I Used to Think I Was Judgmental. Turns Out I Was Psychic.

I used to think I was judgmental. Turned out I was psychic.

For most of my life, I’d get these instant reads on people. A new acquaintance who everyone else seemed to love would seem pleasant, but something in my body would tighten. I would sense the energy and intentions behind their words and actions that didn’t line up with the opinion of others. A contractor’s voice would make my stomach drop. A business opportunity would look good on paper, but I’d feel an inexplicable urge to run.

And here’s what I did with that information most of the time: I talked myself out of it. Or, I would let someone else talk me out of it.

Because who was I to justknowsomething about someone I’d barely met?

For most of my life, I wasn’t “spiritual.” I didn’t know anything about energy or intuition or any of that. I just had these... knowings. These snap assessments that felt uncomfortably certain.

So I did what I thought any reasonable, open-minded person would do. I told myself I was being too harsh. Too quick to judge. That I needed to give people a fair chance before deciding anything about them.

I labeled my intuition “judgment” and spent years trying to talk myself out of it.

That mistake cost me tens of thousands of dollars, years of unnecessary stress, and a mountain of negative self-talk about being “too critical” or “closed off.”

It took me 40 years to realize that I wasn’t actually “judgmental.” I was receiving accurate, intuitive data, and then systematically dismissing it as a character flaw.

The $40,000 Lesson

The first time I heard the contractor my husband had hired, my entire body and mind reacted.

We were doing our first fix-and-flip property, and my husband was confident he’d found “the guy” to oversee the renovations. But the moment I heard this contractor’s voice while he was on speakerphone with my husband, my stomach dropped. I saw red flags. I heard sirens in my mind. I had this weird knowing…this guy is a crook.

I said something to my husband, but he assured me everything was fine. This guy was the best option, had lots of experience with fix and flips, and was highly recommended by our realtor (who I also didn’t trust for no logical reason except vibes). My husband assured me he had it handled.

And you know what? Iwantedto believe him. We wanted to keep things moving. We wanted to make our profit and move on to the next one. So I did what I’d done a hundred times before, and I dismissed my intuition as unfounded fear. Maybe I was being biased. Maybe I was projecting. Maybe I just needed to trust that my husband knew more than me about all of this.

I let my husband convince me. More accurately, I let my husband confirm what I wanted to believe anyway…that my gut feeling was wrong and we could proceed.

Well, the contractor did terrible work that had to be fixed. Then he ran off with $20,000 of our money, plus some materials we’d already paid for. We had zero recourse.

At the time, I wasn’t deep into energetics or spirituality, let alone doing psychic mediumship or channeling the Akashic Records. I had no framework for understanding that what I’d felt was intuition speaking to me. I just thought I was being paranoid. Judgmental. Unfairly suspicious of someone I didn’t even know.

But I had known. The moment I heard his voice, my intuition knew exactly who he was.

I just didn’t trust it.

The Real Reason You Keep Overriding Your Intuition

So why do we do this? Why do so many of us get accurate intuitive hits and then systematically talk ourselves out of them?

A big reason is that we’ve been taught that being a good person means being open-minded and compassionate. Giving people a chance to show you who they really are. And that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions without evidence.

And we’ve also been taught about our internal biases. We’ve learned that our assumptions can make us judge others unfairly, how our conditioning creates blind spots, and how we can mistake our prejudices for perception.

So when intuition speaks, we second-guess it. Is this actually intuition, or is this just my bias? Am I being unfair? Am I projecting my own issues onto someone else?

This is hard for everyone, but the pressure to override intuition is even worse for women. We’re expected to be nice. Compassionate. Kind. Welcoming. Accepting. The bar for “giving someone a chance” is set impossibly high, and the cost of being labeled “difficult” or “cold” or “closed off” feels way too steep.

And if you exist in progressive spaces? The stakes feel even higher.

Because what if your gut feeling about someone looks like prejudice from the outside?

What if you can’t articulate a logical reason for why someone feels off, and it gets confused for racism, or classism, or some other form of discrimination?

In a world where we’re (rightfully) trying to examine our biases, it can feel dangerous to trust a feeling you can’t explain with facts.

So we ignore the tightness in our chest. We override the sinking feeling in our stomach. We talk ourselves into giving people chances they haven’t earned, staying in situations that are draining us, and ignoring every warning sign our body is sending.

