Trusting my inner voice again

[Anonymous]

Shelf item #3: I never got spiritual confirmation while dating Mrs. Reuben that marrying her was the right thing to do. In fact, sometimes I felt that breaking up was right. But I was very attracted to her, she had everything I was looking for in a spouse, and our life goals aligned. So I ignored my doubts, and based on natural evidence (and youthful infatuation), I asked her to marry me. Mrs. Reuben has proved time and again that I made the right decision. Now I feel it as strongly as I know it.

It took a long time, though. In our first year, at least twice a week, I’d have to talk myself out of worries that I had made the wrong decision, or fight down the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. As time passed, these feelings intruded less frequently and less intensely, to the point where last year, they popped up only twice and I dismissed them quickly. Today, it aggravates me that neurotic dread used to hold me back from full emotional commitment. It was pathological, stupid, and mostly the Church’s fault.

(It was “mostly” the Church’s fault because without the Church, I still would have had doubts. But they would have been based on natural uncertainty about a life-changing decision, which wouldn’t have lasted long after marriage because I normally plow forward with confidence and because Mrs. Reuben is awesome. As it was, my doubts were based on feeling that GOD MIGHT HAVE DISAPPROVED, which gave them incredible staying power.)

I recently realized that my faith crisis and faith transition are similar to this. A few months ago, the mismatch between my emotional evidence for an all-powerful God who cared and would intervene, and the natural evidence against it, became too great to ignore. My faith crisis began when I finally gave my natural evidence the proper weight.

I can no longer regard emotions as evidence of truth independent of myself, especially since I’ve given myself the freedom to hear and read testimonies of people whose emotional evidence would have directly contradicted mine. Some of these testimonies could have been delivered at an LDS pulpit if a few of the words were changed. (For example, there are polygamist women who have burning testimonies that Warren Jeffs is a prophet.) Now I think of emotions, especially elevation (i.e. burning in the bosom), joy, peace, and other “fruits of the Spirit,” as if they’re an inner voice, which tells me about subconscious thought that I’m not normally privy to. This inner voice allows me to tap into my intuition, and maybe something greater, if there’s a God out there who fiddles with the wetware in my head. Obviously, my inner voice can easily be overridden by strong feelings such as excitement, fear, guilt or disgust, and even when it’s not overridden, it can be very, very wrong.

So now we get to what I feel is my biggest post-FC loss: I don’t trust my inner voice much anymore.

Decades of believing that good feelings are evidence of truth, and decades of associating everything Church with good feelings, have trained my intuition to react positively to Church doctrine, testimonies, and even the cadence we use in discourse, so much that my inner voice still affirms it. It’s uncomfortable when my inner voice contradicts my natural evidence (this is just good old cognitive dissonance), and it helps to ignore it when that happens. I just can’t trust it on Church-related topics.

If that was it, I’d be fine. But I don’t trust my inner voice much now regardless of topic. For me, this is bad. I make decisions half by thinking through consequences, and half by feeling. (That’s according to Myers-Briggs, for what it’s worth.) Now making decisions takes longer, and when I make a decision, I have a hard time following through with confidence. Mentally, it’s like I’m missing an arm and a leg, and I do research for a living, for God’s sake.

Depression has muted my inner voice before. Now it’s chattering away, but I don’t trust it, and the effect is almost exactly the same.

I expect that, just like how my neurotic dread subsided during marriage to Mrs. Reuben, my intuition will slowly get retrained during my faith transition. I have a hunch that, without the weight of ETERNAL CONSEQUENCES giving momentum to my thought patterns, the change may happen more quickly. (On the other hand, there’s more to change.) And I think that the less my inner voice contradicts my natural evidence, the more I’ll be able to trust it.

Does this ring a bell for anyone? Was there anything that helped, or sped up the process? I’m still in the first-year probation stage of employment, and I need to be firing on as many cylinders as possible. I need to be able to tap into my intuition again.

[Anonymous]

I do fully relate. I could have written most of this post. That means, of course, that I can’t really be of any help to you other than affirming you’re not alone. My faith crisis was over a decade ago and I still don’t trust my feelings nor do I see a light at the the end of that tunnel. That was the betrayal part of my FC so how can I ever trust my feelings again?

I don;t mean to be a Debbie Downer. It would be wonderful if someone else does have some insight that would be helpful to us.

[Anonymous]

What caused my faith crisis may be somewhere close to there. Getting a clearly incorrect prayer answer that I couldn’t rationalize to make it correct, made me doubt any prayer answers. Prayers were the foundation of my testimony. I’ve never been very trusting of my own intuition so whenever I had to make a big decision I always went to God. Well, now I can’t trust those answers because apparently they can be confused with our own feelings. So I am having to learn how to trust my own intuition and myself, when I never have. Because those prayer answers I got were false, they must have been my own feelings, so in a way, I’m having to figure out how to trust my feelings/myself from scratch

[Anonymous]

I can’t say I spent much time in that phase so I may not be of much help. I am curious though:

1) What does truth mean to you?

