Why It Might Be Hard To Trust Your Gut
Written by: Wendy J Olson, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Nowadays you so often hear, ‘Just trust your gut!’ I don’t know about you guys, but I was NEVER taught that growing up. It seems like it should’ve been a day one assignment.
Instead, we were told to not trust our instinct, be polite, be nice, be agreeable. Everyone loves an agreeable woman!.
If you grew up in a religious background as I did, it was hammered into you that your “flesh” was not to be trusted. And in some religious circles, it still is.
Isn’t it such a shame that we have these perfect lie detectors built into our bodies, but our entire lives we’re told to tell them to basically, ‘Shut up!’
Now we’re in that thing called mid-life and we can’t seem to figure out how to get back to the place where we can learn to trust our gut, let alone trust it, period.
That’s where trauma-informed recovery and healing come in. I see this all the time as a healing coach, especially with women, but especially with women who have survived severe trauma.
With my nonprofit, Grit Plus Gumption Farmstead, we serve women survivors of domestic violence and sexual exploitation. Can you imagine how hard it is to trust your body after surviving something like that? And yet, it IS possible.
One of the first steps on the road to healing is getting back into your body. You’ve dissociated and removed yourself from your body because harm was done to your body. It was no longer safe to stay in that place, so you left it. Makes sense.
Now the work is getting back into it.
How does one metaphorically, but also psychology get back into their body? Activities like meditation and yoga are always helpful. Grounding practices that make you aware of your body in space, and trauma therapy are all great avenues. Even just mindfulness, knowing and realizing when you are escaping your body in times of stress is extremely helpful and shows tremendous progress.
The point is that it takes time. It cannot be rushed. Healing is a process with no endpoint in sight. We are always “healing,” but never “healed.” It’s a step by step process, and yes, it gets easier with time. Symptoms subside, but there’s always a chance for re-traumatization, and being triggered is a daily reality. What we decide to do with our healing, and what we decide to keep doing is all we can control.
It’s not a fun place to be, this place of powerlessness. But little by little we can gain ground back, taking ourselves back to the place where we once were, where we once belonged, and figure out who we were meant to be before the harm.
You can heal. Keep doing the work. Don’t worry about the endpoint.
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Wendy J Olson, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Wendy J Olson is a healing coach, founder, and president of Grit Plus Gumption Farmstead. Wendy believes in the power of stories to change and shape people's lives. She walks with women through their stories of past hurts and traumas and guides them to find their own freedom and healing. Through Grit plus Gumption, she serves survivors of sexual exploitation and domestic violence. Having applied all she teaches to her own life as a survivor herself, she is able to guide women with kindness and grace, showing them there is always more freedom to be had in one’s life. She believes everyone has a story, and even if that story is really hard, it doesn't mean the rest of the story has to be.
