The Engine Behind the Mask: Hyper-vigilance, AuDHD & cPTSD | Masking Part 2

If you’ve ever been told you’re too sensitive, too alert, or overreacting… this episode is going to land.

In Part Two of the masking series, Ilja Abbattista goes deeper into what’s actually powering the mask, hyper-vigilance.

Not the clinical definition.
 Not the pathologised version.
 But what it really feels like inside a body that has lived through trauma, while also navigating ADHD and autism.

This episode explores:

•  What hypervigilance actually feels like in real time (physically, emotionally, neurologically) 
•  The difference between paranoia vs pattern recognition, and why that distinction matters 
•  How AuDHD and complex trauma overlap, creating a nervous system that never fully switches off 
•  Why hypervigilance is not just a symptom, but a trained survival intelligence
•  The hidden connection between masking and hypervigilance (and why you can’t separate them) 
•  The real cost of living in constant alert, exhaustion, shutdown, and mistrust of safety 
•  Why “just unmask” advice can feel impossible, and what actually helps instead 

Ilja also shares a powerful real-life moment where hypervigilance became a life-saving skill, and challenges the idea that healing means becoming less aware.

This is not about removing the mask.
 It’s about understanding the system behind it, and learning how to live with it differently.

If you’re AuDHD, living with trauma, or constantly scanning your environment without knowing why… this episode will give you language for what your body has been doing all along.

⚠️ Content note: This episode references childhood trauma, sexual abuse, and trafficking. Please listen with care.

If this episode hit something deeper, not just intellectually, but in your body, you don’t have to sit with that alone.

I offer real, trauma-informed support for women navigating ADHD, autism, trauma, and the complexity of all three combined. 

Here are a few ways we can work together:

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Deeper, consistent support to help you understand your patterns, regulate your nervous system, and rebuild your identity, without shame or performance.

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👉 Explore everything here:
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If you’re not ready for support yet, that’s okay.
 You can also follow the podcast, share this episode with someone who needs it, or just sit with what came up.

You’re not broken.
 You were trained.

🎧 Subscribe, share, and spiral with me.

For more raw, honest takes on dating, ADHD, trauma, and being a woman on high alert — head to iljaabbattista.co.uk

