How To Trust Your Gut
Recently I had the opportunity to sit down for a conversation with my friend Anne, who I met through the Couchsurfing community. Anne hosts a podcast called Journeyocity, where she explores the extraordinary stories that unfold through travel and everyday life.
While I was visiting Ottawa, we recorded an episode together sitting along the banks of the Ottawa River. What began as a casual conversation about travel quickly turned into something deeper: a discussion about intuition, psychology, and the personal experiences that led me to leave the United States and come to Canada.
This post shares some of the reflections from that conversation.
The Decision Happened Quickly
I left the United States on July 4th.
The timing wasn’t intentional at first, but in hindsight it felt symbolic.
The decision itself happened fairly quickly. For a couple of weeks I had been feeling increasingly anxious while following political developments and social conversations online. Something about the tone and patterns I was seeing felt familiar in a way I couldn’t quite explain.
My body was reacting before my mind could fully articulate why.
I wasn’t sleeping well. I wasn’t eating much. I felt stuck in a kind of fight-or-flight mode that wouldn’t settle down.
Eventually I realized I needed to step back and give myself space to think more clearly.
Canada was the simplest option. As an American citizen, I could drive across the border and stay for up to six months as a visitor. So I packed up my things, said goodbye to my apartment, and drove north.
Why It Felt Familiar
Part of what made the moment so intense for me was that I had experienced something similar before—though in a very different context.
Years earlier, I had been in a relationship with someone who had severe narcissistic traits. Over time, the relationship became emotionally, verbally, and eventually physically abusive.
The thing about abusive dynamics is that they don’t appear all at once.
They develop slowly.
There’s actually a phrase therapists sometimes use called “boiling the frog.” The idea is that if the temperature rises gradually enough, you may not notice how dangerous the environment has become until much later.
Looking back, the most destabilizing part of that experience wasn’t just the conflict. It was the confusion. It often felt like reality itself was shifting.
As I described in the interview:
“It felt like being trapped in a funhouse of mirrors. I didn’t know what was real anymore. I needed a tether back to reality.” Journiosity - Journeying in wit…
Therapy eventually helped me rebuild that tether.
Learning How Manipulation Works
One of the most important things I learned during that period was how manipulation actually functions psychologically.
People with strong narcissistic tendencies often rely on certain behavioral patterns:
Mirroring – imitating your body language and emotions to create trust
Gaslighting – making you question your own perceptions
Triangulation – bringing in third parties to create division or confusion
Emotional escalation – provoking strong reactions to gain a sense of control
Understanding these dynamics took time. It also took a lot of therapy.
Ironically, when my partner eventually entered therapy himself, it didn’t improve the relationship. In some ways, it made the manipulation more sophisticated.
He became more controlled. More calculated.
Smarter.
But not less abusive.
That experience fundamentally changed how I think about power, psychology, and human behavior.
The Role of Therapy
During that period of my life, therapy became a lifeline.
At one point I was attending therapy five days a week. It may sound extreme, but that level of support was what I needed to break free from the psychological fog that had built up over time.
Therapy helped me:
rebuild my sense of reality
recognize manipulation tactics
understand my own emotional patterns
develop boundaries
It also changed the direction of my life.
Experiencing both excellent therapists and ineffective ones made me realize how powerful—and how uneven—the field can be. That realization eventually inspired me to pursue graduate study in counseling psychology myself.
I wanted to understand the systems that shape human behavior and help others navigate the kinds of situations that had once felt impossible to escape.
Intuition and the Body
One of the biggest lessons I took from both therapy and life experience is that our bodies often recognize danger before our minds can explain it.
Intuition is not mystical.
It’s pattern recognition.
Sometimes those patterns are subtle. Sometimes they’re unconscious. But they still influence how our nervous systems respond to the world around us.
For me, leaving the United States wasn’t about predicting the future or reacting to a single event. It was about recognizing that my nervous system needed space.
Distance allowed me to calm down, think clearly, and reconnect with the sense of stability I had worked hard to rebuild.
What This Year Has Been About
The past year has been less about escape and more about clarity.
Traveling, meeting people, and having conversations like the one with Anne has helped me reflect on how personal experiences shape the way we interpret the world around us.
Sometimes stepping outside your usual environment helps you see things differently.
Sometimes it simply gives you the room to breathe.
Either way, the journey continues.
