253. You're Not Paranoid. Situational Awareness In Intimate Relationships

This episode is for the woman who has ever looked back and said, "I knew it. Why didn't I trust myself?"

Sade unpacks why so many women dismiss their own instincts and how that dismissal — not the red flags themselves — leaves them most exposed. Memorizing red flags doesn't protect you. Situational awareness does. When you build that skill, no disguise fools you.

Your nervous system collects data. Fear, discomfort, that "off" feeling — those are not signs you are dramatic or paranoid. They are signals. The problem is that women spend decades in training to ignore those signals, and then wonder why they feel anxious, confused, and stuck.

Sade also names the two fears that keep women frozen: the fear of being wrong and the fear of being right. Both traps lead to the same outcome — doing nothing while things get worse.

The work is the same whether you're dating, married, or navigating divorce. Discernment. Self-leadership. Knowing what a safe relationship looks and feels like. Building your own life and emotional resources.

You didn't choose the conditioning that trained you to doubt yourself. But you can choose differently now.

Ready to build your situational awareness with real support? Schedule a free consultation with Sade at sadecurry.com/schedule-appointment

Transcript

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Extraordinary Life and Dating After Divorce Podcast. I'm Sade Curry, your host. It is a pleasure to be back with you today.

Today's topic is a little bit heavy. I'm going to try not to make it as heavy as it could be, but I just ordered Giselle Pelicot's book, A Hint to Life, off of Amazon, and that really sparked some of the thoughts I'm going to address today.

If you are not familiar with her story, Giselle is a woman who lives in France. Her husband, over a period of decades, would drug her and let other men come into their home to have intimate relations with her — to the tune of, I believe, over 50 or 70 occurrences. Just so insane to imagine that happening over years and years, and then to have it recorded.

As I ordered her book, I thought about the series I've been doing on my new methodology with relationships, where the first port of call is awareness and discernment around relationships. This tends to apply to relationships where the woman does not feel safe. This is not every relationship, but if you are having conversations in the world today, you realize how many relationships exist where women were not safe.

Of course, there's a whole spectrum of a lack of safety — from physical abuse to verbal abuse to psychological cruelty, gaslighting, financial control, and spiritual abuse. Those are on the heavier side, all the way to neglect or nagging, which is one of the newer terms for when a man puts a woman down in order to make her prove herself. So there's a whole spectrum of a lack of safety in intimate relationships.

If you listen to this and you're comfortable going through the entire episode thinking, "Yeah, none of that is happening in my relationship," you're probably good to go. Then there are some of you who are going to listen and say, "Oh my God, this is totally my relationship. I always knew it." You're probably pretty safe too, because your situational awareness is pretty spot on. Mostly, what I'm saying will validate things you were already thinking and feeling.

The people who are most in danger — and I don't necessarily mean physical danger, but in danger of not gaining the awareness they need — are the ones who listen to something like this and say, "I think that might be happening, but it couldn't be, right?" That is the thing I want to address. The "Yeah, he did that, but what he really meant was..." or "That happened, but it wasn't what you're saying." If you find yourself doing that over and over again, then you are the person this podcast is for.

We're talking about situational awareness — and the belief that when your pattern recognition systems are coming online and you're in a situation that doesn't feel safe, doesn't feel right, or just doesn't feel like what you want, your social conditioning and your extreme self-awareness and humility and desire to do the right thing causes you to ignore clear signs, clear signals, and clear warning signs. Not that the thing happening right now is the most dangerous thing that could happen to you, but that a pattern of behavior is being established in your intimate relationship — and allowing yourself to see what that could become if nothing changes.

The people who are most in danger are the ones who dismiss the signs, which makes them less prepared for when those signs grow into something bigger. If you're already aware of the signs and paying attention, it doesn't mean you have to do something drastic in the moment. Some people do need to do something drastic because of their immediate lack of safety. Some people don't. This is very much a case-by-case situation. But dismissing the signs puts you in the worst position.

It's just like signs of an illness. If you are aware of the signs and you're noting them — even if you haven't done anything about them yet — your awareness of the progression makes you more likely to get help early. If you notice signs and they go away and never come back, you're okay. But the people who end up with the worst medical outcomes are the ones who see the signs and keep explaining them away. That's what we're talking about today.

The title of this episode is: You're Not Paranoid.

