Learning to Trust Yourself with Tabatha Perry

Hey there. Welcome to Stronger in the Difficult Places. I'm your host, Dr. Zoe. And today I have a guest. Her name is Tabitha Perry. She was born and raised in Alaska. She has an MSW, a master's in social work. And we're going to be talking about how to build trust with yourself. I'm always bringing in relationships with it. So, you know, within the context of relationships with yourself and others, she's a certified life coach or a certified coach. I'm not sure if it's life coach, but I'm excited to talk to her. Listen in. Tabitha, I am so thrilled to have you on the podcast today.

Thanks for having me, Zoe.

Yeah. You know, I heard you on a couple of podcasts, and I loved your energy, and I loved your story. So I wanted to share you with my audience today. First, I heard you share something called a self-contract. Can you—

Yes.

Can you share that with my audience?

Absolutely. So my self-contract is that I am a strong, courageous, bold, and consistent child of God. And how I came up with that was I feel like all coaches need a coach. And so I'm part of a coaching group, right? And they encouraged each of us to kind of come up with this contract where I am not all those things at all times, but those are things that I really lean into and want to step into my fullest potential of being bold and courageous and strong and consistent with all of that as well. So it's been fun when I get off track because We all get off track, right?

Right.

That contract brings me back to, like, who I am and what I need to be doing in my life.

I love it. I talk to my audience about having mantras, right? Having affirmations. And that's great. And I know it's important. I have them for myself. But I love just the concept of a contract, just a self-contract, just a one statement, like, this is who I am. Your elevator statement of yourself. This is my elevator pitch for myself. I'm going to incorporate that. I really like it. And I also like the fact that it can be fluid, right? Based on the season that you are in your life.

Absolutely. I've evolved mine. I've made it shorter at times when I just needed to kind of focus on the main things. And then there's ones that are more developed. And so I think it's just a really neat opportunity again to kind of go back to like who you are. And the end part of like being a child of God is just like a very empowering statement for me.

Right.

So yeah, it's been, it's been a fun thing as well as when I speak. A lot of times speakers say, I'm a wife, I'm a mom, I do this and that. And to come at it with these characteristics I want to step into. And it also holds me accountable because if I'm going to say I'm going to do all these things, I want to make sure that I'm really stepping into it.

And it has nothing to do with what you do. It's everything about who you are, which I also love, because usually when we do that, it's like, yeah, you list off all of your accomplishments, you list off all of your roles. But you're not talking about— but this is who I am. So I love that. I love that. Thank you for sharing.

Yeah.

So we're gonna talk today about really a journey from self-doubt to self-trust or learning how to trust. I know my journey with trusting myself has been long, and it's been circuitous. There have been— it's one of those things that you really have to grow over time, I think. There's been the statement that girls, like, level of self-esteem peaks at age 9.

Wow.

And that that is when girls have, like, the most self-awareness, self-confidence. Right. And then it just goes downhill from there. And I think at that point, you know, and I have a 9-year-old girl, she's turning 10 soon. And I can see that the world is kind of coming in. Right. And telling her stories about who she is. And I can see her now questioning And looking at herself in that way instead of the carefree girl that could, you know, walk around with, you know, her bathing suit anywhere and not care. And now it's like, oh, you know, do— how do I look? So I think, you know, starting from 9 on, we start to kind of lose trust in our belief in ourselves and who we are. So that's why I want to have you on today to talk about really just about building and maintaining trust in ourselves.

Absolutely.

Can you tell us a little bit about your journey?

Yeah. And I can totally relate to having a daughter who's 8, and she has no fear. Like, she is strong and courageous, and she's entrepreneurial, always coming up with these business ideas, and will walk around in a bathing suit. And I just applaud her and want her confidence. Right.

Yeah.

So I just— yes. I think it's so important to be building up our young girls because they're going to be running things someday.

So sure are. Yeah. Yeah, she's a little boss girl.

I love it. I love it. Okay. Our girls are going to be running things.

I love it.

In my journey of building self-trust, I think there was a lot that started when I was younger. When I was a teenager, I was— I would say I was pretty confident in who I was. And then some things happened where an older man came into my life and unfortunately took advantage of, of me. And that is when I really started questioning myself. I started doubting my ability to see red flags. I've always prided myself on knowing right and wrong. I was a good girl, you know, went to church, all the things. Right. And then all of a sudden, my life started to kind of go down this road that I had never even anticipated. And so my journey of, like, rebuilding myself has taken so many years. I'm 37 now. This was when I was 15, and I'm still on that journey. And I, um, I had to start with forgiving— forgiving myself that I was 15 at the time and didn't understand what was really going on.

Right.

