How You Lost Your Sixth Sense

Most people think they don't have a sixth sense, but that's wrong. You do have it. You've always had it. The problem is you learned since you were a little kid to shut it down the moment it woke up and started speaking to you. Your sixth sense refers to intuition. And it's super important that you have access to this. The loss of your intuition is a huge reason why you're still stuck in trauma-driven patterns. So, here's an example. You're sitting across from someone, maybe a new friend, maybe someone you're dating, and something feels, you know, off. You can't name it. There's nothing obviously wrong. They're saying all the right things, but there's this flicker inside you, almost like a signal trying to come through on a bad radio frequency. And you do what you've always done. You push it down. You tell yourself, "You're overthinking. Don't blow it. If you do this, you'll end up alone. So you smile, you stay. You act very kind and polite. And then three months later, 6 months later, when everything falls apart, you say the thing that so many of us have said, "I knew it. I knew something was wrong. I felt it that very first day. So what happened? Why didn't you listen? " That's what I want to unpack with you because I think a lot of people walk around believing they just don't have good instincts that they weren't born with that sixth sense other people seem to have. But that's almost never what's actually going on. What's really going on is that you learned systematically over years to ignore the one thing that was trying to protect you. And I want to walk through exactly how that happens because once you can see it, it starts to lose its grip. Okay, so the first thing, and this is the big one, is that you learn to override your own signals the moment they show up. It probably started in childhood. So maybe somebody in your family did something that scared you, really scared you, and you told an adult and they said, "Oh, that's just how they are. Stop being such a worry wart. " or they even got angry at you like you're the one creating trouble. So you learned what I felt doesn't matter and then you carry that into adult life and the pattern keeps happening. So a friend will tell you a story about why they had to cancel a trip that you'd planned with them but the details don't really add up. little small bits of information keep shifting and the timelines don't match and something in you says this person is lying to me but you override it because you don't want to be paranoid. the kind of person who doesn't trust their friends and honestly you don't trust your own suspicion. So, you let it go. And then 6 months later when it comes out that they weren't sick that weekend after all. They just got a better offer from someone else. And actually, that wasn't the first time they'd done that. And actually, they'd been telling other people things about you that aren't true. And you're sitting there thinking, "I knew. I knew before I ever booked the flights. " And this is probably just like what has happened to you dozens of times when your intuition was flashing at you. And every single time you told yourself, "Ah, it's probably just me. " And you went ahead and silenced your intuition and opened the door to more trouble in your life. And here's what makes this so insidious. It feels like you're being mature. reasonable or giving people the benefit of the doubt or not jumping to conclusions. Our culture actually rewards this. People call it being easygoing or lowmaintenance. But there's a massive difference between genuine generosity and the compulsive habit of explaining away every signal your body sends you. And over time, this becomes a loop where you notice, you override, you regret later. You do this over and over until the whole thing collapses. The job, the friendship, the relationship, and you look back and every sign was there. Have you had this happen? you saw them. You just never gave yourself permission to be honest. That's not a failure of intuition. That's a failure of honesty. And the really painful part is most people don't even realize they're doing it. It just feels like, you know, how life works, how you have to be if you want to keep people in your life. And by the way, this incapacity to recognize your honest feelings or express them. This is one of the self-defeating behaviors that so many of us struggle with, especially if we had trauma. I have a list of common self-defeating behaviors that many people have found helpful here. And it's free. You can download it to reflect on. It doesn't diagnose you, but it lists things that you might notice might be