So many women look back at their gut instincts, their intuition, the red flags — everything — and say, "I knew it. I thought I was paranoid. He told me I was paranoid. Everyone around me told me I was paranoid. But I wasn't." That's literally my story. You've heard it on the podcast. I look back and think, "Oh my God, I was the smartest person in the room." But I was also conditioned to question myself — religious conditioning, cultural conditioning, societal conditioning, conditioning by my partner who kept saying, "You're too sensitive, you're paranoid" — all of those layers made it hard for me to trust what I knew.

And here's the thing about being someone who is super self-aware and into interpersonal growth: you question yourself because you don't want to assume you're right. That humility, that desire to learn, that curiosity — it gets weaponized against you by people who are lying to you anyway.

I think I'm getting ahead of myself and ranting instead of following the outline I had for today, so let me start from the beginning.

Think about situations in relationships — romantic relationships, marriages, friendships, relationships with parents. Oh my goodness, I haven't really talked much about my childhood, but if anything set me up for the marriage I was in, it was my childhood. I could literally illustrate everything we discuss on this podcast with my childhood. But there's only so much time.

Think about the relationship that has been the most challenging for you — not a relationship with a child, because those operate under a different set of rules. A child is dependent on you for their survival, so we can't apply the same framework. I'm talking about your adult relationships — romantic relationships, friendships, relationships with other adults.

Think about scenarios like these: the first time that person made a joke and it just felt off, and you dismissed it — "Well, they didn't really mean it that way, it wasn't a big deal, they just have a strange sense of humor." Or you saw them get irrationally angry with someone. Or you saw them harm someone — maybe not physically, but with their words.

I remember when my ex-husband described how he got into a fight with a bus conductor in Nigeria. It didn't feel right. We were educated people, upper middle class — why are you getting into fisticuffs with a bus conductor? There was that little flag that went up in my gut and in my mind. But at the time, we were on a university campus together. It wasn't like he was getting into fights with our friends. It was just something he had told me he'd done. But those are the signs. Those are the things that get labeled as paranoid, overly sensitive, or too picky — and those are the very things you later see play out.

That situation played out in my marriage with my ex-husband being overly particular about being "respected" — no accountability to anybody, anywhere. Not at work, not at home, not at church. Nobody could hold him accountable for any of his behaviors because, to him, that was being disrespected. The same seed that got him into a confrontation with a bus conductor was the same thing that caused him to lose roles at work because he couldn't get along with people — and caused the marriage to be what it was for the same reason.

Or think about when you're looking at the finances and you're thinking, "We're making so much money — where is it all going? We should have more in savings. We should have more in our retirement accounts. What's going on?" And then later, you find out that your husband was gambling the money away, spending it on a mistress, things like that.

What happens when you bring up those concerns is that the person — because these are not people who are honest, accountable, or looking out for your well-being — they're more than happy to dismiss it and say you're paranoid, controlling, or overly sensitive.

A lot of women I talk to believe that the problem is the dishonest person who was cheating on them, who was violent, who was gaslighting them, who was spending too much money, who was an addict. I know that is a problem. I'm not trying to say that person's behavior was okay. But the only way you could have safeguarded yourself from that kind of person is by having situational awareness.

Those kinds of people exist in the world, and they continue to exist. It is not useful to see them as the problem, because if they are the problem, then we are living in a world with a problem that cannot be solved — and you will always be subject to, always be a victim of, these kinds of people. What they do is definitely harmful. However, the existence of that harm does not absolve me, or other women, or people like you and me from learning how to safeguard ourselves.

If you live in a neighborhood where homes get robbed, it is your job to lock your front door, lock your windows, get a security system. There's no point in leaving your doors unlocked because "people shouldn't be robbing other people — that's wrong." You leave everything open, and then when you're robbed, you say, "I can't believe this happened." This is why we lock our doors at night. This is why we use door jambs. This is why we have security systems. Adult behavior is to safeguard yourself.

So that's what this episode is about. It's not about the warning signs of bad people — the red flags. There are a billion red flags. You cannot memorize enough red flags. This is why there is so much content about red flags, and why women fall for them every time — because you can't neutralize red flags if you don't know how to have situational awareness. The red flag will show up as a beige flag next week, and the harm will be the same.

