Why We Spiral

As a person with long experiences in trauma responses, I see this sort of behavior pattern everywhere. There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong especially when it comes to identifying interpersonal threats. We don’t educate people in how to process their feelings in a healthy manner and to differentiate what they feel is happening and how they should behave. This results in anything like saying someone has “bad vibes” to be a reason to exclude them, to actively covering for someone with a known pattern of harming people simply because they are charming.

But you also get disasters when people ignore their gut/"vibes" and try to do the "rational" thing based on more easily nameable evidence. The gut is not reliable, but it is a model that's trained on a lot of data and shouldn't be ignored. As usual there are no easy answers.

Frankly being able to point to specific behaviors that trigger vibes is something that comes easily to me as someone who, again, had to work through identifying trauma responses and reacting accordingly. It’s just a skill I think more people would benefit from picking up. I respond really poorly when I don’t feel understood, but I also have a tendency to be vague on details so it is normal for me to get misunderstood. Recognizing this is useful because I can use my gut frustration as an indicator, not that whoever I’m talking to is a moron or are intentionally bad faith misinterpreting me, but that I may be lacking clarity.