Trust Yourself
Trust Yourself
The Love, Happiness & Success Podcast with Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
Music Credits: James Parm, “I Know I Know I Know”
Anxiety vs. Intuition, and How to Tell the Difference
The phrase “trust yourself” is easy to toss around. It sounds inspirational, and certainly looks great on a coffee mug or instagram post. But learning how to trust yourself, like really and truly trust yourself, is actually a life-skill that requires practice and hard work to develop. I work with many of my private Denver therapy and online life coaching clients around how to trust themselves (or, more accurately, how to tell the difference between trustworthy and untrustworthy aspects of their experience). It’s definitely in the realm of “advanced personal growth” but is truly life changing once you figure it out.
For example, before you can really trust yourself you need to know the difference between anxiety and intuition. When do you listen to that small voice in your head, because it’s right? And when is that small (or loud) voice in your head just scared, jumping to conclusions, or trying to protect you from something that’s not really a threat? Learning how to differentiate between the two will help you trust yourself.
This alone can take a lot of deliberate energy and effort, through therapy or life coaching, to figure out. It requires a lot of radical honesty and self-awareness. But true personal growth requires it.
“We all have ideas, interpretations, perceptions about what’s happening, that are only our conscious thoughts after they have been filtered through our set of life experiences, our core beliefs.”
For example, people working on themselves in therapy or coaching quickly learn that there are ALL KINDS of thoughts and feelings zooming around in their heads and hearts. Some of these thoughts are reality based and true, and some are helpful. Many of our automatic thoughts are neither objectively true, nor helpful. Figuring out how to tell the difference between the two is life-changing (as well as the heart and soul of evidence based cognitive-behavioral therapy or coaching).
Similarly, we can routinely feel all kinds of things. Some emotions, when listened to and explored, are veritable treasure troves of invaluable information about ourselves, our truth, our values. Stepping wholeheartedly into these healthy emotional currents are like being carried forward effortlessly towards growth and healing. But, like our thoughts, not all of our feelings are healthy or helpful. Some, like anxiety, shame, and depression, though they feel real, are the emotional equivalent of drinking poison. They are not to be indulged wholesale, but rather assisted in transforming themselves into something more helpful.
At the same time that we have unhelpful thoughts and feelings, we also receive messages from deep and knowing parts of ourselves that are worth listening to. We all carry intuition and wisdom inside of us. We can know things without knowing why we know them. Often those “gut feelings” or ideas that bubble up in your brain seemingly on their own can be powerful and accurate sources of self-guidance, and you can trust them. And sometimes our anxiety flares up around all kinds of things, and has little basis in reality.
Anxiety will conjure up perceived threats in many situations, irregardless of their basis in reality. Being led (or more often, blocked) by anxiety is exhausting and self-limiting. In contrast, intuition is the product of real information that’s simply being processed on a nonconscious level. Even though flashes of intuition may seem, in some ways, just as baseless as anxiety, it’s not. It’s helpful, useful, and true. When you learn how to tap into your intuition, (and differentiate intuition vs. anxiety) you can trust yourself.
As is so often true in the realm of personal growth therapy, learning how to tell the difference between anxiety and intuition and trust yourself is easier said than done. That is why we’re devoting an entire episode of the Love, Happiness and Success Podcast to exploring this topic. Listen, so that you can understand how to recognize the different signs and manifestations of intuition, and learn how anxiety is different.
In This “Trust Yourself” Podcast Episode, You Will…
- Understand the difference between anxiety and intuition.
- Discover the importance of feeling fear (and how it’s different from anxiety).
- Learn what to do with your gut feelings.
- Understand the importance of clarity, and how to get it through your intuition.
- Find out the best way to combat anxiety.
- Identify the reasons why intuitions happen, and how to increase your intuition.
- Learn how to tell the difference between anxiety and intuition in relationships.
I often discuss the subject of how to trust yourself with my therapy and coaching clients. I have so much to share on this important topic of learning how to trust yourself, and I’m so excited to share it with you too. You can listen to “Trust Yourself” on Spotify, the Apple Podcast app, on the player at the bottom of this post, or wherever else you like to listen to podcasts. Show-notes and the transcript are below, if you’re more of a reader.
I hope this discussion helps YOU learn how to tell the difference between anxiety vs intuition, so that you can trust yourself with confidence.
xo,
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Trust Yourself: Podcast Episode Highlights
Gut Feeling About Relationship?
“We all have ideas, interpretations, perceptions about what’s happening, that are only our conscious thoughts after they have been filtered through our set of life experiences, our core beliefs.”
We take in a lot of information without realizing it, but our brain can only consciously process so much. Most of this information is insignificant, but some is extremely important even if we don’t recognize it as vital data. When that happens, we can have thoughts or feelings without knowing why. Then we have to consciously decide whether to act on the feeling or not. When you’re having a feeling about a person… what do you do? Trust yourself? Minimize and explain away your feelings? Act on your feelings, realize belatedly they were anxiety, and then live to regret it? Agh!
