Negative Self Talk, AuDHD, Mindset and Masking part 3

In the final part of the masking trilogy, Ilja goes somewhere she has never gone publicly before.

This episode isn’t theory, it’s truth.

The difference between the self-criticism you can hear…
 and the kind that lives in silence.

The core belief formed before language, the one that doesn’t show up as a thought, but as a feeling. A reality. A quiet, persistent sense that something about you was never quite right.

Ilja explores what happens when that belief is shaped by complex trauma, repeated experiences of being overlooked, and the absence of anyone stepping in to say: this isn’t your fault.

She speaks, for the first time, about the specific impact of exploitation on her relationship with money, the lived experience of earning and having everything taken, and how that creates a deeply embodied block that mindset work alone doesn’t reach.

This episode goes beyond the inner critic.

Into the nervous system.
 Into the body.
  Into the place where the belief actually lives.

And it introduces the one thing that has survived everything:

The core belief that anything is possible.

Not something learned after the trauma, but something that existed within it.

This is the most personal episode of the series.

And it ends with an invitation:

Watch this space.

If this episode landed somewhere in you, if you recognised the silent version, the one without words, you don’t have to sit with it alone.

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Unmask. Rebuild. Thrive.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This episode is called Negative Self-Talk with Aud Mindset and Masking. And this is part three. And I will start with a trigger warning because this episode references childhood abuse, exploitation and trafficking. It also contains an honest account of self-loathing, self-abuse, and the lasting psychological impact of exploitation. So please listen with care and with somebody that you trust nearby if you need them to. Welcome back to Dating on Higher Learn, the podcast about relationships, identity, and life when you're neurodivergent and have a trauma history. I'm Illya Abbatista, trauma-informed coach, speaker, Audi HD woman, survivor, and somebody who speaks entirely from the inside. And a note before we begin. Everything I share here comes from my own lived experience and my work as a trauma-informed coach. Not a therapist or a psychologist, and nothing here replaces professional support. If anything in today's episode opens something up for you, please reach out to somebody qualified to help. And today is part three of my masking series. So in part one, I argued that the exhaustion of masking isn't the mask's fault, it's the shame underneath it. The belief that who you really are is fundamentally unacceptable. And in part two, I went deeper into hypervigilance, the engine that runs the whole system. The nervous system state that makes the kind of masking we do not just possible but automatic. And what we didn't talk about was where that came from, how it got to be installed. And I also didn't tell you what happens when the belief that built them is so deep that it has no words. And today I want to go somewhere I haven't gone publicly before. Not into theory, but into something true. This is about the words we use against ourselves. And I want to start with something that you'll probably recognise immediately. We've all heard it. We've probably all said it. I'm an idiot. I'm so stupid. What's wrong with me? For goodness sake, why can't I just do one simple thing? The thing that you mutter under your breath when you walk into the kitchen for the third time and you come out with nothing again. Not the drink that you went in for or the thing that you were supposed to put in the dishwasher. Nothing. Just a reorganized draw which you didn't intend to reorganize, and the vague awareness that something went wrong again. That voice, that specific flavour of self-cruelty, the impatience, the contempt, the exhaustion of your own brain. And I want to be quite clear on that. That voice is harmful. And don't let anybody tell you that it isn't. And don't let yourself dismiss it as just the way that you talk to yourself, just a habit. It's only just words. It isn't just words. It accumulates, it shapes what you attempt, what you allow, what you believe about yourself. Every single time you call yourself an idiot, you are reinforcing something that was probably never true. And the reason I'm starting here is not because of this version, and it's not because this version is acceptable, it isn't. But it's because this version has a name. You can hear it, you can catch it mid-sentence. And there is substantial information out there about how to work with it, and that work is very real and it matters. But there's another version, and that version is a bit harder to reach, and it's the one that does the most damage, and it's the one that lives in silence, the one that has no words, not because it hasn't formed, but because it formed before you had the language for it, before you had the cognitive framework to recognize it as a belief rather than a fact, before anybody handed you a different story to hold alongside it, and it became part of your core belief. Now, when I say core belief, I don't mean the things that you think, I mean the things you are, the things so deep and so integrated that they don't announce themselves as thoughts, they simply feel like reality. Every ounce of your body and mind integrated this ugly language because it didn't have a different one. And how are you how are you supposed to identify