Question from a reader:

“Do you believe that you can deeply feel when you are in the presence of a genuinely bad person? And if so, how is that something you can explain without sounding crazy to others? Sorry to just jump in your DMs. I’m just sitting on this really hard today and I have a feeling that you maybe know this feeling too.”

Your nervous system picks up subtle psychological cues from other peoples’ nervous systems via things like tone, inflection, body language, micro facial expressions, etc. These are things which you may not be consciously aware of, but your body, and specifically your brain, is taking in all of these cues all the time. It then puts your nervous system on alert, and you may not understand why you feel uneasy around a certain person, but you just do because your nervous system recognizes this person as “not safe.”

For example, you hear people who have been in the presence of serial killers like Ted Bundy and Carey Stayner describing how they were totally normal one minute and then suddenly, something shifted. They can’t always explain what it is, they just know that suddenly they felt very uncomfortable in their presence:

At Cedar Lodge, KGO radio reporter Mary Ellen Geist recalled sharing a soak in the hotel hot tub with Stayner late one evening in March while she was covering the Sund-Pelosso story….Geist grew increasingly uncomfortable. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was something about her hot tub companion that left her cold.

 

“…I remember just literally jumping, sort of, out of the hot tub;” said Geist. “He hadn’t done anything in particular, but I became very nervous.”

 

She excused herself and headed quickly to her room.

 

“I ran up the steps, double-bolted my door, and pushed a table and chairs against it.” she said.”I got the creeps.”

[source]

There was once an investigator who went into Bundy’s cell and told Lewis that he “became weird on me… did a metamorphosis, a bit of a body and facial change, and… almost an odor emitted from him.”

 

He said this lasted for roughly 20 minutes, and that there was a “change of personality with extreme tension. I was afraid of him … it was very scary.”

[source]

This, of course, is a survival mechanism geared toward warning you of imminent danger, but I also believe we can experience these things psychically without being in someone’s physical presence.

I’ve had experiences –– and I know many other psychically sensitive people who experience this, as well –– where someone may not necessarily be dangerous, but they are still not necessarily of a healthy energetic persuasion, and I feel that instantly simply by looking at their photo. One person in particular was a 22-year-old female personal trainer who made me physically nauseous any time I even thought about her.

Other examples include a tightening/constricting of the solar plexus, a sense of an oppressive force, or a sinking feeling like falling into quicksand, all depending on the individual in question and their particular brand of stank energy.

These are people who might not harm you physically, but are likely to engage in emotionally abusive behaviors, manipulation, control, or exhibit otherwise unbecoming personalities, and they’re typically people that someone would describe as, “I felt like something was off about them, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was,” or “I just thought it was me being unkind.”

Incidentally, these are the ways that certain spiritual practices can cause you to gaslight yourself.

Thanks for being here,

Ash

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