When Other People Get in Your Head: Learning to Trust What You Know

By TaShara Davis, LPC
Licensed Professional Counselor | Founder, Brighter Side Counseling

Relationships are complicated.

You can love someone and still get scared. You can trust someone and still question your judgment. And sometimes, if enough outside voices get involved, you can find yourself questioning a relationship that hadn’t actually given you a reason to question it.

I had one of those moments recently.

Not because something terrible happened. Actually, that was the problem.

Nothing had happened that justified the amount of doubt I suddenly felt.

There were just voices.

Opinions. Interpretations. Warnings. Little comments that probably wouldn’t have meant much individually, but together started sounding convincing.

Eventually, I found myself thinking:

Maybe I need to pull back.

Maybe I shouldn’t share as much.

Maybe my intuition about this relationship was wrong.

And then I had to ask myself a much harder question:

What has this person actually done to make me feel this way?

The answer made me uncomfortable.

Nothing.

When Other People’s Voices Get Louder Than Your Own Experience

There is a difference between ignoring red flags and allowing other people to create red flags for you.

Sometimes the people around us see things we can’t. There is wisdom in listening, especially when concerns come from people who genuinely love us and have shown that they want what’s best for us.

But listening doesn’t mean handing someone else the authority to define your relationships.

At some point, you have to separate what you know from what you’ve been told.

What has this person consistently shown you?

How do they treat you when nobody else is watching?

Have their actions made you feel unsafe? Or are you anticipating hurt because someone else told you that you should?

Those questions matter.

When we hear something repeatedly, we can start looking for evidence to support it. A conversation suddenly sounds different. An innocent decision feels suspicious. We start connecting dots that may not actually belong together.

Before we realize it, we’re pulling away from someone who hasn’t moved at all.

Trust Is Not a Guarantee

I think sometimes we misunderstand what it means to trust another person.

Trust doesn’t mean believing someone will never hurt you.

Nobody can promise us that.

People disappoint each other. People make mistakes. Even people who genuinely love us can get things wrong.

For me, trust looks more like this:

Until your actions give me a reason to believe differently, I will not treat you like you’ve already hurt me.

That’s vulnerable.

Because I could be wrong.

I could trust someone who eventually disappoints me. I could find out one day that my judgment wasn’t as good as I thought it was.

And you know what?

So be it.

If that day comes, I’ll deal with what actually happened.

What I don’t want to do is damage a relationship today because I’m trying to protect myself from something that hasn’t happened.

Everybody Gets an Opinion. Everybody Doesn’t Get a Vote.

This may have been the biggest lesson for me.

Other people are allowed to have opinions about our relationships.

But everybody doesn’t get a vote.

Sometimes you have to turn everybody else’s volume down long enough to hear yourself again.

Ask yourself, what do I actually know?

Not what somebody told me.

Not what I’m afraid could happen.

Not what somebody else experienced with this person.

Not even what happened to me in a completely different relationship.

What has this person actually shown me?

Sometimes the answer really will tell you to pull back. Sometimes that uncomfortable feeling is there for a reason, and you need to pay attention to it.

But sometimes you realize you’re preparing to protect yourself from a hurt that hasn’t happened.

That’s what I realized.

If someone’s actions eventually show me that my trust was misplaced, I’ll deal with it then.

But I’m not going to punish someone today for something they haven’t done just because I’m afraid I could be wrong about them tomorrow.

Relationships are complicated enough without making people answer for things they haven’t actually done.

Maybe loving people well isn’t believing they’ll never hurt us.

Maybe sometimes it’s simply being able to say:

I know what you’ve shown me. Until you show me differently, I’m going to trust that.

A Brighter Side Thought

Sometimes anxiety has us preparing for betrayal before betrayal has even happened.

And sometimes our past experiences make pulling back feel safer than trusting what is right in front of us.

Learning to tell the difference between intuition and fear isn’t always easy. Neither is figuring out whether you’re seeing a real red flag or an old wound telling you to protect yourself.

You don’t have to ignore your instincts.

But you also don’t have to let fear, history, or other people’s voices make every decision for you.

Sometimes you can trust what you know.

If anxiety, past relationships, or difficulty trusting others has made it hard to know when to listen to your intuition and when fear is doing the talking, you don’t have to sort through it alone.

Brighter Side Counseling provides virtual therapy throughout Alabama.

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https://www.brightersidecounselor.com/contact