- Hey everybody, happy Monday.
Today, I wanna talk about intuition
and how sometimes it can kind of get in the way
and become a bad thing.
Now, today's video topic is born out of a question
that I received on my Patreon live stream,
I think it was like a month or two ago,
so I'm gonna read it for you.
And it says, "Kati, I have either been blessed or cursed
with a very powerful intuition for other people's feelings.
I can often read their emotions
before they even feel them themselves.
This intuition served me very well as a child.
Neither my mother nor father were exactly stable
and being able to predict how they felt
saved me from their anger
while my sister endured a great deal of torment from them.
This hasn't served me so well as an adult however.
I've become somewhat of a slave to this intuition.
Often I have done what others wanted
rather than what I wanted,
because I was afraid
of the displeasure that I sensed in them.
I'm working on overcoming that,
but what really troubles me though,
is that this intuition is often incorrect
and has betrayed me on numerous occasions.
What should one do
when they have a natural mechanism for reading people,
but this mechanism is broken?
Should I try to ignore my intuition entirely
off of logic alone?
That seems unnatural."
I thought this was a great question
because so many of us maybe feel this way,
I know personally, as a recovering people pleaser,
I will try to sense how other people are feeling
and adjust how I act accordingly.
And that can be really exhausting.
Now, just so we're all on the same page,
intuition is the ability to immediately understand something
without any conscious reasoning, right?
It's almost like a knee-jerk reaction.
I can just feel it, I don't have to think about it,
I just know it like in my bones.
Now intuition can be a great thing, right?
It could save us from hurting someone's feelings
or hurting ourselves or making a huge mistake.
We can sense things and act accordingly.
However, it can get in the way,
like the person who asked this question,
is saying that their intuition
is causing them to walk on eggshells,
so afraid that they're gonna upset someone in their life
or do something that could in the end, cause them harm.
This experience is incredibly common,
especially for those of us
who come from a abusive household,
like the person who asked this question was talking about,
they said that it saved them
from being further abused by their parents
'cause they were able to read the room more quickly
and the sister wasn't as lucky.
So for those of us who have that in our past
it can behoove us to read people
and better navigate how we act
so that we don't set them off, right?
Also, those of us who have trauma in our background
can be very hypervigilant,
very afraid that we're gonna cause that trauma
to occur again
and those of us who come from a household
of alcohol or drug abuse,
we can feel that if we, or think rather,
we can think that if we do everything just perfectly, right?
If we act in just a certain way,
that then we won't upset them and then they won't use again.
Spoilers, we're not in control of them,
but we think that we are
because we think that if we are just perfect
or just right, then the abuse or the addiction won't occur.
And unfortunately that follows us into adulthood, right?
In our future relationships
we can find ourselves trying to read the emotions
or the mood of people in our lives
and doing what they want
instead of doing what maybe we need.
And focusing all of our energy on other people
and how they feel
and trying to appropriately react or respond,
leaves no room for us,
it doesn't leave any room in our lives
for us to put energy into ourselves
or to think about maybe what we want.
I've heard from a ton of my patients and viewers alike
that growing up in a household like this
and walking on eggshells, leaves us as an adult
feeling like we don't know who we are.
"I don't know what I like and don't like,
I don't know what hobbies I wanna do."
Even recently,
I got a question from a member of our community
saying that when their therapist offered
these different coping skills and tools and like,
"Which ones do you wanna try?"
She didn't know because she wasn't sure how to select it
because she'd never made decisions purely for herself
because that's what she needed and wanted.
And so all of this energy
that we have going out to other people,
strangers, possibly, right?
I'm even guilty,
I've talked about this thing before,
going to the grocery store and feeling bad about like,
if someone seemed in a hurry
and I happened to be like looking at the same thing as them
and I'm kind of in their way
because we have to share public space,
I apologize and maybe move out of the way
even though now I can't get to the item that I wanted.
And I know that might seem like a silly example,
but it's just one of the many ways
that those of us who try to people please
or read other people's emotions,
can find it hindering us later on.
Another unfortunate side effect
of this almost overactive intuition
is that we have no emotional boundaries.
We can be like sponges for other people's feelings
and what they're going through,
so even if we had a wonderful, happy, easygoing day,
we can encounter someone who didn't
and suddenly we feel terrible.
