Trusting Your Intuition is Actually a Massive Act of Resistance
Trusting yourself as a woman is a major act of defiance
Have you ever wondered why trusting your intuition is so dang hard? I feel like there is always doubt in my mind. Messing with my own gut feeling and steering me away from the voice within. But there is actually a very clear reason why we as women have a problem trusting our own intuition. And it’s a problem that we’ve been struggling with for a long time.
Every now and then – or rather often – I find myself in a situation where I feel torn between my gut and the gray mass inhabiting my skull. Because my intuition says one thing. While my brain will immediately start questioning whether or not that inexplicable feeling, that seems to live somewhere around my belly button, is actually justified. Or maybe I’m letting my imagination run wild again.
But it could also be last night’s dinner that’s just not sitting well…
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Raised on hindsight
And because of that, I always felt pretty confident about my so-called ‘people skills’. I could read people pretty well and I always intuitively understood what their intentions were. And whether or not these people could be trusted (back then, I didn’t know I was just very sensitive due to my dysfunctional household and upbringing). Every time I had a gut feeling about someone, I turned out to be right. And I believed with my whole heart that no one could ever trick me.
Growing up, I learned that my last name meant that I was supposed to be a very intuitive person. Because my family knew when something was up. We knew if we were being played or if the person we were interacting with was being sincere.
The interesting thing about this, though, was that I got tricked aplenty. Because I always turned out to be right after the fact. My special ‘skill’ was hindsight. Every time I had had a bad feeling about someone, they turned out to be a bad seed. And I would always say: ‘See? I knew they were trouble’.
It wasn’t that I just said that I already ‘knew’ afterwards. Because I did actually know. But I never acted on my intuition. I kept throwing myself into bad situations even with that gut feeling of ‘something is off’.
Why?
Because it is actually pretty easy to hear your intuition. But it is gosh darn hard to accurately interpret and follow your hunches when they show up.
Why trusting your intuition is hard
Me and my intuition are always embroiled in an ongoing argument that I can only describe as the bickering of a stereotypical married sitcom couple from the nineties.
My intuition would tell me not to trust someone and my brain would take on the voice of the male lead. Telling tell me not to be so paranoid or ‘crazy’. This would result in me doing absolutely nothing and feeling surprised and ‘tricked’ when yet another one of my gut feelings turned out to be right. That would be the moment where I got upset with myself about the fact that I didn’t listen to my own doubts. That trusting your intuition just isn’t as easy as they make it out to be.
And that I didn’t even trust myself enough to know that I am the one who knows best for me.
In a previous blog about intuition, I wrote about the different factors that could cause your intuition to be incorrect and misleading. You would think that with that knowledge, I would eventually start to trust that little voice in my head warning me to get the f* out. But I never did. Haven’t I been burnt enough times to actually know not to touch the stove anymore? Apparently not.
And the reason why seems to go back to where basically every problem I’ve ever had started: a lack of trust in ourselves that is especially prevalent in women.
Love yourself and trust yourself
While researching for my blog about listening to your intuition, I came across a Medium-article that stated that trusting your intuition causes you to become more confident. The article said that listening to yourself and your intuition gives you the feeling of certainty. The feeling that you yourself can be trusted. And that will make you more likely to listen to your intuition the next time you need to.
My issue with this is that it implies that listening to your intuition for the first time is easy. As if it doesn’t require self-esteem to even begin to know whether or not it is your intuition you’re listening to. And to blindly follow your own advice? That takes a lot of confidence.
I think trusting your intuition can only be facilitated by knowing that you are worthy of being listened to. That you’re not being ‘stupid’ or ‘paranoid’ when you feel something is off. And when you feel something might be good for you, you don’t dismiss that intuition with the message ‘it can’t be for me because I don’t deserve good things’.
Successfully trusting your intuition is about confidence. About believing that your own intuition is just as trustworthy – if not more – as the intuition of any other person you would blindly follow solely based on their gut feeling.
You need to learn how to trust your intuition with the same energy as a mediocre white man.
Trusting your intuition isn’t taught
But that is where the core of the problem lies, right? Because that voice of doubt, the one who tells us we’re being crazy and that we shouldn’t believe everything we “feel”, is the voice of the patriarchal society we grow up in.
For as long as I can remember, I learned that men are logical and rational creatures. That, because of their “biological” talent of reason, they are the ones who are usually right. Because they base their argument on facts. And women only rely on their emotions to guide them.
This social conditioning teaches us that women could never be logical. That their default is to be emotional and that because of that, they’re less likely to be right. What do you think it does to a woman when she’s been told her entire life that her feelings aren’t facts? That she could never be right because there’s no “logic” to be found within her?
Now, we already know that logic isn’t something that is just reserved for men. And feelings aren’t something that are just reserved for women. Yet this very deep mistrust of our feelings persists. It’s been spoon-fed to us from the moment we could speak. And has completely shaped the thoughts we have about ourselves and others.
And what is intuition if not a feeling that we get when something seems right or very wrong?
So, we push that intuition aside while shaming ourselves for ever giving our feelings an audience. And we continue doing the thing that our body screams we shouldn’t. This results in either a missed opportunity that could have helped us out of our current situation, or a horrible mistake that will cost us dearly.
A tool of oppression
But that is how you keep women small. Because if we don’t choose to go for the things that we want, because our mind keeps telling us it’s “crazy”, we stay the unhappy little housewives we were meant to be.
And if we ignore a hunch about the life we could be living instead, we stay exactly where we are. Even if it’s a toxic situation to be in.
Women doubting their intuition is very much a tool of the patriarchy. And I would even go as far as saying that women not trusting their intuition is a tool. One that promotes abuse and encourages violence towards them.
Because if you gaslight a whole gender into distrusting themselves – and trusting you and your “logical” thinking – you get to make all the decisions for them.
And that means you are their voice of reason. They will rely on you for their decision-making. Even if you coerce them into doing things that will inevitably hurt them.
And that’s how we create a system in which women stay in the exact same place they need to be in order for that very same system to function. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the patriarchy relies on itself to stay upright and only when we stop holding the pillars, will it slowly crumble down.
Trusting your intuition is resistance
It is interesting to me that this issue seems to come down to confidence and self-love as well. But it is definitely not surprising. Because what is your intuition if not a part of yourself that deserves to be loved and nurtured?
And even though this belief of self-doubt is so ingrained in our system, it doesn’t mean that it’s hopeless. Because our trust in ourselves can be restored. And learning how is one of the most important things you can do for yourself. Because a woman who trusts her intuition to do right by her, is a woman who will unlock her full potential.
It’s a woman who will be able to leave a bad situation because she knows she’ll land on her feet. A woman who will be able to create the things she can dream up and who will single handedly shake the very foundation of the systems that try to cage us.
When you trust your intuition, you say “no” to the path set out by a world that never meant for you to thrive.
One of the biggest acts of resistance for women is to ignore the doubt and the dismissal you feel when your intuition starts speaking up. To silence the voice of the patriarchy and listen to the “feelings” that you’ve learned to ignore because they weren’t deemed as valid as “men’s logic”.
I would say the most logical thing you as a woman can do is to listen to your feelings and follow that “sixth sense”.
Cause it might save your life some day.
