Intuition Saved My Life
Welcome to Sacred Musings, a space where I share reflections from the heart on love, life, caregiving, and the lessons that shape us into who we are. My hope is that these words bring comfort, perspective, and inspiration to anyone walking their own path of healing and growth.
There was a time in my life when I did not trust myself.
When you grow up in an environment where abuse and gaslighting are present, your sense of reality becomes distorted. When you are sexually abused as a child, the nervous system does what it must to survive. In my case, I dissociated. I went into a trance-like state. I do not remember everything that happened that day, and over the years I have come to understand that incomplete memory is not weakness. It is protection. But what lingered long after the trauma was something deeper. I stopped trusting my own perception.
And when you cannot trust your perception, it becomes difficult to trust your decisions. When you cannot trust your decisions, it becomes difficult to trust your life. As a child I experienced episodes that I later learned were likely sleep paralysis. At the time I did not have language for it. I only knew that my body would freeze while my awareness sharpened. Those experiences made me curious about the inner world about intuition, awareness, and perception. By the time I was a teenager, I began searching for spiritual systems that could help me understand what I was experiencing. I explored churches and Afrocentric traditions and eventually spent years studying earth-based spiritual practices. At the time, I believed I was developing spiritual abilities.
Looking back now, I understand something different. What I was really developing was trust in my own mind. Over time I began creating what I once called “recipes” structured actions and intentional steps that helped me navigate difficult circumstances. Sometimes that meant writing a carefully worded letter. Sometimes it meant making a firm decision about a relationship. Sometimes it meant stepping back and observing patterns before acting.
Occasionally those efforts coincided with meaningful outcomes. Debts were resolved. Relationships that were unstable eventually collapsed. Situations that felt chaotic began to make sense. For a long time I interpreted those outcomes through a spiritual lens. Today I see them more clearly. Those actions were not about controlling fate. They were about reclaiming agency. When your power has been taken from you, structured action becomes medicine. Taking deliberate steps setting boundaries, making decisions, refusing manipulation moves you from being a passive victim of circumstances to being an active participant in your own life. That shift changed everything for me. One boundary I developed early on was refusing to manipulate other people’s will. Over the years I occasionally encountered individuals who wanted help “keeping” a lover or forcing someone to return to a relationship. I always declined unless both people were present and willing. Love without consent is not love. It is control.
Maintaining that boundary became part of my integrity. What I am most proud of is not any particular outcome. It is that I learned to trust myself again. My intuition is not mystical power. It is highly developed pattern recognition. It is the ability to read situations carefully, notice inconsistencies, and anticipate consequences before they unfold. It is also the result of surviving difficult experiences and learning to respond rather than collapse. Hospice nursing reinforced something I had already begun to understand: as long as a person is alive, there is always a chance. A chance to change direction. A chance to repair something broken. A chance to grow. A chance to choose differently.
Intuition, in my life, has never been about predicting the future. It has been about sensing when something is misaligned and having the courage to act. That ability did not come from magic. It came from surviving, learning, and refusing to give up on myself. And that is something I am proud of.
By Kimberly!
