258: How To Trust Yourself Again
Okay, so this is a big one. I did a reel on IG about this, and I know it resonated with a lot of you. How can you tell the difference between anxiety and intuition? How can you decipher what is a real threat that you need to do something versus anxiety that’s making you think you need to do something about it?
Before I dive into a few ways you can learn to trust yourself again, I want to share a story that I experienced after Aria died. So as many of you know, Aria died in the night, and I didn’t find her until morning. I had absolutely no idea. No intuitive hint. A nudge telling me to go check on her.
I had a friend not too long after who was sharing her story of her child where there was something wrong and she said she just felt like she needed to go check on her and good thing she did because then her baby didn’t die. Her baby was okay. She said she felt like it was God nudging her to go check on her baby.
And I get that. In her story that gives her a lot of comfort and I could believe that too that it wasn’t her baby's time to go, and so God intervened and nudged her to go check on her.
But, where does that leave me? First, my thoughts were, how come, God, didn’t nudge me to go check on Aria? How come I didn’t get that knowing? It felt so unfair. And then in my life, if I was having a thought and I couldn’t tell if it was an anxious thought or an intuitive, I should listen to this kind of thought, I would wonder, is this God nudging me to go check on them, because if I check on them it will prevent them from dying?
It's so messed up, but I found that many of you have experienced the same thing as me, where you can’t tell the difference, and it’s hard to trust yourself. It’s hard to trust what you are experiencing is real, and it’s hard to trust that you will know how to make the right decisions and choices for your child if you have others who are in your care. When my mind was so crazy and my thoughts would race and I would see things that weren’t happening, it was completely confusing.
So, I wanted to share some thoughts with you here.
First, just a way to decipher the difference between something that is anxiety and something that is intuition.
Here are a few descriptions of what anxiety is like anxiety is urgent, panicky, loud, and big, it demands all your attention, and it’s usually forward-focused, about something in the future. Anxiety can scramble your brain, not make you think clearly. In fact, for me when I’ve been super anxious, it’s like a fog comes over my brain and I can’t think straight. These thoughts that come up can be repetitive, ruminative, and just destroy your ability to function.
Intuition, on the other hand, is calm. Quiet. It’s not urgent, it’s not suddenly super important. It’s calm and when it comes you know.
I do think that it can be very hard to distinguish between these two, because when you haven’t been able to trust yourself you’re always questioning, okay this feels like intuition, but now I’m wondering if it’s anxiety.
Because for me, if it’s anxiety, I don’t want to answer the call. Like if I’m super anxious and I need to go check on my children like I have had to in the past, say this thought pops into my head, I should go check on the kids while they are sleeping, and then I think no, they are completely fine, I don’t need to go check on them. And then I thought, but what if this is my intuition or God’s nudge telling me that I should because then I will save a kid from dying?
Wow, just sharing that it’s amazing how mixed up and chaotic our minds can get.
One thing I’ve done in the past is check in with my husband Justin. I will ask him, is this an anxious thought? Or I ask him, is this actually something I need to be worried about?
But here are the beautiful parts I want to share. It’s not that your mind isn’t working, or that it’s messed up. Your mind is working perfectly fine. The parts are working fine. It’s just that because of the way your mind is programmed, sometimes information comes in and it gets jammed in there. And then the mind is super hypervigilant, stuck in this state. Believing that it’s happening all the time.
So think of there’s this gunk that got stuck in the mind and the way the mind has been processing information. It’s almost like there’s a lens of anxiety put over the unconscious mind that’s constantly scanning for danger. It’s not that your mind is broken, this is exactly what it's supposed to do. This is what the mind does, in fact, it’s the number one prime directive. That mind would scan for danger to protect. But when data from the outside came in for whatever reason, like your child dying, and the data got jammed in the way the mind was reading the information, then
So then from this perspective, let’s think together, about how when the mind has this lens of anxiety on it, it can be very hard to tell the difference between intuition and anxiety.
For example, say you have a lady friend, say her name is Jane, over, and then a guy friend say his name is Mark, comes over, and while he’s there, you’re chatting, and Jane seems to be acting very strangely and oddly. She’s snapping at him and seems to be so angry at him and you can’t figure out why. Finally, Mark looks a little bewildered and leaves. And when Mark leaves, you ask Jane, wow Jane, what was the deal? Mark is such a nice guy, why were you treating him that way? And Jane says, I don’t know, he gave me the creeps. I really didn’t like him. He just seemed off.
For our example, let’s think, that there was nothing wrong with Mark. Mark was a perfectly nice guy, and he was just visiting with them. But what happened was that Jane had something terrible happen to her when she was younger by someone who has a voice that sounded similar to Marks. She isn’t even consciously aware of this, but her mind is so amazing, that it picked up on that similarity and showed her that there was danger and she should be aware and stay away.
So, here’s the thing. When trauma and anxiety are clouding our experiences, yes it’s hard to trust our intuition, because the trauma is going to override any intuition. You might say, I know that this person has something off about them, but it might be because unconsciously, they are similar to something else that was a bad experience.
When those gunk pieces that got stuck inside can get cleared, that’s when that lens of anxiety can be taken off, and your unconscious is no longer looking through that lens, but through a lens of clarity, and then it’s easier to tell the difference between real and imagined threat.
When the gunk that got stuck in the way the mind was processing information gets cleared, then anxiety disappears and you’re left with more clarity, more energy, and more capacity to notice intuition and listen to it.
For example, in the story of Jane and Mark, once the gunk is cleared, then there’s no more being angry at Mark for no reason. It just doesn’t happen, because the unconscious isn’t reading Mark as a threat. It’s cleared out, and now Jane can clearly see that he isn’t a threat, she can treat him kindly, and he is different from the person that harmed her in the past.
Is this all making sense? I’m doing my best to explain something that’s on the one hand very complicated, and on the other hand very very simple.
We tend to make things way more complicated than they need to be, and I’m trying to simplify and make it very easy to understand, so I hope I’m accomplishing what I’m trying to do here.
The last question you might be asking is, well how in the world do you clear the gunk from your unconscious mind, if I don’t have any control over it, how do I get rid of it?
The quickest, easiest, and most effective way I’ve found so far is with the Rapid Resolution work I’ve been doing. It works with your mind consciously and unconsciously and helps you to be able to clear the anxiety lens clouding your mind so that you can see clearly and your mind is free of all the preoccupation.
I do this in 1:1 sessions, if you’re interested in 1:1’s you can send me a message at hello@meganhilluka.com and we can chat if it’s a good fit for you, or this September inside of Grieving Moms Haven, I going through a program I’m calling Be Anxiety Free. So we’ll meet on a live call once a week, and I teach you everything I know about anxiety, how the mind processes information, how to clear the gunk, and once all the gunk is cleared, it’s so much easier to trust what you are thinking, or feeling, because that stuff doesn’t even show up, and you have more energy because the mind isn’t so preoccupied with trying to protect you from every threat around you.
For right now, you can join Grieving Moms Haven for your first 2 weeks free, I don’t know how long this offer will last. I changed things up, so 2 weeks free is available as long as I decide to keep going with it. If you go to www.grievingmomshaven.com you can join there, and then join us for the month of September to Be Anxiety Free and finally feel like you can trust yourself again.
Have you felt anxiety after your child died?
The racing mind, unable to sleep, waiting for the next bad thing to happen, unable to breathe, panicky kind of anxiety, whole body riddled with anxiety?
Watch my free video on anxiety and grief below!
So that you can think clearly, feel calm in your body, and live your life without the chains of anxiety.