that? You can read the books, do the research, develop a self-awareness over years of deliberate, disciplined work, and even then, even with all of that, it can still take decades to reach. And some of it arrives as a shock. Um, and I'm not talking about the gradual dawning of insight, but the sudden disorientating realization that something you have believed about yourself your entire life was never actually true. It was handed to you by people who had power over you at a time when you had no defence against it and no alternative to put it in its place. And I know this because I lived it. And I want to tell you how. For me, it wasn't just finding out that I had ADHD and then autism. For me, it was shortly before I was okay. I'd made some changes in my life. I wasn't giving any significant thought to any of the questions that had been burning in the background for years. They were just there. Very occasionally they would just pop up and still be a question. And why did that happen? Never any clarity, no answer, other than a tiny fraction of a memory that simply made no sense at all. No other thoughts connected to it, no rhythm, no follow-up. And in other parts of my life where things weren't clear, I had just intensely deep negative thoughts about myself, a self-loathing, something I couldn't control, and I couldn't control how people treated me because of it. I genuinely believed that I deserved everything coming to me. But I never gave it any thought as to why I thought so badly of myself or how it came about. I had zero self-respect, and with that came a level of self-abuse that couldn't be contained. I couldn't change the narrative because I had no language for it. No understanding of it at all, just things I had picked up from others, how easily they judge without knowing the full story. The words said to me along the way that I too had started to believe because there was no alternative. This is what's happening, therefore, this is who I am. And yet, I was never talking about, I was never talking to anyone about what was happening. I kept all of this to myself. And as I grew up, I tried changing the way I did things, the way I held myself, my posture. I was relentless at changing so that I wouldn't be seen as the person I believed I was. How incredibly lonely and sad it must have been for that child. And I say that in the third person because even to this day, I struggle seeing myself as that child. I disassociated and I am still learning to become one with my younger self. And I want to stop here for a moment. Because I don't want to tell this story only as a story of damage. Changing the way I held myself, it worked. And I mean that without any qualification. It genuinely, significantly worked. People stopped bullying me. People saw me differently. I became somebody who was taken seriously, somebody people stopped underestimating. I developed techniques through sheer observation and necessity that I still use today at 52 because they are still effective. And that is not a small thing. That is a child with no framework, no diagnosis, no support, no one intervening, figuring it out through intelligence and will that she could change how the world responded to her by changing how she held herself in it, and that worked. But I was still carrying the cracks within that posture. Most people couldn't see them, most people were fooled, and I don't mean that unkindly, I mean the mask was doing its job. But the people who wanted to harm me for their own gain, they saw it, they always see it, and that's what they're looking for. That's the specific thing that they are scanning for, the crack in the foundation. The belief underneath the posture that says at some level that this is what happens to somebody like me, that I don't deserve, that I don't quite deserve protection, that I won't fight back in the ways that matter. Changing how you hold yourself changes how most people read you, but it doesn't change what you believe about yourself in the quiet, in the dark, in the moments when nobody is watching, and the posture relaxes, and the real thing is still there. And the people who are specifically hunting for that belief, they find it. That's not your fault. It never was your fault. It was a crack in the foundation put there by people who should have known better. Long before that you were old enough to fill it yourself. And before I go further, I'm I'm just gonna pause here again for a moment. If what I've described so far, the posture work, the mask that held most people back, but not all of them, if any of that has landed somewhere in you, I want you to know that you don't have to sit with that by yourself. And here's something that I've noticed about myself in this work. It is significantly easier for me to recognize these patterns in other people other than myself. I can hear somebody describe their experience and see exactly what's happening. The belief underneath it, the crack in the foundation, the thing that they've been carrying without language for it. In myself, though, I'm still learning, still finding the next layer. Which is probably why I coach the way I do, not from a position of having it all resolved, from a position of being genuinely in it alongside you. And if you want to bring what you're carrying to somebody who gets it from the inside, the dear Ilya voice note service is exactly there for that reason. You send me a voice note, I send my back. No agenda, no fix-in, just real. The link is in the show notes. Come and find me when whenever you're ready. Now, let me keep going. Um, because the next part is the part that I've never said out loud