Your Inner Alarms: Relearning to Trust Yourself After Abuse
A Reflective Worksheet
What you’ll find in this article
My experience of overriding strong warning signs in my marriage, and what those moments looked like in real time.
An explanation of why we silence our inner alarms in abusive relationships, even when something feels clearly wrong.
Insight into how repeatedly overriding your instincts damages self-trust.
Practical guidance on how to begin rebuilding your inner radar and responding differently.
A downloadable Inner Alarms worksheet to support reflection and pattern recognition.
One of the deepest impacts of abuse in a relationship is the damage done to your inner alarm system. Most of us have an internal warning signal that may show up as a feeling in our gut, a sense of dread, a tightening in the chest, or a thought that flashes through your mind saying something about this situation is not right. I sometimes think of it now as an inner radar. It scans for danger, for shifts in tone and behaviour that do not feel safe.
In healthy environments, we notice those signals and adjust. In abusive ones, we learn to explain them away, override them, or ignore them altogether.
Looking back at my marriage, there were so many moments when my inner alarm went off and I pushed it down. The shock when he smashed a glass in front of me, his hands clenched in fists. The disbelief when he blocked me in a room and refused to let me leave. The tight knot in my stomach when I discovered he had been tracking my car for eighteen months because he found it “convenient”. Each time my inner radar registered that something was deeply wrong, and each time I talked myself out of it, treating my discomfort as the issue instead of his behaviour. I trusted his explanations more than my own instincts.
Over and over, I felt stunned by things he would say or do. But instead of allowing that shock to mean something, I reshaped it into something manageable. Accepting the full meaning of what was happening would have required me to confront a reality I was not ready to face.
When My Inner Radar Lit Up
One conversation my husband and I had during the Covid period captures this pattern.
We were both frustrated about how a certain political leader was handling things, and he asked what I would do if I met him in person. I said I would challenge him, raise the issues, and hold him to account.
He looked at me with disgust and said, “I would slowly torture him to death.”
He was not joking. There was no humour in his voice. He meant it.
I remember feeling a jolt move through me. It was sharp and immediate. We all have angry thoughts from time to time, but this felt different. It was not just the intensity, it felt like a glimpse into something darker.
But almost immediately, my mind moved to soften it. I searched for context, for stress, for some explanation that would make it less disturbing and therefore less consequential. Listening to my inner alarm would have forced me to confront that hard truth that the man I lived with carried a real capacity for cruelty.