Let’s keep this messy, magical conversation going:
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Unmask. Rebuild. Thrive.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Dating on High Alert, the podcast about relationships, identity, and life when you're neurodivergent and have a trauma history. I'm Ilia Abatista, trauma-informed coach, speaker, ADHD woman, survivor, and somebody who speaks entirely from the inside. This episode references childhood trauma, sexual abuse, and trafficking, so please listen with care. Today's episode is part two of my series on masking. And if you haven't listened to part one, masking ADHD autism, why unmasking isn't always the answer, I'd encourage you to go back and start there. This episode builds directly on that foundation. And if you're joining me for the first time, I'll give you enough context to follow along. In part one, I argued that the exhaustion we attribute to masking isn't actually the mask's fault. It's the shame underneath it. The belief that who we really are is unacceptable and needs to be hidden. And today I want to go deeper because there is something else running underneath that mask. Something that makes the whole system possible, and I don't think that it gets talked about enough in the new in the neurodivergent space. Today we are talking about hypervigilance, what it actually is, what it feels like from the inside, why it is inseparable from masking for those of us with Audi HD and complex trauma. And why? Despite what the clinical world might tell you, it is not a simple disorder to be treated. It is for many of us a training, a sophisticated body-based intelligence that was forged in circumstances that demanded it. And I just want to share a quick note too. Everything I share comes from my own lived experience and my work as a trauma-informed coach. I am not a therapist, nor am I a psychologist, and nothing here is clinical advice. If this episode opens something up for you, please seek qualified support. This is the engine behind the mask. So before I describe what hypervigilance feels like for me, I want to give you a weigh-in. A version of it you you might already know. You you've had a baby, you've you've been close to somebody that has, and so you might recognize this. Finally, you fall asleep after days or weeks of exhaustion, and yet some part of you never fully goes offline. You're already tuned in, already listening, already prepared to hear your baby's specific cry in a room full of noise, maybe even a room full of other crying babies, yet you know their sound instinctively. You wake before you even know why, and a second later you hear it. That is a relaxed, loving version of hypervigilance. Your nervous system is attuned to something it has decided matters above anything else. And it monitors for it even in sleep, even in rest, even when you look completely calm to everybody watching. Now, imagine that same state, that same readiness, that same constant low-level monitoring, but forged not by love, but forged by danger. And it imagine that it never switches off, not even when you sleep, not even when you're safe, or even when the danger has long gone. And that's what I want to talk to you about today. And let me tell you what hypervigilance actually feels like. And I'm not talking about the textbook definition or the clinical criterion, but what it actually feels like in a body that lives with it. When it's at its most severe, it arrives like a switch being flipped. One moment I'm fine, relaxed, present. And the next, full body tension. My heart rate climbs and I can feel it pulsing in my neck. My shoulders rise without me deciding to raise them. And my stomach tightens in that specific place, just underneath the chestbone where my ribs meet. And my senses sharpen to a point that is almost uncomfortable. Every noise in the room becomes distinct. Every movement in my peripheral vision gets registered. I start to sweat slightly. And my ears, and that's something that I've never heard anybody else describe. My ears tense on the inside. They become uncomfortable, hypersensitive, like they're straining to catch something that's just out of hearing range. And there's one more thing, my skin. It gets a kind of tingling sensation, as if it's being stretched by the tension underneath it, like the surface of my body is being pulled taut from the inside. Electric almost. And nobody around me knows any of this is happening. Because the mask is up, the surface is calm, and I am scanning, processing, assessing, and presenting as completely fine. That is acute hypervigilance. And it can arrive and dissolve in seconds, or it can sustain for hours as long as it's necessary until whatever triggered it has resolved, or until my nervous system decides that the threat has passed. But that's only one version. The more significant version for those of us who have lived in this state for most of our lives is the low-level background version. The one that hums underneath everything. The one that has become so normal, so woven into how we move through the world that we stop noticing it. Now I'm always scanning, always. When I walk somewhere on my own, I'm I'm aware of everybody around me. I register who's walking behind me, where they are, whether their pace changes. I notice who's watching, who's following, who doesn't quite fit the context that they're in. And I noticed vulnerable people before most would even see them. And I'm going to tell you a little story about that. So not long ago, my friend and I we were walking and we were relaxed having a conversation, and I noticed a woman and probably mid to late 30s walking out of a pub on her own, quite drunk, unsteady, and unaware. I watched her for a few seconds, and it wasn't a conscious watch, it's just something that I do at any given time, and um I talked to a man nearby who had also noticed her. But it was the way that he noticed her, the calculation in it. She turned and walked towards a narrow street, you know, almost like an alley, the kind of street where fewer people going. And I told my friend that we we really needed to follow her. And yep, she didn't question me. We we walked faster, we we entered the narrow street. The man had already started moving towards her, and I pulled my friend's