Your Body Already Knew...Your mind Just didn't Want To Know

Your Body Already Knew. Your Mind Just Didn’t Want to Know.

Have you ever had a feeling about someone that you kept explaining away?

It wasn't because you were naïve, or because you “missed the signs.”
But because the connection felt stronger than the warning your body was giving you.

In this episode of Dating on High Alert, Ilja Abbattista explores the difference between gut feelings, intuition, and trauma responses - and why so many of us learned to override ourselves long before we ever entered a relationship.

This episode is for:

• Neurodivergent people navigating relationships, masking, emotional overwhelm, and self-trust
• People with trauma histories who struggle to trust their own knowing
• Partners wanting to better understand trauma responses, intuition, and nervous system patterns
• Anyone who keeps finding themselves overriding what they already know

Inside this episode, Ilja explores:

• The difference between gut feelings and intuition
• Why trauma responses can blur clear thinking
• Why strong feelings are not always true feelings
• How childhood experiences can disconnect us from our own signals
• ADHD, object permanence, and internal imagery
• Why visualisation and manifestation advice often fails neurodivergent brains
• The difference between thinking an image and seeing one
• Why masking, survival, and self-doubt make complete sense
• The real reason we override ourselves — and why it isn’t weakness

This isn’t an episode about blaming yourself for the times you stayed.

It’s about learning to hear yourself sooner.

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CONTENT NOTE:
This episode includes discussion of trauma, abusive relationships, dissociation, nervous system responses, and survival adaptations.

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💬 WORK WITH ILJA

If this episode resonated with you and you’re looking for support that actually works with your brain and nervous system - not against it - you can explore support, coaching, and resources here:

https://iljaabbattista.co.uk/

🖤 SUPPORT THE PODCAST

If Dating on High Alert has helped you feel seen, understood, or a little less alone - you can support the podcast here:

