Vox Meditantis

Do you trust your instincts?

Wednesday, 19th November 2025

The line came out of my mouth before my supervision brain had time to vet it. “Trust the small hunch that comes before the overthinking,” I told the young woman on the sofa, watching her hands twist themselves into a thesis about why every choice she’d ever made was inadmissible evidence. She blinked, then actually laughed, as if someone had finally named the brief, clean moment before the internal committee convenes and filibusters anything that looks like desire.

It was only when I wrote the sentence in her notes between sessions that I realised I’d accidentally issued myself a prescription. “Do you trust your instincts?” sat at the top of today’s prompt sheet like a smug cross‑examination, and there was my own voice in black ink, recommending exactly the sort of thing I regularly refuse myself.

Why is it that I trust my clinical instincts almost to the point of superstition, yet second‑guess myself so ferociously when the subject is intimacy or rest? How can the same nervous system know, with quiet confidence, when a patient can bear one more difficult question, but panic at the thought of replying to a message from David in under twelve hours, in case enthusiasm looks unseemly on a woman of fifty‑eight?

In the room, instinct feels less like magic and more like a well‑tuned instrument. Thirty years of listening have built a kind of muscular memory I don’t have to think my way into it, any more than Tom has to think about how to protect his hip on the harbour boards. There’s the moment when silence lengthens and I know it is fertile, not punitive, so I keep my mouth shut and let the next sentence arrive in its own time. The moment when a patient glances toward the door as they mention a father or a boss, and some older part of me notes, “Ah, yes, we’re in the neighbourhood of leaving, best not slam anything.”

Clinically, I trust that kind of hunch without fanfare. I will alter a line of enquiry, abandon a beautiful formulation, or sit through four minutes of unadorned weeping because something wordless in the room says, “Not yet or, just as clearly, Now.” If you pressed me for my methodology, I would offer psychodynamic language about transference and counter‑transference, attachment patterns and the nervous system’s pattern‑recognition, but the lived experience is simpler: my body leans in or it does not.

Outside work, that same body offers its opinions and I immediately convene a tribunal.

Take the evening outside the Methodist church, Bartók still ringing in our bones, when David asked, with that careful, unshowy courtesy of his, “Would you like to sit together next time as well?”

The first response rose clear and unlaboured: “I’d like that.”

The second response, arriving nanoseconds later, was an entire committee meeting: “Shouldn’t you be more dignified, Catherine, less transparent, more measured, certainly slower?”

For once, the hunch outran the overthinking, and I heard myself say the words aloud before my defences could clear their throats.

It felt, in that small, ridiculous doorway, like stepping off a gangplank I’d been studying for months and finally testing whether the planks would actually hold.

The same pattern played out with the art classroom. For years I walked past the notice for Tuesday watercolour, treating it as scenic background to my own briskness. Then one morning the instinct arrived, plain as a grocery list: “Ring them, ask if beginners are tolerated, go with the wrong brushes and the right humility.” Immediately on its heels came the overthinking: “Is it frivolous, is it indulgent, what if you’re dreadful, what if someone from the Historical Society sees you making mud where skies should be.” The small hunch was a simple yes to play; the big mind turned it into a referendum on my entire character. Again, I experimented with taking the first impulse seriously, phoned during a gap between sessions, and was disarmed by the registrar’s laugh: “Most of us arrive poorly equipped, doctor; that’s half the point.”

It would be comforting to declare that this marked a decisive conversion to instinct in all areas of life. It did not. What it did, more modestly, was reveal an uncomfortable asymmetry: I am willing to trust my hunches when I can plausibly label them professional judgement, and fiercely suspicious of them when they threaten to make me visible as a person.

The shell on my windowsill is, if I’m honest, the oldest piece of evidence that my body has been better at this than my mind for some time. Years ago, when it was still light enough to live in my coat pocket, a teenager inched it from the bowl during a late‑afternoon session and said, half‑defiant, half‑pleading, “I think I need this more than you do.” My superego reached instantly for generosity: “say yes, Catherine, don’t be sentimental, objects are replaceable and adolescence is not, what sort of clinician hoards a shell.” But everything from my jaw to my shoulders said no. Not this one. What came out of my mouth, before I’d had time to sanitise it, was “How about we find you your own?”

Later, walking the river after the group clean‑up where we did exactly that, it dawned on me what my body had known at once: I needed one object in that room that belonged to me as much as to my patients. Not as talismanic décor, but as a kind of personal continuity an enduring thing that had accompanied me from solitary harbour walks into three decades of other people’s stories. The shell was not simply an instrument of grounding for anxious hands; it was my quiet insistence that the room held me too. My training has plenty to say about boundaries, less about the subtle reciprocity of objects. But in that instant refusal, something pre‑verbal rang true: “this stays, so you can stay.”

