If there was one thing I could go back and tell my younger self it would be, trust your gut! Every. Single. Time! I promise you it knows. It cannot lie to you, and it always has your best interest at heart.
I often tell my clients “You are the expert of YOU!” What I mean by that is that what you need is already inside of you. The answers you are seeking, are already there. I act as a guide and I help my clients uncover them, but they have had the answers all along.
As humans, and especially as women, we have been trained to second guess our intuitive gut feelings. And not only do others second guess them, we do too. We say things in our mind like, “Maybe he didn’t mean it like that,” or, “People will think I sound like a Bitch if I say that,” or, “I don’t think I have enough ‘proof’ to bring this up.” None of those are helpful thoughts, and they all discount the amazing work your brain has done to get you to the point where you had the gut feeling in the first place.
See, your intuition, or this gut feeling, is really your brain collecting thousands of pieces of micro-data, and compiling them all together. When your brain finally has enough data, it gives you that “feeling” that something is off. I often hear my clients say “I just had this gut feeling to check his phone at a specific moment, and that’s when I found the evidence of his affair.” In that moment, the brain had decided it finally had enough data, and knew exactly what was going on. So it told you, and you found the proof.
Now what about the times that you have this same type of “feeling” and you don’t find the proof afterwards. I would just like to say, you didn’t IMMEDIATELY find the proof afterwards. Really, the only “proof” you need is your gut feeling.
How would your life and your relationships change if you acted on your gut feelings and you didn’t wait for the “proof?” For instance, for my clients who say, “he says he isn’t talking to the other woman anymore, but I just really feel like he is lying to me. But I can’t find proof.” I tell them they already have the proof.
Let’s look further at really where this gut feeling comes from so that you can hopefully trust yourself better. I will be using the example of a wife who doesn’t trust her husband after he had an affair, but this can be applied to any situation. The fact that she had her gut feeling at just the right moment and found the messages between her husband and the other woman, that they had been deleting, but she found at just the right moment was not a fluke. Your intuition was paying attention to millions of tiny data points, in the background of your mind, and organizing them for you without you even having to think about it.
See, for months your unconscious, and sometimes semi-conscious mind was aware of when you would reach for his hand and he’d pull back. It was aware of the times he put on a new cologne, or all the new “work meetings” he had that made him stay late. It noticed the half smile that he’d get when his phone would buzz that he got a message while you were watching a movie together and all of a sudden he needed to use the bathroom. It noticed every little thing that was different.
And I can tell you from my own life, your gut is right every single time! Even when there is no way to “know” these things, my gut just knew. It took ignoring these gut feelings and dismissing them for years, only later to realize they were always right, and 2 divorces later, I have finally started to trust my gut above anything else.
If I have a feeling that something is off, I take that feeling over any “proof” that someone else can offer. I have had to fight so hard, and do the work to get to this place of self-love and self-trust, that now that I’m here, I am holding on, and leaning in. And I really feel that when I trust myself, I am then free to be in beautiful relationships where I don’t need to trust the other person.
I don’t need to trust them, because my trust is in myself! I trust myself to actually leave if I feel I am being lied to, cheated on, or dismissed. I trust myself to care for my own needs, so when I allow others into my life they are there to enrich it. I don’t NEED to trust them, because all the trust I need in the relationship already exists inside of ME. I don’t NEED them to love me because all the love I need already exists inside of ME. So then, when my partner does something trustworthy or loving, it just adds to my already full life, and life just feels wonderful!!!
When I operate from this place of trust I also don’t fear my partner doing something that would end the relationship. I hope they don’t cheat on me, but I don’t fear them doing that, because I know that I will trust myself to believe my gut feeling, and I’ll trust myself to leave. And I will leave with all my love and trust for myself, so I will be leaving whole, not broken.
Work that I do with my clients helps them recognize when they have already been right, and when their gut feeling was right. Then we work on building their confidence, to trust themselves, to be willing and able to feel any emotion, and be willing to act on the next gut feeling they have. Some of this is done with processing events from the past.
Other parts of this work are done with exercises that really help my clients return to themselves. For 48 hours I invite my clients to ask their body what it needs and what it really wants to eat. And for 2 days, they must eat what their body wants, and stop eating as soon as they are full. It doesn’t matter if there are only 4 bites left on their plate, if they are full they need to stop. This exercise is important because so many of us are so busy we don’t actually know what our hunger is telling us, and we don’t know what it feels like to pay attention to know when we are actually full. These require a new level of self-awareness.
Then I help them pay attention to thoughts, promptings, gut feelings that they have. We don’t entertain gut feelings being wrong, we work through, “Now that we have this new information (as if it is factual information that has been handed to us), what do you want to do next?” And I have heard from so many clients how after doing this part of the work they often find the “proof” they would otherwise be looking for, but wouldn’t have found, unless they actually took the step forward, believing the feeling was right. And, it helps them trust themselves more.
If you are interested in a more scientific approach to understanding your gut feelings, I encourage you to read the book “The Gift of Fear” by Gavin De Becker. He does a great job of breaking down how your brain keeps track of these bits of micro data. And although he is mostly talking about how it relates to fear, I think it could still be a useful read for you.
If you glean nothing else from reading this today, I hope you know: You can trust yourself! Every single time! And I hope that you will be willing to start to take steps to exercise that trust in yourself. So that one day you will be willing to act on it like I do. Life is pretty good when you trust yourself.
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