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, and welcome back to Dating on High Let. And I want to start today's episode a little differently. No preamble, no warm up, just something honest. And I spent years not listening to what my body was telling me. And I'm not talking about small things. I mean knowing. Really knowing in a way that your body knows things before your mind has even formed the thought that something was wrong. And overriding it anyway. Because what I wanted, what I needed, what felt like the only possible answer at the time was stronger than the signal my body was sending. And I want to talk to you today about that. And this isn't to frighten you or to tell you what you should or shouldn't have done. But because I think we need to be honest about something that doesn't get talked about clearly enough. That not listening to yourself has consequences. Real ones. And the longer we override what we already know, the higher the cost. And I never thought in a million years that some of the things that I went through could happen to me. But they did. And I'm still here. And what matters now, the only thing that matters now, is what we do with that. So this episode is actually for a few different people. It's for you if you've already been through something and you still find yourself not quite listening. You know this territory, you've done work on yourself, and yet here you are again in a situation that feels familiar in a way that you can't fully explain. And it's for you if you if if you're dating right now and something keeps feeling slightly off. You can't put your finger on it. Everything looks fine on the surface, but there's something quiet underneath that you keep brushing past. And it's also for you if you had absolutely no idea this conversation was one that you needed until just now. And this is for all of you, because wherever you are in this, the signal was always there. Your body was always telling you the truth. And there are some really good reasons that make complete sense that aren't your fault why you didn't learn to listen to it. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. And before I go any further, I want to be clear about something. I'm not a therapist, I'm not a clinician, I don't have a psychology degree. Um, what I'm sharing comes uh from my own experience, um what I've lived through, what I've learned from it, and what I found useful. And if you're working with a therapist or uh, you know, you're considering it, please keep doing that. This isn't a replacement for professional support. It's one person sharing what she knows from the inside. My name is Ilya Abatista. I'm a trauma-informed coach working with people whose brains and histories mean the standard approaches haven't worked for them. I'm Audi HD myself. I have a C PTSD diagnosis, and I've been through experiences that most people will never face, thankfully. And I'm not sharing any of that for sympathy. I'm sharing it because everything that I'm going to talk about today, I know from the inside. And it's not from a textbook, it's not from a training course, but from living it and from learning slowly, imperfectly, and still ongoing. What it actually takes to hear yourself again. So let's start with what the body actually does, because I think most of us have been taught to treat our feelings as either reliable or unreliable. And the truth is considerably more nuanced than that. There's a difference between a gut feel gut feeling and intuition. And I think it's one of the most important distinctions you can make when trying to work out whether to trust what you're feeling. So a gut feeling is immediate, it's visceral, it lives in the body, the stomach, the chest, the throat. It arrives fast, often before you've had any conscious thought about that particular situation, and it can be extraordinarily accurate. And it can also be a hysterical echo, a response firing because something in the present resembles something from the past. Your nervous system pattern matching and triggering an alarm based on what happened before, and not necessarily what's actually happening now. An intuition is different. It's slower, it's quieter, more integrated, and it's the accumulation of everything that you've observed, everything that you've experienced, everything you know about this personal situation, processed somewhere beneath conscious awareness and surfaced as a knowing. And it doesn't arrive loudly. It tends to be persistent rather than urgent. And here's what I've come to understand about the difference between the two in practice. Intuition allows you to still think clearly. When what you're experiencing is a genuine trauma response, when the nervous system has gone into threat mode based on something historical, rational thought starts to blur, and you can't access clarity in the same way. The feeling can be overwhelming, it crowds everything else out. But intuition, real intuition, sits alongside clear thinking and it doesn't override it, it informs it. And learning to tell the difference between those two things, between the historical echo and the genuine knowing, that's the beginning of being able to trust yourself again. Now, for some of you, that distinction is going to take time and support to develop because if you've spent years in survival mode, overriding the signals, disassociating from them even, having them dismissed by the people around you, the pathway back to your own knowing isn't always a straight one. But it does exist and it gets clearer the more you use it. And for some of you, this didn't start in a relationship. It might have started much earlier than that. And if you grew up in an environment where there was nowhere safe to land your feelings, no one to tell, no action available that would change anything, no language even for what you were experiencing. So you learned to suppress the signal, not because there was anything broken about you, but because suppressing suppressing it was the only available response. And you adapted intelligently to an environment that gave you no other option. The problem is that adaptation outlived the environment it was built for. The signal kept arriving, and the habit of suppressing it kept running long after the original reason for it had gone. And for some of you, the signal was accurate, and the people around you said that it wasn't. You knew something was wrong about