Why Do Survivors Blame Themselves? Childhood Trauma, Gaslighting & Reclaiming Your Inner Compass
Updated: Oct 20
What if your intuition was right all along, but you spent years believing someone else's version of your reality? Exploring Childhood trauma and gaslighting.
Content note: This article discusses childhood trauma and sexual abuse, grooming, coercion, and escaping a dangerous situation. Please take care of yourself as you read or opt out if you're not feeling it right now.
Nearly twenty years ago, I jumped out of a moving vehicle because the man driving refused to let me out....
I had repeatedly asked him to pull over. I told him I felt unsafe. I asked to get a cab. I tried reasoning with him, bargaining with him, even suggesting he could wait with me until another ride arrived.
He continued driving in the wrong direction, farther into the middle of nowhere.
I knew something was wrong. I knew I wanted to leave.
And when I believed I had no other way out, I listened to something inside myself that told me what to do next.
I jumped, rolled, got up, and ran through the woods in the freezing January night.
But afterward, something happened that would leave me questioning my own experience for almost twenty years.
The man told the police a different story. According to what I learned afterward, he claimed we were boyfriend and girlfriend, that we'd had an argument, and that I had jumped from his vehicle in an attempt to end my life.
None of that was true.
Yet the response I received from the authorities left me questioning my own interpretation of what had happened.
How could I know, deep inside myself, that I had acted to protect my life and still spend years wondering whether I'd misunderstood the situation?
That question is at the heart of this week's episode of Embodied Magic.
Why Do Survivors Blame Themselves for What Happened?
When we hear about someone experiencing abuse, coercion, or violence, it's easy to imagine that we would recognize the danger immediately.
We might believe we'd fight back, leave, call for help, or know exactly what to do.
But human experiences are rarely that straightforward.
Trauma can be profoundly confusing, especially when the person causing harm is someone we know, trust, love, or have been taught to respect.
Sometimes the danger doesn't look like what we've been taught danger looks like.
Sometimes it looks like affection.
Sometimes it looks like someone insisting they're taking care of us.
And sometimes it looks like someone confidently telling us that what we experienced wasn't what actually happened.
For survivors, self-blame can become a way of trying to make sense of an experience that felt overwhelming or incomprehensible.
Why did I go there? Why didn't I leave sooner? Why didn't I fight back? Why did I trust that person?
But those questions can obscure something essential:
Someone else's decision to violate your boundaries was never your responsibility.
How Childhood Grooming Can Teach Us to Distrust Ourselves
I experienced sexual abuse throughout my childhood, beginning before I was old enough to understand what was happening.
The person responsible was someone in my family whom I was expected to love and respect.
I knew I felt uncomfortable. I knew something wasn't right.
But I didn't understand why.
I was also taught, directly and indirectly, that maintaining relationships and protecting other people's feelings were incredibly important.
I worried about hurting someone's feelings by refusing affection. I worried about disrupting my family. I worried about what would happen if I spoke up.
Eventually, I began carrying responsibility for things that were never mine to carry.
As a child, I even believed that I had somehow caused the abuse.
I interpreted what was happening through the limited understanding of sexuality and relationships available to me.
I believed I was participating in an affair with my grandmother's husband.
Looking back, that belief is heartbreaking.
It wasn't an affair. I was a child experiencing abuse.
But the shame I internalized was powerful.
Rather than recognizing the adult's responsibility, I worried about protecting him and everyone else who might be hurt if the truth came out.
I was carrying shame that wasn't mine.
And that early conditioning shaped how I understood other experiences later in life.
When Belonging Feels More Important Than Your Boundaries
Children depend on their caregivers and communities for safety, connection, and survival.
When maintaining belonging requires suppressing discomfort or accommodating someone else's needs, children may learn to disconnect from their own signals.
They may become skilled at anticipating other people's emotions while struggling to identify their own.
They may learn that being good means being agreeable, accommodating, and respectful of authority—even when something feels wrong.
For me, those patterns didn't disappear when I became an adult.
They became part of how I navigated confusing relationships and situations.
