Inside Out: Learning to Trust What You Know

Speaker Identification

Speaker 1 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters, Host
The speaker identifies herself by name and describes herself as a transformational teacher, trauma recovery guide, and author. She delivers the full spoken monologue and promotional closing.

Speaker 2 – Prerecorded Theme-Song Vocalist
A brief unidentified vocalist is heard in the opening and closing theme-song fragments. The vocalist’s identity is not stated in the transcript.

Speaker 2 – Prerecorded Theme-Song Vocalist:
I don’t have to hide.

Speaker 1 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters, Host:
Hi there, everyone. Welcome, welcome. This week, we are human. That’s what we are. We are so human.

Welcome if you’re joining me for the first time. I am so glad to have you. If this is a repeat and you’ve been with me for weeks, I am even more glad to have you.

Thank you so much for joining us. I want you to know that I value your time. I value the fact that you are here. This week, we are going deep into something that affects almost every area of your life—not just yours, but mine too: self-trust.

Why don’t you trust yourself? You knew, and you didn’t listen. You felt something, and you overrode it.

I am Jennifer Elizabeth Masters, transformational teacher, trauma recovery guide, and author of Unbecoming. This isn’t just talk. It is the felt sense in your body.

You’re in the right place if you’ve ever walked away from a conversation, friendship, or relationship feeling unsettled, irritated, or even angry, and you didn’t fully understand why. Deeper than that, you questioned yourself. You thought, “Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m too sensitive.” Somewhere along the path of patterns like that, you got lost. You lost yourself. That is where we begin: discovering who you are.

I am going back to Toronto in this episode because I did not finish the story last week. This is part of the ending. My mother turned 104 on July 10. Mind-blowing, isn’t it? She is still walking around and is not a vegetable. My mother is 104. This is where we’re winding back into the story, and I think you’re going to find a lot of joy here.

I didn’t get to tell you the best part about my Toronto trip. I got all of my mother’s clothes. I didn’t get her mink coat, but better than her mink coat was a huge wardrobe of beautiful clothes.

Why is that important? I do speaking engagements and live events, and my mother had a wardrobe to die for. She dressed like Jacqueline Kennedy. She dressed beautifully, but she didn’t go anywhere except perhaps church once in a while to show off her latest outfit.

On my last visit, my mother gave me her clothes. This rattled me deeply because she had never wanted to give up her things. She kept saying, “Jennifer, if you see something, take it. If you see something, take it.” Those words were foreign to me because, all my life, if she saw something, she wanted it.

I got dressed at my brother’s house in the dark before going to the airport. I was wearing my mother’s slacks, which fit me like a glove, her lovely purple top, and her white leather jacket. I was looking sharp. I felt confident. I felt as though I had finally gotten it right.

I checked in at the airport, checked my bags, and went to security. I even had to run back to the rental-car facility because I had dropped my wallet in the car. Then, while going through security, I was told that I would receive an extra check. I thought, “What’s wrong with me? What do they see?”

I finally got through security and sat in the U.S. Customs lounge because they were giving me extra-special attention. I was about to be called up, and I was feeling really good. Then I looked down at my legs and my lap and thought, “Holy cow.”

I took a picture of my pants to send to my friend Becky Jones in Louisiana. My text said, “Guess what, Becky? My pants are on inside out.”

I had gone through the airport, returned my rental car, and checked my bags. I thought I looked hot. Meanwhile, my pants were inside out.

When I told someone this story recently, they asked, “Could you tell?” Yes, you could tell. The seams were on the outside. When I called Becky to tell her, I swear she nearly choked from laughing so hard. She laughed for ten minutes. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise while she laughed and laughed and laughed.

No wonder I couldn’t put anything in my pockets. When I went downstairs into my brother’s kitchen to leave, I looked down at my pants and thought, “Why is this tag sticking out? It should be on the inside.” It didn’t even dawn on me. I cut the tag off and kept rolling.

I want you to know that we are human here. We’re fully human. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you are taking life way too seriously.

There I was, inside out. Speaking of inside out, this goes beyond the fact that the story is funny. How many of us are walking around every day inside out, and nobody tells us? Maybe it isn’t our pants. Maybe it’s our patterns: people-pleasing, overgiving, overfunctioning, and saying yes when your body is screaming, “No. Stop.”

Nobody pulls you over at security and says, “Hey, you might want to check that.” You keep walking around the world thinking you’re fine while you are completely turned around.

