Red Flags

What are they?

Where’d they come from?

How come we miss them sometimes?

What can we do about that?

Apparently around the 1600s, navy ships started raising a red flag to warn of danger. Red flags were used during battles and wars for the same reason.

In our day to day life, a red flag is so

mething that sparks our attention because it shows up as kind of out of the ordinary.

There are people who notice red flags, notice something about a person or a situation that makes it stand out a little bit. It seems “off”  and that’s why they notice it.

There are people who ignore red flags, sometimes they look back and realize they chose to ignore them. Or sometimes the ignoring was really out of their consciousness at the time, then they look back, realize the red flags were always out there, then wonder why they didn’t  notice them.

Then there are people who don’t recognize red flags at all. They notice the behavior, but it doesn’t stand out to them. The reason it doesn’t stand out has to do with their earlier experience. Because if you grow up thinking that the red flag behavior is “normal” then it doesn’t seem especially uncomfortable or weird. You don’t feel like you need to do anything about it. For instance, if you grew  up in a  home where people screamed and yelled at each other all the time and then you got a partner who screams and yells at you, it wouldn’t seem unusual to you. You might feel uncomfortable sometimes and wonder what to do about that and not even really know how you got there.

It’s great if we can see the red flags or even begin to see the red flags because then we can take steps to remove them from our lives or at least minimize our exposure to them.

We can become aware of red flags we missed. We can learn not to miss them again.

We can change our sensitivity to them.

We can start to believe in ourselves and our perceptions!

We can take the actions we need to take -  were entitled to life without dangers.

Helpful?