Ep #404: Intuition vs. Wishful Thinking: How to Know Which Voice to Trust

This is Feminist Wellness, and I’m your host, Nurse Practitioner, somatics and nervous system nerd, and life coach Béa Victoria Albina. I’ll show you how to get unstuck, drop the anxiety, perfectionism, and codependency so you can live from your beautiful heart. Welcome, my love, let’s get started.

Hello, hello my love. I hope this finds you doing so well. So something people bring to me constantly in coaching, in my inbox, in breath work, in the, like, slightly unhinged voice memos that land at 11 at night is some version of this.

So I think I know what I want. I think I do. I believe maybe I do. But, like, also, I cannot tell if it's my intuition talking or if it's just what I wish were true. I cannot tell if my gut is telling me something real that I should follow or if I'm talking myself into the thing I already wanted or out of the thing that I'm scared of. And so rather than risk getting it wrong, I go to six people and I ask them what they think. I collect their opinions like a raccoon collecting bottle caps, and I end up exactly as lost as before, except now I am lost with a committee, which like at least, you know, company's lovely.

If this is you, my sweet little fennel frond, you are in precisely the right place Because today, we're getting into the difference between intuition and wishful thinking, which we have a whole entire module all about this in anchored because it's really important and because it keeps us up at night literally and figuratively. We're gonna talk about why most of us, especially those of us living in emotional outsourcing, cannot tell them apart in the exact moments we most need to and what to begin to actually do about that.

So quick grounding for anyone new around here. Hello. I love you. I'm glad you're here. Almost everything I teach lives underneath a pattern I call emotional outsourcing, which is the habitual pattern of sourcing your safety, your sense of belonging, and your worth from outside of yourself rather than from within and it runs through our codependent perfectionist and people pleasing habits. All of it. And one of the very first things to go very very quiet when you've lived in those patterns for years and years and years is your own inner knowing. Right?

The plain felt sense of yes and no that you were born with because you really were. All babies... I mean, listen, if you've ever met a baby, they sure know what they want. We had it and we slowly learned to stop consulting it, to stop trusting it, stop believing it. And so the belief running underneath all of it, the one that we're not saying out loud, but almost everyone's operating from, it sounds something like this.

You ready? My instincts are a liability. I have trusted my fool gut before and ended up somewhere awful. Therefore, the safest possible move, I think this is pretty logical. You ready? Never trust myself again. And to hand every read of every situation to whoever nearby seems calmer, surer, more put together than I feel. And listen, that belief didn't come from nowhere. If your reads kept getting overruled when you were small, if the grown ups treated your no like the beginning of a negotiation and your yes like the only acceptable answer, come on. Of course, you concluded your inner signal was faulty equipment. What else is it bear to do?

A lot of what you remember as your intuition steering you wrong was never your intuition at all. It was fear, the old kind. The kind that learned early that everything was a threat and that bracing was the only way through. And that fear is loud and certain and extremely convincing, which is exactly why I spent a whole episode on telling your true intuition apart from the voice of trauma way back in episode 252 on coming out of functional freeze. Here is what's actually happening in your body. And I wanna invite you if you're available and so desire to feel for this rather than think your way to it. Because the answer, it's never gonna arrive just from thinking.

Wishful thinking lives up in your head. It's the busy, caffeinated, buzzing back and forth between your thoughts and your feelings. And it often feels agitated, revved up, vibrating. It moves. It shifts up and down across a single afternoon. It wavers. There's like a forcing quality to it, a questioning quality. Like you're leaning your whole body against a door marked pull and wondering. Maybe I should push? Wishful thinking arrives with wondering and questioning and doubting in the same loop running at two in the afternoon again, slightly mutated at two in the morning. It's chaotic.

Intuition though. Let's take a sigh for intuition. Intuition feels like another thing entirely. Intuition is steady. It is calm in a way of something that does not need anything from you, that is not trying to win you over, that will go on saying the same thing whether or not you're ready to hear it.

Intuition does not escalate. It does not waver. It's the same steady message on a Monday and on Thursday and the following Tuesday unchanged. Almost boring in how consistent it is, like a house guest who's been sitting peacefully at your kitchen table for a week telling you the same true thing every time you wander in for a snack. While wishful thinking is the friend who just had three big espressos and one big idea, I need you to act on it this instant before the feeling wears off.

And here is why. So often, we cannot seem to tell these two apart in the moment we're most desperate to, my sweet cardamom pod. So when your nervous system's lit up, when you're braced and buzzing and running on the specific fumes of a woman who spent the day managing everyone's feelings except her own, you're not in your body. And so your body cannot hand you a clean read because the very channel intuition comes through is flooded. The receptors are clogged.

