The Importance of Intuition

Intuition is a crucial and powerful tool for each human being to really get in touch with. It allows you to harness the vast powers of your subconscious to make judgments that can save you a lot of pain later on, and prevent bad people from making their way into your life.

Unlike the conscious mind, which may only notice a few things at a time, the unconscious mind processes almost everything. If you're in touch with your feelings and work on analyzing your dreams, you can build a connection to your subconscious that allows you to, for example, experience that something is "off" without really being able to pin-point what it is that is causing it.

This "gut feeling" is very useful for detecting liars or abusive people. I've had situations where I ignored such feelings, attributing them to something else or wanting desperately to believe that everything would be okay. This has always been a mistake that I regretted later on.

Once a lie or an abuse is revealed, these prior red flags quickly come to mind and I realize that they were all spot-on. Such analysis of previously ignored gut feelings can help you hone them, confirm their validity, and pay more attention to them next time.

The real problem though is that sometimes out intuition fails to ring a bell, or perhaps more tragically, it rings like mad and we ignore it.

Why we have blind spots in our intuition

In my poem, Seeking Out Our Abusers, I write how those who abused us in childhood "Plucked out also the eyes we so dearly needed, And the signs that could tell them apart." What I mean is that we become blind to the abuse that is normalized, especially when it comes from someone on who we are utterly dependent

If you were screamed at for your entire childhood and saw no other mode of communication, you may have normalized screaming in relationships and thus don't see anything "off" about it.

Worse, if you were abused by people you could not leave and depended upon for your survival (your parents), you learnt to suppress your instincts and intuition out of a base fear of homelessness and death.

Sometimes, our desperate need to be in a relationship leads us to try and convince ourselves that the other person isn't really as bad and manipulative as we first intuited.

But just as abuse in childhood hobbles our intuition, so does self-knowledge, journaling, dream analysis, and therapy, restore it.