When It’s Anxiety: Our feelings can be in direct contrast to reality. We should test feelings of discomfort, especially if they don’t coincide with what is happening. These feelings could manifest as fear or dislike of someone, but sometimes without a rational, apparent cause. It’s essential to remember that these feelings do stem from something — past experiences, for example. The other person might remind you of a painful part of your history. Anxiety often doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
When It’s Intuition: “Even if you have trust issues, it doesn’t mean that you might not have a spidey sense feeling about someone that you should listen to.” Intuition, even though it’s processing information on a subconscious level, is still processing reality-based information. Often, when you talk through thoughts and feelings that are worth listening to, they make sense and are based on facts.
Recognizing Anxiety
Your past experiences will determine how you act in a relationship. Different people with different issues will react differently. If you tend to have anxiety in certain types of relationships, or know that your anxiety is triggered by certain types of things, your self-awareness will help you identify anxiety. Anxiety is familiar.
“Somebody else standing right next to you looking at the same situation would perceive a fairly neutral thing — they would not have the same kind of emotional reaction, or sort of instinctive reaction that will feel very much like intuition.”
For example, if you have trust issues, it’s critical to be aware of your patterns. Should you feel uncomfortable about someone, you must recognize why. The feeling may not be related to the person at all! If you dismiss them without analyzing why you feel the way you do, you might miss the opportunity to meet a wonderful person.
- Pay close attention to your internal dialogues, especially in neutral situations, like a lunch with a friend. Ask yourself whether you attribute meaning to actions that have none. Are you mind reading, jumping to conclusions, or beating yourself up? Knowing your tendencies is 80% of the game.
- Ask if what you’re feeling is unusual for you. If you’re having funny feelings outside of your usual pattern about someone, it could be a sign of intuition — your mind could be giving you information that you should pay attention to.
- If the thought and feeling are familiar, and ones that you commonly have in similar situations, it’s probably anxiety.
Listen To Your Intuition
“We all know things that are true without knowing why we know that they are true.”
Your brain receives factual information from many different sources, but some sources don’t get the benefit of conscious awareness. Just because data doesn’t immediately connect with your conscious awareness doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. These feelings are still valid and real — and sometimes, they may be an actual, intuitive warning about someone. These messages from a different, though very real and trustworthy part of your show up as intuition.
When To Go With Your Gut
Our brains process truth by absorbing the tiny details of our surroundings, especially regarding people. We are highly evolved social animals, and our minds are wired to spot danger instinctively. However, our conscious minds do not always recognize these details.
“And so, because this is happening, we can be gathering a ton of valuable information about people, about situations, about relational dynamics, about whether or not somebody is telling the truth or is trustworthy, or, you know, all of these things that are never consciously noticed.”
You get this information through feelings. To illustrate, we may feel that a person is wrong for us without consciously knowing why, or you feel good about someone for no reason.
“What many others want to dismiss as a coincidence or a gut feeling is, in fact, a cognitive process. It is faster than we recognize and far different from the familiar step-by-step thinking that we rely on so willingly. We think conscious thought is somehow better, when in fact, intuition is a soaring flight compared to the plodding of logic.”
Your intuition is the rapid analysis of all those small details. It bypasses conscious thought: suddenly, you know something, but you don’t know why you know it. The speed of intuition is useful for protection; when you are afraid, it may be best not to ask questions. Trust the fear, and figure out the fear when you’re safe.
The Gift of Fear
If you feel afraid of someone, nothing else matters. Always listen to fear, whether around your personal relationships or personal safety. Fear is not the same thing as anxiety.
But even fear can be confusing. For example, if you have a history of toxic relationships or come from a dysfunctional family where emotional safety was not something you could count on, you might be used to ignoring fear. Not listening to or respecting healthy fear is one of the reasons why people can fall into toxic relationship patterns.
Even worse, if you have a history of toxic, unhealthy relationships you might feel apprehensive in safe, stable, healthy relationships. If you have this type of history, you may develop “trust issues” or unrealistic concerns about your partner in a healthy relationship.
But the path to trusting yourself is to understand your patterns and what feels “normal” to you. Do you have a pattern of minimizing fear? Do you have a pattern of trust issues even in relationships with good, safe people? (Or do you tend to reject good, safe people?) Knowing yourself will give you the answers, and will help you trust yourself going forward. (And here’s the link to our How Healthy is Your Relationship Quiz, if you want to do some reality testing.)
To Know Yourself: Learn and Grow
Some of us may have struggled for a long time in damaging, toxic relationships. Those relationships can sometimes damage our ability to trust, to feel good about ourselves, and to have healthy self-esteem. To overcome this, we should face the past, remember it, and accept it for what it is. It is not impossible to move on — often, with the help of evidence-based therapy, it’s easier to grow beyond your past. Your history isn’t the end.
