When your gut feeling was spot on

[marriedwithhounds]

Feeling an intense mixture of emotions and hoping that others will relate in some way.

When I was little (maybe about 10?) I remember telling my mum that my great uncle had touched my bum when he had his arm around me. She said she was sure he hadn't meant to and not to worry - but not to hug him any more if I didn't feel comfortable. I never hugged him again after that and he never tried to hug me.

I always had a bad feeling about him. Fast forward 20 years and it's now confirmed that he is a pedophile with a penchant for young boys. My gut instinct was right about him.

AIBU to ask you for similar experiences? DSis thinks you can't trust gut instincts but I defo feel vindicated.

Peadophile for me too. A woman though at a church event. I threw up when she went on stage.

She'd been abusing children during her missionary work.

"make sure you don't persecute any innocent men though"

Kittens oh yes, because people think MEN and their safety are more important than ours.

On the majority of threads that turn out to be trolls

This is so funny and a classic case of mn selective reading and rewriting it as all about the male/female debate.
GO BACK AND READ WHAT I WROTE AND DON'T BE SO LAZY

Yep I'm really hairy and live under a bridge, go and do some searching, been here since 2002.
And as I am the one saying this loud and clear and none of you will actually talk to me but instead "funny how people are...."

If you bothered to read my posts about this, I gave 2 very clear reasons why we should be wary of the gut instinct thing.
One of them was in order not to be the victim of a paedophile becuae your 'gut instinct' says he is a nice guy.

In fact I cited someone I knew that we ALL thought was fine, until the day the police knocked on the door.
Apparently though 'someone would have known but just didn't speak up'
NO, that's CRAP and it is SO DANGEROUS to hmm let me think - dangerous to the poor little men? No DANGEROUS TO YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN.

(Oh wait, I'm getting a sense of de ja vu, didn't I already write a long post about the danger of going by gut instinct alone, and the importance of safeguarding? Yes I did, funny how the people writing 'oh it's all about looking after the men' failed to READ what I had written)

I sincerely hope that if you are in the position of looking after children, or employing people to look after children that you understand the basic safeguarding principle, that you cannot tell form the outside if someone is a paedophile or not.

Nothing wrong with a bit of gut instinct, but on threads liek these the impression is that we would 'just know'

You wouldn't. At least you wouldn't always know.

My mum used to work in a pub years ago when I was around 10.. It was a really nice family friendly pub but there was this one man who used to give me the absolute creeps, for no reason at all! I told my mum and she told me to not be so judgemental and that he was a lovey man.
One year when the fair was down, this man tried to give me some money for the fair to which I politely declined, he then grabbed my wrist and stuffed money in my hand quite forcefully while no one was watching.. My friends and I then left for the fair- I didn't say anything to anyone.
My friends all went on a ride while I stayed off it (I felt a bit unwell) and he appeared from no where looking panicked saying my mum wanted me back ASAP it was an emergency. He then pulled me down an alley and attacked me, he said I took the money and therefore owed him. I never ever told a soul because everyone loved him I knew no one believed me. I've never trusted anyone ever since, but I have always trusted my gut! X

nurseymummyx

I used to work in a nursery. One of the dads made almost all of us, young women in late teens and 20s, really uncomfortable. He was very charming but there was something about him that always made us answer the door in pairs and keep handover as short as possible to get the locked door back between us and him. He and the mum eventually split and it all came out that she had endured lots of violence from him. He made threats about snatching their child from nursery when he was ordered to only have contact at a centre.

The other is the childcare student the manager took on for placement out of the blue. She never took on students as she was very particular about staff and didn't like placement set up. Although she didn't know why she felt that this particular student had to be there. She was placed with me a lot of the time in the baby room and I just felt she shouldn't be left alone with the babies. Unlike other nurseries in the area only level 3 qualified staff were allowed charge of the children, level 2 and unqualified were there to support but would not be allowed soul care. The student really took objection to this but that was just the way we worked. She just didn't seem suited to the role and struggled to fill her portfolio despite unlimited opportunities at the nursery. A few years later she and her much older boyfriend were convicted of doing awful (making indecent images amongst them) things to his children while they were in his care. Knowing other nurseries that should could have been placed at in the area, she'd have had lots of opportunity to get the alone time with children she tried to seek in our setting. The manager taking her on may have prevented children in other settings being abused while she trained.

I've had gut feelings about needing to keep ds home or see a doctor which has meant his either had massive sezuires at home rather than at toddler groups or been in a and e.

This weird fundamentalist Christian woman who wore a headscarf and carried a copy of the Bible with her started coming to my synagogue. I got some major bad vibes off her, especially as she'd read Corinthians during the service. Then one day she tried to convert people. Luckily a couple of the congregation schooled her on theology.

@spacepyramid @teancy101

it's Have I Got News For You

Thanks!

On the plus side, I've also met people where I've thought 'you seem really cool' and we've ended up becoming good friends. Or my gut instinct has told me to do something when I've considered not doing it, and it's paid off.

Yep, it's not always a negative thing, though the negative ones tend to be more memorable as there's nothing like that visceral just spotted striped in the long grass and on high alert now feeling to stick in the mind.

Did you know that in Hebrew the name for woman also sounds like intuition? (which means knowing without knowing). I love that.

@spacepyramid I had tales from a contact of a newspaper contact years before he died.

