When the Truth Breaks, So Does Your Trust in Yourself
Iesha Taraboulsi is an author, Certified Neuroscience Coach, and founder of Graceful Discoveries. Her work explores the neuroscience of betrayal and trauma, helping women understand survival responses, interrupt destructive patterns, and rebuild clarity, identity, and self-trust when life changes without their permission.
When something we believed to be true is suddenly called into question, we can begin doubting more than the circumstances. We begin doubting ourselves. But what happens when those same questions emerge without a crisis, when the life we've built simply no longer feels quite the same? Drawing on more than 25 years in investigations, governance and risk, alongside lived experience and her work in neuroscience and personal development, Iesha Taraboulsi explores how we can rebuild trust in our own judgement, question long-held assumptions and reconnect with ourselves without dismissing everything we've built.
When you discover that something you trusted was not what it seemed, the questions can become relentless. But the most damaging question is often the one we turn on ourselves: how could I have been so wrong? I have spent much of my working life examining evidence and asking difficult questions. What I have learned, both professionally and personally, is that questioning ourselves and understanding ourselves are not always the same thing.
The questions we turn on ourselves
I spent more than 25 years working across intelligence, investigations, fraud, governance and risk. In that world, you learn to be curious. You look for inconsistencies, you test what people tell you, and you resist concluding before you have enough information. I have always found that work fascinating.
Then my own life changed, personally and professionally, and I found myself doing something I recognised all too well: going back over what I knew, what I thought I knew and what I might have missed. Only this time there was no distance between me and the subject. I was questioning my own judgement.
There is a difference between asking, “What happened here?” and asking, “What is wrong with me that I didn’t see it?” The first question might help us understand an experience. The second can make us doubt everything about ourselves, including decisions that were perfectly reasonable at the time.
The unfair advantage of hindsight
We are very good at making the past look obvious. Once we know the ending, we begin to spot the clues. A conversation takes on a different meaning. An incident at work that seemed minor at the time suddenly feels significant. We wonder how we could have missed what now seems so clear.
Psychologist Baruch Fischhoff studied this tendency, known as hindsight bias. His research showed how knowledge of an outcome can change our assessment of how foreseeable it was. In other words, knowing what happened can make us feel we should have known it would happen.
I think about this whenever I hear a woman say she wasted years in a career or should have recognised a problem in a relationship sooner. Maybe she could have noticed things. Maybe there weren’t. But she was making decisions in real time, with incomplete information, commitments to other people and an understanding of the world that had not yet been turned upside down.
We can take responsibility for our choices without pretending we had access to information we only gained later. That is not making excuses. It is being fair to the person we were.
When the search for answers takes over
In an investigation, there comes a point when you have to ask whether another question will actually tell you something useful. Are you filling a gap in the evidence, or going around the same material again? I wish we asked ourselves that more often in everyday life.
After something difficult happens, we can replay conversations for hours. We imagine different responses, search for the exact moment things changed and tell ourselves that one more answer will bring peace. Sometimes an answer does help. But sometimes what we really want is a guarantee we will never be caught off guard again. No amount of investigating can give us that.
Research on stress and decision-making shows that stress can influence choices under uncertainty, although the effects depend on the situation. I do not take that to mean we become incapable of making decisions when we are distressed. I take it as a reason to pay attention to the circumstances in which we are asking ourselves to decide.
This is part of the thinking behind the Calm the Chaos Method™ I developed through Graceful Discoveries. Before deciding what an experience means for the rest of our lives, we can look at what we actually know, what we fear, and what we may be assuming. Some decisions can't wait, especially those involving safety or practical responsibilities. But not every uncomfortable feeling requires an immediate, life-changing answer.
What if nothing terrible has happened?
Another kind of questioning interests me just as much. It is quieter, and because of that, women often dismiss it. Nothing has fallen apart. The marriage may be good. The career may be successful. The children are growing up. On paper, life looks much as we hoped it would. Yet a niggling feeling tells me something deserves a closer look.
I think this happens to many women as they move through their forties and fifties. We have spent years building lives around work, family, responsibilities and the choices we made when we were younger. Then one day we wonder whether those choices still fit. Do I want to keep doing this job? Is there something I have always wanted to learn? Have I made enough room for myself?
We can be surprisingly quick to shut those questions down. We tell ourselves we should be grateful. We worry that wanting something different means we haven't appreciated what we already have. But why should curiosity about the future amount to criticism of the past?
That question has become central to my work through She Rebuilds Collective. The EDIT Method™ encourages women to examine an unsettled feeling rather than immediately act on it or push it away. What is really behind the question? What assumptions are we making? Is there a small way to explore an idea before turning it into a major decision? Sometimes the answer will be to make a change. Sometimes it will be to appreciate what is already there, but see it differently.
We do not need a crisis to reconsider our lives. Equally, reconsidering our lives does not mean we need to dismantle them.
What trusting yourself can actually look like
For a long time, I associated good judgement with getting things right. My professional experience reinforced the importance of being thorough, checking information and looking beneath the surface. Those skills still matter to me. But life has taught me that even careful people can be misled, surprised or simply change their minds.
I no longer think self-trust means being certain about every decision. I think it means being willing to look honestly at what is in front of us, ask questions that help rather than punish, and accept that we may need to adjust course as we learn more. It means knowing that changing direction does not erase the value of the road we have already travelled.
A career can have been right for twenty years and not be right for the next ten. A relationship can be worth nurturing while still needing attention. A woman can be proud of everything she has done for her family and want to discover what she might do for herself. None of those things has to contradict the others.
Whether we are finding our feet after a difficult experience or simply exploring what we want from the next chapter, I believe we owe ourselves something better than endless self-interrogation. We deserve the chance to be curious, to reflect and to make choices without demanding perfect certainty first.
You can question the life you’re living without forgetting the life you’ve built.
Read more from Iesha Taraboulsi
Iesha Taraboulsi, Founder, Graceful Discoveries & She Rebuilds Collective
Iesha Taraboulsi is an author and founder of Graceful Discoveries, where she helps women understand what happens to the brain, body and sense of self after betrayal, trauma and unexpected life disruption. Drawing on lived experience, her study of neuroscience, and 25+ years in investigations, governance, and risk, she created the Calm the Chaos Method to help women stabilise, regain clarity, and rebuild self-trust. Her guiding principle, "Don’t ask a survival brain to make life-changing decisions."