You're straining to feel for a quiet, steady signal in a body that's currently blaring a smoke alarm. So the move is never to think harder or pull more people. The move is to slow your butt down. Is to slow it all down. Slow your roll. Orient your nervous system first. And if you don't know what orienting the nervous system is, it's simply reminding the nervous system that you are in this time and place. Yep. Because being triggered, being activated, it's leaving this time and place energetically in your body. Right?

So we remind the mind body, hello. Hi. I'm in my room. I'm safe. I pay the rent here. I maybe even own this space. That's my blankie. That's my cat. This is my space. So you just look around slowly and you take it in. And you remind your nervous system. There's no lions here. There's not the nary a lion is to be found in this room. I'm looking around. No lions. No lions. You orient the nervous system. And then you do the work to regulate your nervous system. So maybe you like hand on heart and slow breathing. Maybe you like to squeeze one of your own hands in your other hand while breathing.

Find your feet, find the ground. Begin to ground yourself. Maybe you do that on your own. You co regulate with someone who feels safe. Someone settled enough.And that can be a plant. That can be an animal. That can be a crystal. That can be the energy of Pacha Mama or Earth Mother herself. But you co regulate with someone who feels safe.

Settled enough that the steady signal can actually reach you. If your whole system is running on empty and you're wondering why nothing feels clear, go back to Reclaiming Rest part 3 episode 373 because you cannot get a clean read off a fully depleted body. Right? I mean, I guess you could. But gosh, that seems much harder than it needs to be.

All of this is the entire reason. Well, not the entire reason. It's one of the core reasons of why I go on and on about somatic work. Body based practice, regulation, until you're all thoroughly sick of me. And that's because you cannot reason your way into trusting yourself.

It's not how it works. You build trust from the body up in small, ordinary moments by getting grounded, oriented, regulated enough to feel your yes and your no when nothing much is riding on it so that the reed is already in your hands when everything is riding on it and someone you love is really insisting that you move to Genovia and you're just not sure if it's the right choice.

So here's the one thing to actually try this week. Your homework, if you will. The next time you're tangled up, truly unable to tell whether it's your gut talking or your wanting talking, don't know what to do, do not make the call in that activated buzzing moment, because the read you get there will be pretty complicated. I don't want to call it worthless, but I do. So orient. Settle your body first even a little. Plant both feetses right flat on the floor as you are able. Let your exhale get longer than your inhale for a few slow row.

Let your eyes wander around the actual room you're in until your system clocks that you are safe and nothing is on fire. Then ask yourself the question again. And instead of chasing the answer around with your thoughts, notice where it lands in your body and what it actually feels like in there. And then the test that settles it. Ask the same question tomorrow and the day after.

Wishful thinking will have rewritten its story by Thursday. Louder one day, gone the next, arguing with itself the whole way. Intuition will be sitting right where you left it, saying the exact same solid, grounded, boring thing it said on Monday, calm as anything, not the least bit bothered that it took you three days to come back and believe it. Because intuition is not here to judge you. It's here to guide you.

Living without this read in your day to day life is expensive in a way nobody ever adds up for you. It's rewriting the same email 11-ty times because you cannot feel whether you actually wanna send it. It's lying awake rerunning a conversation not to understand it or grow or change, but to find out from the replay whether you're even allowed to feel the way you feel. It's rumination. It's saying yes with your entire mouth while your entire body says no and only catching it three weeks and one fresh resentment later. It's canceling the plans you made with yourself the second anyone else needs a thing, and it's years of that. A whole life run on everybody else's reading of your life.

My love, it is my work in this world to help folks just like you to start to see what's going on when they're living in emotional outsourcing and to support you to end emotional outsourcing in your life. Because I gotta testify living on the other side of my own codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing habits is really freaking great. And this is the work I do in all of my work.

If you wanna learn more, my book End Emotional Outsourcing is available wherever books are sold. Of course, would prefer if you get it at your local independent community or family owned bookstore. Kind of a huge fan of keeping money local. Right? Shop small. Or get it at your library. It's free there. I mean, get it for free. Why not? Right? It's a great book.

You can also if you've been listening to the show and you're like, you know what? I wanna take this to the next level. I wanna learn more directly from her, from someone who's been studying this, thinking about it, philosophizing about it for decades now. I'd love to have you in one of my courses. You can work with me in Anchored, which is my deep dive 6-month program, or in one of my 12-week shorter form courses. You can learn more at beatrizalbina.com/courses. Alright, my love. Thank you for being here.

Go do your homework. It's really good homework. I think it would be really, really helpful now in the short term and in the long term as those life questions come up and you want to be able to tap into you to know the next right step for you. The best way through is to ask your body. Alright, my beauty.

Thanks for being here. I love I love doing this with you. It's truly a delight. Let's do what we do. Gentle hand on your heart should you feel so moved.

And remember, you are safe. You are held. You are loved. And when one of us heals, we help heal the world. Do all my beauty. Much love. Ciao. Ciao. Talk to you soon.