Here is what I’ve learned: the outside of your life can look completely fine on Instagram and Facebook—wherever you’re presenting yourself. The job, the relationship, and the smile can all look fine while the inside is backward. You’re the last one to know because you’ve spent so long performing “I’m fine” that you’ve lost the ability to check.

How do you check? This has to be a real check-in, not just a check. You have to build the habit, but not out of criticism. If we were criticized as children, we may continue beating ourselves up in our subconscious and conscious minds. How do I know? Because I did it for decades.

We are not criticizing ourselves. We are checking in out of love, the way you might gently tell a friend, “Your tag is showing.” Ask yourself regularly, not only in a crisis, “Is this actually me, or am I performing? Am I being authentically me, or am I trying to keep everyone else comfortable?”

Do you focus on making everyone else happy while you are the one who is miserable, exhausted, overfunctioning, and overgiving?

Tonight’s gift to yourself is this: before you turn out the lights and put your head on the pillow, ask yourself that question. Write down the first answer that comes without editing it: “Am I really showing up authentically as me?”

Speaking of my mother and speaking of editing, I used to edit myself constantly when I spoke to her. I could not say to my mother the things I would normally say to other people.

Recently, I have been editing videos of her. I interviewed her when she turned 100, 102, and 101—well, 101 comes before 102. I have interviewed her each year from age 100 onward, and this year was no exception.

I listened to those interviews over and over while editing them. Somewhere in that repeated listening, I actually heard her. I mean, I heard her in my body. I felt what she was saying. I felt what she was telling me.

She told me how much she loved me. She said that I am intuitive, that I am kinder than the rest of my siblings, and that I am more accepting. It has taken almost 72 years, and I had to hear it nearly 30 times before it sank in.

That was not the voice of my mother that I had heard for most of my life. The voice I remembered said, “You’re too fat. Your hair is too long. Are you going to do something with your hair? Honestly, you’re too old to wear your hair like that,” or offered some other criticism.

But I heard her on this visit. Criticism seems to be a familial gift; my brothers are critical too. I almost missed the love sitting right next to the criticism.

Here is the teaching in that: our brains are wired to hold on to criticism far more tightly than praise. We hold on to the negative things people say about us rather than the kindness and compliments. It has a name: negativity bias. One critical moment can outweigh ten kind moments in your memory.

Excuse me. I remember when I began to channel, and my guides told me that if I said something negative to myself, I needed to say something positive and kind to myself ten times—ten times, count them—to overwrite the negative and counteract the negativity bias.

If you grew up with a critical parent, that bias becomes carved deeper and deeper and deeper, like grooves on an old record. Remember those? Before CDs, 8-track tapes, or tape decks?

Praise slides off you like water off a duck’s back, while criticism sticks like glue. When love finally comes—even when it is real, true, and freely given—your nervous system may not know what to do with it. It doesn’t feel safe. It feels unfamiliar.

Some of you have had someone tell you that they loved you and thought you were beautiful and amazing, and you flinched, deflected, or thought, “Yes, but I’m imperfect.”

It is similar to the way you deflect compliments, and I’ve talked about this before. That is not you being ungrateful. If someone gives you a compliment and you respond, “Well, this old thing,” you are not open to receiving.

We need to be open to receiving in order to be abundant and prosperous. It is part of the abundance concept: wealth, love, and money. They operate at the same frequency.

If you don’t love yourself, guess what? You are going to struggle with money. You are going to struggle with debt, and you are going to struggle to receive love and compliments. That is a nervous system that was never given the practice of receiving.

Do you have blocks to receiving? It is one of the things I help women clear. The work is not only hearing love. It is letting love land and sitting with it long enough for your body to begin believing that it is allowed to trust it.

We have to trust ourselves in order to receive love and trust what we are being given. We are going to go deeper into what trust means. Hang on and buckle your seat belt.

Tonight’s exercise is to think of one person whose good opinion you have never allowed to land. Text that person tonight and ask, “In your own words, why do you love me?” Then let the answer sink in. Let it in.

There is another aspect that I want to share with you. Before I traveled to Toronto, my mother told me that she had fallen and broken her shoulder.

I called my brother, who is the executor, and told him. He said, “Oh, yes, she said she had fallen, but she hasn’t. The nurse checked her out. Nothing is broken. She is fine. It is all in her mind.”

I called my other brother, and he said the same thing. They both assumed it was dementia talking.

When I got there, I was the only daughter, and she told me how different my relationship with her was. After all that criticism—all those 71 years of her being jealous of me and critical of me—I let her love me in the way she could.