And when someone in a position of authority contradicted my understanding of an experience, I was especially vulnerable to questioning myself.
How Gaslighting Makes You Question Your Own Reality
Gaslighting involves patterns of manipulation that undermine someone's confidence in their own perceptions, memories, or understanding of reality.
But even without an established pattern of intentional gaslighting, having your experience repeatedly dismissed or contradicted can create profound self-doubt.
After escaping that vehicle, I was confronted with an account of the evening that didn't match what I knew had happened.
I hadn't been trying to end my life.
I had been trying to get away from someone who wouldn't let me leave.
Yet instead of receiving the understanding I desperately needed, I found myself having to explain why I'd taken such a drastic action.
The focus shifted from his refusal to let me out of the vehicle to my decision to jump.
And because I deeply valued truth, I began scrutinizing every detail of the night.
What had I misunderstood?
What had I said?
How had I behaved?
Was there something I had done that made him believe he had a right to control the situation?
I spent years revisiting those questions.
But eventually, I began to recognize something I hadn't been able to fully appreciate at the time.
Consenting to one thing is not consenting to everything.
Agreeing to accept a ride doesn't mean surrendering your right to change your mind.
Having a drink doesn't eliminate your right to say no.
Flirting with someone doesn't give another person ownership over your body.
And feeling confused about a situation doesn't mean your boundaries stop mattering.
You are allowed to change your mind.
You are allowed to leave.
You are allowed to recognize that something doesn't feel right, even when someone else insists everything is fine.
Autism, ADHD, and the Experience of Sexual Trauma
Another important part of my story is my neurodivergence.
I'm an autistic woman with ADHD, although I didn't recognize this about myself until adulthood.
Looking back, I can see how my neurodivergent experiences intersected with my trauma history.
Social situations could be confusing, particularly when navigating unfamiliar groups of people and unspoken expectations.
I sometimes struggled to reconcile what I felt internally with what other people appeared to believe was happening.
And because I'd spent much of my life being corrected, misunderstood, or encouraged to comply with social expectations, I had learned to question my own interpretations.
This isn't an experience shared by every autistic person.
But it is an important part of mine.
What Does Research Say About Autism and Sexual Victimization?
Research has identified concerning rates of sexual victimization among autistic people.
One study found that 56.8% of autistic adult participants reported sexual violence, compared with 28.2% of non-autistic participants.
Another study involving 225 autistic women in France found that 88.4% reported experiences of sexual violence when responding to detailed questions.
These studies involved particular groups of participants and should not be interpreted as population-wide prevalence estimates. Nevertheless, they contribute to an important conversation about the vulnerability of autistic people to sexual coercion and abuse.
And I think we need to ask a different question.
Rather than focusing exclusively on what makes autistic people vulnerable, what is it about the way autistic people are treated that can create opportunities for manipulation, coercion, and exploitation?
What happens when someone has spent a lifetime being told that their perceptions are incorrect?
What happens when maintaining relationships requires masking discomfort?
What happens when belonging feels more important than saying no?
These are questions worth exploring, particularly when we talk about consent, bodily autonomy, and rebuilding self-trust.
What If Your Intuition Was Right All Along?
Recently, following public conversations surrounding survivors of sexual violence brought something unexpected to the surface for me.
I found myself feeling tremendous compassion for women whose experiences were being questioned.
I felt angry about the scrutiny placed on their behavior, their choices, and their credibility.
I knew that initially agreeing to something didn't mean consenting to everything that followed.
I knew that drinking alcohol didn't make someone responsible for another person's actions.
And I knew that taking time to understand a traumatic experience didn't make someone's account less worthy of consideration.
Then I began to recognize something.
I was extending compassion to these women that I had struggled to extend to myself.
For nearly twenty years, I had been questioning my own experience.
But what if I hadn't misunderstood the danger?
What if I had recognized it?
What if my intuition had been right all along?
My Inner Compass Wasn't Absent That Night
This realization changed the way I understood my story.
My inner compass hadn't failed me.
I knew I felt unsafe.
I asked to leave.
I kept asking.
And when I believed I had no other way out, I experienced a sudden, vivid visualization of what I needed to do.
