Yes, this is a problem. Thank you for your reply, I think the feedback is helpful.
Good point. I took the first approach of trying to work out why my intuition thinks it’s right. Consciously I think I’m often dismissive of my intuitions, so I was trying to respond to it more positively and understand it better. I guess I ended up too focused on that.
This specific intuition is (and I think some others like it are) very sensitive to criticism and it’s much harder to access them if I’m not being friendly to them. I think I should at least try some more critical interpretations of them in situations like this; maybe try some friendly interpretations then one or two critical interpretations - kind of like trying to show my intuition goodwill in advance.
I did say at the beginning that I disagree with my intuition.
But I think it was bad to basically end the post with my short brainstorm, without further comment about it. I think that could confuse others. I think I hit some sort of wall in writing and couldn’t find the words to continue, and maybe took that to mean I had nothing more to say (possibly I was again dismissing one of my intuitions). When I feel like that at the end of a post about my intuition I should say so, and also I should reiterate my final position on my intuitions.
I had a pretty strong defensive intuition reading this. I think I subconsciously dropped the context when I was reading these questions and took them as accusations, instead of suggestions of brainstorm subjects. That’s something I need to be wary of. That may be a big factor in why I find it hard to access my intuition in a critical way. Even if they were accusations, they would be accusations that I should think about seriously and not be defensive about.
So I have multiple intuitions working badly there. One is taking a question as an accusation. Another is, upon receiving an accusation, to drop the context around it. Another is to be defensive about accusations. They’re all pretty bad and consciously I disagree with them. I think they happen very quickly subconsciously and I just get the emotional response as an output. It’s something I’d like to fix super fast but I don’t know if there’s a very direct way of approaching at that subconscious thought chain. I guess it’s something I just need to keep gradually challenging and talking about when it happens.
In answer to the suggestions, that’s an extra brainstorming step that I should think about in a situation like this. Not just the thing I responded to (ET’s post), but the thing I did that got that response (my first post).
That’s a good point. I think I would have taken that a lot more positively. I think my intuition took his post negatively because it took it as an implied criticism which is something I don’t like, but that’s unfair on Elliot. I think if he was actually trying to criticise me he’d say so. The fact that I inferred criticism from something does not mean the writer implied it.
I think I’m also not good at brainstorming and that’s something else I should keep working on. I don’t think I’d be capable of just doing a really good brainstorm right now. Yes those scenarios are not revolutionary ideas and they could occur to me in the right circumstances, but I think there’s some sort of skill in brainstorming and connecting up all those ideas which I’m lacking. Possibly I was worse than usual in this case owing to dealing with an intuition and having some resulting confusion and low-lying conflicts.
I’m a little wary at this point of having too many things to learn from this post alone and I’m pretty sure I’m going to repeat some of these mistakes.
Again thanks for your reply. I have a lot of growth I need to do here.
I’ll try to utilise this feedback next time I write about intuitions.
Some notes about writing about intuitions:
- Writing about intuitions is a difficult skill to learn. I think it’s I’m going to get it wrong a lot before I get any good at it. But I want to work on it, as I think I have a lot of small conflicts like this that are distracting and take energy. I don’t have a sense of how much they add up to, but I could easily have lots of small intuitions like in this case which may add up to a lot more problems than I realise.
- Intuitions are hard to understand, and I think people often end up with a lot of connected intuitions all activating each other. So when writing about them I think it’s important to mention connected intuitions that come up (at least the presence of them, even if the words to explain them are hard to identify).
Some notes about brainstorming (roughly about talking to people):
- Consider multiple steps of context (e.g. not just a reply, but what the reply was following).
- Consider scenario variants (e.g. rather than “someone else”, try specific people, try different kinds of people)
- Consider broader contexts (e.g. in a different place/forum)
- Consider different subjects (e.g. subjects I’m much more or much less confident in)