2) How important is it to you to follow truth? Is it necessary to follow truth at all times or can you venture off the path every once in a while?

3) Do you think it is possible to be happy independent of adhering to truth? Is being happy enough? Is adhering to truth enough? Some combination of both?

I could list more questions but maybe I shouldn’t.

[Anonymous]

Funny story.

As a newlywed we lived in small three bedroom ranch house. I had a pretty female coworker that was trying to get out of a bad marriage. I felt what I believed to be a strong personal revelation to help her. We had a spare bedroom. She would pay rent. She had grown up LDS and was interested in coming back to church. Everybody wins!

I told my wife about my idea and she very nearly threatened to leave me. 👿 How could my personal revelation have been so wrong?

So I learned some from that experience.

I suggest that in some important ways you have to rely more now on your inner voice than you ever did before. Now you have to apply doctrines and principles of the church one by one and see how the “feel” to you. You are rebuilding your own boat one plank at a time at the same time that you are sailing into “ambiguous” waters. You get to make imperfect decisions based upon limited information and always stand ready to revise your conclusions.

[Anonymous]

nibbler wrote:

1) What does truth mean to you?

Knowledge of things as they really were, are, and will be. The truth is an accurate model of reality.

There are a lot of caveats. Human models of reality are subject to bias of all kinds, limited by finite observability, limited by finite memory, limited by finite processing power, limited by representation, and necessarily approximate. This is true of mathematical models as well as mental models.

nibbler wrote:

2) How important is it to you to follow truth? Is it necessary to follow truth at all times or can you venture off the path every once in a while?

It’s very important for me to follow truth. To me, only love and self-preservation have higher value than truth – and even then, I’d better have awesome reasons and be sure I’ve thought through the implications.

nibbler wrote:

3) Do you think it is possible to be happy independent of adhering to truth? Is being happy enough? Is adhering to truth enough? Some combination of both?

Maybe. Maybe. No. Yes.

My second answer needs elaboration. I don’t think it’s possible for me to be happy while not adhering to the truth as I understand it. If I can’t be happy without adhering to the truth, then being happy is enough because that means I’m adhering to the truth.

It takes more than just adhering to the truth for me to be happy. So adhering to truth is necessary but not sufficient.

nibbler wrote:

I could list more questions but maybe I shouldn’t.

Go ahead! This is fun and helps me think.

I think I still regard my inner voice as a thing that’s supposed to tell me the truth, or at least tell me what I believe is truth. Otherwise, why would I stop trusting it because it tells me things I think are likely to be false? So I might get some mileage out of regarding it as telling me what I believe is good or has value instead.

[Anonymous]

Reuben wrote:

being happy is enough because that means I’m adhering to the truth.

Reuben wrote:

regarding [the inner voice] as telling me what I believe is good or has value instead.

This is where I’m currently at. Whenever I pray and get some sort of thoughts or feelings as an “answer”, these answers are always tied to something being good or having value to me.

My inner voice has never been helpful in identifying absolute truth, but it’s helpful in pointing me towards possible good things.

[Anonymous]

Reuben,

In the response you mentioned “truth as I understand it.” I think the qualifier you added is important/interesting.

I’m a convert and joined the church a few decades ago. There and back again, a nibbler tale? While walking my path I’ve noticed that what I believed to be true has changed over the years, significantly so. My truth has evolved with me.

During the crisis years I began to wonder whether it was possible to get at the truth. I used to use the signature:

Slartibartfast wrote:

Perhaps I’m old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what’s actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, “Hang the sense of it,” and keep yourself busy. I’d much rather be happy than right any day.

Which is still a good line. The thought of devoting my life to the pursuit of truth started to feel a bit like a dog chasing its own tail. Whatever truth I found in the crisis years would not be my truth in the future (and as it turned out, it wasn’t) and whatever truth I discover today will not be my truth 5 years from now.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the exploration, the reinvention, the pursuit, I’m not advocating spiritual laziness but I am saying that I don’t get as hung up on whether what I currently hold to be true as being a definitive universal truth. I recognize that my truth is impermanent so I try to spend a little time reducing my attachment to it.

I don’t mean to get into another truth vs. Truth discussion. Maybe another way to talk about the subject is to explore dealing with uncertainty?

I remember praying and fasting about the crucial decision of who to marry. It was an interesting process. One where I felt like I was receiving direction from god. Even today I won’t skimp on giving god some of the credit for that one. It’s a good thing my faith crisis happened later in life, before I was able to successfully shut that voice out.

I return to this idea of impermanence. Addition is accompanied by subtraction. Multiplication is accompanied by division (and maybe toss in some rounding errors while we’re at it). If we goof a decision or take a wrong step life will eventually reveal the next truth to us. Pencils are accompanied by erasers.