The key isn't to memorize all the red flags from all of your past relationships. The key is to have situational awareness, so that no matter how a red flag is disguised, you can say, "Nah, I don't like this." And not only that — you are willing to experience the discomfort of expressing that. When you say, "This isn't for me, it doesn't feel right," and people respond with, "You're paranoid, you're too sensitive, you'll be single forever, you're ruining your marriage, you're too negative," you can still say, "Yeah, but I still don't like it, and I'm not going to do it."

That's the key. That's usually where people fall apart — they'll say, "I think this is a red flag," but then they're willing to be talked out of it, because they don't want to be the bad person, they don't want to be mean, they don't want to be judgmental.

So let's talk about how we even got to this point where so many women are so afraid of being called paranoid.

One of the books I read in the middle of my divorce was Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear, and it helped me so much in understanding the situation I was in. It gave me a lot of situational awareness when I went back into the dating world. It was a learning process. I had to learn to dial down the level of trust I gave people, to listen to my own intuition, to listen to my gift of fear.

That book talks about how fear — when you feel uncomfortable — is data. It is information that your nervous system is giving you. Your nervous system is the part of your biology that processes input. When you see something, say you're walking and you spot a lion coming toward you, that input goes in through your eyes, through your retina, through your optic nerve to your brain. Your brain registers "lion coming — this is bad," and it sends signals down through your nervous system.

Here's a fun exercise: Google a picture of the nervous system. We use the skeleton at Halloween as the scary image of a dead body — but if the nervous system came floating toward you, I guarantee you would run even faster. The skeleton doesn't have eyes, just eye sockets. The nervous system includes the eyes. It's looking at you.

Your nervous system — your eyes, your ears, your skin, all of your senses — is the part of you that is making connections with the world you are in. When you feel something's off, when you feel sad, angry, or scared, that is information. That is literally data.

The challenge is that women have been raised to ignore that sensory data. And "ignore" is such a benign word for what we actually do with the information our nervous systems give us. Not only do we receive the information, and not only does our nervous system say, "This is bad, don't do that" — we have been trained, we have gone to boot camp for 20, 30, 40, sometimes 50 or 60 years, to say: if you feel scared and it's a romantic partner, ignore that. You probably need a partner. You're crazy and overly sensitive.

If you were raised in a family where you were told to suppress your responses and your emotions, to stay in a relationship at all cost, and that your nervous system's responses were disrespectful to somebody else — all of those things — then you have been taught to be at war with yourself.

And so when you think about women experiencing high levels of stress, anxiety, autoimmune diseases linked to chronic stress, emotional eating — all of the things that were historically labeled "hysteria" — it's because the social conditioning of women, almost globally, trains them to ignore their own nervous systems. Of course, there are exceptions. Some families do an excellent job of protecting their daughters and helping their children stay connected to their instincts. But generally, the numbers aren't great.

Basically, you are a ninja. You are an expert at talking yourself out of what your body, your brain, and your nervous system already know.

So if you feel crazy, and you think, "I must be paranoid because I feel crazy" — it's the other way around. You feel crazy because you're seeing something real and spending enormous energy talking yourself out of it, while other people are also spending energy talking you out of it.

If you have some time, look up Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear. It's an older book — 1997 — but it holds up completely. There may be updated editions, but that's the version I read, and it's what I'm recommending.

As a woman, you're taught to be easygoing — not too sensitive, not too dramatic — even as you're being harmed. To be agreeable, even as you're being harmed. Think about what that creates: you're in a relationship, you're being harmed, and any response other than "I guess this is okay" gets tagged as problematic — and there are consequences for it. So it becomes this cycle: you're being harmed or you sense you're about to be harmed, you have a reaction, and then punishment comes for the reaction. The underlying harm is still there, still happening, still not being dealt with. But the reaction gets punished — by people saying things about you, by isolation, by being talked out of your own experience. It's a lot.

I've told the story of how my mentor told me I was "so negative" when I talked about what was happening in my marriage — only for things to get really, really bad less than two years later.

If you feel confused about your situation — about your thoughts versus your intuition versus what's actually happening — that confusion is a feature, not a bug. It consumes all of your energy, keeping you stuck. You can't make decisions. You can't take adult actions. You have been forced into the position of a child who doesn't know what she's thinking or what she's doing.

So here's a question to sit with: When was the first time you were told — or it was implied — that you were being overly dramatic, overly sensitive, or paranoid?