And forgiving that teenage girl Mm-hmm. Um, for whatever responsibility she had, although it was very little, but also forgiving the people in my life that, um, really challenged my trust with authority figures, with, um, who— with men in general. And so as I started to realize that I needed to work through that forgiveness, I also needed to build self-awareness. And that was kind of the middle journey.

I'm going to stop you right there with self-forgiveness. And I apologize because somebody is cutting my yard right now at the very worst time and my dogs are barking. So we're just going to have to work with it.

I can't hear anything.

Good. You know, I have so many clients and I'm really, I'm really doing a lot of studying on shame and complex shame because what happens— and you mentioned it almost when you said forgive myself for whatever little part I had. And of course, also recognize that it wasn't your fault. And I know from working with so many clients that that statement of it wasn't your fault doesn't do much because there's this part of you that says, but wait, I was a participant in some way, shape, or form. Mm-hmm. Without the acknowledgment that, you know, What is consent? What was your ability at that age? There's no attachment to that, right? Yeah. Um, and so I find that self-forgiveness is the biggest, biggest tool for working through that. And so many people, so many therapists don't go that route, and they just go the route of, it wasn't your fault, you need to accept, maybe you need to forgive the other person, maybe you need to let it go, maybe we need to process this. And they completely Don't appreciate or recognize the self-forgiveness part. And I know one of the reasons is because we don't want to victim blame. So we don't want to say, well, you had some part in it, and therefore you need to forgive yourself. The reality is you didn't have a part in it other than being alive and being taken advantage of. And yet you still need to forgive yourself. Yeah. Both of them can be true. So I'm so glad that you That you said that, because that really begins the process of learning to not trust ourselves, learning to not trust our instincts and what we believe and think. So I'm so glad that you mentioned that.

Thank you. Yeah, that was very helpful when my therapist had me just look back at that 15-year-old girl and kind of have a conversation with her. And I feel like we can have conversations with ourselves at different points in time in our life, right? So there were times when I really struggled with gaining weight and I didn't trust myself around food. And so I had to You know, go back and be like, hey, at that time you were struggling and I forgive you, and that is okay. You needed to do that. And so now I am me. And then even kind of doing future self-talk of, you know, building that, you know, 40-year-old woman up, you know, in a couple of years that I'm going to be and, you know, forgiving her for future stuff, but also, you know, setting her up for success.

I love that. How do you do that? How do you set up your future sell for success?

Well, I, um, that consistency, that's part of my contract. And life has thrown lots of curveballs, and so there's always kind of going with the flow. But there's certain, like, just routines in my life that I have set up in order to set my future self up for success in regards to my faith walk, my faith journey. And that had— that's key to setting up to to success as well as continually forgiving myself. And shame is something that I struggle with a lot. On the Enneagram, I'm a Type 1, and so I have a very loud inner critic. And so I constantly have to quiet that inner critic and combat it with truth and who I am and what I'm capable of.

Yeah. So it's about setting up those practices. And I tell myself often, like, I'm taking care of my future self right now, right? Whatever I'm doing, when I'm doing something, I'm taking care of my future self, especially when I really don't want to do it. So I love that.

Well, and because as women, we're motivated by helping other people, right? And so when we kind of put it ourselves as this third person, we're actually sometimes more motivated to do the things that we don't want to do, just as a reframe in our mind.

Right. Because we're used to doing that. We're used to caring for people outside of ourselves. So I interrupted you when you were talking about your journey, and I stopped there. That's okay. And learning, you know, Well, really, you were talking about after that, learning with your therapist. So can you tell us a little more?

Yes. And so I realized I needed to do more self-awareness. So I was no longer that 15-year-old girl. I had, you know, a new part to my story. And so I needed to incorporate that because I wasn't going to deny that that had happened to me and I wanted to use it for good. So there was a lot of like self-exploration of— I was also becoming a mom at the time and staying home. I had put my career on hold. As a social worker, and I was just going to stay home with my kids. So there was this changing of responsibilities and really trying to figure out, like, what the heck am I doing? Yeah. So with that self-awareness, being able to read books, listen to podcasts, I took a lot of older women out to coffee and just asked them questions about themselves and about their life. And tried to connect with them on different levels just to understand how other women operated and be able to get in new information so I could start filtering my belief system and figuring out if that was the belief system I wanted to continue.

Uh, that challenging is so important for maturity because we just go along, we learn what we learn in childhood, we bring it straight into adulthood, and sometimes we don't even question it. We continue to think things we have no idea why we believe them. They were just kind of implanted in us, right? And so I love that challenging aspect because that's also a part of learning to trust yourself. So this is what I was taught. This is what I've always done. Why does it still make sense to me? And what do I actually know and feel deep inside? And how can I move closer to that?

Yes. And that takes so much courage because it's messy. That process is not a, like, smooth trajectory. And I don't like mess. I don't like interruptions. But that is, that is part of the learning process. And so when I choose to do that, that has been a lot more helpful than when it's just happened to me because I've been so bullheaded.