I saw myself jumping from the vehicle, rolling, getting up, and running.
I had never practiced anything like that.
But in that moment, the image gave me a way forward.
I acted, and I escaped.
I don't know exactly how my mind arrived at that visualization. I experienced it as a form of intuitive wisdom emerging when I desperately needed it.
And looking back, I can recognize that I was listening to myself.
The difficulty wasn't that I lacked discernment. It was that afterward, I struggled to trust my own account of what had happened.
That distinction has become central to my work.
How Do You Learn to Trust Yourself Again After Trauma?
Rebuilding self-trust isn't about believing every feeling is an objective fact.
Our nervous systems respond to past experiences, present circumstances, perceived threats, and countless other influences.
Fear doesn't always mean danger.
Comfort doesn't always mean safety.
And intuition doesn't give us perfect information.
But our internal experiences still matter.
Our bodies provide information through sensations, emotions, hesitation, discomfort, curiosity, and desire.
We can learn to bring that information together with what we're observing, what we know, what we value, and the choices available to us.
That's discernment.
And it's something we can practice.
1. Notice Your Inner Signals Without Immediately Explaining Them Away
When you experience discomfort, hesitation, or an internal sense of no, what happens next?
Do you become curious?
Or do you immediately start constructing reasons why your feelings must be wrong?
You don't have to act on every sensation.
But you can practice acknowledging it.
Something about this doesn't feel right to me.
That's information worth considering.
2. Separate Your Experience From Someone Else's Interpretation
Other people may have opinions about what you feel, what you meant, or what you should do.
They may even be extremely confident in those opinions.
But their confidence doesn't automatically make their interpretation more accurate than yours.
Try asking yourself:
What did I actually experience?
What am I being told about that experience?
Where do those accounts differ?
You can remain open to new information without automatically abandoning your own perspective.
3. Practice Honoring Your Boundaries in Small Ways
Rebuilding self-trust doesn't always require dramatic decisions.
Sometimes it begins with noticing that you don't want to attend an event.
That you need more time before making a commitment.
That a conversation feels uncomfortable.
That you would prefer something different from what another person expects.
You can practice recognizing those preferences and communicating them.
And if you freeze, struggle to speak, or find yourself complying when you wish you hadn't, that doesn't mean you've failed.
Your boundaries still matter, even when you're unable to express or enforce them.
Five Things I Want Survivors to Know
If you've experienced abuse, coercion, or trauma and struggled with self-blame, these are the five things I hope you'll take away from my story.
1. Self-blame can be a consequence of trauma and gaslighting.Questioning yourself doesn't mean your experience was invalid. Sometimes it reflects years of having your perceptions dismissed, contradicted, or minimized.
2. Your nervous system's response is not a measure of your consent.Freezing, dissociating, complying, or struggling to say no does not mean you agreed to what happened.
3. Children are never responsible for preventing their own abuse.Grooming can teach children to protect an abuser's feelings, internalize shame, and assume responsibility for harm that was never theirs to carry.
4. Neurodivergence can shape how we experience and process coercion.Social confusion, masking, pressure to comply, and experiences of being misunderstood may complicate self-trust for some autistic and ADHD people. Responsibility for abuse always belongs to the person causing harm.
5. Your inner compass may have been there all along.Rebuilding self-trust can begin with recognizing the moments when you sensed something was wrong, even if you couldn't act on that knowing—or struggled to trust it afterward.
Reclaiming Your Inner Compass
I teach discernment because I know what it's like to have a feeling in your body and spend years trying to reason yourself out of it.
I know what it's like to make someone else's certainty more important than your own experience.
And I know how powerful it can be to begin reclaiming that relationship with yourself.
You don't need to become someone who never doubts herself.
You don't need to interpret every sensation perfectly.
And you certainly don't need to hold yourself responsible for preventing someone else's harmful behavior.
But you can begin developing a different relationship with your own inner signals.
One built on curiosity, compassion, and the willingness to take yourself seriously.
Because sometimes healing isn't about discovering an inner voice you never had.
Sometimes it's about realizing that voice was there all along—and learning to trust yourself enough to listen again.