My Mum is one to have gut instincts, the night my now dh brought me home from our first date, she said ‘you think that he is the man you are going to marry don’t you’, then several months later after a night away with my now dh, she said ‘you have lost your virginity, today! Haven’t you! I didn’t think you were still a Virgin!’ I was quietly horrified and wanted the world to open and swallow me whole!

My Grandmother came up to visit me and my two little ones, she was a strong, lively woman who used to go and help ‘Wee old ladies’ who were not far off the same age she was. But that visit, as she left, I knew that she would never be back. Weeks later, my lovely GM was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, it spread quickly, she only lasted another few months.

@Alunwynsknee Sadly that doesn't surprise me.

My gut instinct totally failed when I had some counselling sessions from a man who later went to prison for child abuse. The counselling sessions were for something related to his crimes.

Everyone loves my cousin's DH but i get a strange feeling off him and can't bear to be around him. I know something isn't right.

@DriftingLeaves

*People only remember the times their "gut feeling" was right, not the many times it was wrong.

The whole "trust your instincts" thing is what causes witch hunts and leaves socially awkward or non NT people isolated and reviled. This has happened in our village and I'm ashamed that an innocent yet socially awkward person felt he had to move on.

Of course sometimes the gut instinct is right but most of the time it isn't, we should bear that in mind and not isolate those most in need of support.*

This is the best comment on gut instinct I have ever read!

Remember meeting an Australian woman with a new born. She felt her baby hadn’t moved enough and had a feeling something wrong at 36 weeks tramped to hospital and demanded a scan. Staff not impressed and eye rolled her as neurotic but agreed. Cord wrapped round baby’s neck they did a c section immediately left any longer she would have died. Sent shivers down my spine thank god the mother was assertive

@Shortfeet

Thank you.

There is a guy that lives locally, married and has grown up daughter.
He hasn't ever done anything but I absolutely hate him. He looks at me with rapist eyes and I'm scared of him. I wouldn't ever want to be on my own with him.

He seems to be Mr popular in the pub though.

Gut instinct about the young lady that came to work for my (now X) DH - just the mention of her made me think she was trouble. She was. She destroyed my marriage.

She moved on and is now a much admired household name. Still wouldn’t trust her further than I could fart though ....

@ParkheadParadise 💔 I lost my best friend when she tried to leave her husband. It was devastating I can't imagine your daughter.

My colleague at a volunteering group set up a meeting for us to visit a venue that could host us. We went, and I had a huge negative reaction to the guy who ran the venue. My colleague thought he was great, but I got such bad vibes that I insisted that we find a different venue. Colleague wasn't too happy, but was later relieved when it emerged that the guy had been arrested for embezzling money from a charitable organisation (not ours) that had used his venue.

I think lots of people I work with would say that gut instinct is important but when you really sit and reflect on it it's not instinct it's learning your service users well and picking up on changes and warning signs which indicate something may be off kilter.

The night I was attacked on a ward I pretty much knew SOMETHING was going to happen but I didn't predict being pinned to the wall by my throat by a psychopath (diagnosed). I knew he wasn't in the right place and I knew he wasn't going to like the answer I was about to give him. 5'6 me wasn't going to have much of a chance against 6'6 him. It's risk awareness and assessment not gut. Thankfully we all had it that night and I was released pretty quickly.

I had a gut pull to my husband, I loved him very quickly which was unusual for me. I was drawn to him very much.

I've always always trusted my gut with my child though. Same as at work it's risk assessment though, you know your child and you know when something is off.

When I was about 19 I was at a house party full of students. There were a bunch of people sitting on a sofa laughing and messing around. I was quite shy and didn't know many people there. One voice really stood out to me and really quickly even though I wasn't looking at them I could hear that voice and knew there was something special around it and that something significant Was going to happen. It was a really incredible 'feeling' and very memorable. Like a feeling of excitement and adrenaline and expectation and recognition and it came from nowhere. It wasn't the actual words that person was saying and I had my back to them.

I didn't even speak to those people that night and I didn't act on it. I walked out of the room. And I thought nothing of it. Nothing did happen. For months.

But yes reader I married him.

A lot of gut instincts don’t involve people but situations.

Years ago I was driving home after taking the dc to a ECA when I came to a crossroads.

It was cold, dark and we were all tired.

Ahead lay the road home but turning left was a small village (I don’t think I had been down the road before)

Something inside me was telling me to turn left and go and buy a lottery ticket.

FWIW I don’t really gamble, I find it boring and I had never bought a lottery ticket in my life.

The urge to make the turn was so strong but I over road it as I knew the sensible thing was to get home and get everyone fed and bathed and put to bed.

It stayed with me for a few days until it was announced the winning ticket had been bought at the local shop in the same village at the time I would have been in the queue if I had turned left.

I asked upthread if even in some ordinary situations do people know what is going to happen next.

Conversations around the table and you know what someone is about to say and who is going to speak next and what they will say and what noises from outside the group are going to happen.

it's not instinct it's learning your service users well and picking up on changes and warning signs which indicate something may be off kilter.

That's what gut instinct in the negative sense is though. You're picking up on something that's not right, and it may be subconscious in the sense that you can't explain exactly what's bothering you, but it is. Gavin de Becker (security expert who's worked for a lot of VIPs) talks about this in The Gift Of Fear.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/56465.The_Gift_of_Fear