How to trust your intuition as a highly sensitive when you've spent years suppressing it
For years, whenever someone told me to trust my intuition, I’d nod along and quietly panic, because I had no idea how. Tune in. Get quiet. Listen to my body and still feel unsure or overwhelmed. But for a lot of highly sensitives and empaths, listening was never really the problem. Trusting what we hear once we do is where it gets hard.
Many of us stopped trusting ourselves as children, growing up in emotionally immature environments where our feelings were treated as inconvenient, inappropriate, or simply wrong. We learnt early that our feelings and needs were a problem. It didn't feel safe to be in our bodies and feel, when the people around us felt unpredictable.
So we did what we needed to do to stay safe: we went into our heads, we overthought, we performed, we perfected, we disconnected from our bodies and got very good at appearing fine, while staying acutely aware of how everyone else was feeling and what they needed.
Years later, we find ourselves trying to "develop our intuition" and wondering why we can't hear it. The reason is that we spent decades unconsciously learning to silence it. It's useful to understand this as we try to reconnect to our intuitive knowing and voice.
Why so many of us lost it
If we've lived with emotionally immature or unpredictable primary carers, where our needs weren't being met, we grow up fast. We become the adult in the relationship. Instead of learning to listen to our feelings, hear our needs and have them validated, we're always looking outside ourselves, tending to the needs of others. We lose the natural intuitive connection with ourselves and stay focused outward, before we ever check in with our own feelings, needs and rhythms.
When feelings aren't safe to express, we find ways to manage them. We rationalise, we minimise, we push them down. The body can feel like an unsafe place to rest when we're containing big feelings we can't do anything about, so our minds become the safer place to live instead. Worse, if we're being continually gaslit, we learn to question whether what we feel is real, whether we're overreacting, whether we're being too sensitive. We become experts at talking ourselves out of our own experience while validating the feelings of everyone else.
Over time, this becomes the default. The inner voice doesn't disappear. It gets buried under layers of self-doubt, overthinking, and the habit of deferring to what seems rational, acceptable, or safe. We lose access to the felt sense of knowing, that quiet but clear signal that arrives before thought, because we've trained ourselves to override it before it can even reach us.
This is especially true for anyone who, as a child, had no space for their emotional reality, or had it consistently denied or punished. They learn to deny it themselves too. By adulthood, it can feel impossible to tell the difference between a genuine intuitive signal and an old fear response. Am I being triggered by this person or situation because of my past, or is this an intuitive warning?
The work of coming back to intuition, then, isn't just a mindfulness practice. It's a deeper process of understanding what we were taught, unlearning it, and making it safe again to feel, to know, and to trust what we know.
Here's how we can begin that process.
1. Begin with the intention to listen
This sounds small, but for those of us who learned to disconnect from our inner world, relearning to listen takes time. It's both a muscle to build and a relationship to develop trust in. The decision itself is the beginning: choosing to listen, and to act on what you hear.
Setting the intention to listen means making a quiet, genuine commitment to being interested in your own inner experience, not to act on everything you feel, not to get it right, just to notice. It means starting to treat your inner intuitive signals as information worth attending to, rather than noise to be managed, denied or ignored.
This might look like pausing before decisions and asking: what do I actually sense about this? It might mean sitting with a feeling before reaching for an explanation. It might simply mean stopping, once a day, and checking in with your body rather than your thoughts. Small practices. But the intention is what makes them meaningful: deciding to actually listen to what your intuition has to tell you.
2. Come back to the body
Intuition is often a felt sense, and it arrives in the body before the conscious mind realises what's happening. This is called clairsentience. A tightening in the chest. A feeling of expansion or relief. A heaviness, a restlessness, a quiet settling. These are the signals that we're registering intuitive information through somatic empathy, at a refined, subtle level. Many of us have spent years living from the neck up, which means that even though we're sensitive to these shifts and changes, we may have little practice actually reading them.
Developing our intuitive sensitivity and awareness means learning to inhabit the body again. This doesn't need to be complicated. It means navigating to the body first, rather than the mind. It starts with simply noticing what's there. What just happened? Was there a shift or a change? Where did the tension creep into the body? What was that emotional shift, was it anxiety? Where does something landing well show up?
When you're asked to make a decision, what's happening in your body? When you're around particular people, positive or negative, what happens to your energy? What happens in your gut when you're asked to do something that doesn't feel right?
This takes time, and it takes patience with yourself, to train yourself to return and notice the body first and listen. It means being aware, open, curious and consistent with your attention. Practices like breathwork, yoga, somatic therapy, or simply spending time in nature can all support this process of embodied awareness. The goal isn't to become hyperaware of every sensation, but to re-establish a relationship with your own body as a source of trustworthy intuitive information.
3. Learn to tell the difference between intuition and a trauma response
For those of us who carry unresolved trauma, whether from childhood, relationships, or other experiences, the body doesn't always distinguish clearly between a genuine intuitive signal and an old fear response being triggered. Both can feel urgent. Both can feel like knowing. But they're not the same thing, and acting on a trauma response as though it were intuition can keep us stuck in patterns we're trying to move beyond.