We just soak up all of what they're experiencing
because we are seeking it out.
We don't have any healthy boundaries up, we're just,
boundaries are down,
we are looking out to try to decipher as quickly as possible
someone else's mood,
which leaves us really vulnerable to kind of catching it.
Obviously having an overactive intuition like this
isn't healthy,
but that's not to say that we can't care for other people.
A lot of us who've grown up as people pleasers
and feeling like we're walking on eggshells
can struggle to place healthy boundaries
but I'm here to tell you that it is imperative,
it's part of your healing.
We can check in on people
and we can support in the way that we're able,
but the one thing that we can't do
is we cannot make other people feel better,
do better or get better.
We can't, it's not possible,
because we all know if we've been on the other side,
if we have had to overcome an addiction
or if we have, I don't know,
tried to deal with our anger in a more healthy way,
we're the ones that have to decide to get into therapy
and decide to work on ourselves.
That urge to change
and grow and be better or do better,
has to come from within.
No amount of other people in our lives acting,
in the quote, unquote, perfect way,
is gonna make us feel any better
or make things any easier really.
All the work has to come from within.
So just keep that in mind,
because so often
when we're walking on eggshells, reading rooms,
and trying to guess people's moods ahead of time,
we can be wrong and we're doing it under the assumption
that by us acting in that certain way,
that they're gonna act differently,
which isn't always the case.
Overall, I have two kinds of words of advice
on how to get out of this
and the first is to just be aware when you're doing it.
That was huge for me.
When I would recognize that I felt like in the way,
and I felt the urge to say sorry
or to move out of the way
when it was actually making things more difficult for me,
I just recognized it, it didn't mean I always did better,
but just knowing it helps us see
all the ways that this is hindering us
and can, in my case, help motivate you more for change.
By me realizing all the different ways that I was doing this
and how it was affecting me daily,
I recognized how big of a deal this was
and it just helped keep me going in therapy
to try to find other ways to interact with people
and really interact with the world.
And my second tip is to sometimes do opposite action.
Now you know I love dialectical behavior therapy or DBT,
and they talk about opposite action a lot.
When you have that urge to say sorry, get out of their way,
even though you have every right to be there
or not express what you really want at your own cost,
it takes a little bit of effort and yes, it's really hard,
but I'm telling you it works.
If you're like, "I wanna say, sorry and get out of the way,"
the opposite action for me was to stay put
and not say anything, but just smile at the person.
I can be friendly, I don't have to be mean.
Those of us who are people pleasers
and walking on eggshells,
feel like not going out of our way to be nice is being mean.
And I'm encouraging you to change that definition
'cause that's not true.
Just being cordial, smiling at someone,
doing the thing that you were already doing is plenty.
That doesn't make you mean or rude,
that just means that you're another fellow human
who is able to take up just as much space.
And I also have a third tip, I wanna squeeze in one more
because in the case of this particular question,
where this person was raised in an abusive household,
I believe that this response
is what I would call hypervigilance,
meaning we're super on edge
and hyper aware of our surroundings
taking in as much information as possible
so that we don't get hurt again.
I can't think of a better way to define
or describe what that person's question was about,
therefore, the third tip is find a trauma specialist.
Maybe that's EMDR, maybe that's schema,
maybe that's talk therapy,
there's also somatic experiencing,
there are a ton of different trauma therapy modalities
that you can get into,
but finding a trauma specialist in your area
will help you process the trauma
and abuse that you sustained as a child and in turn,
will help that hypervigilance go down.
There are also some basic things that you can do,
I've talked about this a lot recently,
like full body shakes.
If we really shake out, feels silly, actually works,
it releases some of that like pent-up energy,
maybe anxiety that comes out of our PTSD response
and can help us feel better.
Also connection with those that we love
who really care for us, healthy relationships,
non-abusive relationships can also help us feel better.
So those are just a couple things maybe you could do today,
but I really think working with a trauma specialist
to better manage this PTSD response will help you heal
so that this goes away for good.
I hope you found this interesting,
this really hit home for me
and is why I wanted to take that question
from the live stream and turn it into a full video
but I would love to hear your thoughts.
Is this something you struggle with?
What are some tools and tips,
techniques that have worked for you?
Please share those in the comments down below
and I will see you next time.
Bye.
(bright joyful music)