Is It Anxiety, or Is It Your Intuition Trying to Guide You?

How to tell the difference between your trauma programming and your inner guidance system

When we start to become aware of our anxiety patterns, one of the hardest things to untangle is what’s true inner guidance… and what’s actually subconscious survival programming in disguise.

That quiet inner voice that says “Don’t go there” or “Be careful this time”… is it your intuition protecting you from real danger? Or is it a trauma response trying to keep you safe from dangers that aren’t actually there—often holding you back or sabotaging your growth and relationships?

The line between the two can feel impossibly thin at first.

This used to be one of my biggest questions in the early stages of my healing journey. I couldn’t tell if I was listening to my gut... or if I was just anxious, triggered, and calling it intuition. I didn’t know how to trust myself, because my inner signals were all tangled up in past pain.

So if you're in that place, I see you. This is a messy, very real part of healing that not enough people talk about clearly.

The good news is—there are ways to start telling the difference. The more we build awareness and safety in our bodies, the more our internal signals start to sort themselves out.

In this post, I’ll walk you through the key signs I’ve learned to look for. I know how hard it can be to tell the difference, so I’ll share specific situations from my own life to make it clearer and help you apply these insights to your own experience—so you can finally start trusting yourself again and stop questioning everything you feel.

Let’s unpack this!