To Trust Your Choice is to Trust the Heart that Made it: Self Trust from the lens of Internal Family Systems

I’m in a low lunge and my hip flexor is feeling it, not in pain but in sensation. I’m gently rocking back and forth to ease the pressure when the instructor says, “Find stillness. Trust your choice.” (Thank you Krishori)

Mind blown.

What a metaphor for life, right? Stop wobbling back and forth to escape your discomfort. Stay still. Be with your present experience and learn to soften. Trust yourself to attend to the discomfort that is inevitable.

I could write for days about self-trust and its significance on both the spiritual path and the healing journey. But today, I want to focus on what it means to “trust your choice” and explore how this is understood through the lens of Internal Family Systems. Perhaps over the next few days or weeks, I’ll explore what it means from a Buddhist, Vedanta, and somatic perspective as well.

I would also add that I could write for days on what this means to trust your choice in romantic partners, in career, in all of life’s big decisions? But today, I will approach it from a broader perspective.

Internal Family Systems (IFS): “Trust your choice”

I feel that most of my work is helping people when they are in that state of “wobbling back and forth”. They are unsure of what is healthy for them versus pleasurable and just less uncomfortable.  

When people come into therapy they are attempting to pause in the wobble. As you pause in the wobble you begin to discern: am I acting out of reactivity just to feel relief or am I acting out calm, courageous, kindness?

In this process of pausing we are training ourselves to nurture ourselves. We are building trust in ourselves to stay present without abandoning ourselves. 

Trusting your choice does not mean that if you are in pain or danger you stay, but rather you build the wisdom to discern if it is pain or just discomfort, is it causing you harm or causing you growth. 

Richard Schwartz, founder of IFS,  teaches that the core wound many of our parts carry is an exiled part that experienced being overwhelmed and then left alone with it.

As children we have felt fear, shame, grief — and no one came to teach us how to be with it, how to nurture ourselves.

So protective parts stepped in to help the pain:

• A manager says: “Be perfect so this never happens again.” “Be Thin so no one can call you lazy”- Personal favorite

• A firefighter says: “Numb this immediately.” “feel something, anything other than this heart ache”.

• An exile holds the pain of: Shame, disgust, fear

  
  

Over time, our system internalizes that certain types of pain are intolerable and need to be feared. We learn to leave ourselves, even our bodies the moment something reminds us of that original pain.

Examples of this may be

• Overriding your inner signals of hunger to be seen as thin

• Forcing yourself through something because a harsh part says you need to be seen a certain way.

• Escaping sensation the instant it intensifies maybe through purging, drugs, sex

• Dissociating from your body through fantasies, phones, TV.

• Shaming yourself to control behavior to avoid rejection, failure, humiliation, or abandonment.

In IFS terms, abandonment happens when Self — our non-fearing, kind, steady Self — is not present, when protectors, those coping mechanisms, run the system and the vulnerable parts are left alone not being taught how to nurture themselves.

So when we speak of trusting your choice, we are not talking about rigidly holding a posture or stubbornly staying in pain. We are talking about trusting that our inner wisdom or Self,  is here now. That the one making the choice is not the shaming manager, not the numbing firefighter, not the uncomfortable exile — but the calm, compassionate center that can listen to them all.

It takes practice…daily practice to build this connection to wisdom, but it is possible for everyone. 

To trust your choice is to trust that your kindness and strength will not disappear when things get uncomfortable. To trust your choice actually has nothing to do with the choice itself. To trust your choice is to trust the one making the choice. To trust your choice is to know that whatever you decide — to stay or to shift — you will do so with yourself, not against yourself. It is an act of love and self-study to learn to trust your choice yourself.  

I’m in the low lunge and I pause the wobble. At first, the discomfort escalates — suddenly, I’m hyper aware of the sensation. My instinct is to move, to escape it. But instead I breathe. I soften toward the center of the tightness that I had been avoiding. I reassure my body that it is safe and that I respect its boundaries. Slowly, something shifts. My body begins to soften, not even get deeper, but just relaxes around the tightness. There is no urgency, no need to change or to be different.