How Intuition Becomes Overridden
Photo by Alexa Chernii
If you’ve been badly burned in past relationships, trusting your gut can feel damn near impossible.
Instead of intuition feeling like a steady inner compass, it might feel noisy, contradictory, or completely unreliable.
You followed your feelings in the past and it led you to pain and regret.
So when someone tells you to “just trust your intuition,” it can feel frustrating, invalidating, or even dangerous.
If that’s you, just know,
Your intuition isn’t broken.
You just haven’t yet learned how to experience it.
Anxiety & Intuition Can Feel Confusingly Similar...
In the previous article in this series, we explored how anxiety and intuition can create similar sensations, but come from very different internal states.
For many people, intuition doesn’t typically feel calm or clear because its signals have been muted, distorted, or drowned out over time.
So when you’re told to follow your gut—and you’ve never had a positive experience doing that—it can bring up discouragement instead of empowerment.
You might wonder:
- Did I lose my intuition?
- Was I ever intuitive at all?
When The Past Hijacks the Present
After enough relational wounds, your nervous system starts using those past experiences to interpret current situations.
This means:
- Silence feels like abandonment
- Space feels like rejection
- Uncertainty feels dangerous
Not because something is wrong—but because something was wrong before. And you want to prevent that from repeating, and protect yourself from anything else that could go wrong.
You may have:
- Ignored red flags to keep the peace
- Gaslit yourself into staying
- Trusted someone who betrayed you
- Stayed in uncertainty for far too long
- Lost years hoping things would change
After enough of this, your system stops knowing which signals to trust.
Why You Might Feel Disconnected from Your Gut
Difficulty sensing or trusting intuition is often linked to:
- Trauma
- Relational betrayal
- Dissociation
- Neurodivergence
- Chronic emotional invalidation
From a neuroscience perspective, your insula (insular cortex)—the part of the brain responsible for tracking internal bodily signals – may be underactive.
If the insula is underactive, you may struggle to notice or trust sensations like gut feelings, instincts, or emotional cues.
Important note:
Underactive does not mean defective.
Disconnecting from your body’s signals was not a flaw — it was an adaptation to an environment that felt unsafe or unpredictable.
And this capacity can be strengthened.
How Early Conditioning Blurs Intuition
For many people, intuition became distorted early in life.
You may have grown up in:
- An authoritarian household
- Strict religious or patriarchal systems
- Environments where blind obedience was rewarded and questioning was punished
You were taught—directly or indirectly—that:
- Your perceptions couldn’t be trusted
- Your body was wrong or sinful
- Your instincts were dramatic or inconvenient
To stay connected and safe, you learned to override yourself.
Signals like:
- Something feels off
- I don’t feel safe here
- This doesn’t align for me
Were dismissed in favor of someone else’s authority, certainty, or version of reality.
As an adult, this often shows up as relationships where someone else with strong convictions holds leverage over you —and you’re unsure what you’re allowed to feel, say, or need.
Or how much space you’re allowed to take up.
Your Intuition Isn't Gone - It's Been Overridden
If you feel disconnected from your gut, unsure of your signals, or afraid to trust yourself, please know:
Your intuition hasn’t disappeared or been taken from you.
It’s been overridden by fear, conditioning, and survival strategies that once kept you safe.
But you’re shifting that by slowing down.
You’re learning new ways to stay attuned with your inner state – rebuilding trust from the inside out.
That’s hella recalibration.
Give yourself some grace for your imperfections and for sticking with the process.
What's Next in the Series
In the next blog, we’ll explore why intuition gets overridden even when we sense it clearly—especially when fantasy and manifestation are involved.
See ya there xo.
Ready For the Next Step?
If you found this helpful, share it with a friend who might need it too.
And if you’re craving more insights and tools around enhancing your relationships and emotional intelligence, be sure to subscribe to my newsletters and YouTube channel for a little more love and clarity.
* A quick note: Coming from my own lived experiences & the clients I most often work with, you’ll often hear me use heteronormative pronouns. That said, my coaching & content are meant to be inclusive & supportive of people of all gender identities & orientations.
No matter how you identify, you are welcome here.
Got a relationship question?
Drop it here & subscribe to my Youtube channel so you don't miss the reply. (Your name and any identifying information will always be kept confidential).