Yeah, learning to trust yourself is messy. It's messy because we do make mistakes. It's messy because we have a lot of crap in our closet. And so we've got to be able to take that out, See our mistakes. You know, when I think about that, especially even within the context of relationships, we know that, you know, our experiences can teach us something. We can choose to learn from it, or we can choose to just repeat it and repeat it until eventually, hopefully, we get the lesson, or we can try to learn the first time. But those lessons of our mistakes aren't the thing that confirms that we shouldn't trust ourselves. It's the thing that should help us learn to trust ourselves, right? So can you— do you have— have you had any experiences in relationships where maybe you didn't trust yourself and you learned to?

For sure. So in my, in my dating days, I really needed to trust that I was going to find someone who wasn't abusive and Thankfully, with the support of friends, right, and creating boundaries within what— who I was going to date. So I even had like a no-date list. I— of no cops, no firefighters.

I have a client who has that exact same list.

And no salesmen. However, I worked in the justice system for 15 years, which— so that was very hard. And then I ended up marrying a A life insurance salesman, right? So it's good to have rules, but it's also good to be flexible with them. But the reason I had those boundaries for myself was because I knew those characteristics would clash with my personality and there could be red flags. And those particular jobs aren't for red flags for everyone, but for me specifically. And I needed to protect myself. And even with friendships, I've had to create boundaries around how much they needed me. For a long time, I was in unhealthy relationships because I like to save people. I like to help people. And I realized that the relationship dynamics were really off and I was being drained. I was just constantly pouring out and it wasn't an equal relationship. So I also had to build trust with myself that I could find healthy women to have friendships with, that they weren't going to take more from me. And that it was just like equal.

Right. So you learned that it's not that there's something wrong with you. It's not that you can't do relationships. What you learned is that there are certain types of people who you work better with. There are certain types of people who have qualities that bring out your own dysfunctional, for lack of a better word, you know, qualities of people pleasing, of, you know, maybe putting others first. And so going through those negative experiences, you learn that about yourself and you started to seek people who were healthier for you in that way.

Absolutely. And I needed to end relationships. I've, I've moved around a lot, so there's been a lot of natural endings in relationships. I

heard you moved 20 times.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yes.

That's a lot.

Different houses. And yes. I'm hopefully, you know, we've been in this one for about 2 and a half years. So, okay.

That's long term.

I know. Hey, yes. And so being able to, in a healthy way, end relationships when it becomes unhealthy. And I think it's been interesting to live in places all around the country. So I'm from Alaska. I lived in Colorado, Texas, and now Minnesota. And each place has its own culture. And many people I've found who are born and raised and their family was born and raised in a certain place, their relationships are more just out of convenience than actual choice. And I find that curious because I've never had that.

Choosing, right? Yeah. They've always been steeped in it. They continue. They can't just get out of the family structure when they're still there. So there isn't a choice. Yeah.

Right. And so they haven't built that self-trust of even being able to figure out, do I Do I like hanging out with them? Can I trust myself to go and find other people to hang out with? And, and then that's where you really have to have that self-awareness and that courage when you're developing those relationships and when you're really trying to just move your life forward.

That's an excellent point that I hadn't really thought about. I've not— I mean, I study people and family and relationships, and I hadn't thought about that specific cultural aspect. But I can see what a blessing it's been for me having moved to LA at 18 and not having family and having to learn how to navigate those relationships. And not that there isn't any— well, first of all, no shade against police officers and firemen either.

Oh my goodness.

Thank you for your service.

We just won't date you.

Yes, we thank you for your service, but some people won't date you. But, you know, and there's definitely gifts and being in that close-knit type of community where you've lived there and raised your kids there and had generations there, there are definitely those gifts. But I hadn't thought about the fact that it doesn't necessarily allow you to step out of the framework.

Right. To challenge those beliefs.

Yeah. Wow. Great.

But it also provides stability and roots. And that's something I'm having to learn, too, building trust with myself and being open and vulnerable And allowing people to know me long term, because I can go into any place, make friends. I know the surface stuff. It's the roots. It's the building trust that, hey, they're going to like me for me. And even after, you know, living here in Minnesota for 4 years, like, I need to trust myself that that's going to be okay. And if they choose not to want to spend time with me, that's okay. It's not a reflection of me. It's just their choice.

Right. And it's just that not all people go together. They just don't. Yeah. And it's not a reflection of you. I like that because it's— yeah, they're going to like you for you. And if you show up as you are and they don't like you, that's okay too. And I know everybody says that, and that's the mantra I say to my daughter and my kids. But sometimes we just have to continue to hear that and sit with it because part of our psyche really is wanting to be a part of, and it's a survival instinct. I mean, historically, If we were shunned by a community, we would die. We needed our community, right, to live and survive. And it's not the same anymore necessarily, but still, as humans, we need that connection. And so that drive is so strong to give up a part of ourselves, especially as women, to connect with other people. And once again, when we're doing that, we're not sitting in trust.