arm and we quickened our pace. We passed the man and we caught up with the woman as if, you know, we already knew her. And I explained that we were going to walk uh with her to the taxi rank and make sure that she got in safely. And at that moment, the man turned around and left. And my friend was amazed, grateful. And she told me that she would never notice any of it. Not the woman, not the man, not the threat, not the window closing in around that woman. And I noticed it in seconds, and I acted without hesitation. That is hypervigilance as a superpower. And I want you to sit with that for a moment because that woman got home safely that night, in part because my nervous system never fully switches off. Because decades of living on high alert gave me a pattern recognition that most people will never develop. This is not a disorder, this is a skill forged in fire. And I want to pause here because I think I may know what some of you are thinking. Because for most of my life, I didn't call what I just described hypervigilance. I called it paranoia, and that was the word that I used for myself. That was sometimes the word that other people used for me. Too suspicious, too alert, seeing things that weren't there, reading too much into situations, overreacting. Now, I want to challenge that directly and firmly, because paranoia, clinically, actually, is a false belief in threat that doesn't exist. It is a perception of danger that is not grounded in reality. It is the nervous system firing at shadows. Now, what I described to you a moment ago, that was not that. That man in the narrow street was real. His intention was real. The window closing around that woman was real. My read of that situation was accurate. And she got home safely. That's not paranoia. That is pattern recognition operating at a level that most people never develop. And I think that that distinction matters enormously because the word paranoia carries shame with it. Or you might describe it as a different feeling. It implies that you are irrational, that your perception cannot be trusted, that the problem is your mind, not the world. That you're broken in a way that makes you see danger where none exists. But for those of us who grew up in genuine, dangerous environments where the threat was real, where reading people correctly was survival, where danger did come from people who appeared safe and situations that looked normal. Our nervous systems learned something true, not something distorted. We learned that danger is real, that it can arrive without warning, that it often wears a familiar face, and that the safest thing is to stay alert. And that learning was correct. It was appropriate to the environment that we were in. The problem is not that we learnt it. The problem is that the learning became permanent, that the wiring system kept the setting even after the environment changed. That's not paranoia. That is a nervous system that hasn't yet received the message that the war is over. And there is a profound difference between those two things. One implies that your perception is broken, and the other implies that your perception is working exactly as it was trained to work, and that the work now is helping your nervous system learn slowly and safely, and that some environments are different from the ones that shaped it. And if you've spent years calling yourself paranoid, if partners or loved ones have told you that you see things that aren't there, if professionals have pathologized your alertness, if you have dismissed your own accurate reads because you told yourself that you were overreacting, I want you to hear this. You're not paranoid. You're pattern matching from a very deep database of real experience. And some of those patterns were saving lives, maybe even your own. And I only recently learned the word hypervigilance, only recently had framework for what my body has been doing my entire life. And I was only, you know, recently diagnosed with ADHD and autism, and you know, I'm 52 now, but I've always had both. I just didn't know. And here is something that is, in my opinion, rarely talked about. Aud already comes with its own form of heightened sensory and environmental awareness. The autistic nervous system is wired to take in more, to process more, to register things that others miss. And the ADHD nervous system adds hyper-arousal, a threat detection system that is perpetually scanning for stimulation, danger, and change. And so before anything traumatic ever happened to me, I was already a person whose nervous system was tuned to a higher frequency than most. And then the trauma came. Childhood sexual abuse, beginning when I was really small, years of it, then the care system. Then at 17, exploitation and trafficking across Europe. My nervous system didn't just learn hypervigilance. It was forged in it, and survival demanded it. Reading the room, reading people, reading threat correctly and quickly was the difference between being hurt and not being hurt, between danger and safety, between what I could control and what I couldn't. And I don't know where the Aud hypervigilance ends and where the trauma, trauma hyper-vigilance begins. I just I genuinely don't know. And I think for many of us sitting at this intersection, Aud with complex trauma, that that distinction may be almost impossible to make because the two systems have been running together for so long, reinforcing each other that they have become one. And I think that that distinction matters clinically, and I think that that means those of us at this intersection are not simply people with two conditions that happen to co-occur. We are people whose neurological wiring and traumatic experience have fused into something that current research has not yet fully described. And I want to spend a moment on what is actually happening in the brain and my body during hypervigilance because I think understanding the mechanism changes how you relate to it. When your nervous system perceives threat, real or anticipated, your amygdala, the brain's alarm system activates, it triggers a cascade of physiological responses. Adrenaline and cortisol flood the body, the heart rate increases, muscles tense, senses sharpen, and the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for