Journal writing restores self-trust in a way that is easy to miss, because the change happens slowly and on paper rather than in a dramatic moment of confidence. For many neurodivergent adults, the real obstacle isn’t a lack of confidence at all. It is one specific belief: that their own perceptions can’t be trusted. This post is for autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD adults who second-guess what they noticed, felt, or remember. It looks at where that belief came from, why it feels so convincing, and what can replace it.
Prakash was 52, a hospital pharmacist, identified as autistic three years earlier. At work, he was the person colleagues trusted to catch a dosing error nobody else saw. Everywhere else, he told me, he assumed he had things wrong. “If my wife and I remember a conversation differently, I just go with her version. If I think a meeting went badly, I assume I misread it. I don’t even trust myself on whether I’m tired.” He said it flatly, the way you’d describe the weather. “It’s just safer to assume my read is off.”
In this blog post, I’ll name the belief that so often sits underneath lost self-trust, and trace where it tends to come from. I’ll look at why it feels like evidence rather than a belief, and what a more accurate belief looks like. Then I’ll describe how journal writing helps rebuild self-trust in practice, and how to handle the moments when your record and someone else’s memory don’t match.
3 Key Takeaways
- Lost self-trust often rests on one belief: “My perceptions can’t be trusted.” For many neurodivergent adults, that belief was taught, one correction at a time.
- Everyone’s perception and memory are imperfect. Being wrong sometimes is human, not proof that your read on things is broken.
- Self-trust isn’t certainty. It is a working relationship with your own perceptions: noticing, recording, checking, and revising. Writing is how that relationship gets built.
The Belief Underneath: “My Perceptions Can’t Be Trusted”
When people talk about low self-trust, they often describe it as a feeling: insecurity, self-doubt, a lack of confidence. In my practice, I usually find something more specific underneath. It is a belief, held so long it no longer feels like one: “What I notice, feel, and remember is probably wrong.”
The belief shows up in small, constant ways. You defer to other people’s memory of events. You assume your read on a room is off, even when it turns out to be accurate. You doubt your own body (“Am I really tired, or am I being lazy?”). You ask for reassurance before making decisions you are fully capable of making. And when you’re right, you put it down to luck.
That last one matters. A belief like this protects itself. Every time you are wrong, it is confirmed. Every time you are right, it is explained away. Prakash could catch a dosing error that three other people missed, and still describe himself as someone whose perceptions were unreliable. The evidence was there. The belief simply didn’t count it.
This is why encouragement alone rarely helps. “Trust yourself more” doesn’t touch the belief. It just adds another thing you’re supposedly doing wrong.
Where the Belief Came From
For most neurodivergent adults, the belief that their perceptions can’t be trusted didn’t arise on its own. It was taught, usually without anyone meaning to teach it.
It came from being corrected, often and early. “That’s not too loud.” “You’re overreacting.” “That’s not what she meant.” “You can’t possibly be hungry again.” Many of these corrections were about things the child was in fact perceiving accurately: the sound really was too loud for their nervous system, the comment really did have an edge. But the adult’s version won, because adults usually do.
It also came from masking. Many neurodivergent people learn to watch others closely and copy what seems expected, overriding their own reactions to fit in. Over time, that habit can blur the line between what you perceive and what you think you’re supposed to perceive. In interviews with autistic adults about camouflaging, people described not only exhaustion but a threatened sense of who they were (Hull et al., 2017). If you have spent decades checking your reactions against everyone else’s, it makes sense that your own read would start to feel secondhand. My post on neurodivergent masking explains why that effort is so tiring.
And for some people, it came from relationships where their memory was repeatedly contradicted, sometimes because the other person remembered differently and sometimes for less innocent reasons. Prakash traced his habit of deferring back to childhood. His family’s version of events was the official one, and his tended to be treated as a misunderstanding to be cleared up. He learned early that the quickest way back to peace was to accept their version.
Looked at this way, the belief was an adaptation. It reduced conflict and helped you fit in. It just came at a cost: the gradual loss of your own vantage point.
Why the Belief Feels Like Evidence
The belief is convincing partly because it contains a grain of truth. Your perceptions and memory are imperfect. So is everyone’s.