But I want to tell you this: I could tell by the way she groaned when moving her shoulder that something was wrong. My mother is not a chicken. She is a tough cookie. She did not get to be 104 by being a wimp.

When she moved her shoulder, she groaned. I knew she had broken it. It was much more than a bruise. I knew it was broken, and I did not doubt her for a second. But do you know what? I kept my mouth shut.

I never called my brother to say, “Hey, Mom is really complaining about this pain.” I didn’t. I witnessed how difficult it was for her to move. I witnessed her groaning in the shower because I was right there.

When I returned home from Toronto, my brother called and told me that the doctor had reviewed Mom’s X-ray and found that she had a broken scapula. Yes, her shoulder was broken. My mother was far more aware than my brothers had given her credit for.

How often are we not heard? How often do you say something to someone and they dismiss you? “Oh, come on. Come on, Jennifer. Come on, Becky. That’s not true. You’re just complaining. You’re just being negative.”

Here is what I want you to notice: my brothers were not lying. They genuinely believed what they were telling themselves. That is what happens when we override our own perception—or someone else’s—for long enough. We stop trusting the evidence directly in front of us and start trusting the story that is easier to believe.

That is the same mechanism as gaslighting, whether anyone intends it or not. Are you gaslighting yourself? Excuse me. When someone tells you something often enough, you may eventually doubt what you saw, what you felt, and what you knew.

I trusted what I saw with my mother because I had spent years rebuilding that muscle: trusting myself even when it was inconvenient and even when other people disagreed.

I am also learning to stop trying to convince anyone. I wait, and eventually they learn the truth for themselves. I have stopped wasting my energy.

That is the same intuition my mother named in me on the recording. I trusted it even under pressure.

Tonight’s gift is this: the next time your gut tells you something is true and everyone else tells you that you are wrong, don’t argue. Write it down. Check back in a week.

I cannot tell you how many things have come through intuitively for me in the last week and then come true. That is how you rebuild trust in yourself.

If you don’t trust yourself, you won’t trust your eyes. If you don’t trust yourself, you won’t trust your gut. I am going to tell you, women: your body never freaking lies.

If you get a gut hit that somebody is a cheater, he is a freaking cheater. If you get a hit that somebody is a narcissist, that person is a freaking narcissist. Trust yourself. Stop discounting your gut.

If you don’t trust your gut, you won’t trust your intuition. You won’t hear the voice of God, the angels, or your guides. That is how life becomes easier when you have a quiet mind, which I help you develop. You trust the guidance you receive, and you know it is absolutely correct. I have built that trust over time.

It is one of the things I help my clients do. The more you trust yourself, the more self-reliant and independent you become. Self-trust makes life easier, not more difficult. It allows you to feel more confident and self-assured.

Self-trust helps you make better decisions instead of asking all your friends and then doing whatever you want anyway. It helps you take up more space. You stop being so afraid to speak up and say what is in your heart. You begin keeping small promises to yourself.

You listen to your body’s signals: hunger, tension, and “Oh, I have to pee.” You know that one—the signal you keep suppressing while you go all day like a camel. You are not a camel.

Stay present through discomfort instead of abandoning yourself. Own your decisions, even the imperfect ones. Honor your limits without overexplaining. Let mistakes be information—I’ve made a few of those—not proof that you cannot be trusted. Match your actions to what you actually believe.

Why does this matter? Self-trust is the foundation that everything else stands on. You cannot trust anyone or anything until you trust yourself first.

That is what self-trust ultimately prepares you for: not only the choices you make, but also the way you will meet the moments you cannot choose. What are those moments? Nothing puts self-trust to the test like living and dying.

That makes me think of a woman named Joan Kemper, who lived in Ohio. I had the pleasure of knowing her and meeting her multiple times. She gave so much to our town—our little town—the arts, the land, the hospital, and the community for decades.

She was not critical. She was kind, sweet, and accepting. She used to repeat something her father told her: “When you get old, don’t quit working. You rust when you sit around, and then you’ll never move again.”

She didn’t stop. She worked almost until the end of her life, volunteering at the art center in Ohio and giving and giving and giving.

Oh, my. It makes me emotional. When her time came, at age 103, she died peacefully in her sleep—the way we all want to go—at home, surrounded by the people who loved her.

My mother, on the other hand, is experiencing a very different death. She was fiercely critical, unkind, cruel, and even jealous for most of her life, until about six months ago, when she was 103 and three-quarters. Now she is struggling to die.

