Learned to Distrust Your Own Intuition?

Your gut told you something was wrong and you ignored it. Someone ignored what you said mattered and you convinced yourself it didn’t matter that much. Your instinct said go and you stayed instead. Your instinct said no and you said yes anyway. Over time you learned that your intuition wasn’t worth listening to.

The distrust didn’t happen all at once. It happened through small moments of being wrong or being told you were wrong. Someone you trusted said your instinct was incorrect so you believed them instead of yourself. Someone important said you were reading things wrong so you stopped trusting your own reading. You learned to second-guess yourself and the second-guessing became automatic.

Now you can’t trust your own knowing. You see a red flag and you wonder if you are overreacting. You feel something in your body and you question whether the feeling is real or you are being paranoid. You have a sense about something and you wait for someone else to confirm it before you act on it. The trusting of yourself got replaced with waiting for external validation.

What’s happened is that you’ve given other people authority over your own experience. You’ve decided that their interpretation of what’s happening is more trustworthy than your own direct experience of what’s happening. They’re not there in your body. They’re not feeling what you are feeling. But their opinion about what you are feeling has become more important than your own direct knowing.

The people who taught you to distrust yourself probably weren’t trying to hurt you. They were probably just confused or defensive or had their own reasons for needing you to doubt what you knew. But the result is the same. You’ve learned to be suspicious of your own instincts. You’ve learned to seek permission before trusting yourself.

Now you are in situations where you know something is wrong but you can’t act on it because you don’t trust that your knowing is real. You are in relationships where your gut is screaming but you are telling yourself you are probably overreacting. You are ignoring red flags because you’ve learned that trusting flags gets you labeled as paranoid or sensitive or dramatic.

The cost of distrusting yourself is that you stay in situations you should leave. You ignore warning signs you should pay attention to. You let people hurt you because you are not sure whether the hurt is real or you are imagining it. The distrust of your own intuition becomes a vulnerability that other people can exploit.

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