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Posted Friday July 16, 2010 by Jackie Morgan MacDougall

Earlier this month, something happened in my hometown that shook moms and families for miles. While watching fireworks from a sidewalk on the 4th of July, a 43-year-old mother of three was killed when a car careened off the road and into a crowd of bystanders. Several members of her family were also hurt, her teen son in critical condition.

Shannon Penrod was there, sitting only 20 feet away with her husband and young son. Over a week after the accident, I spoke with her, still hearing the raw emotion in her voice. "I don't think anyone who was there walked away the same. It was a war zone. There were people in the street crying. I saw people get down on the street and pray. It's something that not any of us are going to forget -- ever."

But while the accident shocked Shannon, in some ways, it didn't surprise her. Sitting on a patch of grass right off the sidewalk, she admits she felt a tremendous amount of concern sitting so close to the street that night. "I was having a lot of anxiety, sitting there trying to work through it. I was worried about a car coming up on the curb. I told my husband and he admitted he was worried about the same thing."

But Shannon and her family didn't move. They remained there on that patch of grass and watched the fireworks show. Shannon says she ignored her intense feelings, dismissing them as an overreaction and talking herself out of moving their seat. Our three hour conversation brought up the question over and over, "how can we tell the difference between intuition and just being a freaked out mom?"

I know that since becoming a mom I've had moments of paralyzing fear, images of catastrophe flipping through my mind leaving me confused about whether it meant I was wound too tightly or something serious was about to happen. I'll never forget the dream I had a few years ago. I'll spare you the details but it ended with my kids' double stroller in a pond and one of my boys still strapped in. Since then, I have always taken the kids out the stroller when walking over a bridge, terrified that the dream was some sort of premonition. But am I overreacting? Should I just write it off to being a bad dream?

Therapist Stacy Kaiser says there are three steps to facing the fear: Identify, Assess and Weigh

1. Identify the feelings Determine what fear feels like for you. "The problem is, true fear and a gut feeling can feel the same physically, literally giving you the same physical reaction," Kaiser says. It's important to pay attention to when you have the feeling, what could have triggered it and whether it feels like your imagination is in overdrive or not. While the fear and intuition can feel the same, with a little further inspection, we can see the difference between them.

I remember the time, two weeks after giving birth to my firstborn, I was standing with him in my arms on a pier in Santa Monica. I was overcome with terror that I would drop him over the side and into the crashing waves below. Obviously having complete control over keeping him safe simply by not being close to the edge, that was an example of fear.

2. Assess the danger Ask yourself, "What is the likelihood of this actually occurring?" If there is genuinely a risk factor, Kaiser says take action to remove yourself from the situation. "It's better to be safe than sorry. The last thing you want is to regret not listening to yourself. That's much worse than moving your chair or taking the kids out of the stroller before going over a bridge."
 
3. Weigh the consequences Will avoiding the behavior affect your quality of life? If your children will never have the chance to see their grandparents because you're afraid to fly, that's debilitating. Succumbing to a fear where the risk is minimal and the negative consequences are great will just create a domino affect, ultimately controlling your life. That's when you get on that plane anyway. The more you do that, the more you begin to become OK with your fear and recognize when it's happening.

That clears up the fear side but what the heck is intuition and do we really have it? "Absolutely," says Clairvoyant Dougall Fraser, author of But You Knew That Already. He says every one of us is born with intuition, but most people just don't tap into it. "But one area society gives us permission to be psychic is with a mother and her child -- mom's intuition. She knows when her baby needs her or when her kid is having trouble at college... a mother's emotional bond that can not be broken, her intuition, nobody questions that, it's completely understood."

So is intuition a gift (and the gateway to a job on the Psychic Network)? Fraser says what he has isn't a gift at all, but something we can all find within ourselves. "Intuition is  a combination of instincts and experience." For example, if every time you went to pet the neighborhood cat, it scratched you, your intuition (experience) would tell you to stop petting the neighborhood cat. So why are there those people who would continue to do it, ignoring the red flag? Dougall says, "The mind and all of the things we have to get done day to day pulls us away from intuition. When we're aware, we're picking up on energy in the moment. Whether you think its common sense or not, when something tells you to step back, step back. Whether it results in an accident, listen to your body's vibration."

I had to jump in there, admitting that with all due respect, I can't hear myself think over the chaos that is my kids, never mind hear my body's vibration. But Dougall disagrees, suggesting there's always time to check out. "Everybody's afraid to be quiet. We're becoming a society that doesn't know how to tune out. But if you have time to take a shower, you have time for a moment of meditation. Take a deep breath and exhale, you'll be much more aware of life around you."

From all three completely different conversations, I did find a new understanding, drawing this conclusion: Fear is like when we're switching back and forth between stations and hear mostly static, intuition is when we tune, listening to our gut. Because as Dougall says, "The mind will justify and rationalize anything but the heart will always tell you the truth."


Jackie Morgan MacDougall is a TV-executive turned parenting blogger who lives a crazy life with her husband and three small kids. Her dreams of climbing the corporate ladder have been replaced by the dream of one day having a nap.

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