She has been falling and breaking bones. Most recently, she fell face-first, broke her nose, and was left with a black eye. She swears the nurse did it to her. She is afraid. She is holding on for dear life, though she would never say it that way. She could never let go, and I do not think that is a coincidence.

I think we die the way we lived. Death is inevitable. Living, however, is something we choose. When we do not fear death—and I no longer fear death—we live full out. We are not afraid of dying.

Here is the teaching: the emotions we do not process in life do not simply disappear. You cannot put them on ignore and expect them to go away. They will not do that. It is kind of like dandruff, you know. It is still there. Those emotions tend to show up at the end, amplified.

Peace at the end of life is rarely an accident. It is usually the result of a person who spent years doing the work—the shadow work—looking at themselves with acceptance, love, and compassion; forgiving; letting go; telling the truth; and choosing themselves over and over again.

Restlessness at the end is often the same pattern that ran through a person’s whole life, except that the person is now out of time to fix it.

I know this because I lived it from the other direction. I married man after man who abused me—not once, not twice—and I am alive to smile about it, laugh about it, and write about it.

It was a pattern: the same wound wearing a different face each time. For years, I could not see why. I could not even feel it. I had a chip on my shoulder that I did not know was there—something old, something carved into me long before any of those men.

I kept walking straight into it over and over, thinking it was love. Remember what I said: if it feels like home and home was not safe, run in the other direction. I kept running toward home, and it was not safe.

The pattern did not break until I finally turned around and gave that love to myself first, loving and accepting myself fearlessly—even the parts, especially the parts, that were pretty ugly to look at. I had a bunch of those. They did not smell so good.

That was when the pattern broke, and that is how I became an expert at this. It was not because the next man was different. It was because I was different.

That is the work, women. It is not about fixing your circumstances. It is not about moving to another country or buying another house, another car, or another wardrobe. It is about fixing the thing in you that keeps choosing the same circumstance.

I am not saying that to scare you. I am saying it to hand you the one thing you do get to control. You do not control the ending, but from this moment forward, you get to choose the way you live your life.

Tonight’s gift is this: you do not get to choose how you die, but you do get to choose one thing today. Send the text. Share your story. Tell the truth. Forgive the person, even if it is only in your head.

Even if it is simply Ho’oponopono: “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.” Begin this prayer with yourself. Do it over and over for everyone. Forgive them all. Pick one person before bed tonight.

A lot of people have done a lot of bad things to me, and I do not hold hatred toward any of them. I am talking about bad things, people. I am almost 72, with no gray hair. I am going to see my hairdresser tomorrow. You see this? It is because I did not hold on to hatred. I forgave. I do not live in despair. I let it go.

Like my book Orgasm for Life says—get that one; it’s on Audible—hanging on to the windowsill of life will not get you to the big O, and it certainly will not get you to happiness.

Choose yourself. You are so worth it.

Pick one person before bed tonight.

Take a nice, deep breath.

Breathe in deeply.

Breathe out deeply. Let it go. Let it go.

You are worth loving. You are so worth loving.

You are the reason I created Unbecoming: Shedding All That Isn’t You. You are not the hatred. You are not the low self-esteem. You are not the ugly. You are not the heaviness. That is not who you are.

If something you heard today resonated, that is your nervous system recognizing truth. Here is what to do with it: pull out your phone right now. Open your browser and type in unbecoming.jenniferelizabethmasters.com. That is my app.

It contains 71 years of life experience involving healing and overcoming fibromyalgia, Epstein-Barr, autoimmune disease, sadness, sorrow, and anger. It can help you forgive, become grounded in your body, and love yourself fearlessly in the way you were meant to.

If you add it to your home screen, it will be right there on your phone like any other app, ready whenever you need it.

I have something for you—a big secret to share. I have not talked about this openly. Next time on SOS for the Soul: Coming Home, you do not want to miss my next episode. I am going to tell you about the man I married who was hiding three things at once. I call him my trifecta.

Oh, yes. You would not believe how I did not see it coming, although there were one, two, three, five, or ten warnings that I ignored. I went headlong toward him anyway.

I hope you will join me next time on SOS for the Soul: Coming Home. In the meantime, get the app and start for free at Unbecoming. If you cannot remember the app address, go to my website, jenniferelizabethmasters.com. There is a little pop-up there. Click it. It is right there too.

I am so glad you were here with me today. I hope you enjoyed this show. I would love to hear from you.

Much love. Until the next time we meet, have a great night.

Speaker 2 – Prerecorded Theme-Song Vocalist:
Coming home to me.
I don’t have to disappear.
I don’t have to leave.