Rediscovering Your Intuition Through Responsible Media Consumption

Sep 23

I’ve talked a lot about how leaving high-control religion is a profound and often disorienting experience. After taking such a courageous step towards personal freedom, some folks find themselves facing an unexpected challenge: how to find reliable information after a lifetime of being misled.

In this post we’ll talk about the process of exercising your critical thinking muscles, as well as rediscovering your intuition. As you learn to spot logical fallacies and red flags in the media, my hope is that you’ll also learn to trust yourself to navigate a world full of both fun facts and fake news.

Letting Go of Past Mistakes

It's easy to feel embarrassed or angry about beliefs you once held or decisions you made based on misinformation. However, it's important to remember that you were doing the best you could with the information available to you at the time.

Letting go of past mistakes is not about forgetting them, but about forgiving yourself and using those experiences as stepping stones towards growth.

Acknowledge your feelings without judgment.
Recognize the strength it took to question your beliefs.
Understand that critical thinking is a skill that can be developed over time.

How Do You Learn?

Before looking at the how-to’s of evaluating information, it's helpful to understand your own learning style. Everyone absorbs and processes information differently, and recognizing your preferred methods can make the journey easier.

Visual Learners

Benefit from diagrams, charts, and written information. Helpful content for visual learners: books, articles, written social media posts from experts.

Auditory Learners

Prefer spoken explanations and discussions. Helpful content for auditory learners: podcasts, tik-toks or reels from experts, audio books.

Kinesthetic Learners

Learn best through hands-on experiences and practical applications. Helpful content for kinesthetic learners: workshops, interactive courses, workbooks or guided journals.

Identifying your learning style can help you choose resources and methods for expanding your knowledge in a way that feels comfortable for you.

How to Evaluate Information

Let’s consider the moment you're faced with a piece of information. Maybe it's a news article, a scientific study, or your Aunt Caroline's Facebook post about lizard people. How do you figure out if it's trustworthy?

There are lots of resources out there on how to responsibly consume media and evaluate information. It can be helpful for some folks to have a system they can follow so they can feel confident they covered all their bases. Here are a few important aspects of evaluating information, along with some links to further reading so that you can develop a system that works for you.

Logical Fallacies

A logical fallacy is a way of making an argument seem more convincing, when actually the logic used in the argument is flawed. This article lists seven common logical fallacies. Here are three common examples.

Straw Man

A straw man argument is arguing against a point no one actually made. It involves distorting the other side’s point of view into something that is easier to argue against, rather than arguing against the actual point made.

Appeal to Ignorance

This is an argument based on the idea that if you can’t prove something isn’t true, it must mean that it is. This absolves the person arguing of the need to provide proof of their statements.

False Dichotomy

Presenting only two, often extreme, options when there are actually any number of positions. A well-known example would be the phrase, “You are either for us or against us,” being used to deny any nuanced objections or critical discussions of an idea.

Fact Checking

It would be nice if we lived in a world where we could always rely on media outlets to hold themselves accountable with ethical standards and thorough editorial policies. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Fortunately, basic fact checking is fairly simple. Just pull up a site like Snopes and check away. You might be surprised how often a very believable article is actually way off base.

Evaluating Sources

Another important aspect of evaluating information is thoroughly evaluating where the information comes from. Here’s a list of questions you can ask when checking where the information being shared is coming from.

Listening to Qualified Voices

One of the things that tends to happen when folks leave high-control religion is a reluctance to believe anyone labeled as an authority. This is completely understandable, and a healthy amount of skepticism is actually a good thing!

However, there is a difference between listening to someone only because they are in a position of authority, and listening to someone because they have put in the time and effort to be an expert in their field.

This concept is a little easier to understand if we think about it in terms of maintaining a house. If someone told you they had a friend who was the best house painter in the state, you still probably wouldn’t hire them to fix your plumbing. On the other hand, if you need a plumber, you should feel confident that a good one will get the job done.

You might have grown up being taught that church leaders or other christians were the only people you could trust to guide you in topics like finances, sex, world events, and even your own health. Don’t be afraid to seek out information from true experts in their fields. You might be surprised how many people truly just enjoy sharing the information they’ve worked hard to gather, without having a hidden agenda.