Stop treating your intuition as your enemy, IT’S NOT!
Have you ever had a sneaking suspicion about something that turned out to be true?
It’s humbling when it happens. And it can also be extremely frustrating that you might not have listened to it or ignored it completely.
If there has been anything I learned with all this grey hair is that intuition is a very real thing that we may try to ignore or move past and we should not. I read a quote somewhere that said the things you think will bother you in the beginning of a relationship will be the reasons for your breakup later. So why do we override this intuition about what is going to be a problem later? Seems we could save a lot of time and heartache sooner rather than later by trusting the wisdom within ourselves.
I have a friend who had some concerns about a guy she started dating. He was a “nice guy” and she thought she was lucky to have found him. He had a good relationship with his kids but had a non-existent relationship with his children’s mother. His family would speak to his ex’s family about anything to do with the kids. The ex wife didn’t even have his number. Her boyfriend’s story was that the ex wife had been hiding debt, she stole things, and cheated on him. She expressed her concern about this and said she felt something was off. She told me all of this on the phone one day. She said that she “had a bad feeling” about it. But this friend is also one of those people that wants to believe everyone is good and give them the benefit of the doubt. She didn’t quite understand why such a seemingly good guy would have such a strained relationship with the mother of his children.
My friend gave him the benefit of the doubt and ignored her feelings that this would be a problem or that this should be a cause for concern. They dated and got married and had kids together. She saw other things that were concerning; a lot of porn on their shared computer, he would use things that she was working on as a weapon against her in arguments. She started to say he would gaslight her. It took her a long time to realize this because he was really good at it. She questioned if something was wrong with her, was she really crazy like her husband sometimes told her she was? He also had a separate bank account and she had no idea where money was being spent. He had access to her account but not access to his. Suddenly he didn’t have money to help with some of the bills and my friend started struggling financially. Even though they were both making money, it didn’t make sense. She was finding herself in an abusive relationship with the “really nice guy.”
Her original intuition was right. There was something wrong and definitely a reason why his last relationship did not work out. She started to see how his ex racked up the debt and why they don’t communicate. All of her original instincts were right, except now they were married and share children together.
It wasn’t easy but she extracted him from her and her children’s life. He turned more abusive and she had to get a restraining order because he wasn’t safe to be around her or her children.
She told me she will never push down her intuition again. She learned a lesson and will be more eyes wide open next time. She and her children are safe and she’s working on getting used to her new normal. She now knows that things between he and his ex must have been similarly difficult and in order to escape his lack of empathy about not doing the right thing in his marriage, he just blocks contact. Or possibly the wife also had a restraining order against him? We don’t know. Now she is the next ex wife who also doesn’t have contact with him. The common denominator is him, not her.
It is likely that you won’t find yourself in the same situation as my friend, but you could if you don’t follow those light tugging feelings when something doesn’t seem right. She had them but figured she had been so jaded from living in NYC that she was traumatized. Trauma is a trigger, a quickly escalating response when something happens to bring something up for you. It could be someone reminds you of your overbearing mother or that you think you’re being taken advantage of because you have been before. Intuition is a slow growing tugging, pleading, and eventually it gets so loud you can’t ignore it.
My advice? Listen to your intuition early on. Acknowledge what you are seeing and keep your eyes open. No one knows you better than you, so you need to trust yourself.
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