“Trust your gut.” This familiar advice reminds us to rely on a precious source of wisdom we all possess. “Gut sense” isn’t based on logic or an objective weighing of the facts, but rather what we feel to be right or true in a given situation. It results from living a life and storing lots of experience along the way. Intuition, instinct, hunch, inkling are words we use to capture moments in which all that experience comes together in a conclusion that just feels right. This coming together is often thought of as the intersection of heart and mind. It can be a channel into who we most deeply are and a link to the spiritual.
People who rely on logic alone are usually encouraged to become more familiar with their gut sense of things and put more faith in it. Many a therapy hour has been devoted to these goals. Those of us who practice body–based therapies place a special premium on being able to access the way experiences feel in the body. We rely on these feelings as a gateway to self–knowledge and change.
So it’s simple, right? Just go with your gut. Not so fast! What about when your gut tells you to eat an entire cake? Or to reject food as the enemy? What if it tells you to trust no one, or that you can only be loved if you’re perfect?
Confused now? Time for an important distinction: Gut feelings don’t guarantee a direct line to objective truth. What they give you is an absolutely accurate reading on what feels true to you in the moment. If the accumulated experiences that give rise to your gut sense have been basically grounded in a larger–consensus reality, what your gut tells you is likely to be a good guide for reading the world around you and your relationship to it. For instance, you instinctively lower your guard when entering a brightly lit street where people are going about their business, while just as instinctively you become wary on a street that’s dark and sparsely trafficked. You have a sense something is off when a person’s body language doesn’t match their words. Or you just “click” with somebody, subliminally reading a host of cues that tell you: “This is my kind of person.”
Bur we all have characteristic blind spots when it comes to the trustworthiness of what our guts are telling us. These blind spots usually come from early experiences, especially in our families, which gave us a distorted picture of ourselves or how things are in the wider world. For instance, if you were repeatedly let down, your instincts may tell you never to trust what other people promise. Or, if criticism was used as a weapon in your family, your instinct may be that even constructive criticism is really an attempt to hurt or undermine you. These are examples of a kind of distortion known as overgeneralizing from your personal experience: You unconsciously use what happened in your family as a guide to the entire universe.
In another kind of distortion, you can develop a faulty filter for incoming information. For example, if everyone pretended nothing was going on when Dad arrived home rip roaring drunk, you probably learned not to be aware of alcoholic signals (a misperception known as denial). Or, if abusive language was tolerated without comment in your family, you may not register such talk as inappropriate in others. You could be drawn into relationships in which you are demeaned or disrespected with no alarms going off to warn you: “Get out of here!”
Either kind of distortion, overgeneralizing or faulty filters, causes your predictions and judgments to be off base in certain areas. Your gut sense feels completely true but leads you in the wrong direction. This can sound like pretty discouraging information. You’re supposed to be able to trust your instincts, but it turns out your instincts are unreliable? What are you supposed to do? First of all, what not to do: Do not fall into all–or–nothing thinking! Your experiences may have distorted your gut sense about some things, but certainly not about all things.
All of us need to learn what our characteristic blind spots or distortions are. You can learn about yours in any safe situation that provides you with reliable feedback about your instincts. This might be therapy, a support group, friends, a partner, work colleagues or others from whom you can get a reality check. Reality checks don’t necessarily make long–held distortions disappear. But they can help us learn when to take our gut reactions with a large grain of salt—and conversely, when to relax into trusting them as we were meant to do!
