Learning to Listen to My Inner Bodyguard

Did you know that the word intuition means to guard or protect? I just learned that in The Gift of Fear, by Gavin De Becker. If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend that you do. Thanks to De Becker, I can no longer be in denial about my disregard for personal safety.

De Becker says that intuition is always in response to something. That doesn’t mean that we will always make the correct prediction, but we owe it to ourselves to explore what that something is rather than trying to explain away or dismiss our fear.

I’m trying to pay closer attention whenever I get anxious. I’m trying to honor my fear. But I’m having trouble figuring out what my anxiety means because I am never sure what is intuition-based fear and what is pathologically-based fear, since I have an anxiety disorder.

In my relationships, not hearing from the guy felt like life or death. I always thought it meant I was just really insecure. And sometimes that’s what it was. But sometimes it was because that’s how the guy felt about me. And because of the whole hyperempath thing, I couldn’t tell the difference between his fear of separation and my own.

Or sometimes it meant they were up to no good. But there’s always that doubt. Maybe I’m just being paranoid. And it’s not the kind of thing that is easy to confirm. It’s not like they’re going to admit that they’re doing something that would piss me off when they’re not around. But in retrospect, they usually were.

I also have a hard time saying no to any request. De Becker says that you should be wary of the stranger who ignores the word no. A guy who isn’t trying to hurt you would totally understand why you would not let a complete stranger into your house to use your phone.

And yet, back when I was in grad school and the UPS guy asked me if he could use my phone, I said yes. I wanted to say no, but it seemed rude. Maybe he would be offended. Luckily, nothing bad happened. But it’s still hard to forgive myself for putting myself at risk like that. And it’s hard to imagine how I will be able to overcome this deeply ingrained impulse to give people what they want.

It’s hard to trust my instincts because I want to believe that other people are trustworthy. I don’t want to live in a world where I have to be worrying all the time that people may be trying to hurt me. Although De Becker provides some pretty convincing stats for why I should be worried.

In another blog post, I talked about how I am trying to say yes to what I want and no to what I don’t want. Maybe I need to do the same thing with trust. If I have to choose between trusting my instincts and trusting another person, I need to choose me.

I need to let my intuition do its job.