“If you’ve been in a relationship that wound up being hurtful to you. . . there’s gonna be stuff, and that’s not that there’s anything horribly wrong with you. It’s part of the human experience.”
But it’s part of our responsibility to be aware of what issues we have. We have to work through it. While we can’t get rid of our experiences, we can become familiar with them, so they don’t destroy us.
You might feel apprehensive in relationships regardless. A therapist can help you learn to recognize your patterns and internal dialogues. Even if you feel anxiety, you can still be the way you want to be in a relationship.
Listening to Our Feelings
Once you recognize your patterns, you might think you can talk yourself out of your fear and anxiety. However, the critical thing to do is to analyze your emotions.
“With judgment comes the ability to disregard your intuition, unless you can explain it logically. The eagerness to judge and convict your feelings rather than honor them. And that is the other side of this coin that we all have access to this sort of subterranean part of our brain that is providing us with highly reliable intuitive intuition and information, and the work isn’t.”
In my experience as a Denver marriage counselor, I encountered three clients having problems with their relationships. They had a sense that their partners weren’t faithful, and were trying to figure out how to rebuild trust after infidelity. As hard as they tried, they could not feel safe with their partners despite working hard at it. As it turns out, all three of them were indeed not with trustworthy partners. Their intuition was trustworthy. Your feelings of fear and mistrust might be anxiety — or they might be an accurate, intuitive analysis.
In another instance, I’ve worked with people were cheating on their partner. Despite leaving no trace of infidelity, their partner still felt anxious, emotionally clingy, and suspicious. “Your partner doesn’t have all of the factual information, but they can feel the truth of the situation. They know what is happening even though they don’t know, they still feel the truth. You can’t hide that.”
Patterns in Relationships
It might feel discomfiting to think that all your feelings have a basis in truth. But again, you must analyze them —knowing the patterns in your relationships is a big part of the battle. For instance, your attachment styles can also play a part in how you form your relationship patterns.
However, it could be intuition if you’ve already done the work on yourself by asking questions like:
- Why did I choose a partner I was suspicious of?
- Is there something in my pattern around the partners I choose?
- Am I seeking a specific personality type?
Understand why a particular person attracts you. Knowing this can help lessen your anxiety and help you understand your patterns in relationships.
“It requires a lot of self-awareness to know that so that you can make informed choices based on what you know about yourself as opposed to what someone else is telling you.”
Therapy is a great way to help guide you on your personal growth work. With self-awareness and therapy, you can gain more clarity about yourself. Is something bad happening to you, or is it all your old stuff?
Trusting Yourself and Gaining Clarity
Another way of attaining clarity is by talking your problems out with a neutral third party, someone with no stake in what’s happening. Not someone close to you, like your mom or your best friend — someone genuinely neutral. They might have a completely different perspective.
The point of asking a third party is to borrow someone else’s brain to get a better read on a person or situation. For example, at Growing Self, we interview new therapists, counselors, or coaches as a team — multiple people compare notes and see if anyone has a gut feeling about the interviewee.
Building self-awareness involves work. Two exercises you can try in addition to talking to a third party are as follows:
- When you have an intuitive feeling about someone, flesh it out. If you listen to the emotion and examine it, you might find that it has a basis in factual information!
- Look back to moments when you knew something wasn’t right, didn’t listen to it, and the feeling turned out to be correct. What did it feel like at the time? Reexamining your history goes back to understanding your patterns and seeing what fits.
These feelings might not be conscious thoughts. They can manifest as dread or even physical, visceral sensations. Intuition can take many forms, so it’s vital to know what language your intuition speaks.
Signs of Intuition
Anxiety usually feels familiar, but intuition often seems to come from nowhere, unattached to anything. It typically means that there is a fully formed thought in your mind. Even dreams can be part of your intuition. While most dreams have no basis in reality, some might feel different and worth investigating.
“If it is an intuition and something trustworthy, when you do give it a voice, your intuition will make perfect sense.”
As always, analyze the feeling. See what feels different — intuition feels different from your usual anxiety. Have tools in place to help you sort out what you’re feeling: the strategies here can help you, but it would be best to find professional assistance. If you’d like to get involved in evidence based therapy or life coaching with one of the therapists at Growing Self Counseling and Coaching, get started by requesting a first, free consultation session.
I hope that this discussion around understanding the difference between anxiety and intuition helps you trust yourself. What part of this podcast did you connect and relate to the most? Or do you have any follow up questions for me? Feel free to share your thoughts by leaving a comment down below.
Lastly: If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast and pay it forward by sharing this with some you love who could benefit from hearing it!
All the best,
Listen & Subscribe to the Podcast
Trust Yourself
The Love, Happiness & Success Podcast with Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
Music Credits: James Parm, “I Know I Know I Know”
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Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby is the founder and clinical director of Growing Self. She is a licensed psychologist, a licensed marriage and family therapist, and a board-certified coach, as well as the author of “Exaholics: Breaking Your Addiction to Your Ex Love,” and the host of The Love, Happiness & Success Podcast.
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