Intuition and It's Role In Healing
The Quiet Voice: Learning to Trust the Guidance That Saves Us
A note before you begin: I first wrote this during a very hard season several years ago, while I was still in an abusive marriage. I'm sharing it from the safe shore—I've since left, I'm remarried to a gentle and loving man, and I am healed and well. It touches on abuse and some dark days, so please be gentle with yourself as you read. And hear me say this, right at the top: if someone is hurting you, listening to the voice that tells you to protect yourself is not a lack of faith. It may be the most faithful thing you ever do.
A couple of weeks into my time volunteering in India, a friend asked if I'd help with a math event she was putting on at the school. Everything in me wanted to say yes—and yet, for no reason I could explain, I hesitated. Over the years I've learned to trust that hesitation. So I said, "I'm so sorry, I won't be able to help that day," and braced for the misunderstanding I was sure would follow. I couldn't exactly explain that my gut was telling me no.
That Saturday morning, my roommate came into the kitchen with a solemn face and terrible news: one of the school's drivers—the one meant to pick us up—had been killed in a motorcycle accident the night before. Everything was canceled. The whole community stopped to grieve one of its own.
I've turned that morning over in my mind many times since. Did some quiet part of me know? I'll never be certain. But it left me sitting with the question this whole post is really about: How much do we let God—Higher Power, intuition, that quiet inner voice, whatever you call it—actually guide us?
The times I listened
I felt for four years that I needed to go to Mexico for treatment before I finally stopped asking permission and just went. I had surgery for damage that had been quietly wrecking my life. The voice had been right the whole time; I'd just been afraid to follow it.
Saying yes to India made no logical sense at all. I was recovering from a relapse of neurological Lyme disease, I had one semester of college left, I was barely strong enough to exercise again, and I had five children at home. Ninety days away from them? Impossible.
So I got on my knees and prayed. And a peace settled over me—not just in my heart, but what felt like a mile thick all around me, the kind of peace I'd felt only once before, in the worst grief of my life. I couldn't explain why I was being given peace about something so illogical. But I knew it was my answer. One by one, each of my children prayed too, and each came to their own peace about my going. So I went. That trip blessed me and my kids more than I can possibly say in this post.
The times I didn't
The lessons that marked me most, though, came from the times I overrode that voice because someone in authority told me to.
Years ago, my intuition told me—clearly, urgently—to pull one of my children out of a situation I sensed wasn't safe. I said so out loud. But I let another adult's certainty and "authority" talk me out of my own knowing, and I left my child there. Months later I was sitting beside that same child in a hospital, learning I had been right all along.
I have never fully forgiven myself for not trusting that voice sooner. But it burned a truth into me: no one knows the needs of a child like that child's mother. God-given intuition is worth trusting—even against a doctor, a teacher, a pastor, a husband, anyone—especially when it comes to protecting the ones we love.
An ultramarathon
Around that time I read Born to Run, and I got a little obsessed with ultramarathoners—people who run 100, 150, even 200 miles at a stretch. Here's the detail that stayed with me: in those final, brutal miles, a runner's mind can break down so badly from exhaustion that they hallucinate. They see things that aren't there. They lose the ability to tell what's real. And that's exactly why the great ones never run those races alone. They have a crew—people whose whole job, at the worst moment, is to help them separate what's real from what isn't.
I have lived that kind of depletion. In India, my body gave out one morning as I tried to get to church to teach a lesson—my hands trembled too hard to lift a water bottle, my feet wouldn't answer my brain. And the youth of that school swarmed around me with such tenderness, calling me "mom" and "auntie," holding my hands, resting their heads on my shoulder, praying over me in Tamil. One girl I'd always assumed disliked me, because of the serious look she wore, rested her head on my shoulder. She wasn't cold at all. She was shy. It remains one of the sweetest moments of my life.
I tell you all this because there was a season back home when I was running a race that was quietly killing me—my marriage—and I had reached exactly that ultramarathoner's point where I could no longer tell what was real.