Yeah. Yes. And I feel like I've met a lot of women that are really lonely right now, and a lot of it has to do with their self-trust. And my encouragement to them is start small, you know, like just even start following through with what you say you're going to do in your day. And eventually it'll build up to, okay, I'm gonna trust myself. I like myself enough to have the confidence to like reach out and try to be a friend to someone. Yeah. I feel like so often we wanna like jump in and make things bigger and complicate things when self-trust really starts just with Following through with what we say we're going to do and trusting who we are, that we are good.

That's an excellent point, especially about the loneliness that a lot of women are feeling. You know, when I'm scrolling through Instagram and looking at relationship things, I see so many women say things like, well, that's why I don't— I'm not friends with other women because other women are petty and, you know, other women are jealous or other women are this. And it hurts my heart. Because I know how, how valuable and how important relationships with other women are for women. Um, but it also, it also highlights for me, oh, that person is scared, right? That person doesn't trust herself in relationships. That person has also learned not to trust other people. And that comes from such a place of pain.

Yeah.

Because trust also Is connected with— what's the word— risk maybe, or faith. I feel like it's like a combo of a risk-faith word. I don't know what that word is, but we do have to have a little bit of a leap, right, to trust. I believe that, that we have instinct, and I believe that we should trust, um, we should trust our instincts as women. But still, there's that little gap where you have to kind of make the leap, and that can be very scary. So I think with trust comes that potential for fear.

Oh, and that is so true. And I think that's where a lot of women stop building that trust, because they have to put themselves out there in whatever shape it is, whether it's in a relationship or starting a new business or, or starting to, you know, um, have more education or start a family Whatever it is, if they're having a hard time with trusting themselves, they're not willing to, to risk. And risk is not fun. I am very much risk-averse, but I like the results, and so I'm willing to do the hard thing to get to the results.

I tend to be very a risk-taker in lots of aspects of my life, but then in some aspects I'm, I'm kind of risk-averse, maybe more like in relationships. So I can, I can resonate with that a little bit. So can you give any last word for a woman who's recognizing, you know, I really struggle with trusting myself? I struggle with trusting myself in my friendships and my relationships and my career. I'm there. Like, what, what, what's the next step?

This may seem like out of right field, but— or left field, whatever that statement is.

One side of the field. Yes.

But my suggestion is Each day, write down one thing you're going to do and do it. Because again, it's those little edits that we do in our life that allow us to build up the confidence of who we are. And sometimes we have to start with more tangible things before we can, like, have the abstract trust of our future self, right? Yes. Like, that kind of just sounds so flowy, but starting small. So again, building that trust, write down one thing you need to do each day and make sure to do it. And you'll find that you start building trust with yourself that when you say you're going to do something, you're going to do it. And so if you're going to have that relationship, if you're going to trust someone and you're going to say something that you're kind of afraid to say, you've already started working on tangible things.

The small steps. Yes, I love that. And, you know, my last word after hearing what you just said is You don't necessarily have to trust yourself that you're always going to make the right decision. You don't have to trust that it's going to be perfect. You just have to trust that whatever decision you make, you can make it work. And if you look back on your life, you've mostly been able to do that. No matter what happened to you, things that came out of left field, right? Or bad choices that you might have made, you've self-corrected and you've figured out how to make it work. And that. That, I think, is the biggest thing that you can hold on to, which can give you a little bit of confidence that you can make choices, you can move forward, you can risk and trust because you know you can make it work out.

That's so good.

Yeah. Thank you. So can you tell my listeners about how you work with women and how they can get a hold of you?

Absolutely. So my heart is for women who are where I was a couple of years ago, where I was trying to figure out who I was, what I wanted, and how I wanted to get it.

Mm-hmm.

And so I love working with women who don't have that typical, like, job that they're being— they're able to create whatever life they want, and they just need help taking those next steps.

Mm-hmm.

And so group coaching has been my jam. I absolutely love watching women connect with each other, get ideas from each other. There is just power in it. And again, with that loneliness, Right now there's a lot of loneliness in women, so introducing them to like-minded women has been really, really fun. And people can find me on Instagram and Facebook, Tabitha Perry Life Coach. And I also have a podcast. It's The Life Edit Podcast with Tabitha Perry.

Oh, I didn't realize that.

Yeah.

Okay. I was listening to you on other podcasts. I didn't realize you had one. I don't know how I missed that. Okay, I will check that out and I'll put all of that in the show notes for For you guys.

Wonderful.

Great. Thank you so much for having— not having me. Thank you so much for coming on, Tabitha.

Thank you for having me, Zoe.

You're welcome.