Learn to Trust Your Uncanny Intuition

Some of us Were Forged to See What Others Can't. Use It.

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I put a post on my socials over the weekend that has gotten a lot of positive feedback, and I want to share it here as well, with some additional commentary, because it’s taken me my entire life to start figuring it out, and I think it’s important.

People who grew up in volatile or unsafe homes (or even unsafe external environments outside the home) tend to be significantly better than normies at identifying shifts in the zeitgeist, patterns predicting disruptive change, and untrustworthy people and situations.

Why?

Because their nervous systems were forced to scan for danger 24/7, see it coming, and adapt. Usually before they had the cognitive resources to even identify what they were doing. It’s not cognitive. It’s limbic. It’s beneath the level of conscious processing. It’s a rare vestigial trauma adaptation that has surprisingly useful upsides.

Those of us who have an aptitude for this can’t explain how it works. We can instantly read a room. We know whether a person is “good” or not seconds after meeting them. We get vibes warning us to get out of situations or letting us know when to proceed. We sense the inherent “truthfulness” of a thing, are hard to lie to, and smell BS from a mile away.

But it all just feels like “intuition” to us, so when we say what we’re feeling, people tend to ask, “How can you even say that? What are you basing that on?”

Homie, if I could tell you that, I’d package it and sell it as expensive consulting services.

Instead, the best I can do is point to my track record of getting things right, then hope you don’t think I’m just bragging when I do it.

When I was younger, I didn’t know what to make of it at all. Sometimes I’d even feel bad for making snap judgments that felt so definitive without giving people a chance to prove themselves. And I was slow to notice certain things — the problems with the now-disgraced Legionaries of Christ, for example, which it took me a couple of years of heavy involvement to actually begin to see. But even there, my intuition was primarily based on the individuals within the group that I interacted with initially, and they were people of good character. They were the relatable meat suit worn as human camouflage by the demonic predator who founded that order, and it worked on a lot of us. Threw off the scent. I extended the benefit of the doubt to others in the organization as an extension of the trust I gave to those I first came into contact with who deserved it.

But the more experiences of this kind I had, the faster I started to see the warning signs. I got involved with the Legion at 15. I exited at 19. I’ve literally had people tell me that my time with them is indicative of why my judgment at midlife should not be trusted, to which I respond: I was a literal child, desperate for father figures and institutional approval from the Church my family esteemed so highly, and I had to figure it out with zero guidance from any of the adults in my life.

That considered, I think I did pretty okay. I left before any of my friends did.

Over time, I started to notice that I was usually correct when I had a strong intuition about someone. Very rarely, someone might slip past my radar. If you’re a dog person, you’ve seen a version of this before: there are people your dog will go nuts barking at even if they’ve visited before, and there are people they are immediately friendly with, even if they’ve never met them. When your dog sends the signal that a person is OK, it immediately puts you more at ease. How do they sense it? Nobody knows.

Organizations and institutions are more complex, because they’re made up of a bunch of different people with different traits. Public figures are often very good at crafting personas, while the real person is hidden behind the mask. But the intuition still works in these situations, just with a lower degree of certitude.

As I hit my 40s, I realized this instinct, even though I didn’t know how it worked, was reliable enough that I should trust it. And I have ever since.

If you have this — and many of you reading this do — it can feel like a superpower. But it also has real downsides. This heightened sensitivity often brings with it traits like moodiness, reflexive defensiveness, high susceptibility to criticism, a tendency to be misunderstood or dismissed, chronic anxiety, a high likelihood of using combative behaviors as pre-emptive self-protection, and more.

Those of us who have this also tend to get socially exhausted and need to isolate to recharge, even when we’re dispositionally extroverted. Being in novel situations or with large groups of people, especially in social contexts where you have to meet a bunch of folks you don’t already know, really taxes the scanner. Because there is no off switch.

Finely attuned instruments tend to be the most susceptible to overload.

On a personal level, even if you embrace it, it can be quite frustrating to deal with, particularly when you sense things you can’t easily explain. For example, a couple weeks ago I teased a post I’m working on about a feeling I’ve been getting that we have transitioned into the opening act of a major global change, a storm of events that will represent “the end of the world as we know it.” Last week, I posted an update, saying I can’t get my arms around it well enough to explain it. I have worked on it for multiple days and it just won’t come together in a cohesive way. I’ve even tried changing my approach to the problem and altering the writing style, but these adjustments still haven’t led to much success. In our first episode of the Monitoring the Situation Podcast, I touched on some of the themes with my co-host and good friend Kale Zelden, but I without a lot of red yarn, pushpins, newspaper clippings, and more room to wildly gesticulate, I had no way to go all-in.

It requires WAY too much context for it to even begin to make sense. And that context risks drowning the signal in too much explanation. It’s why I talk about the tactic of “flooding the zone” in disinformation warfare. It’s what you’re seeing happen with the Epstein situation right now. Millions of pages of documents, many of them full of wild but totally unverifiable accusations, and the public is scouring through them looking for something to tear apart. But the real story, the underlying insidiousness of the thing that so many folks have sensed around this mysterious figure and his associations with the global elite, was never going to be disclosed. Entire power structures depend on those things staying buried. That absence is hidden in all the noise, most of which is now being generated by some of the people who were most emotionally invested in getting to the truth. They are not just being played, they have been transformed into useful idiots, barking at ghosts.

But I digress.

If you’re reading this and you have this ability, you knew instantly that I was talking about you. Certainly long before you got to this paragraph. Quite a few people have already responded to my social posts saying things along the lines of, “Oh my goodness, that’s so me.” Until you become comfortable with it, you can feel pretty isolated, because most people around you seem like they’re almost sleepwalking through life, not seeing what you see. You’re at DEFCON 1, and they’re talking about fun things to do this weekend. It can make you feel like a total weirdo. It would make you doubt yourself if it didn’t prove itself true time and again.

If you don’t have this thing, you might be pretty skeptical of all this. Maybe you even find it self-indulgent, like we just really want to be special snowflakes with superpowers. That’s OK. We’re used to that. And frankly, you’re probably happier without it. Sometimes…

So my only advice is this: if you have the uncanny intuition, you can’t shut it off, so you may as well listen to it. But don’t just listen — TRUST. Even if people don’t understand it. Even if it makes you feel odd or alone.

Because it’s right more often than not.

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