When I couldn't hear my own voice
This is the part I most need you to hear, because it's the piece almost no one explains.
Abuse is designed to scramble the very voice I've been telling you to trust. Slowly, deliberately, it takes your inner compass and spins it until you can't find north. I stopped eating food my husband prepared. I drank only from sealed bottles. He took to cornering me—in a hallway, in our room, his face inches from mine—and saying things meant to frighten me to the bone. I was living in a fog of constant fear that I had somehow learned to call normal.
It would take me years to find the words for what was happening: trauma bonding, the fawn response, dissociation—the very real, almost physical addiction that can form to the cycle of abuse. It is not weakness. It's survival wiring, and it is brutal to break.
He was also, I'd only understand later, carefully building a story for everyone around us—that I was the unstable one, that our son was the dangerous one, and that he was the calm, reasonable victim. There's a name for that pattern: DARVO—deny, attack, and reverse the roles of victim and offender. From the outside, those closest to me could see it plainly. From the inside, I could barely see at all.
And here is where God saved my life—through my crew.
My son, who had left home at fifteen because he couldn't bear watching me return again and again, now kept finding reasons to stay close. He would stand between his father and me. One day, after getting us all safely into the car, he said something I wish I'd understood twenty years sooner: "It's hard to reason with someone who isn't being rational." He kept encouraging me to get a protective order. One of my dearest friends threw her hands in the air, tears streaming down her face, and cried, "What will it take for you to see what is happening?" My coach, my family—they all kept saying the same thing. They reminded me of the frog in the slowly heating pot, who never jumps because the change is too gradual to feel. Everyone I trusted—and, I believe, God speaking through them—kept saying one word: jump.
So I did the only thing I had left. When I could no longer trust my own scrambled compass, I borrowed theirs. I chose to believe that the people who loved me could see what I couldn't. I promised my son I would not go back. I promised my best friend the same. And this time—leaning entirely on their clarity and on God's—I kept those promises.
Somewhere in that season, I watched another woman walk past my car: five children like me, married to a man everyone else found charming, and she was moving like the walking dead. I knew that look from the inside. I prayed for her safety, and for my own.
What I know now
Here is what the exhausted woman on that mountain couldn't yet see, and what I want to hand to you if you're on it too:
"I would rather die than be divorced" was never the truth. It was the exhaustion talking. It was the fear, and years of being told that the closer I was to the abuser, the more control I would have. God was never asking me to be destroyed to prove my faith. He does not ask that of His daughters. Ever.
The crew came. The quiet voice I'd spent my whole life learning to trust finally got loud enough to hear over the noise—and this time it reached me through the people who loved me. It wasn't telling me to keep running a race that was killing me. It was telling me that I could complete a race if I wasn't running beside someone who was constantly throwing rocks in my path, pushing me off the trail, and mentally, physically and emotionally bringing me down. My grit didn't want to give up... I didn't want to start the years of marriage count over again... but that is what I needed to do. And when I finally did, God carried me out just as surely as He'd led me to Mexico, and to India, and away from every other danger my intuition had tried to warn me about.
Today I am safe. I'm healed. I'm remarried to a gentle man who would take the arrows before he'd ever let them reach me. My children are okay. The eternal family I was so terrified of losing was never mine to lose by choosing to live. And my own quiet voice? It came back, clear again, once I was finally somewhere safe enough to hear it.
So trust the quiet voice. And when abuse or exhaustion has stolen your ability to hear your own—borrow the voices of the people who love you until yours comes back. Let them be your crew. That, too, is God guiding you. It was trying to save me the whole time.
If someone you love is hurting you, please reach out—you don't have to carry it alone. In the U.S., the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233 (call or text), 24/7. And if the darkness ever gets so heavy that you don't want to be here anymore, please call or text 988 right away and let someone stay with you. If you're outside the U.S., please reach out to a local crisis or domestic-violence line near you. Trust God to guide you. Your life is worth fighting for. You are so deeply loved.
I love you.
Namaste,
Steffi
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