a person or a situation, and you said something, and you were told that you're imagining things, that you were being too sensitive, that you were wrong, and possibly making trouble. And then eventually, too late, the people who dismissed you came round and said that you were right. That experience of having an accurate perception denied by the people you trusted can be damaging. Things that can happen to the relationship between a person and their own knowing. Because now it's not just self-doubt, it's been confirmed from the outside. The signal was real and the world said that it wasn't. So the next time the signal arrives, you're not just fighting your own override, you're fighting everyone else's certainty that you were wrong or that you are wrong. And for some of you, access to body signals was interrupted in a different way, possibly through disassociation, through experiences that were so overwhelming that the nervous system protected you from fully receiving them. And you can't hear what you were neurologically protected from receiving. And that's that's a longer journey back, a more patient one. And it's still completely valid. And it doesn't mean that the signal isn't there, it just means rebuilding access to it takes time and the right support. And for many of you, across all of those experiences, something else was happening simultaneously, and there was an extraordinary amount of noise. We live in a world that has never been louder about what love should look like, about what you should want from a relationship, and what your perfect partner looks like, how to visualize them into existence, how to believe you deserve them before you've even met them. There's affirmations, vision boards, manifestations. Visualise your ideal partner, believe first, feel it as if it's already true. And I want to be careful here because I'm not dismissing any of that entirely. For some people, some of these things are genuinely useful. But for a significant number of people, and I would argue for, you know, most people listening to this podcast, they don't work. And it's not because you're not trying hard enough, or not because you don't deserve love, but because they were built on a particular type of brain and a particular type of nervous system. And they quietly excluded everybody else without even saying so. Think about it this way: there have been entire programs and books built on the idea that you can think yourself to a different outcome. And for some people, those approaches genuinely helped. And for a significant number of people, they didn't even, you know, it didn't even touch them. Um myself included, uh not because they lacked willpower or self-belief, because the tool didn't fit the brain. And the same is true of most dating and relationship advice. Visualize your ideal partner, feel the certainty that they exist, build the belief that you deserve love. And for somebody who has spent their entire life or most of their life being told that they're too much, not enough, too intense, too sensitive, or too difficult. That instruction doesn't land as motivation. It lands as evidence of the gap. Because you can't visualize something you don't believe you're allowed to have. And you can't install a belief from the outside when everything on the inside has been quietly building a case against it for years. So the affirmation doesn't fill the gap, it highlights it. And now, with online access, with content optimized specifically to produce the strongest possible emotional response, delivered directly to the device in your hand in or at any hour of the day, the noise is louder than it ever has been before. And we are even being told what to feel, what to want, what the signs mean, what our attachment style is, what silence means, what hesitation means. We're strangers who have never been in our room, who don't know our history, who don't know our nervous system, who don't know what we've already been through. And the feelings that content produces are strong, sometimes stronger than our own quiet signal. And we've been taught by the same noise to trust the strong feeling, to follow the intensity. Strong was never the same as true. And I want to try something with you now. I want to give you enough context first so that whatever you experience actually means something useful to you. Because most of us have never stopped to examine what actually happens when we're told to visualize. Now we've just assumed we're doing it the same way as everybody else's. I mean, I did for a long time, and it turns out that I was wrong about that. And that realization changed a lot of things for me. And there's a scale that's used in research called the VVIQ. Um, the vividness of visual imagery questionnaire. I'll put a link in the show notes. So it measures mental imagery on a spectrum from five to one. Five being perfectly clear and vivid, like actually seeing something in front of you as if the object is physically present. Four, clear and reasonably vivid. Three, it's moderately clear, present, but not sharp. Two on the scale is vague and dim, more of an impression than an image. And one, no image at all. You only know your thinking of the object. Nothing visual is there whatsoever. And alongside clarity, there's location, which matters just as much. Now, some researchers are some people are what researchers called projectors. They see the image in front of them. Um, basically, if you close your eyes, you can visualize it, you can see it right there. And it's it's there like it is on a screen. Now, for some people, uh they're associators, the image exists somewhere independent of their physical vision, inside the head, in the center, towards the back, off to the side, outside the head entirely, somewhere that isn't forward-facing. And some for some people, this is where, and this is where I want to be really precise, don't generate an image at all. What they do instead is recall something that they have actually seen before. They think it rather than see it, and the information is there, the knowledge of what the object looks like, feels like, is associated with all of that is present and accessible. But there's no picture being created or viewed internally, and that's what I do. I think the image, I don't see it, I can only think of something I have actually encountered in reality, and I can't construct something new. And for years I assumed that I was visualizing