For me, this was implied as recently as six months ago. I was having a conversation with someone, and they didn't use the word "paranoid" directly at me, but they used it in a way that implied, "Well, one might think this was kind of paranoid." They did this whole roundabout thing to suggest that I was being paranoid. And I did what I do now — I thought, "I'm not talking to you again." That was essentially the last time I engaged with that person. I had one more conversation to close out the professional relationship gracefully and then quietly moved on. That's my modus operandi these days.

So how many times have you heard — or had it implied — that you're overly sensitive, overly dramatic, paranoid, wrong, confused, or crazy? I want you to take some time to do this as an awareness exercise. If you only think of one instance, you may not realize how frequently this is happening. Some of you really need to understand how often this is occurring, so you can do something about it.

It comes up when women feel like they're being too picky, or when men imply they're too picky, or when friends and mothers say, "You're too picky — that's why you're not in a relationship." As opposed to what's actually true: they're not in a relationship because they've been smart enough not to choose someone who would harm them. They haven't found someone they can confidently say, "This person is not harmful and has earned my trust over time" — and that's okay. Because trustworthy men are not the majority. It doesn't matter what anyone says about "not all men." We know it's not all men, but we were hoping it was the majority — and we're finding that it is not a majority of men who are good for you in a relationship. That's why dating can take quite a bit of time.

I know women get frustrated when it takes time. But you could marry someone off the internet today if you wanted to. You don't want to, because that person is probably not good for you. It's not that you're doing anything wrong. It's that finding a person you'd actually want to merge your life with requires a high level of safety, compatibility, mutual satisfaction, and mutual reciprocity. These are dealbreakers in relationships, and not everyone knows how to give and receive that today. You don't have to take it personally. You stay in the journey for yourself until you find the person who is right for you. That's all it is.

Now, there are a couple of things I think create this catch-22 for women — reasons why they don't want to engage with the level of awareness required.

One is the cost of being wrong. Say a woman is married with three kids under ten. She starts to feel like things aren't safe, things aren't right, things are happening. But she doesn't want to engage with what she thinks might be going on, because if she's wrong, there's a high cost. Women pay dearly for being wrong about their suspicions, even though it's not often that women are wrong. If they were, the consequences are significant — she could blow up her life, her children's lives could become unstable, and her husband, if he was actually innocent, could then decide to end the relationship because she accused him of cheating or being controlling. Then her friends, his family, everyone could turn against her.

That is a deep fear: "If I'm wrong, I will have rocked the boat, created a huge mess, created all these problems, and I won't be able to take it back." It makes total sense that you wouldn't want to engage with a reality you might be seeing, because the world is not kind to women — even when they're not making mistakes, let alone when they are. And this is why the answer has to come from you. You have to be kind to yourself. You cannot wait for the world to rally around and decide to be kind to women. The key is for you to be kind to yourself.

Then there's the other fear: being right. If you really look at what's happening in your marriage, really name it for what it is — "My marriage is abusive, and if I don't do something about it, I might get seriously hurt physically, financially, emotionally; my children's mental health might completely deteriorate" — then if you're right, you have to do something about it. You have to confront it. You have to tell people. And then there's the shame of being that woman — the one you've watched others become and swore you never would. I remember having that feeling during my divorce: the awareness that people were talking about you, pitying you. I heard it in people's voices. I heard the pity for me and for my kids. It was painful.

Right now, looking back, I see it was such a waste of energy — on my part for feeling the shame, and on their part for indulging in it. It's really hard to shame me these days. That's a whole other conversation.

But the fear is real: "If I'm right, I have to blow up my life. I have to start over. I'm not the 22-year-old I was when I got married. My kids will have to deal with it." What happens is that women feel caught — and a lot of this is subconscious — in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, so they do nothing.

What they don't realize is that there's a third option: you do nothing, things get really, really bad, you have fewer resources to deal with it, you're less aware, you get blindsided even harder, and the outcomes are worse than if you had allowed yourself to look at it — even if you did nothing about it immediately.