Human memory doesn’t work like a recording. It is rebuilt each time it is recalled, and it can be shaped by what happens afterward. In one classic experiment, people watched film of a car accident and were then asked how fast the cars were going when they “smashed” into or “hit” each other. Those asked with “smashed” gave higher speed estimates, and a week later they were more likely to remember seeing broken glass that was never in the film (Loftus & Palmer, 1974). A single word changed what people remembered.
That finding is about everyone. It means that when you and someone else remember a conversation differently, it doesn’t automatically mean you are the one who got it wrong. It may mean you both rebuilt it slightly differently, which is ordinary. The belief takes an ordinary human limitation and treats it as your personal flaw.
There is another wrinkle. Many neurodivergent adults remember certain things with unusual precision, such as exact words, sequences, and small details others don’t notice. They may miss other things, like tone or the emotional gist. So you can be very accurate about what was said and less sure about how it felt, while someone else is the opposite. Neither of you is simply right. You are noticing different layers of the same moment.
What Replaces It: Perceptions Worth Recording
The opposite of “my perceptions can’t be trusted” is not “my perceptions are always right.” That belief would be just as inaccurate, and much harder to live with. The belief that replaces it is closer to this: “My perceptions are real information. They are worth recording, checking, and taking seriously, alongside other people’s.”
That shift turns self-trust from a feeling you’re supposed to summon into a practice you can do. You don’t have to feel confident. You only have to notice something, write it down, and come back to it later to see how it held up. Over time, you build a track record. Track records are much harder for an old belief to explain away than a passing feeling of confidence.
This is where writing has a particular advantage. Writing about emotional experiences has been studied for decades, and a review of controlled studies found it was linked to better outcomes across physical health, psychological well-being, and general functioning (Smyth, 1998). What I see in my practice adds something more specific: written notes become a record, and a record is something you can check. A feeling of doubt can’t argue with a page dated three weeks ago that says exactly what you noticed and how it turned out.
Self-trust, in this sense, is not a personality trait. It is a relationship with yourself, built the way any trust is built: through repeated experience of being reliable.
How Journal Writing Rebuilds Self-Trust in Practice
The writing that rebuilds self-trust is different from writing to vent, or writing to settle your nervous system. Its job is to create a record of your own perceptions that you can come back to. These are the practices I suggest most often.
Write It Down the Same Day
When something happens that you might later doubt, such as a conversation, a meeting, or a decision, write a few lines the same day. What was said, as close to the exact words as you can manage. What you noticed. What you concluded. Keep it plain and factual. You are not building a case, just keeping a record.
Separate What You Noticed From What You Concluded
A simple two-column habit helps a great deal. On one side: what I observed (“He looked at his phone twice while I was talking”). On the other: what I concluded (“He wasn’t interested”). Often the observation is accurate and the conclusion is the part worth checking. This keeps you from throwing out a good perception just because one interpretation turned out to be wrong.
Keep a Small Log of Your Own Preferences and Signals
Many neurodivergent adults doubt even basic things: whether they are tired, hungry, overwhelmed, or enjoying something. A brief daily note of what you felt and wanted, without judging it, begins to show patterns. After a few weeks, “I don’t know if I’m tired” becomes “I’m usually tired at this time on days like this.” That is self-knowledge, and it was built from your own data.
Go Back and Check
Once a week or so, read back over earlier entries. Where did your read turn out to be accurate? Where did it miss, and what did it miss? This is the step that actually rebuilds trust, because it lets you see your own track record. Most people find they were right more often than the belief predicted.
Prakash started with the same-day notes after conversations at home and at work. He told me he felt a little silly, “like I’m keeping minutes on my own life.” A few weeks in, he read back over them. In most of the moments he’d assumed he misread, his notes were accurate. “I’m a pharmacist,” he said. “I would never accept ‘probably wrong’ without checking the chart. I’ve just never checked my own.”
If what tends to come out on the page is careful and polite rather than true, my post on journaling for neurodivergent adults looks at why honesty matters more than polish. And if writing about the past starts to stir you up more than it settles you, my post on autistic nervous system regulation explains how to pace it.
