I have a sixth sense. I believe everyone does to be honest. My sixth sense is my ability to read people and to read situations. I think everyone has this ability, I just think it gets more finely developed in people that have been through traumatic experiences. The experiences can vary, vastly vary, but I think people can tap into this ability and once they do, learn to trust it. Most people never have to tap into it and even if they do, an even greater portion probably never fully trust it. I rely heavily on my sixth sense and I trust it implicitly. Am I always right, no, but I am very, very rarely wrong, and this has become my shield. A very, very important shield that is my number one form of protection.

Every time I go into any situation or any time, I meet anyone, I use my sixth sense to judge the situation and to frankly judge the people in the situation as well. This can be for safety, literally and figuratively; it can be when meeting people in networking opportunities, it can be when making friends. I especially use it when meeting people that I might be interested in or am in fact, interested in. I have come to rely on this sixth sense of mine and I trust it. I trust it implicitly. It has never let me down. I have gotten very good at judging situations and people and I can do it quickly.

For most people when they judge a situation poorly it’s simply that, a misjudgment. An error in judgement, a mistake. Maybe they get in trouble, maybe they get their feelings hurt. For me it’s much more traumatic. For me, it means my armor isn’t working, it means that I cannot protect myself. To give this some context, it goes back to my abuse. Every single time I was in trouble, I had a gut feeling that something was wrong. I didn’t always know what to do, or how to get out of it, but I knew something wasn’t right and eventually I did find a way out. Maybe not right away, but I always found a way to get out eventually. That’s when I first started listening to my sixth sense. That’s when I first started paying attention to it and realizing that it was there to protect me. And if I trusted it and listened it would protect me.

Through the years, I learned to trust it more and more as time and time again, it proved whatever it was I was feeling was right. Even when I misread something and made a mistake, I was never 100% wrong, I was usually just delayed or in denial. Denial was me not listening to my sixth sense, not that it wasn’t guiding me or telling me what to do. The problem with misjudging a situation is that my first reaction is always panic. Initially depending on the situation, it might be that you are being rejected, rejected from some person or situation that you thought was going to go one way and then it went another way. Sure, the rejection hurts, and this is a normal reaction. Then the panic that follows is what I’m talking about. It’s the panic that doesn’t sit well. It never sits well. It makes me want to claw something; it makes me squirmy. It makes me want to run away. I want to run because on some deep-down primal level, I feel defenseless.

My fight or flight emotional response has just been activated. If I can’t judge situations and people correctly, I can’t protect myself, in a nutshell. It is this emotional response that is terrifying. This panic, this fear is far worse than any rejection I could feel, because ultimately this panic comes from doubting oneself. Sometimes abuse rears its ugly head in funny ways and in ways that you and others around you wouldn’t expect. What is masquerading as rejection on the outside is really a fear of not being able to protect oneself on the inside. After a few deep breaths I can usually talk myself through it. Now, after years of analysis, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still feel the initial emotions of panic, of fear, of doubt in myself. Doubt and fear that my sixth sense isn’t working.