before. Now, for me, it came from being repeatedly left out deliberately by adults who decided that I wasn't deserving. This didn't happen just once nor twice. It was a pattern repeated across years by various different people, the ones who should have known better, who chose again and again to leave a child out, to let her know through their actions, their choices, their casual cruelty, that she was the last in the queue, that she would wait, and that she would be humiliated that no one was going to intervene, and no one did. Time and time again, nobody stopped it, nobody named it, no one looked at that child and said, This is wrong. You deserve better than this. And so I drew the only available conclusion, the one the evidence supported, the one that every repetition of that pattern confirmed. I deserve this. This is what I get, this is who I am. That belief falled in childhood, confirmed repeatedly, never challenged by anybody with the power to challenge, challenge it, didn't stay in childhood. It travelled with me into every room, into every room that I entered, into every relationship I ever had, into every opportunity that came close and then somehow didn't quite land. And then came the circumstances that confirmed it most brutally of all. I was exploited and trafficked, and everything that happened in those three years affirmed the belief that had already been installed that I was worth nothing, that I was the lowest of the low, that everything I earned, every single thing would be taken from me, because of course it would, because that is what somebody like me gets. And I want to be really specific about something here because it really matters, and because I have never found anything online or in any framework or in any coaching mythology that speaks to exactly this money, and what I mean with that is my version of it. My block isn't abstract, it isn't generic scarcity thinking or imposter syndrome or the standard narrative about charging your worth. It is specific, it is embodied, it is this. Everything I earned was taken from me. I had to open myself, my most intimate self, every day, and I was paid, and then I had to give it up every single time for years. The humiliation of that, the specific grinding, relentless humiliation of earning through the most intimate parts of yourself and then watching it just disappear, of having no ownership ever over what your own body produced, of learning of in the most visceral way possible. That earning and keeping are two completely separate things, and that keeping was never going to be available to somebody like me. And that's not a mindset pattern I could find in a book. There is no framework for that, no resonant language, no worksheet that reaches it, because it isn't in the mind, it's in the body. It's in the wall that goes up. Physical, felt, unmistakable. The moment financial success gets close enough to be real. I feel it as a break, a wall, a um the body engaging before the thought even forms. And I've done some extraordinary mindset work in my life. I mean, I mean that without false modesty. It was fundamental to my masking. It enabled me to build businesses, win awards, survive things that were, well, that shouldn't have been survivable. It's still working in almost every area of my life. But this one thing, this specific thing, it has lived below the level where mindset goes until now. And I said earlier that there is substantial information out there about obvious versions, you know, the I'm an idiot version, the inner critic that you can hear. Money mindset is also already out there too, but not in a way that resonates with my particular truth. And I want to say clearly that work is real and it matters. And if you can catch the thought, the you know, you can name it, challenge it, begin to introduce a different story, do that work. It's it's not nothing. But for those of us whose cruelty to ourselves lives in silence, whose core belief formed before language, before consciousness, before we had any way to question what we were being told, the standard toolkit doesn't reach far enough because the belief isn't sitting in the thoughts waiting to be challenged. It's in the nervous system, in the body, in the automatic responses that fire below the level of conscious thought. You can know intellectually, cognitively, cognitively, completely, that you are worthy, that you deserve good things, that the story you were handed was never true, and still feel the break engage, still feel the wall go up, still find yourself acting from a place that says at some level in some quiet corner that the mindset work hasn't reached yet. This probably isn't for somebody like me. I'm not a failure and it's far from being weak. This is a nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do, protecting you from outcomes that in circumstances that were real, getting close to something good meant something bad was coming next. The body remembers. Even when the mind has already moved on, even when the circumstances were or are completely different, even when you're safe, which is why the work that reaches left this level isn't just mindset work, it's body work, it's the slow, careful, sometimes uncomfortable process of turning attention to where the belief lives, not in thought, but in sensation and staying with it long enough that something begins to shift. And it's not something that you can force, but it's something that you need to give yourself permission to do and give it enough safety to move. And I want to tell you something that I think is the most important thing in this episode, because even in my darkest hours, and I'm I mean