Anxiety can leave you paying so much attention to other people’s reactions that your own preferences become harder to hear. Explore how therapy can help rebuild self-trust.
It’s painful to realize how much of your attention is spent checking whether everyone else is ok with you. Someone else is upset, and before you’ve had much chance to notice your own reaction, you’re wondering whether saying or doing something differently could have made things better between you. Their reaction can quickly become the thing you use to decide what happened and whether you did something wrong.
When situations like this happen repeatedly, it can become harder to stay connected to your own experiences. You may be so focused on whether someone else is disappointed that you barely register that something they said was hurtful for you to hear. The other person’s experience taking precedence, you begin to lose touch with what it is that you are or aren’t getting out of the relationship. Outside of relationships, patterns like these can also show up in other areas of life, like trying to squeeze yourself in a job and assuming the challenge is because you’re not doing something right without also asking if the job is the right fit for you.
Anxiety has a way of directing our attention toward whatever feels most threatening. Other people’s disappointment, uncertainty, or disapproval can start carrying enormous weight while your preferences, intuition, and feelings get buried underneath.
This is one reason people seek anxiety therapy in Portland. Part of our exploration together can involve bringing your own experience back into the conversation. The goal isn’t to find an internal voice that always knows exactly what to do. It’s to become more able to hear yourself when worry has gotten very practiced at speaking first.
How Anxiety Can Pull Your Attention Toward Other People’s Reactions
A familiar version of this in therapy sounds something like, “They were so upset with me, and I didn’t know what to do.” What I sometimes notice is that the person telling me this has already accepted the other person’s reaction as evidence that something went wrong on their side. We may not yet know whether they behaved unfairly, crossed a line, or did anything that needs repairing. Their attention has already moved toward figuring out how to restore the other person’s approval.
That can happen very quickly. Someone else is disappointed and the search begins for the thing you should have done differently. Conflict leaves you reviewing the conversation rather than asking how you felt during it. Reassurance can bring temporary relief, but it also keeps the answer outside of you: If they’re okay with me, then I must be okay.
The harder part is what gets missed while your attention is there.
You may have felt uncomfortable long before the conflict happened. Something about the way you were being treated may have bothered you. You may keep trying to talk yourself back into a situation that no longer feels right because the possibility of disappointing someone feels more urgent than your own unhappiness.
For LGBTQ+ people, paying close attention to other people’s reactions can also have a very real history. Reading a room, deciding how visible it feels safe to be, and noticing whether you will be welcomed can serve an important protective purpose. When you’ve had good reason to watch for those cues, looking outward can become deeply familiar. Eventually, the habit can follow you into decisions where someone else’s approval is only one piece of information among many.
You can understand this pattern intellectually and still get pulled into it. That is part of what can make the experience so frustrating. You may have plenty of insight into why you second-guess yourself and still struggle to feel connected to what you know once anxiety and rumination get going.
How Therapy Can Help You Hear Yourself More Clearly
Clients will sometimes look to me for an answer: Do you think I should stay? Was I wrong? What would you do?
I understand the pull toward asking. When you’ve spent a long time looking outside yourself for reassurance, therapy can easily become one more place to search for the person who finally knows what the right choice is. I’m more interested in helping us notice what is already happening inside you.
What happens when you talk about staying in the relationship? What do you notice when you imagine another year in the same job? How do you feel after spending time with this person—not only while you are trying to understand how they feel about you?
Those questions can sound simple, but they are easy to lose access to when most of your attention has been going toward threat, approval, and avoiding regret.
Mindful awareness can help us stay with your actual experience long enough to know it better. Sometimes the discomfort you’ve been trying to solve has information in it. A feeling of relief can have information too. We can make room for those reactions without immediately turning them into instructions or arguing them away.
I also pay attention to how quickly self-judgment enters the picture. If every uncomfortable reaction becomes evidence that you’re selfish, overly sensitive, difficult, or making the wrong choice, it becomes much harder to hear what the reaction was trying to tell you in the first place. Compassion can help create enough safety internally to stay interested in your experience instead of immediately putting it on trial.
One of the changes I listen for is the question “Are they okay with me?” beginning to share some space with “How am I doing here?”
That second question puts you back in the picture.
Rebuilding Self-Trust by Letting Your Own Experience Count
Trusting yourself does not require reaching a point where every choice feels obvious. There will still be decisions you wrestle with. Other people will sometimes be disappointed. You will occasionally wish you had handled something differently.
Self-trust grows through having more experiences in which your own reactions are allowed to count.
After a difficult conversation, you might notice that you were hurt before racing straight toward how to repair things. When you are considering a change in a relationship or job, your own sense of relief, dread, interest, or exhaustion becomes part of what you consider. You get to gather information from your life by actually living it rather than trying to predict every possible consequence before you move.
That can also mean discovering that you were wrong about something and remaining connected to yourself anyway. You can change your mind. You can repair something when repair is called for. You can take in new information without using the experience as proof that you should never have trusted yourself in the first place.
Over time, the internal compass you thought you had lost may begin to feel more familiar. Your preferences have more room to register before they are cross-examined. Discomfort becomes something worth understanding rather than immediately correcting. You can care about the people around you while also noticing whether the relationships, commitments, and choices you are making continue to feel like your own.
When Starting Therapy Feels Like Another Decision You Have to Get Right
The same pattern can show up when you think about reaching out for therapy.
You can spend a surprising amount of time deciding whether your anxiety is serious enough, whether therapy is really necessary, whether you’ve found the right therapist, or whether you should wait until you understand the problem better. Reaching out becomes another decision that feels like it needs enough evidence behind it before you’re allowed to make it.
A free 15-minute phone consultation is much simpler than that. We can talk briefly about what has been bringing you here, you can ask questions about working with me, and you can get a sense of what it is actually like to talk together. You don’t have to decide whether therapy will solve everything before having one conversation.
I offer online therapy to adults in Portland and throughout Oregon. If anxiety has left you spending so much energy figuring out whether everyone and everything around you is okay that you’ve lost touch with how you are doing, therapy can be a place to begin listening in that direction again.
I offer a free 15-minute phone consultation if you’d like to see whether working together feels like a good fit. You can call (971) 533-5590 or use my consultation scheduler to reach out.
Eric Goodwin is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Oregon and offers online therapy in Portland and throughout Oregon.
Eric works with adults navigating anxiety, harsh self-criticism, high internal pressure, and identity-related stress. His approach is warm, affirming, and focused on helping people better understand themselves while creating more room for ease, clarity, and self-trust.
He offers support for anxiety, LGBTQ+ affirming counseling, and Internal Family Systems, IFS. You can learn more about Eric here.