Why Do I Ignore Red Flags?

Kerrie Hudson • April 21, 2026

You're not missing the signs. You've been taught to override them.

The question of ignoring red flags assumes something significant: that you saw them, and chose to ignore them anyway; and more often than not, that’s exactly what happened. When working with my clients they’ll say something like, ‘how could I miss it’, and when we dig a little deeper, we find that they didn’t miss ‘it’ at all; they saw it, felt it, and talked themselves out of it.


Why does this happen? The answer is both simple and complex: hope. But not the aspirational hope, the kind that’s grounded in evidence or a sincere promise, it’s the hope driven by anxiety. This hope is rooted in fantasy.


Fantasizing is the habit of imagining the best possible outcome. It is similar to catastrophizing, where one escapes to immerse themselves in the worst possible outcome. Both are functions of anxiety, and both ignore the reality right in front of you. This is why red flags are so easily ignored.


For many, catastrophe is the more recognizable symptom of anxiety, but the truth is both sit on opposite ends of the same spectrum. Fantasy is often overlooked as a function of anxiety, and is usually associated with something more positive, like having a vivid imagination. In reality, as an adult, fantasy can lead you into danger if you’re not mindful. It usually develops in childhood as an escape from an unpleasant reality, and over time, evolves into a habit where you ignore what’s in front of you to imagine something much more pleasant than the truth. This is how you can find yourself in an abusive relationship.


What often triggers the fantasy in relationships is the conflict between what you see and experience with the other person, and what you want. You see the red flags, and you want to make it work with this person, so you fantasize to make them better than they are. This is where the trap is built.


On the outside, their behavior is toxic, or at least less than ideal. On the inside, you’re envisioning a future in a house with a white picket fence and babies running around; and this vision, you’ll fight to protect regardless of what’s in front of you. This is why when your friends and loved ones question the relationship or reflect what they’re seeing it feels like an intrusion. It’s not just a threat to the relationship, it feels much more personal. It’s a threat to your fantasy and the future you hope to exist in.


The question is, how likely is it that what you’ve imagined can exist with who they actually are? This is where it’s necessary to wake up. Not to a reality that says you can’t have the love you long for, but to the reality that you can’t get love from someone who isn’t loving, no matter how hard you work to manifest your fantasy.


This tendency isn’t new, as I mentioned, it was developed in childhood. It’s the sign that the love and attention you needed as a child and the love you received were not in alignment. You couldn’t force the love you needed, so you adapted. You held onto what you were given while fantasizing about something much better, like being showered with gifts, receiving praise, or possibly even having a friend. Over time, this became a pattern. You added what was missing, eased your pain, and made it all make sense even when it didn’t. These tools helped you to survive childhood with your mental health relatively intact, and today they challenge it.


What worked then keeps you stuck now. You had one childhood and one set of caregivers to survive, and you did that. Today, you have options, but you keep choosing people who also will not meet your needs, and possibly even hurt you, while escaping instead of choosing to walk away. It’s time to set aside the fantasy and start responding to what’s actually in front of you. As Maya Angelou said, “when people show you who they are, believe them”.


This is where the work begins. The truth is you are deserving of love, the kind that doesn’t require you to escape to envision it, but the kind you can experience in real life. The challenge is believing that you can have it, and that you’re worthy of the type of person who can provide it. This is where many people get stuck, believing they can have something that they’ve never consistently experienced: love without anxiety. Until you do, you won’t just ignore red flags, you’ll continue to justify them.


If you’re recognizing yourself in this, it’s likely not just this relationship—it’s a pattern.

And patterns don’t change just because you understand them… they change when you can clearly see them.


If you’re ready for that kind of clarity, take the Relationship Pattern Diagnostic.

Woman taking a pill

Why Leaving a Toxic Relationship Feels Like Withdrawals

By Kerrie Hudson • March 18, 2026
Why leaving a toxic relationship can feel like withdrawal—and how to break the cycle of emotional addiction to unhealthy love.
Woman peacefully journaling