Ready to Reconnect With Your Inner Compass?
If you've ever wondered Why do I second-guess myself? Why do I feel guilty for setting boundaries? How can I learn to trust my intuition again?, I created two resources to support that exploration.
A gentle introduction to reconnecting with your feelings and finding clarity when you're overwhelmed by competing thoughts, expectations, or emotions.
Begin exploring your inner signals and developing a more compassionate relationship with yourself.
Ready to explore this work more deeply?
The Inner Compass Reset is a self-paced course designed to help you reconnect with your body's signals, recognize your needs and boundaries, and strengthen your capacity for discernment.
Learn to approach your inner experiences with curiosity, compassion, and greater confidence in your own authority.
About Melinda
Melinda Love Raines is a consulting hypnotist, sexuality and empowerment coach, artist, and host of Embodied Magic with Melinda. Through hypnosis, embodied practices, compassionate self-inquiry, and sexuality education, she helps people reconnect with their inner wisdom, develop self-trust, and create more authentic, pleasurable lives.
Read the Full Transcript
Why Do Survivors Blame Themselves? | Trauma, Gaslighting & Reclaiming Your Inner Compass
[00:00:00]
It's a form of self-defense. our bodies give us information, fear, discomfort, hesitation, that feeling of no or a twisting in your stomach. We can bring those signals together with what we're seeing, what we're knowing in the moment, what we value, and what choices are available to us
We don't have to dismiss our own experience just because someone else is more confident, more powerful, more convincing that their version of the events is reality. And that's what I mean when I talk about developing a relationship with your inner compass. Welcome to the Embodied Magic Podcast with Melinda. It's me, Melinda, and today is a very personal share. Before we begin, I wanna let you know that this episode includes my personal experiences of childhood sexual abuse and the experience I had of escaping a situation where I believed I was in great danger.
And I'm not sharing this for shock value, I'm sharing it [00:01:00] because of what it taught me about discernment, reconnecting with my own inner compass, consent, and how difficult it can be to trust your own experience when other people insist that you're wrong, especially people in authority. So please take care of yourself as you listen.
If you feel you need to pause or skip or just completely ignore this episode, please, please do that, okay? But if you would like to hang in there with me, then thank you for being here and hearing this story. And I'm sharing this now because at the time of this recording in October of 2026, the Cornell 57 and the LSU rape cases are top of mind, top of social media, and the empathy that I feel for Jane Doe and Kendall Francis have allowed me to see my own experiences in an entirely new way almost 20 years later.
And I'm profoundly [00:02:00] grateful to survivors who come forward in sharing their stories, making space for others to understand and reclaim their own. So it took me almost 20 years to realize and name the fact that I had been kidnapped. And how did this happen? Why did it take me so long to really understand and be able to name that?
And a combination of factors really led me to this understanding. So how can a person know inside of their self that something is wrong, something is not right with what is happening, and still spend years after the fact questioning that knowing because somebody else told you a different story? And that is the question at the heart of this episode and what I wanna share today.
So firstly, if you don't know me already, I am an AuDHD woman. That means I am autistic and ADHD. I was diagnosed about three years ago , after a pretty lengthy self-identification process
[00:03:00] So bringing my neurodivergent identity into this conversation is so important. I was deeply confused by the entirety of the situation that I was in 20 years ago that led up to my transportation, non-consensually, in a car by a man that I knew and I thought that I trusted . When I was told by him and the authorities after the fact that I misunderstood the situation that I had to escape his moving vehicle by jumping out of the vehicle
they told me that I was suicidal, that this is why I had done that, and why would I do that? So although I knew that that wasn't true, it was enough of a story in the middle of a deep trauma to disrupt my sense of understanding of the situation and to convince me that I had misread everything, because I was being met by several men in an [00:04:00] authority position asking me, questioning my motives for protecting myself in that moment in the only way that I had available to me it convinced me that I misread his refusal to let me out when I begged repeatedly for fifteen minutes to be let out of his car to get a cab because I told him, "I feel unsafe here.
