I Used to Be So Intuitive as a Child - What Happened?

There's a particular kind of loss people rarely talk about.

You used to feel things you couldn't explain. You knew which adults were safe and which weren't, long before anyone told you. You sensed when something was off at home before anyone said a word. You had imaginary friends who felt real. You woke from dreams that seemed more vivid than your waking life. Sometimes you saw things, or heard things, or simply knew things — and it didn't feel strange to you. It felt natural.

And then, slowly, that capacity went quiet.

Maybe you were told you had an overactive imagination. Maybe the adults in your life laughed it off, or looked uncomfortable when you described what you'd seen. Maybe your culture or your religion taught you these things weren't real, or weren't safe, or weren't yours to have. Maybe you just stopped getting a response when you spoke about them, so eventually you stopped speaking about them.

Now, years or decades later, you find yourself wondering.

You're more sensitive than most people you know. You still pick up on atmospheres the moment you walk into a room. You still sometimes know things you have no logical way of knowing. And every so often — usually at a quiet hour, often with no warning — you feel a pull back toward something you can't quite name.

If that's you, I want you to know something important.

Those gifts didn't leave. They just went quiet.

A Language You Were Born Speaking

Think of your intuitive senses like a language you were born speaking.

When you were small, you spoke it fluently. You didn't think about grammar. You didn't question whether it was real. You simply used it, the way a child uses their native tongue — naturally, without second-guessing.

But languages need to be spoken back to stay alive. When a child speaks a language and no one responds in it — when the adults around them only speak something else, or worse, correct the child for speaking it — the child slowly stops. Not because the language has been forgotten, but because there's no one to speak it with. It goes dormant. It waits.

Your intuitive senses work exactly the same way.

You were born with them. You used them naturally. But they weren't nurtured the way your physical senses were — no one taught you to refine them, trust them, or build a vocabulary around them. So they went quiet. They didn't disappear. They simply retreated.

And the reason you're feeling a pull back toward them now is that something in you remembers how to speak.

Why the World Taught You to Shut Them Down

Most of us grew up in cultures that didn't have a framework for intuitive experience. Depending on where you were raised, you might have been told:

• That's just your imagination — when you described something you clearly sensed
• Stop being so sensitive — when you responded to energy other people couldn't feel
• People who see things have something wrong with them — when you tried to talk about what was natural to you
• Only certain kinds of people have these gifts — usually implying you weren't one of them

For many people, religious environments were the first place they tried to explore the spiritual. That was true for me too. I went all in — looking for deep answers, looking for meaning, looking for qualities like divine love, acceptance, and trust. But what I often hear from others — and what I experienced myself — was something very different from what I was looking for.

Remember you are nothing but dust. You are a sinner. The image of God was painted as a strict, distant figure who would punish you for your wrongdoing. You could not speak to God directly — you needed an intermediary. Your inner experience, your questions, your sense of the divine within you were not to be trusted.

Instead of a framework for exploring our inner knowing, we were given a framework for suppressing it. The message, whether spoken aloud or simply absorbed, was the same: what you're sensing is dangerous, and the safest thing is to stop sensing it.

And so we adapted. We stopped speaking the language. We pushed the experiences down. We learned to rely only on what the five physical senses could tell us. We became appropriate — in the way children are trained to become appropriate.

That wasn't your fault. It was survival. It was what the environment asked of you.

But the cost was real. And the part of you that knew things went into hibernation.

The Misconception That Keeps People Stuck

Here's the belief I most often need to gently challenge when someone comes to me wondering if they can reawaken what they've lost:

These gifts are rare and reserved for a chosen few.

They aren't.

Connecting to energy, sensing what's beneath the surface, receiving information that goes beyond logic — none of this is a rare gift reserved for special people. Everyone has the capacity to develop these senses. It's more like learning to play piano than winning a genetic lottery.

Not everyone will be a concert pianist. But everyone can learn to play. And the level of fluency you reach will depend almost entirely on two things: the time you invest, and the quality of your training.

The Four Higher Senses

The second misconception is about how these senses work. Most people assume that to be intuitive or psychic you have to see things — either with your physical eyes or in your mind's eye. This is one of the most limiting ideas in the spiritual space, and I watch people give up over it all the time.

There are four main higher senses, all of which carry the prefix clair, which simply means clear:

We all have all four senses, but one or two will usually be stronger than the others. And that's a feature, not a flaw. The work isn't to force yourself into the one you think you're supposed to have. The work is to recognise which sense is strongest in you, develop that one first, and let the others open in their own time.

If you've been trying to see things and assuming you're not intuitive because you can't — please know you might simply have a different primary sense. Most people's strongest gift isn't clairvoyance at all. It's often claircognizance. The knowing.

What Reawakening Actually Looks Like

I want to be honest about this, because the spiritual space is full of promises that don't match reality.

Reawakening your intuitive senses is not a sudden switch. It's not something that happens during one workshop, one ceremony, or one transformational weekend. People who've had big openings like that often find themselves confused and scattered afterwards — because the capacity opened without the foundation to hold it.

What actually works is slower, gentler, and infinitely more sustainable: consistent energy work over time.

When I talk about energy work I'm not talking about one big event. I mean a regular, almost unremarkable practice where you spend time with your own energy. Clearing it. Noticing it. Grounding. Learning the difference between what's yours and what isn't. Over weeks and months, you start to become familiar with your own energetic landscape — and as that familiarity grows, your sensitivity to subtler information grows with it.

This is the piece most people miss.

It's not that you need to push your intuitive senses back on. It's that your senses have been drowned out by noise — other people's energy, your own unprocessed emotions, stored trauma in the body, the constant stimulation of modern life. When the noise gets quieter, the signal becomes audible again. Naturally. On its own.

The reawakening isn't dramatic. It's like the volume slowly coming back on a radio that had been turned down so low you'd forgotten it was playing.

For the Reader Who's Afraid

I want to speak directly to someone here, because I've sat with a lot of people who feel this and I know it's rarely said out loud.

If you had strong experiences in childhood, shut them down because they scared you or scared the people around you, and now feel a pull back — but you're afraid of what might open up if you let yourself explore again — I want you to know that fear makes sense, and it's not a reason to stay closed.

Those early experiences were often overwhelming because you were a child with no training, no framework, and no one to help you interpret what you were receiving. Of course it was intense. Of course some of it was frightening.

But you're not a child anymore. And if you return to this work gradually, with the right environment and the right support, it's genuinely safe. The work of reawakening these senses, done properly, also includes learning to ground, to protect your field, and to hold boundaries around what you receive and when. You're not being asked to throw open every door at once. You're being invited to learn the language again, one word at a time.

There's a tremendous difference between uncontrolled sensitivity — which is what most children have — and developed sensitivity, which is what practice creates. One feels like being battered by a storm. The other feels like reading the weather.

A Final Reflection

The part of you that used to know things didn't disappear. It didn't break. It didn't get given to someone else.

It went quiet, because the world you landed in didn't have a language for it. You adapted, the way children adapt, and you did what you needed to do to belong. That's not something to grieve forever. It's something to understand — and then move past.

What matters now is that you're feeling the pull back. That pull is a signal. It means something in you remembers, and it's asking to come home.

You don't need to become someone else to reawaken it. You need to spend time with your own energy, gently, consistently, and trust that what went quiet can speak again.

One word at a time.

If you'd like support reclaiming those senses, this is what energy healing is designed to do — not as a single event, but as a practice that gradually restores your natural sensitivity. And if you want to understand which gifts are strongest in you and what your soul came here to do with them, an Akashic Records reading can offer a clearer picture.