rational thought, perspective and decision-making effectively goes offline, handing more control to the primitive survival brain. And this is the fight, flight, or freeze response. It is designed to save your life. So in people with CPTSD, this system has been activated so repeatedly, so intensely, and so over such a prolonged period of time that it has become recalibrated. And the baseline has shifted, the threshold for activation is lower, and the system fires faster, more frequently, and sometimes without any identifiable external trigger. This is not malfunction. This is your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, adapting to a world that was genuinely dangerous. It learned correctly that danger could come at any time, often without warning, often from people who appeared safe. And it therefore stopped waiting for proof. It began to anticipate. Now layer Audi HD on top of that, an autistic nervous system that already processes sensory information more intensely. An ADHD nervous system that is already in a state of hyper-arousal, constantly scanning for stimulation and threat. And then you add complex trauma and you have a nervous system running at a level of vigilance that most people will never experience, and that the person living in it has often stopped noticing because it simply became normal. Now, this is the engine behind the mask, because here is the connection. I want you to really understand. You cannot mask the way that those of us with Aud and trauma mask reading rooms, mirroring and mirroring people, adapting in real time, managing every microexpression and every vocal tone, voice choice without a nervous system that is already scanning everything at an elevated level. The hypervigilance doesn't just coexist with masking, it powers it. The mask requires data. The hypervigilance provides it constantly and automatically in real time, and they are the same system. And I want to be honest about the cost because I have spent a lot of this episode rightly talking about the about what hypervigilance can do, what it enables. The woman in the street, the reading of rooms, the pattern recognition that most people don't have. But it costs, and it costs enormously. Living in a state of elevated vigilance, even at low-level background aversion, is metabolically and neurologically expensive. Your body is running a system that was designed for short-term emergency use chronologically. The adrenaline and cortisol that flood your system in acute moments are the same hormones that over years and decades contribute to exhaustion, chronic pain, immune dysfunction, and the kind of bone-deep tiredness that sleep doesn't fix. And there's also the psychological cost when your threat detection system is always on. It cannot easily distinguish between genuine danger and perceived danger. It fires in response to raised voices, unexpected sounds, unfamiliar environments, social situations that feel unpredictable. And what other people experience is as mildly uncomfortable, you experience it at full alarm, and then you manage that alarm invisibly while continuing to function normally outside of that. That management, that constant invisible labor of keeping the internal alarm from showing up on the surface is where the masking and the hypervigilance become inseparable. And it's also, I believe, where so much of the exhaustion that people attribute to masking actually comes from, not from the adapting itself, but from the cost of running a high alert nervous system around the clock while making it look effortless. And then then there is the something more subtler, a cost that has harder to name. When you have lived in hypervigilance long enough, you begin to distrust calm. Safety can feel more threatening than threat, because at least when there is threat, the system knows what to do. Calm is unpredictable. Calm might be the moment before something bad happens. And so the nervous system, even in genuinely safe moments, will keep scanning, keeps waiting, keeps the engine running. And I recognize this in myself not long ago. The realization that I don't fully know what it feels like to be unguarded. That even in relationships where I am loved and safe, there is a part of my nervous system that remains at the door watching, just in case. And that is the cost that nobody really talks about. And there is a question that I get asked, and I've even asked it myself, about whether the hypervigilance that comes from being Audi HD is a different thing from the hypervigilance that comes from trauma. And the clinical answer would distinguish them. The Audi HD hypervigilance is neurological, it comes from a nervous system wired to process more, scan more, register more, it's it's present from birth. Trauma hypervigilance is acquired. It develops into in a response to repeated threats, reshaping the nervous system over time. But here is my honest answer. I was diagnosed with ADHD at 51 and autism at 52. I have always had both. I generally don't know what my nervous system would feel like without the trauma layer. Because I've never experienced it in that way. And the two have been running together since before I had words for either of them. And I think for many of us at this intersection, that is the reality. The ODHD nervous system was already heightened. The trauma nervous system built on top of it, amplified it, gave it new and more specific triggers, and fused with it so completely that um picketh them feels almost beside the point. And what matters more, I think, is this both are real, both are intelligent responses to lived experience. Both deserve to be understood on their own terms rather than flattened into a single pathology. And both, crucially, are part of what makes the mask possible and necessary. And I want to come back to the woman in the street because that theory matters beyond the immediate event. What I did that night, the threat detection, the rapid assessment, the decision or the decisive action is something I have done in various forms my entire life, in dangerous situations, in professional settings, in relationships. I've walked into rooms and known within seconds who was safe and who wasn't. I have heard what people weren't saying as clearly as what they were. I have spotted dynamics and dangers