I want you to pull over and let me out so I can get another ride home." The whole night that preceded this moment was a group partying experience
that had several smaller experiences inside of it that were pretty confusing to me. The nuances of what was happening, my reading of the situation, and yes, there was alcohol involved. And because of all this, my mind spent years going through every detail of that night, picking it apart, picking apart every detail of what I had thought was happening, what they [00:05:00] must have thought was happening, all the things that were said and done,
The way that I looked, scrutinizing myself and my behaviors, but then also deeply knowing that something was definitely wrong and I didn't know how to get myself out of it And I'm not saying that neurodivergence caused me to be the target for this kind of a crime, but it contributed to not being able to fully understand and grasp that that's what had happened to me Secondly, years of grooming by the men in my life and the women in my life to accept that the men in power know more than me, even about my own experience, to not question authority, to never get in trouble, to always be a good girl.
So growing up, I was sexually molested by my step-grandfather from the time I was a very young child, before I can remember, until I was a teenager. And the depth of profound confusion that I felt in my childhood around this, the gaslighting I experienced, [00:06:00] this set me up to question everything about my own body, my signals that I was receiving from my body, and my inner authority.
I knew that I felt uncomfortable. I knew that something about this wasn't right. I just didn't understand why, and I was always encouraged or required to treat him with respect and to give affection when I didn't want to, because withholding a hug would hurt his feelings and make him feel like he was less of a true grandfather to me as a step-grandfather So I took on the responsibility for his sense of belonging in the family, and that was reflected in me knowing something was wrong and being unable to activate out of it.
Because belonging in my family meant way more than my own suffering. And I am in no way saying that a child is responsible, that a child should be the one to say, "This is abuse, and I'm [00:07:00] leaving this now." That's not how it work- it works in a child's mind, and it's up to the adults around them to be able to identify something is going on, something is up, and to take the initiative to protect children.
I mean, that's just, that's the way it is. And it's up to abusers to not abuse. And at the same time, all this stuff comes from somewhere, and ultimately, in the end, I'm the adult child now, still continuing to heal, attempting for years to step in and integrate this pain. So that's why the language I use is me reclaiming my power, me saying
That my retrospective understanding of my neurodivergence in that situation contributed to the deep confusion in me not being able to connect the dots that this was abuse. [00:08:00] So belonging as an autistic ADHD child felt so very important to me. As with any child, belonging is absolutely crucial to your survival.
are so many reasons why children don't tell. And I would watch the news with my family morning and night. I would hear of kidnappings, and rapes, and child molestation, child abduction. I heard about these things happening to other kids and women, but I couldn't identify it as being what was happening to me because the stories that I heard felt so horrific.
When I could experience it through the eyes of another person, it was terrifying. That level of terror when I would experience what someone else was feeling gave me a profound dissonance within my own body. Because with what I was experiencing, I was numb, I was dissociated from my [00:09:00] body. And so to me, it didn't necessarily feel scary.
And it was delivered to me in such a way that was posed as caring. I was not particularly threatened physically, and that's where the confusion came in. And that's the way a lot of quiet molesters are gaining access to children through this deep confusion because this is someone that I'm supposed to love.
This is someone who says they love me. This is a part of my family or a close friend.
And I'm just gonna take a moment to ground. So if you're with me still, place your feet on the floor. Let's take a breath as we root in. Coming back to the present moment is so important when we talk about this stuff because it's easy to become activated and [00:10:00] dissociated
And if you need to pause, remember to pause. I'm gonna continue on now. So I believed that I was causing the abuse to happen, that in some way with my child body, I was sexually seducing this person with my limited understanding of what sexuality was, and that my belief was that he was having an affair with me, my grandmother's husband.
So that was a total mind fuck. That's the story that I believed as a child. It was never a child's responsibility, and it wasn't an affair. That interpretation was the product of the gaslighting I experienced. That level of shame that I internalized from that story was so profoundly immobilizing to me.
And when I found myself recovering from having jumped out of a vehicle in which a man would not [00:11:00] let me out and was driving me into the middle of nowhere without my consent when I was 24, I decided to jump out of that vehicle rather than let him do with me what he wanted.