A trauma response tends to feel contracted, urgent and familiar. It pulls us back toward old dynamics: the urge to shrink, to appease, to flee, to shut down. Old memories or fears surface, and the body reacts to the present as though it were the past. Just because a situation triggers an old memory doesn't mean the outcome will be the same this time. That's the body and mind trying to keep us safe, even when the danger has passed. It can get confusing when we're trying to read a person or a situation. Are we picking up an old fear from narcissistic abuse, or are we sensing something true about this person right now? This is where becoming a clearer vessel matters for clear intuitive messages, and why trauma healing has to be a priority.
A genuine intuitive warning, for example, tends to feel quieter, clearer and more neutral. It doesn't usually arrive with panic. It arrives with a kind of steadiness and clarity, even when what it's telling us is uncomfortable: "not to be trusted."
Learning to tell the difference takes time and usually benefits from support, whether through therapy, somatic work, or another form of professional guidance. The aim isn't to dismiss every strong feeling as a trigger, but to develop enough self-knowledge that we can ask: is this a signal about what's happening now, or is this a familiar old response to something that happened then? That question alone begins to create the space between stimulus and reaction where real discernment lives. We resolve the older traumatic response through EFT and similar tools, and then we're left with clarity in the message.
Clearing the residue of trauma doesn't mean we'll never be triggered again, simply because we're layered beings who have lived many lives, often with ancestral baggage too. It means the signal becomes much cleaner and clearer. We start to trust what we sense because we know ourselves well enough to know where the noise is coming from: our intuition, or an old trigger still waiting to be worked on.
4. Stop denying what you feel
This sounds obvious. It's less obvious in practice.
Many of us have a long habit of explaining our feelings away. Of telling ourselves we're overreacting, reading too much into things, being too sensitive. Of minimising the quiet knowing that something isn't right because we can't point to evidence, or because naming it would be inconvenient, or because we were taught that what we felt was never quite valid.
Intuition can't be developed in a person who's been taught to distrust their feelings, because intuition and feeling aren't separate things. They run together. A person who's learned to dismiss what they feel will also learn to dismiss what they sense. A person who's been told their perceptions are unreliable will eventually stop trusting their own experience.
So part of this work is simply allowing what's true to be true. Not every feeling needs to be acted on immediately, but all of them deserve acknowledgement. What's happening in my body right now? What's alive in me that I've been explaining away? These aren't indulgent questions. They're the beginning of honest self-knowledge, and honest self-knowledge is the ground that intuition grows from.
One of the complexities highly sensitives have to navigate, once we start acknowledging and processing what we're picking up, is learning to filter it. This is a practice. When something arises in my experience, I ask: is this mine? What is it? Where is it? What's it connected to? Is it someone else's emotion or thought? Have I absorbed it, or am I corded to this person? Is it ancestral? Is it mine, but from another life? Is it collective, and so on? I notice, I track, and I simply ask what it is, then set the intention for it to release. If it's more complex, I get help.
As we learn to ask and filter, our filtering system becomes more refined, and what's alive in our experience becomes clearer, even if it remains complex. This is part of being highly sensitive: you have access to a lot of subtle information, but you haven't necessarily trained yourself to know what you're picking up on, and that's what feeds so much of the overwhelm.
5. Practise in low-stakes moments
Trusting your intuition is a muscle, and like any muscle it strengthens with use. The mistake many people make is waiting for the big moments, the important decisions, the crossroads, to try and access it. By then the pressure is too high and the habit is too thin.
Build the muscle in ordinary moments. Before you check reviews, notice what you're drawn to on a menu. When you're deciding between two options, pause and ask what you sense rather than what you think. When you're about to call someone, check in: does this feel right today? Notice what you pick up in a room when you walk in. Notice how different conversations leave you feeling. None of these are high stakes. All of them are practice.
What you're doing is training yourself to consult your inner experience as a matter of course, rather than as a last resort. The more you do it, the more familiar the signals become, and the more confidence you build in your own ability to read them accurately and act on your intuitive knowing. We're practising putting down the overthinking, and intuitively asking for guidance in low-stakes moments, to build our confidence as well as trust our inner authority.
Eventually, this becomes natural. We start making intuitive decisions instead of overthinking every single one. Making mistakes will be part of the process, which is exactly why it matters to practise on low-stakes decisions first. That way you learn what it feels like when you don't listen, and what it feels like when you do.
6. Trust what arrives, and keep building the relationship
Early on, it's likely you'll find it hard to feel confident trusting the information that arrives. That's fine. The practice isn't to act on every signal uncritically, but to notice it, take it seriously, and over time pay attention to what happens when you follow it and what happens when you don't. The record accumulates. The relationship of trust builds.
You hear yourself say: "hang on a minute, the last time this happened and I ignored this feeling, I really kicked myself. This time, I'm gonna listen."
Relationships require honesty. If you want a strong relationship with your own intuition, you have to be willing to be honest with yourself: about what you feel, what you want, what you're afraid of, what you're avoiding. Intuition doesn't speak clearly to a person who isn't willing to hear it. It doesn't need us to be perfect. But it does need us to be present and truthful. It might bring us up against ourselves and our fear of saying what we think, need and want, in setting healthy boundaries…
Many of us spent years learning to silence ourselves for very good reasons. Coming back isn't necessarily a quick process or a linear one. But it's completely possible, and the relationship you rebuild with yourself, with your own sensing, feeling, knowing self, may turn out to be the most important one you ever tend to. If you learn to listen, be honest and take action on your intuitive guidance, it can grow stronger. Then you'll gradually feel more confident in your own inner authority and decision making.
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