You're trying so hard.

You think through decisions carefully, come to conclusions that make sense-and then immediately second-guess yourself. You find yourself asking your therapist, your partner, your friends: "Do you think this is the right choice?" You can't move forward until someone else confirms you're not making a mistake.

And then you hate yourself for it. For being so indecisive. For not being able to just trust yourself like other people seem to.

You've been working on this. Trying to be more confident. Trying to care less about what others think. But here's what no one has told you yet: the reason those attempts haven't worked is that you've been trying to fix something that isn't actually broken.

Why You Can't Stop Checking With Others

Let's be specific about the pattern.

When you need to make a decision-even a small one-you gather information, think it through, and arrive at what seems like a reasonable conclusion. But the moment you have that conclusion, doubt floods in. What if I'm wrong? What if I'm not seeing this clearly?

So you do what feels necessary: you check with someone else. Someone who seems more together, more capable, more trustworthy than you. You're particularly drawn to authority figures-therapists, mentors, people in positions of knowledge. You need them to tell you you're right.

Beyond decisions, there's the constant adjustment. You've become incredibly skilled at reading rooms, anticipating moods, figuring out what will make others comfortable or happy. You can sense when someone's energy shifts, and you immediately start calculating: What did I do? What do they need? How do I fix this?

You've probably called this "people-pleasing," and you've definitely called it a problem. A weakness. Evidence that you're somehow less capable than people who seem to know their own minds.

The conventional advice has been straightforward: Stop caring what people think. Trust yourself more. Be more assertive. Set boundaries.

You've tried. It doesn't stick. The pull to check, to adjust, to make sure others approve-it's not a choice you're making. It's something deeper.

The Real Reason You Don't Trust Yourself

Here's what actually happened.

When you were young and your mother dismissed your feelings-told you that you were overreacting, that you had no reason to feel upset, that your perception was wrong-your brain faced a critical problem.

A child's survival depends on their primary caregiver. If that caregiver repeatedly communicates that your internal experience is invalid, unreliable, or wrong, your brain makes an adaptive calculation: I can't trust what I feel or think. I need to trust what she says instead.

This isn't weakness. This is brilliant survival engineering.

You developed exactly the coping system you needed. You learned to:

• Monitor external cues instead of internal ones
• Value others' perceptions over your own
• Adjust your behavior to prevent criticism and maintain connection
• Become highly attuned to what others needed from you

This pattern has a clinical name: fawning. It's recognized as a trauma response-specifically, one that develops in environments where emotional experience is chronically invalidated.

Research on people-pleasing and childhood trauma has identified this clearly: fawning describes individuals who "seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs and demands of others." It's not a personality type. It's a protection mechanism.

And that constant need to check with others, to seek validation for your decisions? That also has a name: external locus of evaluation. It means you look outward rather than inward to determine what's true or right.

You didn't choose this. You learned it. Because in your childhood environment, looking inward was actively dangerous-your mother taught you that your internal compass was faulty.

What Happens When You Stop Blaming Yourself

When you see people-pleasing as a character flaw, you add shame to an already painful pattern. You hate yourself for something you did to survive.

But when you understand it as a trauma response-as adaptive behavior that once kept you safe-everything shifts.

Studies on childhood emotional invalidation show that higher invalidation scores correlate directly with poorer emotional intelligence and more severe identity problems in adulthood. This isn't about some people being naturally more confident than others. This is about what happens when a developing brain learns it cannot trust its own experience.

The research is clear: emotional invalidation "can lead to a shift in sense of self driven by the perception that emotional experiences are undesirable and a reflection of the person's identity as a whole." Translation: you didn't just learn not to trust your feelings. You learned that having those feelings made you unacceptable.

So of course you look outward. Of course you need confirmation. Your brain was trained to believe that internal validation is inherently unreliable.

This reframe matters because it changes the question.

The question is no longer: Why am I so weak that I can't trust myself?

The question becomes: What did I learn about safety that's still running in the background?

And that question has an answer. More importantly, it has a path forward.

What Really Creates People-Pleasing

Here's the piece most people miss.

When therapists talk about people-pleasing or seeking external validation, they often focus on building confidence or practicing assertiveness. Those aren't wrong, exactly. But they're addressing the symptom, not the cause.

The cause behind the cause is this: your brain's threat detection system learned to categorize internal experience as dangerous.

