Jun 10, 2026 · 29 min · 15 segments
Many complex trauma survivors struggle to trust their memories, emotions, perceptions, and reactions. In this episode, we're exploring why being disbelieved can feel so painful, how emotional…
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Sarah HerstichHost
This is something I see in so many complex trauma survivors, and it's something that doesn't always get named super explicitly, and I think it's something that underlies a lot of the suffering that actually brings people to therapy in the first place.
And it's not the kind of self-trust that's about confidence or knowing about which career to choose or believing that you'll figure things out in the end of it.
I'm talking about something a lot more fundamental than that, the ability to trust your own perceptions, to trust what you felt, to trust what happened to you was real, that it impacted you, and that you don't need an overwhelming amount of evidence before you're allowed to say so.
For a lot of complex trauma survivors, that kind of self-trust was compromised very early in life, and the way it happened and why it's so hard to rebuild is what we're gonna spend time talking about today.
So for a little map of today's episode, we're going to talk about why being disbelieved by other people is so much more than just having your feelings hurt.
We're going to get into how survivors end up not believing themselves, oftentimes just as much or even more deeply than anyone else ever disbelieved them.
We're going to spend time on memory and fragmentation because there's so much misunderstanding about memory or lack of memory, and it can cause a lot of unnecessary shame.
And then I actually wanna talk through the neuroscience of what happens to memory under threat and what that looks like in daily life.
And then we're gonna talk about what rebuilding self-trust actually looks like, not kind of conceptually, but more as a practice.
This is something I see in so many complex trauma survivors, and it's something that doesn't always get named super explicitly, and I think it's something that underlies a lot of the suffering that actually brings people to therapy in the first place.
And it's not the kind of self-trust that's about confidence or knowing about which career to choose or believing that you'll figure things out in the end of it.
I'm talking about something a lot more fundamental than that, the ability to trust your own perceptions, to trust what you felt, to trust what happened to you was real, that it impacted you, and that you don't need an overwhelming amount of evidence before you're allowed to say so.
For a lot of complex trauma survivors, that kind of self-trust was compromised very early in life, and the way it happened and why it's so hard to rebuild is what we're gonna spend time talking about today.
So for a little map of today's episode, we're going to talk about why being disbelieved by other people is so much more than just having your feelings hurt.
We're going to get into how survivors end up not believing themselves, oftentimes just as much or even more deeply than anyone else ever disbelieved them.
We're going to spend time on memory and fragmentation because there's so much misunderstanding about memory or lack of memory, and it can cause a lot of unnecessary shame.
And then I actually wanna talk through the neuroscience of what happens to memory under threat and what that looks like in daily life.
And then we're gonna talk about what rebuilding self-trust actually looks like, not kind of conceptually, but more as a practice.
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