your priorities for your next steps in healing. You can download it below this video. I'll put a link in the first line of the description section. Now, the second way you lost your six sense, and this one is sneaky, is chronic stress. When you're amped up all the time or freaked out, it drowns out the subtle signals. You can think of it this way. Intuition is quiet. It's like a shift in the air. It's so subtle you'd miss it if you weren't still inside. But when your nervous system is in overdrive, when you're living in that state of constant stress, constant vigilance, constant problem solving, everything in there is like loud. Everything feels urgent and your brain is spinning through worst case scenarios and running threat assessments on every interaction. And in all that noise, you're never still. So people will say, "I can't tell the difference between anxiety and instinct. " And yeah, that's exactly right. When your system is flooded, they feel the same. Both produce that tight feeling in your chest, that sense that something is wrong. But one is based on real information that you're picking up from the environment, and the other is your nervous system just firing away because it's been firing away for 20 years. And if you're exhausted by every small decision, that's not because you're bad at decisions necessarily. It's because without access to your instincts, every decision feels like something terrible and unpredictable could happen. That has happened, hasn't it? With some of your decisions, you some of the serious ones even and things didn't turn out well. But now your nervous system reacts like every choice that you make could be the one that ruins everything. All right. So third, and I see this so much, is that overthinking overrides your instincts. Now, intuition is fast. It's a flash. It shows up as a first impression, a gut hit, a feeling that you get in the first 3 seconds. But if you've learned not to trust yourself, what do you do? You immediately start analyzing. You replay the conversation word by word, round and round. You examine every possible interpretation. You build a case for and against. And somewhere in all the mental churning, the original signal, the one that came in clear and fast, gets buried. It's gone now. And now you're just lost in your own head. And the cruel irony of this is that the overthinking feels like you're being responsible. It careful, doing due diligence, being fair. But what's actually happening is you're thinking your way out of what you already know. You knew the first impression was right, but you talked yourself out of it because that's what you've, you know, taught yourself to do. All right. Fourth, and this is an important one, is emotional intensity can masquerade as intuition. This trips people up because strong emotions feel true. When you feel something intensely, fear, attraction, anger, uh a really strong pull towards someone, it can produce this sense of certainty. Like you just know, but intensity is not the same as clarity. And I want to say that again, intensity is not clarity. Sometimes what feels like a deep soul connection with somebody, it's actually just your nervous system recognizing a familiar pattern and not a good one for that matter. Sometimes what feels like a strong gut feeling about someone is actually insecurity or old fear just kind of standing there in a costume. So if you find yourself feeling instantly certain about people you barely know or making big decisions based on a wave of emotion, it's worth just pausing a minute. Real intuition tends to be subtler and calmer than you'd expect. It's more like a knowing than a feeling. And the really intense stuff that might come up in you, that's usually something else. I have a free course. It's called the daily practice. And I'll put a link to that in the second line of the description section below this video. The daily practice is a twin set of techniques that allowed me to get my intuition back and the emotions and the intense thoughts have now with the daily practice somewhere to go. So with pen and paper, a little bit of stillness, I learned to actually hear myself again and then my whole life changed. So this might help you too. I encourage you to give it a try. It's free. Okay. The fifth thing, and this is really common for people who grew up in unpredictable environments, hypervigilance. That can be mistaken for intuition. Now, if you grew up in a home where the mood could change in an instant, where you had to constantly read the room to stay safe

read minds, talk about six sense. Well, you probably developed a very sharp ability to detect shifts in people's energy. And you can walk into a room and instantly know who's angry, who's anxious, who's about to blow. And that feeling feels like intuition. It feels like a superpower really. And it can be, but it's not intuition. It's surveillance. It's your nervous system on permanent high alert, scanning for threats. And the problem with this is that it doesn't turn off and you end up reading danger into just neutral situations. Someone's quiet and you immediately think they're angry at you. Someone doesn't text you back and you start building a whole story in your mind about what you did wrong. And here's the really disorienting part. When your life starts to finally calm down, when you're actually in a safe environment, the absence of that constant scanning can feel like you've lost something, like your edge is gone. But what's actually happening is your system is starting to stand down and you're not used to what peace feels like. That's not losing intuition. That's not what it is. That's the beginning of finding it. All right. The sixth thing, and this one might seem obvious, but it matters, is constant distraction because it weakens your awareness. Intuition relies on noticing subtle patterns. the slight shift in someone's tone, the thing they didn't say, the way your body responds when you walk into a room. But when your attention is constantly fractured, when you're scrolling, multitasking, numbing out, these signals can't get through. They need a little bit of quiet, space. And then you look back and you think, "Ah, how did I miss that? It was so obvious. " Well, you missed it because you were too overwhelmed and distracted to receive the message. So, here's what I want you to take away from all this. You probably did not lose your intuition. What you lost was confidence in your own perception or you lost the that little internal space where intuition can actually be heard. And that's not a permanent condition. That's something that gets damaged. Yes. And it's something that you can rebuild. So, remember that person at the beginning of this video? You know, somebody sitting across from you and you're feeling the flicker of a red flag and you push it down. That flicker was your intuition. It was working. You just didn't trust it yet. If you like this video, I've got one that you're going to love right here, and I'll see you very soon. If you grow up with childhood trauma, you might have ended up with a tendency to overshare and then you might regret it or feel shame or actually put your safety in jeopardy.