Is Your Intuition Guiding You Or Your Trauma Misleading You?

From my experience, intuition is something you can’t really define or rationally explain. If you google its meaning, the answers given won’t really satisfy you and you’ll be left with a big dilemma: “How can I be sure it was my intuition?”

Well, you can’t. There is no certainty surrounding this “gut feeling” as some like to call it. It is difficult to pin point it, box it in and label it. For that reason, I’m tempted to believe intuition isn’t just one thing.

The closest we’ve been able to get to explaining it is a hunch you get every now and then that tells you something is right or off. Think about what people call “vibes” nowadays and how we often describe someone by saying “I did/didn’t like her vibes”. In other words, you like or dislike their energy.

Intuition is very similar and is often described as a feeling. Feelings are sparked by emotions and shaped by experiences, beliefs, memories and thoughts linked to a particular emotion. But is that all it really is? I would go beyond this shallow description and say it’s more than a feeling, but less than a knowing. It situates somewhere between the two and that is why it is so difficult to put it into words.

How do you recognize it? Technically, that should be the easier part of the process, but as I mentioned in other previous posts, humans have a way of complicating everything. We are social, analytical, conceptual and structural beings. We often need to be able to rationalize something in order to understand it, and, not only that, but our minds are always busy, with thoughts and ideas running through it at all times. And boy, are those thoughts loud!

Because of the inner chat going on in our heads, recognizing our intuition’s presence at a given time is much harder than it should be. We either do not realize it is there or we ignore it because our very own thoughts convince us we’re crazy.

There is, however, another side to the story. We often mistake intuition for past traumas. What??? Yes, it’s possible, especially if you’ve got a lot of unresolved, unhealed wounds. All the dirty laundry you haven’t washed can potentially keep you from getting involved with another person, achieving your career goals and evolving. They can hold you back from enjoying life and the worst part is that you might justify it through claiming it is your intuition.

So, how do you know it’s your trauma misleading you and not your intuition guiding you?

In short words, you won’t experience that weird mixture of feeling and knowing, but rather fear, frustration, anger or sadness. You may say “okay, but I get the feeling that someone’s untrustworthy, how do I know I’m right?” Well, are you sure you’re not basing your choice of not trusting them on past experiences, where you ended up brokenhearted? Have they given you any reasons not to trust them? Is there an unhelpful belief behind it? If it isn’t and you can’t explain it, then it’s intuition. If you can justify it, it’s an unhealed wound.

Trauma is so convincing and powerful that it can easily be mistaken for intuition. As mentioned earlier, intuition can’t be justified, pin pointed or explained. Anything that requires justification, convincing, rationalizing or explaining is trauma.

Quite simple, huh?

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