Educate yourself. Work on your emotional resilience. Work on emotional detachment. Get some help, get some healing, go to therapy, get support, build a network, build community — all of the things I teach my clients. Even if you decide not to leave. If you decide to stay, you're going to need all of those things. You're going to need financial resources and independence. You're going to need a community of support. You're going to need an education in what is happening — "What is this? What is going on in my life?" There are answers to all of those questions. You're going to need knowledge about how people have navigated this, and what will and won't work in your specific situation — whether you stay or leave. The work is the same either way.

And that is part of why I've shifted what I'm teaching on this podcast. I'm realizing that what my dating clients need to do is the same as what my married clients need to do is the same as what my divorce clients need to do. We need discernment. We need personal authority and self-leadership. We need to know our core values and live in integrity with them. We need to understand safe relationships versus unsafe relationships, and we need to know how to connect to love in ways that are safe and with people who are safe. We need to know how to build our own lives independently and build our own emotional resources independently — whether we're in a relationship or not.

After eight years of doing this work, I realized: it's all the same thing. I distilled it all down to the same work.

So whether you're dating, married, or going through a divorce — if you're dating, you need situational awareness. You need to understand who this person is, what's happening when they say certain things, how that lands with you, and what's happening inside of you. You need to develop an emotional vocabulary, because your nervous system is giving you information.

If you are married, your husband may or may not still be the cute, sensitive, sweet guy you met in your last year of college. He might still be that person. He might not. How are you going to know? Situational awareness. Being willing to see what you see and know what you know.

And here's the thing: if your marriage is wonderful, this information is not going to be a problem for you. It really isn't. I would be the first person to say that. If your husband is truly a good guy who cares for your well-being, who understands what is needed to sustain the mental health, physical health, and well-being of his spouse and children — he's simply not going to be doing things that harm you. And if he did do something harmful and you brought it to him, he wouldn't respond with, "You're crazy, I never did that, that never happened, you're reading it wrong." A man who responds that way is not someone who understands what you need to be healthy and well. He is not someone who is looking out for your wellness.

Now, some men are willing to be educated on what it takes for you to be well in the relationship. You can have that conversation, and he can say, "Oh, I didn't mean that, but I can see where you'd get that — I won't do that again." Guess what? You didn't lose anything by engaging with what you were feeling and having that conversation.

And then some of you will engage with what you're feeling, have the conversation with your partner, and he will respond with harm — more harm than before. And then you have more data. Anything that happens in your pursuit of integrity, wholeness, and a truly loving, connected relationship is data that lets you know whether that kind of relationship is available where you currently are.

My encouragement is this: you should want to know what's really going on in your relationship. You should want to know the potential consequences. Some of you are listening and thinking, "I don't want to know." I get that. I've talked about why we resist knowing. But your safest bet is not avoiding what's happening.

Okay, I think I'm going to stop here for now. Go at this with a lot of self-compassion. Remember: the overly trusting, naive, denial-prone way of engaging with life that you may have developed — you didn't choose it. Your parents, your church or spiritual community, the adults in your life were supposed to teach you. They were supposed to encourage you to engage with your situational awareness so that you could keep yourself safe. If that wasn't given to you as a young person, that's not your fault. If it's been reinforced by society since then, that's not your fault either.

But now that you're an adult, now that you get to choose, you get to choose how you think about things. You get to choose how you want to approach and engage with life. You get to decide: "I want to learn how to have situational awareness, and I want to know how to apply it" — because there's a difference between knowing something and knowing how to apply it in your specific context. The right decisions for you, in your specific situation, may look completely different from what someone else might do.

But the first step is understanding what's going on. There's a saying:

Diagnosis is 50% of the cure. You can't cure something if you don't even understand what the problem is.

Situational awareness — understanding your context, understanding your own responses, understanding how what your partner does and how your dynamic together is impacting you — that is you taking responsibility for the experience you are having on Earth. Life is short. The experience you have can be in your hands. It can be something you take charge of — not by controlling or changing other people, but by becoming aware of what's going on, deciding if that's what you want, and then making changes in yourself and in your life. Getting the education. Taking the steps you need to create what you want.

Okay, thanks for hanging with me for this ride. I tried to keep it light on the surface, because even knowing that Giselle's book is on its way, I'm thinking, "Oh Lord, what's going to be in it, and am I going to be able to handle reading it?" But I definitely wanted to support her work and, in a sense, stand on the side of those of us who are fighting these evils in the world. It is crazy what's happening out there.

All right. Thanks for your time and attention. I will see you on the next episode.