A Coping Mechanism from the 4-year-old: When My Truth Made Grown-Ups Uncomfortable

Some of us don’t struggle with intuition because we lack it — we struggle because, somewhere along the way, we were trained to doubt it.

When your gut sense was met with dismissal, denial, or emotional discomfort by those you relied on for love, something quietly rewired: survival over self-trust. You stopped saying what you felt. You stopped trusting what you saw. You learned that clarity could cost you connection.

This blog is for the silenced intuitive — the one who second-guesses everything, not because they’re indecisive, but because they once had to trade their truth for belonging. Let’s take a gentle look at what really lies beneath “I don’t trust my gut” … and how to come back to the wisdom that never left you.

“I Just Don’t Trust My Gut”: How Emotional Survival Masks Itself as Self-Doubt

The Personality We Think We Have

🟢 "I’m just indecisive. I overthink everything. I can’t trust my gut."
You see yourself as someone who second-guesses, who doesn’t “just know” like others seem to. Maybe you feel insecure, overly analytical, confused — or like your instincts must be wrong because they don’t match what others remember, say, or want to be true.

But what if you weren’t born this way? What if your clarity was trained out of you… because it made others uncomfortable?

What It Looks Like

The Silenced Intuitive:

• Doesn’t trust their feelings, even when strong.

• Seeks outside confirmation before making decisions.

• Dismisses discomfort as overreacting or being “too sensitive.”

• Believes other people’s versions of the past over their own emotional memory.

You believe your uncertainty is a flaw. You tell yourself you’re not intuitive, not insightful, and you can’t trust your inner knowing. But what’s actually happened is this:

Your true knowing got buried under the need to stay safe, loved, and acceptable in an era where a child’s wisdom was denied.

Why It’s Not Really Your Personality

This is not indecisiveness or over-sensitivity. This is adaptation — a powerful, intelligent, and painful reshaping of your inner compass.

As a child, you learned:

• That telling the truth of how things felt might upset someone you loved.

• That what you knew in your body was often contradicted by what was said in your family.

• That sensing sadness, anger, or tension in a parent meant you were wrong — because they smiled and said everything was fine.

So, you stopped trusting your body. You stopped naming what you saw. You started believing that your intuition was the problem — not the unspoken energy in the room. Your inner compass didn’t break. It was overridden by survival instincts.

What to Do Instead

Here’s how to start rebuilding trust in your deepest truth:

✅ Validate your emotional memories. Even if no one else remembers it that way, your feelings were real. They still are.

✅ Distinguish intuition from inherited narrative. Ask, is this what I believe — or what I was taught to believe?

✅ Reclaim your right to sense things. Not everything has to be explained, proven, or agreed with. Your body holds wisdom, not evidence.

✅ Speak your truth — gently. It’s okay to say, “That’s not how I experienced it.” That’s not betrayal. That’s belonging to yourself.

✅ Practise being “too much.” Your emotional awareness is a gift, not a threat. Let it speak — even if it shakes at first.

✅ Build safety around honesty. With trusted people, start sharing what you feel without needing to justify it. Let your truth exist without defence.

💌 Your Inner Compass Still Works

You weren’t wrong.
You weren’t too sensitive.
You weren’t imagining it.

You were learning how to survive in an environment that didn’t honour your knowing — and that’s not a personality flaw. That’s adaptation. But the truth you tucked away is still alive in you. It’s waiting for your permission to reawaken — not to prove anything, but simply to guide you home.

So, when your gut speaks next, even in whispers, try this: Pause. Listen. Believe it. And if that still feels scary — breathe some more. It’s okay.

☕ And remember, every time you honour your own knowing, no matter how small — you earn a stamp on your Life Café Loyalty Card. Self-trust is a practice. And today, you showed up for it.