance and firm boundaries while you learn to hear your own voice clearly.
Reclaim: Taking Back What You Need to Trust Yourself
Reclaiming is the active work of taking back your authority over your own life. This includes:
Reclaiming your right to make decisions without needing permission
Reclaiming your voice and your "no"
Reclaiming your time, energy, and attention
Reclaiming your body's autonomy
Reclaiming your right to change your mind
Reclaiming pleasure, desire, and joy as valid guides
You are gathering back the parts of yourself that were given away, taken, or suppressed.
Re-emerge: Becoming Whole, Grounded, and Trusting
As you move through this process—again and again, in ever-deepening spirals—you begin to re-emerge. Not as someone entirely new, but as yourself, more fully realized. Whole, grounded, and trusting in your own wisdom.
This doesn't mean you never doubt or question yourself. It means you trust that you have the capacity to navigate uncertainty, to learn from mistakes, to adjust course when needed. You trust the process of your own becoming.
The Cyclical Nature of Self-Trust
These five movements are not steps to complete and move past. They are a rhythm you return to throughout your life. Each time you encounter a new challenge, a triggering situation, or a deeper layer of healing, you may find yourself reflecting again, releasing again, reconnecting again.
This is not regression—it's the spiral path of growth. Each time you cycle through, you do so with more awareness, more skill, and more trust in yourself.
You can walk this path more deeply with support through my Trust Yourself Again Course, where you can Reclaim Your Inner Compass after Leaving Evangelical Subculture.
2. Learn to Know Yourself
Knowing yourself means developing a clear sense of who you are apart from who you were told to be. This involves:
Exploring your authentic preferences: What do you actually like? What brings you joy? What are your genuine values, not the ones you inherited?
Identifying your needs: What do you need to feel safe, seen, and satisfied? What are your non-negotiables?
Discovering your desires: What do you want? Not what you should want, but what you actually want.
Understanding your patterns: How did enmeshment and people-pleasing show up in your life? What triggers these old patterns?
This is about unwinding your identity from your parents' or community's identity. It's about differentiation—becoming a separate, whole person.
3. Learn to Express Yourself
Expressing yourself means using your voice to communicate your truth, needs, and boundaries. This includes:
Articulating your needs: Being able to say "I need..." without apologizing or justifying.
Setting boundaries: Clearly stating what is and isn't okay for you, even when it disappoints others.
Saying no: Declining requests, invitations, or demands without excessive explanation.
Sharing your perspective: Expressing your thoughts and feelings, knowing they're valid even if others disagree.
This is perhaps the most terrifying part of recovery because it risks the very thing you've been trying to avoid your whole life: disapproval, rejection, or abandonment.
Breaking Free from People-Pleasing
People-pleasing is a learned survival strategy, not a personality flaw. In environments where love was conditional on compliance, you learned that your safety depended on keeping others happy.
Breaking this pattern requires understanding that:
You are not responsible for others' emotions: Their disappointment, anger, or hurt feelings are not yours to fix.
Conflict is not catastrophic: Disagreement doesn't mean disconnection. Healthy relationships can withstand differences.
You can disappoint people and still be worthy of love: Your value is inherent, not earned through compliance.
Others' expectations don't create obligations: Just because someone expects something from you doesn't mean you owe it to them.
Practical Steps for Recovery
1. Recognize the Patterns
Begin by identifying how enmeshment, codependency, and people-pleasing have shown up in your life. This isn't about blame; it's about developing clarity so you can make informed choices moving forward.
2. Set Boundaries
Learning to set healthy boundaries is critical. This might start with small things: choosing what to eat without asking for input, declining an invitation without over-explaining, or limiting contact when interactions leave you drained.
Boundaries move you from the low-consent quadrants (Paternalism and Authoritarianism) toward high-consent relating (Radical Acceptance and Radical Autonomy).
3. Practice Self-Compassion
You will feel conflicted. You will feel guilty. You will wonder if you're being selfish. These feelings are evidence of the enmeshment itself, not proof that you're doing something wrong.
Be gentle with yourself. You're rewiring decades of conditioning.
4. Develop Your Own Identity
Explore new interests. Join new communities. Try things you were never allowed to try. Give yourself permission to experiment and discover what genuinely resonates with you.
This is how you "unwind yourself" from your parents' or community's identity.
5. Seek Professional Support
A therapist familiar with religious trauma or a Religious Harm Recovery Coach can help you distinguish healthy dynamics from unhealthy ones. They can support you in "unhooking" your emotional wellbeing from your parents' or others' wellbeing.
Moving Toward Radical Acceptance
The goal isn't to stay in Radical Autonomy forever, maintaining high distance from everyone. Rather, it's to move through that stage long enough to develop a solid sense of self, and then to choose Radical Acceptance in your relationships.
Radical Acceptance means:
High consent: "You know what's best for you" (and “I know what’s best for me”)
High closeness: Warm, connected, interdependent relationships
Compassion and curiosity in the face of pain
Restorative justice rather than punishment
Mutual respect for boundaries and autonomy
This is what healthy, non-enmeshed connection looks like. It's possible to be close to someone without losing yourself. It's possible to care deeply about someone without being responsible for their emotional state.
A Final Word
Recovery from enmeshment doesn't necessarily mean cutting off all contact with your family, though for some people going low or no contact is necessary for their wellbeing.
Recovery is about establishing yourself and your life as separate from your parents' lives. It's about reclaiming your right to know what's best for you. It's about trusting that your instincts, feelings, and desires are valuable sources of information, not threats to be managed.
You deserve to live as your own person, with the freedom to choose how and when you connect. You deserve relationships where your autonomy is respected and your authentic self is welcomed.
The journey from "I know what's best for you" to "You know what's best for you" is the journey home to yourself.
Questions for Reflection
Consider journaling about or discussing with your therapist:
In what areas of your life do you still find it difficult to trust your own judgment? What messages did you receive that taught you not to trust yourself?
How does people-pleasing show up in your current relationships? What are you afraid will happen if you stop?
Where do your current relationships fall on the Consent/Closeness Matrix? Which quadrant do you tend to operate from? Which quadrant were you raised in?
What would it look like to move toward Radical Acceptance in your most important relationships? What would need to change?
What parts of your authentic self are still waiting to be discovered or expressed?
Next Steps
Consider working through my self-study course Trust Yourself Again, where you can Reclaim Your Inner Compass after Leaving Evangelical Subculture. And feel free to schedule a free consultation to see if I’m the right fit for 1:1 support. When you’ve finished that, check out my memoir where I walk through this healing journey on a personal level.
Hi, I’m Catherine. I’m so happy to share this time and space with you.
I’m a counselor and self-trust coach living on the Emerald Coast of Florida, on the unceded land of the Muscogee. I am a creative, mystic, and neurodiverse adventurer. I love writing, creating, and connecting.
I love helping folx Befriend Your Inner Critic and Become Your Own Best Friend. I enjoy hearing from you and walking alongside you on your journey.
With a full heart,
Catherine