that others around me couldn't see. And these are not accidents. They are the product of a nervous system that has been training for decades. And I sit on lived experience panels and I facilitate and co-facilitate trainings for survivors and professionals, part of a development programme with a charity, which is amazing. And I always advocate for neurodiversity within the modern slavery and human trafficking sector. I do this work partly because I am passionate about it, but also I do it because my hyper-vigilant nervous system makes me extraordinarily good at it. And I'm obviously not alone in this. And I can sit in a room full of professionals and know immediately who truly understands survivor experience and who is performing that understanding. I can sit with a survivor and know what they're not saying, what they need and what would help and what would do harm. And I can walk into a space and assess its safety emotionally, rationally, physically in seconds. And that's not a clinical symptom, that's expertise, hardware, involuntarily, developed at an enormous personal cost, but you know, expertise nonetheless. And I think that's that this is what is missing from almost every clinical conversation about hypervigilance. The language is entire is entirely about what it costs, what it impairs, what needs to be reduced. The assumption is that the goal is to bring the nervous system down to a neurotypical baseline. But what if that is the wrong goal? What if the goal for those of us who have lived in this state long enough that it has become a skill is not to eliminate the hypervigilance, but to develop a different relationship with it. To be able to choose when to deploy it fully, when to dial it back, and when to set it down in moments that are genuinely safe. And that is a very different kind of healing, not reduction, but integration. And let's talk about part one to the to the masking theory again. Now, in that episode, I argued that the exhaustion of masking is actually the exhaustion of shame or whatever you want to call that feeling. That the mask itself is not the problem. The belief that you need to hide something fundamentally wrong with you is the problem. And I want to add a third layer to that now. The hypervigilance is the engine that runs the mask. And for those of us with Audi HD and complex trauma, the hypervigilance was never optional. It was survival necessity. It became automatic before we were even old enough to choose it. Which means that the masking was never a choice either. Not really, not at its root. We do not decide one day to suppress ourselves, to adapt a mirror and manage our presentation. We were neurologically and experientially shaped into people for whom that was simply how the world worked, how it had to work and how it stayed safe. So when somebody tells us to unmask to simply stop, to let people see us fully, to lower the vigilance and be present without scanning, they are asking us to override a system that saved our lives. A system that many cases, well, that in many cases is still saving our lives, or the lives of people like the woman in the narrow street. The work is not to turn it off, the work is to understand it, to build enough genuine safety internally and externally that the system can begin to calibrate differently, to learn slowly and in your own terms that some rooms are safe enough to lower the guard in, not to eliminate the guard, to choose when to stand it down. Now that is the work. And it is slow, it is not linear, and it cannot be rushed by ideology or internet advice. And if you recognize yourself in what I've described today, the constant scanning, the the body that never fully lets go, the exhaustion of a vigilance that never switches off. And I want to say this directly to you you're not broken and you're not overreacting, and you are not too sensitive or too anxious or too much. You are a person whose nervous system learned to do something extraordinary under circumstances that required it. And that learning left its marks. Of course it did. How could it not? And the goal is not to become someone who never notices danger. The goal is to become someone who can also notice safety, who can, in genuinely safe moments, let the breath release, feel the shoulders drop, allow the vigilance to rest without immediately bracing for what comes next. And that moment when your whole body loosens up and takes normal breath again, you know, you know that feeling. And you've described it to me without knowing that it was the thing I most wanted to hear, that relief, that release. And that is the work that we are working towards, not the elimination of the system, the expansion of the moments where it lets you rest. In part one, I said the mask didn't break me, the shame did. In part two, I want to add the hypervigilance didn't break me either. It trained me. And I am still learning what to do with that training now that I am, in many ways, finally safe. How to honour what it cost, how to use what it gave me, how to let it rest when the room is genuinely safe enough. And that is the work that I'm in. And if you're in it too, if you're somewhere on that road between the high alert that kept you alive and the safety you're still learning to trust, then you're exactly who this podcast is for. Now, I'd love to know what this brought up for you. Um I'd love for you to come and find me. And if you want to go deeper, you know, into the shame, into the mask, you know, the hypervigilance or the identity that sits underneath all of it. That's the work that I also do, one to one. And through the Dear Ilya Voice Note service, there's no agenda, there's just real support from somebody who genuinely gets it. And further information you'll find at uh iliabatista.co.uk, and links of course are in the show notes as are um notes to find resources that might be of benefit to you. Now, if you are a clinician, researcher, or a professional who wants to push back on any of this or build on it. I genuinely want to have that conversation with you. Come and find me privately or publicly, but you know, I would love for our community to hear it because I think they deserve it. And of course, I want you to take care of yourself and I will see you in part three. So, as always, until next spiral.