When Your Record and Someone Else’s Memory Don’t Match
Sooner or later, your notes will disagree with someone else’s memory. This is where it is easy to slide into one of two old patterns: dropping your version immediately, or treating your journal as evidence for a courtroom.
Neither tends to help. A journal is not a weapon, and reading it aloud to prove someone wrong usually makes things worse. Its job is to steady you, so you can stay in the conversation without either collapsing or attacking. You might say, “I remember it differently. I wrote down that you said Thursday. Can we figure out where we lost each other?” That keeps your perception in the room without demanding that it win.
In couples, these mismatches are often about different layers of the same moment: one partner remembers the words, the other remembers the tone. When the disagreement keeps happening and both people end up feeling unseen, my post on autism and gaslighting looks at what’s going on when two honest people can’t agree on what happened.
And if you notice that your perceptions are consistently dismissed in a particular relationship, no matter how carefully you check them, that pattern is worth taking seriously. Self-trust includes trusting what you notice about how you’re being treated.
Trust Built One Entry at a Time
The belief that your perceptions can’t be trusted was taught, often by people who didn’t understand how you were wired. It feels like evidence because everyone’s perception is imperfect, and the belief takes that ordinary fact and turns it into a verdict about you. What replaces it is not certainty. It is a practice: notice, write it down, check it later, and let your own track record speak.
That is why journal writing restores self-trust so reliably for many neurodivergent adults. It gives you somewhere to keep your own version of events, and a way to see how often it holds up. If you want to go further, working with the larger stories you’ve been told about yourself is the territory of narrative therapy for autistic adults.
Prakash still defers sometimes. Old habits are patient. But he described a small change that mattered to him. In a disagreement with his wife about a weekend plan, he said, “I’ve got it written down as Saturday,” and they looked at it together. He was right that time. The next time, she was. “Either way,” he said, “I didn’t disappear.”
If you’d like support rebuilding trust in your own perceptions, therapy for neurodivergent adults can be a place to do that work at your own pace. You’re also welcome to Book a FREE 20-minute “Clarity & Connection” Zoom session.
I’m Barbara (Blaze) Lazarony, MA, LMFT #151788. I work with neurodiverse couples and neurodivergent adults, including people who learned long ago to assume their own read on things was wrong.
Client stories referenced in this post are composites, with identifying details changed to protect privacy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why don’t I trust my own perceptions?
For many neurodivergent adults, the doubt was learned. Being corrected often, especially about sensory experiences and feelings that were real for you, teaches you to treat other people’s version as the reliable one. Masking can add to it, because you spend years checking your reactions against everyone else’s. Understanding where the doubt came from is often the first step in loosening it.
How does journaling help with self-trust?
Journaling gives you a record of what you noticed, felt, and concluded, written at the time. When you read it back later, you can see how often your perceptions held up. That track record is much harder for self-doubt to dismiss than a passing feeling of confidence. Over time, it changes the belief that your read on things is usually wrong.
What should I write in a self-trust journal?
Keep it simple. After a conversation or event you might later doubt, note what was said, what you observed, and what you concluded, keeping observations and conclusions separate. Add a brief daily note of your energy, preferences, and body signals. Once a week, read back and notice where you were accurate and where you missed something.
What if my journal shows I really was wrong?
Then you’ve learned something useful, and that is part of trusting yourself too. Self-trust isn’t about always being right. It’s about taking your perceptions seriously enough to check them, and being able to revise without concluding that you can never trust yourself. Often the observation was accurate and only the interpretation needed adjusting.
Is it normal to doubt my memory when my partner remembers things differently?
Yes, and it is very common in neurodiverse relationships. Partners often remember different layers of the same moment, such as the exact words versus the tone. A different memory doesn’t automatically mean yours is the wrong one. If the mismatches are constant and you always end up deferring, that is worth exploring, on your own or together with a therapist.
References
Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M.-C., & Mandy, W. (2017). “Putting on my best normal”: Social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), 2519–2534. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3166-5
Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13(5), 585–589. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80011-3
Smyth, J. M. (1998). Written emotional expression: Effect sizes, outcome types, and moderating variables. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 66(1), 174–184. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.66.1.174