because thinking it worked, it got me the right answer, and it produced the right associations. It just wasn't a picture, and nobody ever told me that those things were different things. So when the dating coach said, visualize your ideal partner, I thought one. Um, I assessed what I knew, I recalled the qualities and characteristics, but I never saw anybody. And the emotional charge that it was supposed to come, that was supposed to come from that visualization, that uh that the felt certainty that this person exists and is coming, just never arrived because the mechanism it relied on wasn't available to me. And I assumed for a long time that was a personal failing, that you know it wasn't. It was a mismatch between the instruction and the brain. So I want you to try this with that in mind, not looking for what you think should happen, but looking for what actually happens. And think of it as a warm drink, whatever you reach for, you know, when you need to feel okay. It could be tea, coffee, hot chocolate, whatever, whatever is yours. And you close your eyes, and um, you know, if that's natural for you anyway, eyes open if that works better. I actually access things better with my eyes open than closed. And that's completely valid and more common than you might think. But for this to really work, you need to start with your eyes closed. Now, notice what happens, honestly. You may need to repeat it or pause the podcast for a moment, but do you see something in front of your eyes? And if so, where is it? Is it in front of you? Is it actually overlaid in your vision, inside your head somewhere? Is it towards the back, off to the side, outside of your head? Do you see blackness? Or do you think it rather than see it? You know what it looks like. You can access the information about it, but there's no picture there. Or it's certainly not clear as a picture. It's just the concept, just the word, just the knowing what that what you're thinking of. How clear is whatever you're experiencing? Vivid and detailed, vague and impressionistic? Does it stay when you hold your attention on it? Or does it start to fade almost immediately? And the last question matters particularly if you have ADHD. Because for many people with ADHD, out of sight genuinely means out of mind, not as a figure of speech, but as a functional reality. And I'll give you an example from my own life. I have fruit in my house. I haven't eaten any for a while. Not because I don't want it, but because I put it somewhere that I can't see. And when it's out of my visual field, it stops generating any internal signal that it exists at all. And I only remembered it recently because I dropped my dinner on the floor and ended up eating cheese on toast, and thought I actually need something healthy. And this was an indirect route back to information that was there the whole time, just invisible because it wasn't in front of me. That's object permanence, by the way, or more precisely, the lack of it. And for a brain that works this way, the instruction to hold a vivid mental image of a future relationship, a future partner, a future version of yourself isn't just difficult. It's often functional, you know, functionally impossible. The image fades almost immediately, and not because you're not trying, because the brain doesn't sustain internal imagery without external um anchoring. Now, whatever you've experienced in that exercise, I want you to notice one more thing. Did anything happen in your body, even if there was no clear image, even if you were thinking rather than seeing, even if it faded almost immediately. A warmth somewhere, a sense of comfort, a weight in the hands that isn't actually there. Something that responded to the thought of it even without a picture. That response, however subtle, however quiet, is your body accessing something it already knows? Without a perfect image, without a belief installed from the outside, without an affirmation or a vision board or an instruction to feel it as if it's already true. It was already there. And that matters enormously. Because that's the same system that holds your gut feeling, your intuition, the quiet knowing that arrives before your conscious mind has formed the doubt, the thought, the thought. The reason the affirmations didn't work, the reason the visualization felt hollow, the reason you could do all the right exercises and still feel nothing shift, might not be because you're broken or undeserving or incapable of belief. It might just be because you were asked, you were being asked, you have to access something through something real through a door that just doesn't exist for you. You might be an associator being whole told to project. You might be a thinker being told to see. And you might be somebody whose imagery fades the moment attention shifts, being told to hold a vivid vision of a future relationship. And none of those are failures. They're mismatches between the tool and the brain. And there are other doors. There always were. And your body just demonstrated one of them. Whatever you experienced in that exercise, that is your starting point. Not somebody else's version of it. It's yours. And it's enough. And it's more than enough. And it's exactly what we work with. So if the signal is real and the body is telling the truth, and the door exists, even when the picture doesn't, why do we keep not listening? And the simple answer is this the connection feels stronger than the signal. That's the mechanism. Simple. Human. And it makes complete sense. You meet someone, the connection is real, the warmth is genuine, the positive signals are consistent. And underneath, quietly, subtly, your body is picking up on something else. Something that doesn't feel quite right. Something that contradicts the warmth on the surface. And you don't listen to it. And it's not because you're being foolish, but because the feeling of that connection, the relief of it, the rightness of it, the finally of it is stronger than the quiet thing underneath. And the online noise just adds to it, confirming that what you feel is real, that the connection matters, and that you should trust the feeling. But here's what I'd like to name a little bit more precisely because there's a version of the override that's more sophisticated than simply ignoring the signal. And I think, you know, quite possibly a few of you might recognize this. It's asking how