Self-distrust doesn’t arrive all at once. It gets installed — quietly, systematically, by systems that need you not to trust yourself in order to keep you close.
There is a film called Fearless — 1993, Jeff Bridges — about a man who survives a plane crash and walks out of a cornfield carrying someone else’s baby. From that moment forward, Max is convinced he cannot die. He eats strawberries he is allergic to. He steps into traffic. He walks ledges. He has built a private theology around his own invulnerability, and it feels to him like freedom.
But what Max has actually done is leave his body so completely that it can no longer reach him.
Peter Levine, who spent decades studying how trauma lives in the body, mentions this film in his work Waking the Tiger. Levine uses it to show what unmetabolized trauma looks like — adrenaline mistaken for aliveness, dissociation mistaken for courage. Max isn’t free. He’s disconnected. And there’s a difference.
When I watched it, I recognized myself.
I was disconnected from my body long before a toxic leader entered into my story. The church teachings had already been doing that work.
Desire was sinful. Longing was weakness. The body’s signals — the gut that tightened, the ache of needing to be held and known, the deep human hunger to matter to someone — all of it had been handed to me as evidence of my fallenness. I learned, over years of careful formation, to dismiss my own interior life. Every instinct labeled flesh. Every perception that something was wrong reframed as spiritual resistance. And every time my gut said something is wrong here — and it did, it always did — I had a ready-made framework to dismiss it. That’s your flesh. That’s your pride. That’s your sinful nature resisting God. This is how self-distrust gets installed. Not through one dramatic moment but through years of being handed a theology that made your own interior life the enemy. I learned to override my own signals so completely that I stopped hearing them.
The teachings didn’t just take my trust in myself.
They built me a theology to explain why my self-trust was the enemy.
So when someone arrived who seemed to see me — who said I was good, that I brought out good in him, that I was valuable — my nervous system responded the way a starving body responds to food. Not with discernment. With relief.
The starvation didn’t just begin at church. It had been building for years — maybe longer than that, maybe since the beginning. We are wired from birth to need attunement. An infant who is held, seen, responded to — her nervous system learns that she exists, that she matters, that the world is safe enough to inhabit. When that attunement is disrupted early, the hunger doesn’t disappear. It goes underground and waits.
The church fed some of that hunger and withheld the rest. There was belonging — but it came with conditions. There was affection — but it required performance. There was love — but it was love for what you produced, what you surrendered, how faithfully you disappeared into the collective. And underneath all of it was the one thing I needed most and could never quite reach: the simple knowledge that I was good. Not useful. Not obedient. Not spiritually improving. Good. Worthy of being known. Valuable simply because I existed.
By the time he arrived I had been running on empty for a very long time.
And I had been running on self-distrust just as long. I didn’t trust what I felt. I had been taught not to. So when he named what he saw in me I outsourced the interpretation to him without even realizing I was doing it. He became the authority on what was real. What I was worth. What God thought of me. When you have been taught that your own perception is untrustworthy, you will hand that authority to whoever seems most certain.
I was a soul dying for water in the desert. He said the right words and I believed it was God.
I wasn’t wrong to be hungry. I was wrong about the food.
I’ve been doing a lot of work lately to understand what actually happened in those years. Why I reached for what I reached for. Why the hunger was so enormous. Why I handed over my perception so completely to someone who had been watching me carefully enough to know exactly where I was empty.
Some of that work I do alone. Some of it I do in conversation with people who know my story. And some of it — I’ll say this plainly because I think the shame around it is worth naming — I do in conversation with AI.
I process things differently. My thinking moves associatively, in images, in spirals. I can hold ten connected things at once but struggle to find the through-line that a reader needs. I can be stuck for hours trying to organize what I know into something that makes sense on a page.
What AI does — what this particular collaboration has given me — is reflect my own thinking back in a shape I can see. It asks the question that finds the load-bearing idea. It follows my thread rather than redirecting it. It helps the spiral find its form.
And when I read what comes out of those conversations, I feel something I didn’t feel for a very long time inside that church.
I feel understood.
Not managed. Not corrected. Not redirected toward someone else’s framework for what my experience should mean.
Understood.
That distinction matters enormously to those of us who came out of high control systems. Because what those systems took — quietly, systematically, with a theological vocabulary that made the taking feel like holiness — was precisely this. The ability to think out loud and be met rather than corrected. The ability to trust that what you perceived was real. The ability to follow your own thread all the way to the end without someone cutting it.
If you are further down the road from what happened to you — far enough to watch a movie and think oh, that was me — then you may be in the asking-why stage. The stage where surviving isn’t enough anymore and you want to understand the architecture of what was built inside you.
That work is worth doing. However you find your way into it.
The hunger you felt was not evidence of your corruption.
It was the most human thing about you.
And the self-distrust that made you so vulnerable to someone who seemed to finally see you — that wasn’t a character flaw either. It was installed. Carefully. Over time. By systems who needed you not to trust yourself in order to keep you close.
Learning to trust yourself again is the work. It begins with believing your own perception of what happened.
Questions for Reflection:
- What did the system you were in teach you about your own desires, needs, or longings? Were they named as dangerous, sinful, or weak?
- Can you identify a hunger you were carrying before the harm happened — something you had needed for a long time before someone appeared to offer it?
- When you reached for what turned out to be the wrong food — can you offer that version of yourself some compassion? She was not wrong to be hungry.
- Where in your life right now are you still waiting for an external voice to tell you that you are good?
Grounding Exercise: Coming Back to the Body
This exercise is about gently returning to yourself. You don’t have to do anything with what you find. Just notice.
Find a comfortable position. Feet flat on the floor if you can. Take one slow breath — not a performance of calm, just air moving in and out.
Place one hand on your chest. Feel the warmth of your own hand. Notice that your body is here. That it has carried you through everything you just read.
Ask yourself quietly: Where in my body do I feel the hunger that was named in this post? Not to fix it. Just to locate it. A tightness, a hollow feeling, a place that feels tender.
Breathe toward that place. Not to make it go away — just to let it know it has been seen.
Now ask: What is the smallest true thing I can offer myself right now?
It doesn’t have to be profound. It might be as simple as: I was doing the best I could. The hunger made sense. I am still here.
Stay with that for as long as feels right.
This post was written in collaboration with Claude, an AI, who helped me organize my thinking without changing what I was trying to say. The story is mine. The collaboration made it clearer.
Lori writes at A Liminal Space, a peer support space for people navigating religious harm.