Lost Confidence After a Difficult Relationship? Here’s Why and What Helps
There was a point after I left when I expected my confidence to come walking back through the door.
After all, I had done the hard thing. I had made the decision. I was no longer living with the same chaos, trying to anticipate moods or wondering what version of the evening I was going to get. I had my own life again.
So why did I second-guess myself so much?
That part surprised me. I could make important decisions. I could work, solve problems and take care of what needed taking care of. From the outside, I probably looked perfectly capable. But give me a decision that was simply about what I wanted, and suddenly there was a committee meeting happening in my head.
Was this the right choice? Was I being unreasonable? What if I regretted it? What would someone else think?
I hadn’t lost the ability to make decisions.
I had gotten very used to making them with everyone and everything else in mind.
That turned out to be an important distinction.
Why can confidence disappear after a difficult relationship?
Confidence is easy to think of as a personality trait. You either have it or you don’t. But I’ve come to think of it much more as a relationship with yourself.
Do I trust what I notice? Do I believe my preferences are worth considering? Can I make a choice without needing to know in advance that it will turn out perfectly? If it doesn’t, do I trust myself to deal with what happens next?
Those are very different questions from Do I feel confident today?
Research on self-efficacy has long connected confidence with our belief in our ability to act and handle what follows. That makes sense to me because confidence wasn’t something I eventually talked myself into feeling. It grew as I accumulated experiences of listening to myself, making choices and discovering that I could handle the outcome.
But before I could do more of that, I had to notice how much practice I’d had doing the opposite.
What happens to self-trust when you spend years managing unpredictability?
When you live with someone whose behavior can be unpredictable, paying attention to them can become remarkably useful.
You notice tone. Mood. Timing. You learn when to bring something up and when absolutely not to. You anticipate what might happen next because sometimes anticipating it helps you avoid a bigger mess later.
You can become extremely good at this.
I certainly did.
Research on chronic stress helps explain why. When unpredictability continues over time, we adapt to the environment we’re in. Our attention becomes very good at noticing what matters for getting through that environment.
The strange part is what happens when the environment changes.
You can leave the relationship and no longer need to monitor someone else in the same way, but your attention doesn’t necessarily come running straight back to you. You’ve had years of practice asking, What does this situation need from me?
You may have had considerably less practice asking, What do I want?
That doesn’t mean your confidence vanished.
It may mean one particular kind of confidence hasn’t had much exercise lately.
How can a capable woman stop trusting her own decisions?
This was the part that confused me because I was still capable.
I could handle complicated things. I could show up professionally. I could solve other people’s problems. I could get through circumstances I once would have sworn I couldn’t survive.
And yet I could overthink something ridiculously ordinary.
It would have been easy to look at that contradiction and decide something was wrong with me. Instead, I eventually noticed that the decisions I struggled with had something in common.
They were mine.
There was no emergency telling me what to do. Nobody urgently needed something from me. There wasn’t necessarily a clearly responsible choice.
I simply had to choose.
Years of responding can make choosing feel unfamiliar.
And when you’re accustomed to considering the consequences for everyone around you, choosing based on your own preference can feel oddly irresponsible at first, even when the decision is as harmless as how you want to spend a Saturday.
Why doesn’t confidence automatically return when the relationship ends?
Because leaving changes the situation. It doesn’t erase years of practice.
Think about how many repetitions went into becoming the woman who could read a room, smooth something over, anticipate a problem, keep going when she was exhausted and make herself useful when everything around her felt uncertain.
That woman didn’t appear overnight.
So it makes sense to me that becoming a woman who notices what she wants, trusts what she sees and makes decisions without endlessly defending them to herself might take some repetition too.
This is where the research on self-efficacy becomes especially useful. One of the ways we develop belief in our abilities is through experience. We do something. We discover we can handle it. That experience becomes evidence we carry into the next decision.
I think we sometimes expect confidence to work in the opposite direction. We wait to feel confident before we act.
My experience was much less tidy.
Often, I acted before I felt particularly confident. Then I noticed I had survived the decision. Eventually, all those little experiences started changing the way I saw myself.
What actually helped me rebuild confidence?
Not a dramatic reinvention.
It was much more ordinary than that.
I started paying attention when I had a preference and immediately talked myself out of it. I noticed how quickly I could turn I want into It doesn’t matter. I noticed the little negotiations I conducted with myself over things nobody else was asking me to negotiate.
And sometimes I let the preference stand.
That might mean choosing where I wanted to eat without saying, “I don’t care, wherever you want.” It might mean declining something without creating a five-paragraph closing argument for why I was allowed to decline it. It might mean trying something I was curious about without needing to know whether it was going to become my new passion, purpose or personality.
None of those things looked like rebuilding confidence.
That’s what was interesting.
They just looked like living.
But each one gave me another experience of hearing myself and responding.
What if you don’t know what you want anymore?
This is where confidence and figuring out what you want become connected.
If your preferences have spent years somewhere near the bottom of the list, you may not immediately have an answer when someone asks what you want now.
I don’t think the answer is to force one.
Sometimes the more useful place to begin is smaller. What sounds good today? What are you curious about? What do you miss? What are you relieved you no longer have to do? What keeps catching your attention for reasons you can’t quite explain?
Those questions don’t demand that you reinvent your life.
They give you something much more useful.
Information.
And the more you notice, the easier it becomes to recognize yourself in your own answers.
What does confidence look like when it comes back?
For me, it didn’t look like becoming fearless or certain.
It looked like spending less time cross-examining myself.
I could make a decision and let it be a decision instead of turning it into evidence about whether I was doing life correctly. I could change my mind without making that mean I had made a terrible mistake the first time. I could dislike something other people liked. I could want something without immediately asking whether wanting it was practical enough.
That kind of confidence is quieter than I once imagined.
It isn’t I know exactly what I’m doing.
It’s closer to I trust myself to find out.
And perhaps that’s why confidence after a difficult relationship isn’t really about getting back to the woman you were before.
You know things now that she didn’t know.
Maybe the more interesting question is what happens when the woman you are now starts trusting herself again.
If you’re wondering what you want now
You don’t need to begin with a big plan. Sometimes rebuilding trust in yourself starts by noticing the small things you’ve been dismissing before they have a chance to become an answer.
A Place to Start is a free resource I created to help you begin there, with your own preferences, curiosities and wants.
References
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control.
McEwen, B. S. (2007). Physiology and neurobiology of stress and adaptation: Central role of the brain.
