Gut Instinct

My therapist recently told me that I should just “trust my gut instinct” on a particular decision I was trying to make. I looked at her blankly and said, “I don’t think you understand how difficult it is for me to listen to my gut.” And then I went on to try to explain what it is like to grow up as a Mormon woman. No one tells you to listen to your gut. You get no training on figuring out what your gut is saying. Exactly the opposite. A Mormon woman is told to look for external sources of authority at every turn.

Wondering if you should marry this guy who asked you? Read your scriptures. Pray. Talk to your bishop. Talk to your father or your brothers. Talk to men who have authority in your life. But to ask yourself if you want to marry him? No, never. You will never be told to do that. What God tells you to do is what matters, and since God rarely speaks to women, you’ll find out what God is telling you to do by following the words of the prophet and apostles.

Wondering if you should have another child? Rinse and repeat. It’s not about it you’re exhausted all the time and can’t believe that you’d be a good parent to another child. It’s about whether God has already decided that another child is coming for you. It might be about whether or not you’ve already committed in the pre-mortal life to have another child who is waiting to come to earth to your family, but the only way you will know if you’ve made promises before you can remember? Men will tell you.

Should you move here? Should you take that job? Should you quit your job? Should you major in Finance? Should you go to law school?

All questions that will be answered based on the farthest thing from your gut.

I daresay that even questions like where did I leave the keys? or what kind of ice cream should I buy? might be things you should ask men about. Because even the smallest things might have eternal consequences. And you wouldn’t want to miss out on a blessing or a chance encounter with someone who might change your life, would you?

I doubt that I will ever become comfortable with trusting my gut instinct. I’ve spent too many years outsourcing all my decisions to men.

But one of my kids pointed out to me that actually, for many Mormons, the “gut instinct” could be elided with the “Spirit.” Plenty of Mormons insist that they got “revelations” from God about important and trivial matters (yes, I know, nothing is really trivial when we look at the eternities). And yes, I remember tilting my head while other Mormons spoke about praying to God and getting an answer that yes, it turned out that they were supposed to do exactly what they wanted to do. So wasn’t all that practice in praying useful for figuring out my gut instinct?

I guess not for me. Because for me, I don’t think I ever was trying to do what I wanted to do and clothing that decision in God’s robes. Either I didn’t see that was one of my choices or the people around me insisted that I was wrong. I got so used to being wrong that I started to think that the answer to every prayer was just to do whatever it was that was the hardest and most painful. I guess that is how I got into Ironman (haha!).

For me, asking what I want is fraught with the sense that even the audacity to start here is selfish and unfeminine and all the things that I was told I would be if I ever left Mormonism. I don’t think that “trusting my gut” is just doing everything that Mormons told me never to do, but I admit, it is tempting sometimes to start there. What about you? How do you know what your gut is telling you? Do you trust your gut to be right? Or do you worry that it will lead you down a path you will later regret?