Trust your gut feeling!

A heart wrenching story

Recently I saw a TV interview with the Austrian kidnapping victim Natascha Kampusch. As you may recall, she was kidnapped at the age of 10, and held captive in Strasshof, Lower Austria for more than eight years before she finally managed to escape. A good part of those years, she was held in a dungeon in her captors house. The interview was a part of the promotion related to her book about her ordeal.

The part that really caught my attention was when the interviewer told the young woman to relay the day when she was abducted. She vividly relayed how she was on her way to school that fateful morning and how she saw a man (her captor) ahead of her.

The man was leaning against a car, and Kampusch remembered that the man seemed nervous, "almost as if he was waiting for somebody". She said she felt that there was something odd about the man and she wanted to cross over to the other side of the road. However, she said she brushed the feeling aside and walked right past her captor, who grabbed the girl and put her in his car.

Your intuition at work

Of course it is being wise after the event to claim that simply crossing the street would have saved Natascha Kampusch from being kidnapped that day in 1998. That is a little too close to blaming the victim in my book...

What this story does to me, is presenting a prime example of your gut feeling or intuition, and how these processes may work. Very often, victims of crimes like abduction, attempted rape, rape and robbery describe how they get this feeling about something "not being quite right", or this sense of urgency or danger.

Unfortunately, it is not uncommon at all to brush our intuition to the side. "This can't be right." "He looks so ordinary." "Nothing serious can happens in our small town." "...At this time of the day? Nah..." "Probably just my imagination." Way to often, we are being taught and raised to trust our logic and reasoning and overlook our intuitive mind and our senses. As such, we may indeed miss out on obvious danger signs.

"The Gift of Fear"

I will urge you to read the acclaimed book "The Gift of Fear" by Gavin de Becker. It's an eye opener when it comes to avoiding violence and trusting your intuition. From what I understand, the book can now also be purchased as a Kindle e-book from Amazon. Get it!

Furthermore, you will be able to read hundreds of such examples in the Woman Can reports and e-book series here.

And what ever you do, please trust your instincts! They are very seldom - if ever - wrong.