The letters at the Historical Society have been their own graduate course in instinct. When Maggie first placed the photocopies of my mother’s Nevada correspondence on the table between us, my first urge was gluttony take them home, read until two in the morning, gorge on a past I’ve only known in anecdotes. The second, quieter instinct was oddly specific: “Read them here, in good light, with someone in the next room who knows when to knock.” For once, I honoured the second. We made tea in the tiny staff kitchen, took two chairs in the archive reading room, and I let the sentences surface at a pace my nervous system could accompany.

Maggie busied herself ostentatiously with accession numbers at the far table, which is curator code for “I’m here, but I won’t intrude unless summoned.” Every few pages I found myself looking up not to escape, but to remind some older part of me that I was being witnessed while I met a younger version of my mother. Instinct, on that occasion, did not rush home with the treasure; it built a small relational container and asked for company. It felt new and faintly radical to treat my own emotional archaeology with the same care I extend, almost automatically, to patients in the leather chair.

Which brings me back to the question on the blotter. “Do you trust your instincts?” The only honest answer, today, is it depends whose life is at stake. If the issue is whether a traumatised man can tolerate one more inch toward the memory he’s never told aloud, my reliance on instinct is almost indecently confident; I would back the tilt of my own head over any manual. If the issue is whether I am allowed to reply to David’s last message with something other than measured delay and tasteful restraint, I will interrogate every syllable as if drafting a treaty.

Part of this is experience. Clinical instincts are not mysterious; they are pattern‑recognition honed over thousands of hours, calibrated by supervision, mistake, repair, and the humbling education of discovering that what felt right to me did not, in fact, land safely for the person opposite. I have data there, even if it’s stored in the muscles rather than the spreadsheet. In my personal life, the sample size is frankly poor. I have invested decades in being excellent at adjacency, which is a marvellous way to avoid collecting evidence on how it feels to risk actual mutuality.

There is also the quieter inheritance from home. Mother trusted her leaps, sometimes to her cost; Father trusted his routes, sometimes to his. One taught me that instinct can be thrilling but financially ruinous; the other that caution can be safe but suffocating. Little wonder that, left to my own devices, I lean on instinct where I can plausibly call it professionalism, and audition it nervously everywhere else.

Still, these past weeks have suggested that self‑trust may be less revelation than repetition. The yes to Bartók did not usher in an operatic romance; it led, quite sensibly, to music, washing‑up done with unreasonable care, and the dawning awareness that I like who I am in his company. The phone call to the watercolour class did not reveal a hidden genius; it produced a series of wonky boats and skies that look like they’re auditioning for other planets, and an hour a week in which I am allowed to be a beginner without anyone demanding that I turn the experience into curriculum. Keeping the shell did not corrupt the transference; it anchored me more firmly in a room that can otherwise feel like an instrument I operate rather than a place I inhabit. Reading the letters slowly and in company did not dilute their impact; it transformed what could have been private self‑torment into something more like shared history.

Perhaps the work now is to treat personal instincts the way I once treated clinical ones not as oracles to obey uncritically, nor as dangers to be suppressed, but as hypotheses to test gently, repeatedly, with an eye on both the data and the damage. Which is where today’s modest experiment comes in.

For one week, I am going to act on one benign instinct a day and treat the outcome as information rather than verdict. Nothing grand, nothing that would require my malpractice insurer to be notified. If, in the gap between sessions, my body suggests sitting in the Victorian light for five minutes rather than diving at the inbox, I will sit, and notice what happens besides the familiar itch to be useful. If, on seeing David’s name blink up on the screen, the first hunch is reply now while the feeling is warm, I will allow myself to be prompt without labelling it teenage or unseemly. If, walking past the guest‑room, I have the sudden urge to open one more box of my mother’s belongings instead of relegating it to an improved future self with better courage, I will open it, and stop when my shoulders, not my perfectionism, say enough.

Each evening I will take brief notes – nothing florid, just what was the hunch, what did I do, how did it feel before, during, after. Not to grade myself, but to give the frightened, data‑hungry part of my mind something it understands: an n of one, repeated over seven days. At the end of the week I may discover that some instincts were simply old habits in better outfits, and can be retired with thanks. I may also discover that a few of them, at least, are trustworthy in the same quiet way the tide table is trustworthy not infallible, but reliable enough to plan a walk around.

“Trust the small hunch that comes before the overthinking,” I wrote in my patient’s notes this morning, and underlined it once. Tonight I’ve copied it on to a yellow sticky and tucked it beside the shell on the sill, where it can make itself gently ridiculous until it becomes ordinary. If the consulting room has taught me anything, it is that instinct and evidence are not adversaries but colleagues; you begin with a feeling, you test it in good company, you adjust. For a woman who has built a life on calibrating other people’s courage, the next ethical experiment may simply be this to extend the same method, at last, to her own.

Catherine

---

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.