We choose being “open-minded” over self-trust. Being “fair” over being discerning.

And we pay for it. In energy, in boundaries crossed, in time we’ll never get back.

This Is the Part That Trips Most People Up

So let’s actually define what we’re talking about here, because this is where most people get stuck.

We use “judgment” and “intuition” interchangeably, as if they’re the same thing. They’re not. And learning to tell the difference is what changes everything.

Judgment lives in your mind. Intuition lives in your body and energy field.

Judgment is the story you buildafterthe feeling. It’s the narrative, the explanation, the case you construct: This person is untrustworthy because of X, Y, Z. It's often reactive, ego-driven, and tangled up with your past experiences and wounds. Judgment wants to be right, and it wants to condemn.

Intuition doesn’t explain itself. It doesn’t need to. It can show up as a tightening in your chest, a drop in your stomach, an inexplicable urge to leave. It is often subtle, unattached, and calm. It doesn’t tell you a story; it just delivers information. Neutral, clean, fast.

Judgment is loud. Intuition is quiet.

Judgment has an agenda. It argues its case, loops, and gets louder the more you resist it. Intuition tends to land once, clearly, quickly, and then wait. It doesn’t negotiate or try to convince you.

Judgment condemns. Intuition protects.

This is the most important distinction. When judgment shows up, it’s usually trying to prove something about you, about them, or about who’s right. When intuition shows up, it’s not trying to make anyone wrong. It’s just trying to keep you safe or guide you to the best outcome for you.

Here’s a simple way to check in when you’re unsure:

Does this feeling have a storyline attached to it?

If there’s a full internal monologue explaining why someone is bad or wrong or beneath you, that might be judgment worth examining. But if it’s just a feeling? A knowing that bypasses logic entirely? That’s your intuition. And it’s worth listening to.

What Happens When You Finally Stop Explaining Away the Feeling

By the time my client “Shirley” came to me, she’d spent years believing she was the problem in relationships. Past partners and her father had called her demanding, controlling, and too much. She’d been told so many times that her point of view was the issue that she’d stopped trusting herself entirely.

So when she got involved with someone who lit up every warning signal she had, she overrode it. By the time she realized how misaligned they were, she was already pregnant.

She came to me while things were falling apart. He was a bad partner and unsupportive father, and she knew it. She could articulate it clearly in every session. But she kept taking him back, giving him chances, and holding on to the idea that it could work.

It took us a while to get to the real reason why.

It wasn’t that she believed in him. It was that leaving him meant something she wasn’t ready to face: that her judgment had been wrong. Again. But if she could make it work, if she could just “get past her ego”, smooth things over, and hold it together, then it wouldn’t be bad judgment. It would just be a relationship that required some effort to stabilize.

That’s the thing about ignoring your intuition long enough. Eventually, it stops feeling like you’re overriding your gut and starts feeling like your gut was never reliable to begin with.

When we went into her Akashic Records, we found the deeper entanglement. Past life threads with this soul that had been clouding her ability to see him clearly. We discovered that this was a pattern they had been repeating together for several lifetimes. Once we fully released those, something shifted. The pull she’d felt toward him dissolved, and she was finally able to end the relationship.

Her intuition had never been the problem. It had been right from the start.

Then there’s my client who invested in a high-ticket mentorship that her gut had been quietly warning her about from the very first interaction.

Something felt off during that first conversation. There was a subtle pressure, seemingly fake urgency, a hint of condescension. There was also a stack of “bonuses” that sounded impressive but left her with a vague, hard-to-articulate, weird feeling.

Even though the energy felt a little pushy and a little performative, the coach was successful, well-respected, and had a long roster of women who’d invested in her. Surely that meant something, my client thought.

So she did what we’ve all been taught to do. She diagnosed her hesitation as “fear of success.” She told herself this was just her resistance to “investing in herself,” that successful people make bold moves, and that she needed to get out of her own way.

You can probably guess where this is going.

The bonuses were mostly never delivered. The coaching was generic. The level of support she’d been promised shrank once she was inside the program. It became pretty clear, pretty fast, that this coach was far more focused on signing the next client than actually delivering for the ones she already had.

She was kicking herself because she’d felt it. Right from the beginning, something in her body had clocked exactly what kind of operation this was. The problem was, she just had a whole arsenal of personal development language ready to talk herself out of it.

“Investing in yourself.” “Making bold moves.” “Getting out of your own way.”

