There are moments when I feel so much that I stop trusting myself.
Not in a dramatic way.
In a quiet, disorienting way.
Like I can’t quite find the ground inside myself.
Part of me wants one thing.
Part of me wants something completely different.
And both feel true.
Then the question starts circling:
Can I trust myself right now?
Or am I too overwhelmed to see clearly?
In this episode, I’m talking with Kate, who is right in that space.
She’s coming to the end of a pause in a relationship that still matters to her. There’s love there. There’s tenderness. There’s also pain that hasn’t quite been metabolized, along with a host of other feelings.
Longing.
Grief.
Hope.
Confusion.
And a growing sense of not knowing how to sort everything out. She’s wondering Can I trust myself when I feel this much?
When everything inside you gets loud
I think this is where so many people get tripped up.
We assume that if we were “doing it right” we would feel clear.
We would feel steady and certain. Know exactly what we want.
When that’s not happening, the mind jumps to:
Something’s wrong.
I’m too emotional.
I can’t trust myself like this.
But what if that’s not what’s happening at all? What if the issue isn’t that you don’t know yourself, but that you’re trying to access clarity while your system is flooded?
Flooded systems don’t do clarity
When there’s a lot moving through us: attachment, grief, old pain, hope, our systems aren’t organized for decision-making.
It’s organized for processing.
For feeling.
For integrating.
For trying, in its own way, to metabolize something that hasn’t fully moved through yet.
And from the outside, that can look like confusion.
But from the inside, it’s often something more like:
There is a lot here that matters.
Same destination, different paths
There’s another piece in Kate’s situation that I think is really important.
Both she and the other person want the same thing.
They want connection. They want ease. They want to move forward.
But they have different ideas about how to get there.
Kater wants to look back, to understand what happened and feel some shared reality, some repair.
And they both want to look forward.
These different pathways to safety are such a common relational bind.
Some people feel safer moving through the pain.
Some people feel safer moving away from it.
And when these strategies co-exist in different people, it can feel like gridlock.
I’m too much
There’s also a really tender layer that comes through, when Kate talks about feeling overwhelmed by her own emotions and worries that other people might feel overwhelmed by them too.
The “I’m too much story can carry so much shame. It usually has roots in earlier experiences where emotions weren’t met, sensitivity wasn’t understood, and expression was too big for the space it landed in.
So now, when feeling comes up, it’s not just the strength of the feeling, but also the memory of how that feeling has been received.
What if this isn’t the problem?
There’s a moment in the conversation where I name a possibility to Kate: What if this intensity isn’t dysfunction. What if it’s your system trying to heal by trying to discharge something? Trying to finally feel something that didn’t get felt previously?
So… can you trust yourself?
I don’t think the answer is a simple yes or no.
I don’t think the goal is to trust every feeling as an instruction.
But I do think there’s something we can begin to trust:
That our feelings are not rando. They are pointing to something. They deserve attention, not dismissal.
We can learn how to stay with ourselves even when things feel big and unclear.
A few places to begin
If you recognize yourself in this, here are a few gentle directions:
• Take the pressure off deciding right away. Clarity doesn’t come from urgency. It comes from enough settling.
• Name the different parts of you. Instead of I don’t know, try: Part of me wants this… and part of me wants that.
• Don’t make this moment the final answer. You’re allowed to be in process. This can unfold.
Can I Trust Myself When I Feel This Much?
If you’re in a moment where you feel everything and know nothing, that doesn’t mean you’re lost.
It might mean you’re in the middle of something that matters.
And if you can stay with yourself with a little more curiosity, a little more kindness, something will begin to come into focus.
Not all at once and not perfectly.
But enough for the next step.
Sometimes that’s how trust is built.