So I jumped, I rolled, I stood up, unbroken but bruised, and I ran through the woods as fast as I could in the middle of the night in January, freezing cold, lost my shoes. And I understood later that what happened when the police arrived was that the man had stopped the car. He called the police. He told them that he and I were boyfriend and girlfriend, we had had an argument, and that I jumped out of his vehicle trying to commit suicide
None of that was true.
So when the police arrived, when I was able to call for help
He [00:12:00] arrived with them and was playing his role out in front of them towards me, telling me that I had scared him, was I okay? Acting a lot more intimate with me than our relationship actually was. I didn't understand that he had told them this story
And the police showed up asking me why I had done it. Why did I jump? Why would I do something like that? That I scared him. I'm sorry. "What? I scared him? He's the one that wouldn't let me out of the vehicle," I said. He's the one that for at least 15 minutes heard me begging, reasoning with him to pull over, let me get home safely because I did not feel safe with him.
I bargained. I said, "You can pull over and wait for the cab with me. I just want to go home on my own."
All he said was that he was going to take me safely back to my place [00:13:00] while continuing to drive in the wrong direction, well knowing it, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. it wasn't until hearing about Jane Doe's case and the Cornell 57 and experiencing the story empathetically
and how emphatically I felt the need for justice for this woman and my reaction to the questioning of her account that something shifted for me. The idea that her account could be treated as less worthy because she initially consented to one thing, because she showed up having already consumed alcohol, because of whatever her reputation was before she came there
The idea that she didn't fully understand the trauma immediately That she was told it was something different than it was
the gaslighting, the threatening that she is experiencing, the conviction that I have felt that it's so fucking incredibly wrong, I couldn't help but see that I had cracked the door in a new way in my own [00:14:00] story for me to be able to see that this was not my fault, that I did not put myself in that situation.
That being out partying as a 20-something woman was not something that said to a man that it was okay to do anything to me without my consent.
It wasn't okay for him to trick me into getting into his car after I had already told him I was getting a cab, and to then afterwards refuse to let me out.
Consenting to one thing isn't consenting to everything. Agreeing at the beginning of the night that you're gonna drive me home doesn't mean that I have to stick to that agreement later in the night if I then feel uncomfortable. Having a drink, flirting, going out, getting in someone's car, none of those things take away your right to say no or to leave or to change your mind in the middle of it.
Now, I wanna talk a little bit more about the neurodivergence piece. So autistic people are many more times likely to experience abuse and sexual assault than non-autistics. [00:15:00] In one study of adults, 56.8% of autistic participants reported sexual violence, compared with 28.2% of non-autistic participants.
That's about twice the rate. And in a separate study of 225 autistic women in France, 88.4% reported experiencing some form of sexual violence when asked detailed questions
So why is this happening? There isn't one clear answer, But myself and other autistic people have talked about some of the ways that we can be vulnerable to manipulation and coercion.
Social dynamics can be extremely confusing, especially in larger groups. Our inner feelings and signals sometimes register differently, and for some of us, having a very high level of empathy puts our attention more deeply into the other people's experience than it does our own.
Some of us have also [00:16:00] spent a lifetime being corrected, misunderstood, or pressured to comply with social expectations and prioritize belonging or keeping the peace
I'm not saying that being autistic causes abuse. I'm asking, what is it about the way we're treated and the way some people take advantage of our differences, consciously or unconsciously, that contributes to these numbers?
And I'm telling you how some of those dynamics played out in my own life. My trauma history allowed for that as well, the empathizing with the perpetrator, me taking on the role of the perpetrator in that experience, because I thought that I was actually the mistress, even though I was a young child. I knew that whatever happened to my step-grandfather in his childhood, it must have been so much worse than what had been happening to me, and that's what I focused on, rather than focusing on my own signals.
I empathized with him. I actually felt I loved him and didn't want him to [00:17:00] get in trouble. I didn't want him to get hurt, and I definitely didn't want my grandmother to get hurt.