Sometimes that language is genuinely useful. And sometimes it’s the exact thing that gets weaponized against your own intuition.

And then there are the friendships. The ones that leave you exhausted every single time, but you can’t quite put your finger on why. There’s no dramatic falling out. No obvious betrayal.

Just a slow, quiet drain that you keep explaining away because they’re technically a good person, they haven’t done anything wrong, and who are you to decide the relationship isn’t working based on nothing but a feeling?

So you keep showing up. You keep giving the benefit of the doubt. You keep waiting for a reason you could actually say out loud, something concrete enough to justify the distance you’ve been wanting to create for months.

Your intuition knew from the beginning. It just took you a while to decide that was reason enough to choose discernment over being open-minded and nice.

The Part Nobody Tells You About Intuition Development

So now you’re probably wondering, okay, how do I actually start trusting it?

And here’s where I’m going to give you a different answer than most people will.

The typical advice is some version of “practice listening to your intuition more.” Slow down. Get quiet. Meditate. Journal. Learn to hear the signal beneath the noise.

And look, none of that is wrong. But it’s also not the whole picture. Because for most people, the problem isn’t that they can’t hear their intuition. It’s that something is getting in the way of trusting what they already hear.

That something is yourshadow.

Your shadow is everything that’s hidden under the surface, everything you aren’t conscious of that is influencing your mind, energy, and feelings. It includes what you’ve been taught to believe about what’s logical, appropriate, and acceptable.

It’s the “shoulds” you absorbed growing up. The conditioning that told you being a good person means giving everyone a chance. The programming that turned your clearest warnings into character flaws. It’s the voice that shows up the moment your gut speaks and immediately starts building a case against it.

And until you do some work there, strengthening your intuition is almost beside the point. You can hear it, but if your shadow keeps intercepting the signal and rewriting the message, then you’ll keep second-guessing yourself.

This is the actual work. Not learning to hear your intuition louder, but learning to recognize when your fears, your shadow, and your programming are masquerading as logic. Learning to notice the difference between genuine discernment and the very sophisticated ways we’ve been taught to abandon ourselves.

So where do you actually begin?

Here are some places to start: slow down in moments of decision and notice where the resistance is actually coming from.

Is it a body sensation? Something tightening, dropping, pulling away?

Or is it a story? A voice that sounds a lot like everyone who ever told you how you were supposed to feel and act?

Journal on the times your intuition was right. This isn’t to torture yourself about not listening, but to build an evidence base. You have a track record, so it’s time to start acknowledging it.

It can also be helpful to practice honoring the small nos before you work up to the big ones. You don’t have to start by ending the relationship or walking away from the investment. Instead, start by noticing when something feels off and not immediately talking yourself out of it. Let the feeling exist without putting it on trial.

The goal isn’t to become someone who makes every decision from “the gut” alone. It’s to stop treating your intuition like a witness that needs to be cross-examined before it’s allowed to testify.

The bottom line is to start getting more curious about where your beliefs, feelings, and reactions are actually coming from. Developing and trusting your intuition starts with engaging in radical honesty about yourself, what you actually want for your life, and what is currently influencing you.

It is more about clearing your energy and letting go than intuition development exercises and wearing the right crystal.

Here's What I Actually Want You to Walk Away With

You are not too judgmental. You are not too sensitive. You are not someone who needs to work on being more open-minded or giving more people more chances.

You are someone who has been receiving accurate information for a very long time and who was taught, in a hundred different ways, to dismiss it as a flaw.

The contractor, the mentor, the relationship that drained you, the friend who left you exhausted…your intuition knew. It knew before you had evidence, before you had language for it, before anyone else around you was willing to see it. And it didn’t waver. You did.

And it’s still doing it.

Right now, there’s probably something you’ve been going back and forth on. A person you keep making excuses for. An opportunity that looks good on paper but makes your stomach do something you keep trying to ignore. Your intuition has already weighed in, and you’re just waiting for permission to listen.

You don’t need tobecome more intuitive. What you need, and what most of us need, is to stop treating our own knowing like it has to earn the right to be taken seriously. Your intuition isn’t judgment. It isn’t fear or bias dressed up as a feeling. It’s your internal GPS, and it has been trying to save you all along.

The first step isn’t learning to hear it better. It’s acknowledging that you’ve been hearing it all along.

You’re way more tapped in than you’ve been giving yourself credit for.