You may feel like you can’t trust your own experiences because you learned growing up not to trust your perceptions. This can happen if you experienced a lot of gaslighting. It can also happen when your experiences were invalidated. For example, if you were running and you fell down and scraped your knee but your caregiver said, “What are you crying about? You’re fine!”
You might also feel like you can’t rely on your experiences because of dissociative amnesia. For instance, your friend tells you about a conversation you have no memory of because another alter was fronting. Frequently finding evidence that you are missing time may cause you to guess about what happened during that time.
Over time, repeatedly being told you are wrong while also having gaps in memory can make it very difficult to feel confident in your own perceptions and experiences.
This page is part of the Self Trust section of the CommuniDID site, which explains how self-doubt, second-guessing, and internal uncertainty develop, particularly in environments involving invalidation, gaslighting, or inconsistent feedback.
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