I didn't want my father to be hurt because of what I had done. I didn't want my mom to be upset because I didn't say no or fight back. I didn't want my father to think less of me because I had somehow attracted the attention of my step-grandfather as a little girl. Ooh. I was deeply ashamed and embarrassed, but I didn't understand that what I was actually feeling was the deep shame and embarrassment of my abuser, and that he transferred that onto me in his own actions And that when it came out, he would say that it was because of the alcohol he had consumed.
He didn't remember doing any of these things. It wasn't his fault. And when the man who kidnapped me gave his statement, he [00:18:00] completely fabricated another lie that made me question my own version of the truth. And it worked sadly for me I knew that I was acting out of self-preservation and desperation to save myself, but as someone who deeply values the truth of a situation, his commitment to this lie shook my mind up enough that I spent the last 20 years almost feeling guilty, ashamed, embarrassed of the scars that I now have because I couldn't confidently drop into reality
Because of how the people in authority positions around me responded to the situation, erring on the side of the man who kidnapped me
rather than the bloodied woman who had jumped out of the vehicle trying to get away from this guy. So all of this is why I teach discernment. I have a special interest in educating autistic people And all people who have had a difficulty owning their own truth, [00:19:00] hearing their inner voice and obeying it
over the claims and convictions of other people on the outside about your inner truth. Because discernment is the thing that I had enough of that told me to jump out of this vehicle before something worse happened
And that's what I can thank myself for looking back. I don't know what would've happened. And because I heard the voice inside
That inner intuition rose up, showed me a picture of myself jumping out of the vehicle in the correct technique that would allow me to not break any bones So I could get up and run away? Ooh, I had never done that before. That was inspired wisdom that came from my subconscious mind that I was able to tune into to hear and feel and see and act on in the moment.
That's why I teach this stuff
[00:20:00] That's why this is important
My inner compass wasn't absent that night I knew I wasn't safe. I asked to leave. I kept asking, and when I believed I had no other way out, I tuned in, "I'm trapped. What do I do next?" And I got the answer that saved my life. What became so difficult afterwards was trusting my own account of what had happened when the account I was being handed by the other people was so different
our bodies give us information, fear, discomfort, hesitation, that feeling of no or a twisting in your stomach. We can bring those signals together with what we're seeing, what we're knowing in the moment, what we value, and what choices are available to us
It's a form of self-defense. We don't have to dismiss our own experience just because someone else is more confident, more powerful, more convincing that their version of the [00:21:00] events is reality. And that's part of what I mean when I talk about developing a relationship with your inner compass. Sometimes our nervous system says to freeze. Sometimes we can't get a no out, our voice doesn't work. And that's why this work is so personal to me, because I know what it's like to have a feeling in my body and then spend years trying to reason myself out of it. I know what it's like to make somebody else's feelings, someone else's interpretation, someone else's certainty more important than your own experiences and your own body signals.
So I wanna leave you with a few questions. Where in your life have you learned to trust someone else's interpretation of your own experience more than your own? Have you ever felt a no inside yourself and struggled to say it out loud? Did you judge yourself for that after?
What would it be like to get curious [00:22:00] about that inner no instead of immediately arguing with it or shutting it down or trying to turn it into a yes? This is all directly connected to why I created the Inner Compass Reset.
It's about rebuilding a relationship with your body's signals, your needs, your boundaries, your values, and your own capacity for discernment. It's about practicing listening to yourself and taking yourself seriously and choosing to obey that inner authority, even when it's uncomfortable
And if your body has ever gone quiet, frozen, or if you weren't able to act on what you knew, that does not mean that you failed. It means that you are human, you have a nervous system that functions
You were in a difficult situation and your boundaries still mattered even if someone else continued to cross them. So thank you for being here with me for this very personal [00:23:00] conversation, and if you want to explore that relationship with your own inner compass, you can find the Inner Compass Reset linked in my show notes as well as the Inner Magic Method
Which is a free download that will help you connect to your feelings in confusing moments
Thank you again. Please take care of yourselves and go get some tea, go for a walk in nature, play some nice music, do something that feels really pleasurable right now to honor your nervous system, to honor this deep conversation we just had, and come back into groundedness. Remember that you're safe, you matter, your feelings are very important.
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