Trust Your Gut, But Check the Facts

Learning goal: Balance your intuitive sense that something is wrong with an evidence-based assessment, giving yourself both emotional and factual ground to stand on.

You knew something was wrong before you read any of this. Your gut told you. The tightness in your chest. The worry that kept you up. The grief for the relationship or the person you remembered. That instinct is real and it is valuable.

But instinct alone can be dismissed — by the person you love, by well-meaning friends who tell you to relax, by your own self-doubt. That is why the facts matter. Not to replace your intuition, but to support it.

Now you have both. You have your lived experience of watching someone you love disappear into screens. And you have clinical criteria, red flag checklists, and research data that confirm what you have been feeling. These two sources of knowledge — the experiential and the empirical — together give you something solid to stand on.

This does not mean you march into the room and present a case. That would likely trigger defensiveness. But it means you can hold your concern with confidence. You are not overreacting. You are not being controlling. You are seeing clearly.

It also means you can make informed decisions about next steps. If you have identified multiple red flags and clinical criteria, it is reasonable to consider professional help. If the situation is less severe, the skills from the previous courses — listening, boundaries, invitations — may be sufficient. Knowing where you stand helps you calibrate your response.

Trust your gut. It brought you here. And now you have the facts to back it up.

Exercise: Write a brief summary — for yourself — of what you know. Include both your felt experience ("I feel worried because...") and the factual indicators ("I have observed these specific red flags..."). This summary is for you. It is your foundation.

Key takeaway: Your instinct and the evidence say the same thing. Together, they give you the confidence and clarity to take the next step.