Think about what happened every time you expressed a feeling or opinion to your mother. Dismissal. Criticism. Invalidation. Your young brain, designed to detect patterns and keep you safe, drew the obvious conclusion: expressing internal experience → threat to relationship → danger.

And since relationship security is survival for a child, your brain did what it's designed to do: it developed a workaround. Instead of trusting the dangerous internal signals, it would monitor external ones. Instead of risking the danger of self-trust, it would seek safety in others' approval.

This is why "just trust yourself" advice fails. You're not lacking confidence or strength. You're operating with neural pathways that were shaped by repeated invalidation.

The research on adverse childhood experiences and coping mechanisms shows that "exposure to adverse childhood experiences was indirectly related to PTSD and disturbances in self-organization symptoms through immature defense mechanisms." What looks like a personality flaw is actually a protective system that became permanent wiring.

Your panic attacks-the ones that stopped when you started therapy-are part of the same system. Research shows that 45% of adults with panic disorder reported childhood abuse, compared to only 19% in the general population. Your nervous system learned to stay in a state of hypervigilance, constantly scanning for threats. Including the threat of your own emotional experience.

The real cause isn't that you're indecisive or weak. It's that your childhood environment required you to abandon internal validation in favor of external safety.

Why You've Been Hating Yourself for Surviving

If people-pleasing is a trauma response-if external validation seeking is a learned adaptation to childhood invalidation-then the years you've spent hating yourself for these patterns have been years spent hating yourself for surviving.

You've been treating your protection system as evidence of your inadequacy.

And here's the harder truth: every time you've successfully pleased someone, every time you've correctly anticipated what they needed, every time you've adjusted yourself to keep the peace-you've reinforced the neural pathways that tell you external validation is where safety lives.

The cost of staying safe this way is that you never learned what your own judgment feels like. You never developed what person-centered therapy calls an "internal locus of evaluation"-the ability to trust your own feelings, values, and lived experience as valid.

You learned, instead, that you are fundamentally untrustworthy to yourself.

This might explain why relationship decisions feel so impossible. How do you choose a partner when you've learned to prioritize their needs over your own awareness? How do you know what you want when wanting has always been dangerous?

The uncomfortable implication is that healing doesn't mean becoming more assertive or caring less. It means slowly, carefully teaching your nervous system that internal experience is no longer dangerous. That you can notice what you feel and think without it triggering a threat response.

That's deeper work than "building confidence." That's rewiring.

What to Do With This Information Right Now

You don't have to do anything with this information right now.

You might notice some relief-understanding that this pattern is adaptive rather than evidence of your failure. You might also notice some grief. The child who learned not to trust herself deserved different.

Both responses are valid. Actually valid, not just "everyone says all feelings are valid" valid. Your internal experience-including your response to reading this-is real information. You don't need anyone else to confirm it.

You might also notice the urge to ask someone if this interpretation is right. If this applies to you. If you're understanding it correctly.

Just notice that. That's the external locus of evaluation doing what it was designed to do: keep you safe by checking with someone else before trusting yourself.

You don't have to fight it. You don't have to eliminate it. You just have to start seeing it for what it is: a protection system that once served you, asking if it's still needed.

The research on therapeutic change shows that clients "often begin counselling from an external locus of evaluation, but as they progress and receive the core conditions of empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard from the therapist, they tend to develop a greater trust in their own decision-making processes."

You're already in that process. Your panic attacks stopped. That's your nervous system beginning to recalibrate. Beginning to learn that it doesn't have to stay on high alert.

How Trust Builds From Here

The work ahead isn't about becoming someone different. It's about slowly shifting where you look for truth.

Right now, when you're uncertain, you look outward first. Eventually-through the small practice of pausing and asking "What do I actually think about this?"-you'll start to look inward first. Not because someone told you to trust yourself, but because you've accumulated enough evidence that your internal experience is worth listening to.

This is what your therapist means about addressing the trauma itself. The people-pleasing, the validation-seeking, the difficulty with decisions-these are all branches of the same root. That root is the belief, learned early and reinforced often, that you cannot be trusted to know your own truth.

Changing that belief doesn't happen through insight alone. It happens through repeated experiences of your internal knowing being met with validation instead of dismissal. Through your therapist not dismissing you. Through you slowly, carefully not dismissing yourself.

Through the accumulation of moments where you notice what you feel, and nothing bad happens.

That's the work. Not fixing what's broken. Learning that you were never broken. Just protected. And now, finally, beginning to learn what it feels like to trust the person who's been there all along.