the darkest, the ones I'm still learning to talk about, I found ways to excel, ways to stop the worst from happening, ways to make something from what was already a really terrible situation, ways to find the angle, see the possibility, refuse to be entirely consumed. That wasn't luck and it wasn't accident. That was a core belief, so deep and so stubborn that even the worst circumstances of my life couldn't extinguish it. The belief that anything is possible. And I want you to hear that because it changes the story. Most trauma narratives go, bad thing happened, I was damaged, I survived, I healed. Mine goes, bad thing happened, and even inside it, even at the absolute bottom, with everything taken, with every confirmation of the ugliest belief that I carried, something in me was still finding ways, still moving, still refusing. That belief that anything is possible didn't arrive. After the trauma. It was present during it. It survived the unsurvivable and kept functioning. And that is the resource that I am bringing to the last block. Not a new technique, not a framework from a book, or not something that I've learned or borrowed or been taught. The thing that got me through the worst of it all, the thing that has, it's always been there. The thing that built businesses and wrote theory and sat in front of trauma experts' responses and didn't collapse. And I'm pointing at this now. I didn't know exactly what to do, and I still don't know exactly what's going to happen next. And I'm not going to stand here and tell you that I have the answer, that I've resolved it, that the wall is down and the break is released and the money flows freely now. I haven't. It isn't, not yet. But I know the resource that I'm bringing to it, and I know that it has survived far worse than this. So here is what I want to say to you directly. If you have done the work seriously, deliberately for years, and there is still a whisper, a quiet, persistent, deeply embedded thing that the work hasn't quite reached, something that feels less urgent somehow, which is maybe why you've left it so long. Something that sits beneath or sits between where you are and where you know that you are capable of going. You're not failing and you're not broken, and you have not done any of this work already in the wrong way. You have reached the level where the standard tools stop working, and that is not the end. And I'm saying that to myself as much as I'm saying it to you. That is the beginning of a different kind of work. The work that goes into the body, the into the felt sense, into the place where the belief actually actually lives. You already have access to that place. You always have. You've been living there for years, feeling everything before you had words for it, knowing things in your body before your mind ever caught up. That capacity, the one that your history forced you to develop, is the very thing that research says is needed for this level of healing. You didn't study it, you survived into it. And it turns out it might be the thing that gets you the rest of the way. And I want to say one more thing before I close. I have never talked about the money piece publicly before. I have never said it out loud. In these specific terms, what that experience did to my relationship with earning and keeping and deserving, I didn't. And I'm saying it now because I think some of you are carrying a similar version of it. Not necessarily the same circumstances, but the same shape, the same wall, the same break that engages right before something good gets close enough to be real. And this is what I want you to know. If that's you, that the absence of a framework that fits doesn't mean you're too broken for frameworks. It means the framework hasn't been written yet. And who knows, maybe we write it together. Anyway, watch this space. In part one, the mask didn't break me, the shame did. In part two, the hypervigilance didn't break me either, it trained me. And in part three, the words used against me didn't break me. Even the ones that I learnt to use against myself. But it's time to change the language. Not with affirmations, with not with toxic posity, not with the performance of healing before the healing has happened. But with the same core belief that has always been there. The stubborn, unextinguishable, apparently indestructible belief that anything is possible. Even this, especially this. And I'll see you for part four. I'm not quite sure when it's coming, as I have some serious self-work to do, but I will keep the updates coming. Now, if this episode landed somewhere in you, if you recognise the silent version, the one without words, the wall that goes up before the thought even forms, I want you to know that you don't have to sit with this by yourself. The dear Ilya voice note service is there for exactly this moment when you need to say something out loud to somebody who genuinely gets it. Not to be fixed, not to be analysed, but just to be heard. You send me a voice note, I send them back. Real, grounded, no agenda. If you're ready to go deeper into the body-based work of what lives below the mindset level, that's what my quantum coaching is for. It's at your pace in a space built for brains and histories like yours. And if you're not ready for either of those yet, that's okay. You can start with a free guide. You're not too much, you were never met fully. I have others in resources that might resonate with you too. They are waiting for you at iliabatista.co.uk and everything is in the show notes. Come and find me. Take care of yourselves out there and watch this space. As always, until next spiral.