[Anonymous]

i can relate– the church emphasis on revelation and “feelings” contributed to my indecisiveness when I was younger. Decisions were so agonizingly awful to make because I needed that lightening bolt, or at least, strong spiritual experience to make the decision. Sometimes nothing came. I now draw on several different sources when there is no, unmistakeable “good feeling”. If there is an unmistakable good feeling then i am prepared to follow it. But in the absence of such (which is most of the time) I tend to pull on many credible sources to get the information I need to make a decision. This includes church/leader advice if applicable, advice from people I respect, research on scholarly journals, internet research, etcetera. And then ULTIMATELY, I run it through my own judgment. This includes some risk-related thinking from decision-analysis theory.

But what I think. That is King. If the “Revelation” is dubious, I will discount it in favor of other more credible or logical input.

I learned this 20 years ago when I came to America for the first time, seeking a job and a sponsor for citizenship. Essentially, a very influential person told me to spend a lot of money on a good car to make a good impression at job interviews. I thought otherwise — with what I was doing very risky (risk of having to go back to my native country if I could not find a decent job and sponsor), I thought I should get a reliable junker that I could sell easily if it didn’t work out. Against my own filter of judgment, I went with the expensive car and it was nothing but trouble. I lost $13000. That was the beginning of my journey toward trusting my own instincts.

Recently, I did it again. But it worked. I am an electric bass player and wanted to move onto upright bass. The thing is big (I am small bodied), a nightmare to play at first, etcetera. Some people start and never finish learning it. Others said it takes 2 years at 2 hours a day to transition to the instrument from my current skill set.

I attribute that to the full size that everyone insisted I must tackle — from their perspective smaller versions of the instrument were completely unacceptable. All the advice from professionals was to get a full size instrument. They were adamant that anything less than that would relegate me to child status, that I would never be accepted in the jazz/booking agent community, my tone would be awful, etcetera. And they got downright nasty about it when I challenged their evidence with my own counter evidence from experienced teachers on youtube.

The pull to do what they said — get a relatively expensive, large scale instrument, high risk instrument — made me lose sleep. My heart told me that as long as I could amplify a smaller instrument, my progress, motivation, and enjoyment of the instrument would be much better. I could see progress immediately and it would add to my arsenal of skills quickly and effectively.

Ultimately, I went with my heart this time. NO REGRETS. I was out gigging with it in two weeks, and now, after a month, can get around it almost as well as I can on the electric instruments I have been playing for 3 decades. I did a full set live last weekend. And my skills seem to be growing rapidly, with less muscle pain and more in tune notes as I have practiced it, with joy, regularly.

My motivation to learn the instrument is high, and I LOVE IT. I increased the amount of joy in my life significantly with that decision. The musicians I play with — some of them pro players — have no complaints with it. Others are ecstatic. I had to work through amplification issues, but the pros who were very much against me — they are simply silent when I talk about it, and many other experienced players accept me in their online community, giving advice, etcetera.

A bit of a digression from spiritual matters, but it displays the process — and the power of the ultimate filter — your own personal judgment — as the final judge of what is best for you personally. Will you be wrong? Sometimes. but how often have you heard stories about people obeying “revelation” and being wrong too? And rather than learning from the experience, they justify it somehow.

They resort to some other stretch that makes it the right thing, in spite of wrong results.

In my view, the best decisions generate the best results, and decisions based on spirituality with terrible outcomes, and minimal side benefits, don’t reflect good decision-making in my mind. Not at all. The lesson is that spirituality alone is not a good teacher in many situation.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your thoughts and encouragement, SD.

I got some mileage today out of regarding my inner voice as telling me what my subconscious mind thinks is good. No cognitive dissonance, even at a certain point in our SS lesson where our teacher failed to give some critical context. (Though I might have just been too happy about having just talked about seer stones. Who knows?) Maybe I can graduate sometime to also regarding it as telling me what I think is right for me.

Looking forward to testing it out tomorrow at work.

[Anonymous]

I had a roommate at BYU Provo who had modeled in NYC and was truly amazingly beautiful on the outside. It didn’t matter where we went in Utah, men would approach her and state that they felt spiritually inspired to meet her. A few were adamant that The Spirit had whispered to them that she was supposed to be their wife. These poor guys didn’t even know her name, but they were sure that she was The One. Each was sure no other man had ever felt that way about her. I wanted to tell each of them, “Get in line.” It was a 5-6 time a day occurrence. THAT was my first experience mistrusting The Spirit because each of these poor sods were so sincere.

[Anonymous]

I am continually (and happy to be) surprised that when it seems I stop trying too hard to find my inner voice, or define it, or box it in a predictable definition of what it is and isn’t, but just move forward best I can…I seem to find times my inner voice is valuable and worth listening to.

This past weekend reminded me of the importance of having that inspiration…and I need to pay attention to it.

Trusting it can be hard, because of my inability to understand it 100% correctly. But…I am reminded it is still important in my life…even if there is always a degree of error involved.

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