You already know something. And you have learned, over many years, to route that knowing through someone else before you act on it.
For many spiritually serious adults, especially those formed in communities where deferring was rewarded and questioning made things uncomfortable, the interior life becomes something like a rough draft. You feel something. You notice something. And then, before you trust it, act on it, or even say it out loud, you check it against someone else’s framework to see if it is valid.
That habit was once called humility. It was probably praised.
And somewhere along the way, it hollowed out something you needed.
Learning how to trust your own spiritual instincts is not a process of abandoning your tradition or stepping outside your faith. It is the process of locating the authority that was always yours, the authority your tradition was always meant to serve, not replace.
That process is uncomfortable, and most people need a companion for it. Not because their instincts are wrong, but because they have been told for so long that they are, it takes another person to notice what they might otherwise pass over themselves.
Why Do We Stop Trusting Our Own Interior?
Most people who carry this particular weight did not decide, one day, to stop trusting themselves. It happened in layers.
A woman I worked with once described it this way: I stopped being able to tell whether I believed something, or whether I had just heard it said often enough. She was not talking about a single teacher or a single moment. She was talking about twenty years of a community that consistently located spiritual authority outside the individual, in the text, in the leadership, in the tradition, and treated personal interior experience as misleading, dishonest, and dangerous.
Over time, the interior life learns to be afraid of itself. The first sign of a genuine interior movement, a sudden clarity, a sense of wrongness, a quiet pull toward something different, gets immediately filtered. Is this from God, or is this just me? And that question, which sounds like humility, becomes a trap. Because just me has been defined as unreliable. As suspect. As something that must always be checked.
What actually gets lost is the capacity to witness your own interior life honestly. Not to obey every impulse, but to notice it, name it, and bring it into discernment without preemptively overriding it via moralization.
That capacity is precisely what trusting your own spiritual instincts requires.
What Does It Actually Feel Like to Distrust Yourself Spiritually?
People in this pattern describe it in remarkably similar ways.
There is a whispered first-knowing: a sense of something that arrives before the analysis does. A clear sense of yes, or no, or not yet. And then, almost immediately, a second voice that says: Is that the right thing, or just what I want? Who do I trust about this? What would the pastor say, or the mentor, or the board?
By the time the final decision comes, the first-knowing has been so thoroughly processed through other people’s frameworks that it is difficult to tell what was yours to begin with.
This is not a character flaw. It is a learned pattern, often formed early, and reinforced by communities that genuinely believed they were protecting people by concentrating discernment authority at the top.
The consequence is that a person can spend decades being active in organizations that are supposed to be spiritually focused, attending, leading, serving, contributing, and still not have real access to their own interior life. Still not know, when they are quiet and the room is empty, what they actually sense is true.
The Day She Stopped Asking Permission
Carol had been describing her decision for twenty minutes when she stopped mid-sentence, looked at me, and said: “You think I should do it.”
It was not a question.
I waited before responding.
I am noticing that you stopped talking about the decision and are waiting for my reaction.
She blinked. Then she laughed quietly.
“I do that everywhere,” she finally said. “I start knowing something, and then I look around to see if anyone is going to confirm it before I let myself believe it.”
Carol was fifty-one. She had served in her faith community for twenty years, counseled other people through hard decisions, and helped lead programs that genuinely changed lives. And for most of that time, she had routed every significant interior signal through someone else’s authority before she trusted it.
“What was coming up in you,” I asked, “before you looked to me for permission?”
She was quiet again. Her shoulders settled.
And then she said it. Simply, without hedging.
It was the right answer. Did we explore it? Sure, but her experience of it. She had known it before she walked in the door. She had known it, probably, for months.
The work we did from that session forward was not about finding her answer. She already had it. It was about learning to recognize her own voice well enough to trust it before she handed it over for approval.
How Do You Begin to Trust Your Own Spiritual Instincts?
Slowly, with attention, and usually with a companion who can hold what surfaces without immediately trying to fix it.
There is a tiny exercise I return to often with people at this threshold.
Before any significant decision, conversation, or moment of discernment, and before you call the mentor, read the commentary, or consult the authority, take two minutes.
Sit quietly. Bring the question into focus.
Then write down, without editing and without second-guessing, what you already sense is true. Not what you think you should sense. Not what would be approved. What you actually feel in your chest, your gut, your shoulders when you hold the question there. It doesn’t even need to be complete. Just what you sense is true now.
That is your first knowing. It is not infallible. It is not the end of discernment. But it is real data, and it belongs to you, and it is exactly the kind of interior signal that gets quietly overridden when a person has learned, over many years, to distrust themselves.
Writing it down before you consult anyone else does one thing: it keeps your own knowing from being shaped by what you anticipate others will say.
If you practice the First Knowing and come up blank, not because you have no sense but because the sense has gone so quiet you cannot find it, that is often the moment a companion becomes most valuable. Processing verbally with someone who can ask open-ended questions based on your experience, without injecting others too early, can be immensely helpful.
Can You Trust Yourself Without Losing Your Faith?
This is the fear underneath the question for most people in this season.
The worry is not simply that their instincts might be wrong. The worry is that locating authority in their own interior means they have left God out of the equation. That trusting themselves and trusting God are somehow in competition.
One of the oldest and most tested traditions of interior navigation, Ignatian discernment, rests on a different premise. The interior life, when honestly attended to, is one of the primary locations where the Divine speaks. Not the only location. Not an infallible one. But a real one.
Thomas, a minister who had spent thirty years telling his congregation that their personal feelings were the least reliable guide to truth, told me in our second session: “I think I have been so afraid of subjectivism that I dismantled the very thing I needed to hear God at all.”
The signs of an interior movement that can be trusted include this: it moves you toward greater freedom, greater honesty, greater openness to the people around you, and especially greater gratitude for life. The interior voice that produces shame, panic, compulsion, or isolation is worth questioning. The interior voice that quietly expands you, without requiring you to diminish anyone else, is worth listening to.
Learning to tell the difference is the work of a lifetime. It is also one of the most important things a person can do.
Finding Your Way Back to Yourself
Trusting your own spiritual instincts is not the absence of tradition, community, or guidance. It is the ability to bring your whole self honestly into relationship with all of those things, rather than arriving with a performance of certainty you do not feel.
People who have done this work describe something that is consistently recognizable: not a sense of having left God, but a sense of finally being available to God as the full person they actually are. Not the curated version. The real one.
The movement from outsourced authority to honest interior engagement is not quick. But it is possible. And it is one of the most quietly transformative passages I get to companion people through.
If you sense this is the work ahead of you, I would be glad to walk the first part of it with you. A free 30-minute exploratory call is a great way to start.
Live and Lead with Soul,
Ben
AUTHOR BIO: Ben Shoup, M.Div., D.Min., is the founder of Essence House, a spiritual direction and discernment coaching practice in Northfield, MN. Learn more at essencehousesd.com.