Protecting My Peace

By Kerrie Hudson • March 10, 2026
There’s a lot of talk about protecting one’s peace these days, but what does that even mean? And how do you protect your peace? Let’s dig in. Peace is an emotion. In psychology there are five basic emotions that are widely accepted: anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and happiness. Unfortunately, of the five only one would be considered a positive emotion, though I believe all are positive in that they provide you with information. But I digress. Happiness, the more positive of the five is the one emotion you likely welcome with open arms, and when it comes, you want it to stay. You protect it. Peace lives on the spectrum of happiness, and like all other emotions, it is literally a feeling in the body. It feels like serenity; there’s stillness and a calm that comes over you. I’ve had folks identify peace in their bodies as the absence of the feelings they’re accustomed to: tightness in their chest, sweaty palms, stomach discomfort, etc. For many, peace is rarely felt, so when they feel it, or any other emotion for that matter, they fail to recognize the environment that nurtured it; and if you’re going to protect your peace, you’ve got to notice when you feel it and what contributed to it. Understanding peace as an emotion is necessary because the role of your emotions is to provide you with information about your environment. At times, emotions can be so intense and distressing that the focus shifts from the environment that ignited them, to suppressing or extinguishing them. But emotions aren’t the problem, the environment is. Every emotion is important, even those that you’ve identified as negative. They tell you that something in your circumstances or environment needs your attention, and when you ignore your emotions, you ignore the task at hand. Peace is a gift, and not everybody or every environment offers it. When you notice peace in your body, you also need to notice what nurtured it. Are there people who bring peace? Are there places where you feel more at ease? Identifying these sources gives you what you need to take care of yourself by accessing more of it. On the other hand, where do you experience the opposite of peace? Where, and with whom do you find chaos and confusion? If you’re going to protect your peace, these are environments and people who you need to limit contact with. If you’re going to protect your peace, you’ve gotta increase your self-connection by noticing your emotions, and allowing them to tell you what you need to increase your overall well-being. When you fight your emotions, you fight yourself and your best interests. Extended periods of suppressing emotions can lead to depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions because two things are working against you: you are becoming more disconnected from yourself while existing in environment that don’t serve you. There’s no magic pill that creates more peace and happiness, it’s the consistent work of nurturing self-connection and meeting your needs, because you are the most important person in your world. May you grow exponentially in peace! If this resonated with you, you’re not alone. These are the conversations we continue inside Next Chapter: Notes from The Other Side, my monthly newsletter where I share insights, reflections, and guidance for women breaking toxic patterns and learning how to love themselves differently. Join Next Chapter here
Woman breaking out

The One Thing Standing Between You & Success

By Kerrie Hudson • February 8, 2026
The new year typically comes with a desire to be successful in an area where winning has been challenging. As such, we spend time thinking about what we want for the year ahead and commit to doing things that will help us achieve our goals. The challenge many of us run into is that we quit on our goals before we can clear the first few months of the year; so, while January is still with us, I want to share with you some information about what I believe to be the number killer of success, anxiety, and how to overcome it so you can have a greater chance at winning this year. Regardless of your goals, anxiety has a way of stepping in and stealing your motivation before you can gain much momentum. It’s the quiet voice lurking in the background telling you that you can’t have what you really want because it’s too hard, or you’re not good enough, or if you do attain it, something terrible will come along and take it away. Essentially, anxiety is at the heart of why you settle; you’ve listened to that little fearful voice that’s informed only by your limited experience and/or imagination, and convinced yourself you can’t have the thing you deeply desire; so your only option is to go without the tightened body, or the love you deserve, or the business that would positively impact the lives of others, which ultimately leaves you dissatisfied and even regretful. You’ve given up on your goals and dreams because of something that might happen, but probably won’t. If you’re going to disrupt this cycle the key is to challenge your ego. Many people believe the issue with the ego is cockiness and arrogance that leads one to see themselves as above others, and while that’s true, what most people fail to understand is the arrogance in perceiving fear as fact versus seeing it as just one of many possibilities. When you see your fears as fact you treat them as certainty and you make decisions that align with them, ultimately shortchanging yourself of the life you deserve. In reality, the ego can work for or against you, and combined with anxiety, an unhealthy ego will kill your ability to enjoy your life and achieve your goals. So, if you you’re going to succeed in anything and have a good time doing it, you must check your ego and anxiety so they don’t keep you in a constant state of settling in fear. If left unchecked, the ego will convince you not to invest too much or not to try too hard because “this probably won’t even work”, or “nothing good ever happens for me”. It will see losses as catastrophic events and overinflate the importance of a few outside opinions. Its goal is to keep you safe, when in reality, the things that pose a threat to you are likely not threatening at all. The key is balancing the ego by removing certainty from your beliefs, because anything that hasn’t yet happened isn’t certain, it’s a possibility. When you begin to see your fears as possibilities you can move from a place of guardedness to a place of curiosity; this helps you to open yourself to more possibilities than the one rooted in your fears, and when you see more possibilities, you can free yourself to take risks (which is necessary to succeed). With this shift, you can begin to see losses as lessons so you can use your setbacks as a setup to do better, to refine your approach, to put the proper supports in place; and as your gain more experience, you’ll begin to see realistic likelihoods of what can happen over possibilities and certainties, reducing the size of your fears. You begin to think “if I take these steps, it is possible that I won’t achieve my goal, but it is likely that I’ll be closer to it than if I settle here”, and when you take on this perspective beautiful things happen.