She Knew: A Womans Intuition and the Cost of Not Listening

"A woman's intuition has often proved truer than a man's arrogant assumption of knowledge." - Mahatma Gandhi

There’s a moment I keep returning to in my own memory. A flicker. A feeling. The moment before I knew something for sure, when I only felt it. And I pushed it down. Smiled through it. Rationalized it. Only later did I say: "I knew it. I didn’t have the proof, but I knew."

So many women know. We don’t always have the evidence, but we have the feeling. The sensation. The still, small voice. And we’re often taught to dismiss it.

Men are often socialized toward action: "If you see something, do something." Logic and perception are linked to decision-making and control. If it looks wrong, fix it. If it sounds off, challenge it.

Women, on the other hand, are often socialized to feel something’s wrong, but manage it, quietly. Interpret. Accommodate. Endure. Our intuition may scream, but we’re trained to stay mute. To give the benefit of the doubt. In other words: Don’t trust your gut. You might be overreacting. And so we silence ourselves, even from ourselves.

Logic vs intuition are often parallelled to rational vs emotional. This dichotomy has been weaponized. It’s not just about how we think. It’s about who gets to be seen as credible, competent, and in control.

• Logic, reason, objectivity are coded as male and seen as strong, disciplined, trustworthy.

• Intuition, emotion, subjectivity are coded as female and seen as weak, erratic, unreliable.

This isn’t accidental. It’s patriarchal design. It's how power sustains itself: by defining what counts as truth and who gets to speak it.

But women’s intuition isn’t magic or witchcraft. It’s pattern recognition. It’s body language, microexpressions, tone shifts, the tension in the air. It’s the accumulation of lived experience passed down through generations of women who had to feel their way through danger when saying it out loud would only be ignored - or worse, get them hurt.

Your nervous system may be responding to wounds you’ve never experienced firsthand, but that your body recognizes on a cellular level. This is ancestral. This is primal. And it deserves respect. In our bodies and our bloodlines are the remnants of both the wounds and the wisdom of our predacessors.

But in a world that favors logic and dismisses feelings as “dramatic” or “hysterical,” intuitive knowing often gets pushed into the background, especially when it threatens to disrupt a relationship, a system, or someone else's comfort.

So many of us only let ourselves believe something once the truth can't be ignored. And that moment, the one where the facts finally catch up to the feeling, isn't liberating. It's devastating. Because it forces us to reckon not only with what was done, but with what we did or didn't do for ourselves:

We knew, and we didn't act on it.

We felt it, and we stayed anyway.

We saw it, and we told ourselves it was nothing.

That internal betrayal often hurts as much as the external one. Reclaiming your intuition isn't just about preventing. It's about repairing the rupture between you and yourself.

It starts with mindfulness: What does my body feel when something’s off?

It continues with honoring: Even if I can’t explain this yet, I’m allowed to pay attention to it.

And it grows with practice: I can set boundaries based on discomfort, not just on proof.

There’s a unique kind of wisdom in women - emotional, embodied, often invisible. And it doesn’t need to be justified to be valid. You don't need permission to know what you know. You don’t need to wait until the damage is undeniable. You don’t need a spreadsheet of facts to say, “This doesn’t feel right.”

Female spies are often praised for having a kind of "sixth sense." An uncanny ability to read people, pick up on subtle cues, and interpret body language with heightened sensitivity. While women are just as capable of logical thinking as men, and men can certainly possess strong intuition; there are natural differences in how male and female brains tend to function. And these differences aren’t flaws.

The real problem lies in how society has long undervalued women’s inherent strengths. From a young age, we’re taught that intuition is inferior to logic, seen as less dependable or credible. As a result, many women grow up discounting their own instincts, emotional intelligence, and the broader, more relational way they tend to approach problems.

But the same epigenetic science that tells us trauma gets passed down also offers something else: hope. Because what’s passed down isn’t just pain, it’s also resilience. Survival. Adaptation. Spirit. Intuition doesn’t always come with clarity. Sometimes it whispers. Sometimes it only makes sense in hindsight. But it’s real. It’s worth listening to. And it’s yours.

So perhaps the next time you feel that flicker, that quiet unease, that internal shift - you won’t push it down. You’ll pause. You’ll listen. You’ll say: I don’t know why yet, but I trust myself. And that alone is revolutionary.

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