could be wrong about what you're feeling, rather than asking what you're actually feeling and what it is telling you. And they sound very similar. They are, however, completely different. So one moves towards the signal, and that's the what am I feeling? Where is it? And the other moves away from it. How could this be wrong? What is the alternative explanation? Am I bringing my history into this? Am I being fair? And those feel like responsible questions, mature questions, kind of questions a self-aware person would ask. But when they're being used in service of not hearing something you don't want to hear, they're not inquiry, they're defense. And I know this because I am an absolute expert at it. I will go to great lengths to prove myself wrong because in the moment it just feels better. Because I know that if I listen to the correct message, then I need to act. And that acting means loss. And in that moment, the loss feels like an awful pain that I really do not want to go through. So the brain, a capable, pattern-reading, case-building brain, goes to work. Not on what the signal is saying, but on how the signal could be wrong. And it's incredibly convincing because it's thorough. Because it finds the reasonable doubt, because it produces something that looks like self-awareness and feels like fairness, and the signal gets quieter, not because it was wrong, but because it was actually very good at being ignored. So let me give you a real life example. I was getting all of the right signals to my face, my text. Consistency was there, the warmth was there. Everything that should have said, this is fine, was present. But I could tell that something wasn't quite right. Not from what was being said, from what wasn't being said, from body language, from a pattern change that I noticed and then set aside from the gap between what was being presented and what I was picking up from underneath. And the signal was there, clear enough. And I overrode it because the feeling of wanting that connection was far stronger than what my body was telling me. And I didn't want to believe what I was hearing. So I asked myself how I could be wrong. And I found the answers I was looking for and I stayed. And it wasn't because there was something broken inside of me, but because the connection felt worth more than the cost of listening. And that was the override in real life from the inside. And there's one more layer to this that I want to name because it's particularly relevant for those of you with a neurodivergent brain or or a trauma history. You are often extraordinarily good at reading people, at noticing patterns, at picking up on the gap between what somebody presents and what's actually there. That capacity didn't come from nowhere. And for many of you, it developed because you needed it. Because reading the room accurately was part of how you stayed safe. And sometimes the very people around you, the ones who told you that you were wrong, too sensitive, making trouble, were the same people whose patterns you were accurately reading. So you have this really precise and reliable instrument and a lifetime of being told that it's broken, which means when it tells you something you don't want to hear, you already have a well-practised framework for doubting it. And that's not a character flaw. That's simply history doing what history does. And I stayed in a relationship for 10 years, ignoring those internal feelings. Ten years. And the reason wasn't stupidity or weakness or not knowing better. It was because I thought it was love. Because I thought connection was something you put up with difficulty to keep access to. Because the alternative, being without it, felt worse than what staying was costing me. And I know different now, but knowing different now doesn't mean I judge the version of me that stayed. Because that version built with what was available at the time made the best decisions possible with the information and the self-belief that existed at that point. And that's the most important thing that I want to say before we finish today. Self-blame has no residence here. It serves nobody. The override made sense at the time. It always makes sense at the time. Because acting on the signal, really acting on it, following it through to its logical conclusion, requires something that wasn't yet fully available. Self-belief that the loss was survivable, the the evidence that trust in the signal was worth the cost of acting on it. The accumulated proof that your body tells the truth and you can afford to listen. That's not something that you had yet. It's something that you build through exactly this kind of work. Through the willingness to examine what you actually experience, honestly, without the version you think you should be having, and start from there. And it gets easier. The signals I missed for years, I now spot much, much earlier. Not always immediately, but I definitely spot them earlier. And that earlier, that reduction in the gap between the signal arriving and me actually hearing it is everything. Because earlier means less cost, less time, less of yourself given to somebody that was never going to be right for you. And that is the work. Not punishing yourself for the times that you didn't listen, learning to hear it sooner. That's it. That's the whole lesson. Keep learning, that's all. So here's what I want to leave. Here's where I want to leave you today. You already know something right now about your situation, about the person that you're with or the pattern that you keep finding yourself in, about the quiet things that's that's been there underneath everything else. Your body has been telling you the truth. It always has been. And the reason it's been so hard to hear, the childhood that gave you nowhere to land it, the people who told you that it was wrong, the noise that got louder than it's ever been, and the connection that felt stronger than the signal. The brain that went to work proving that you were wrong. None of that is a flaw of character. None of it is evidence that you're broken or too much or incapable of love. But it is evidence that you are human with a specific history, a specific nervous system, a specific brain that works in ways the standard tools were never designed for. From the outside, that your inside has been rejected. Rejecting for good reason. What's missing isn't more information. You already have more than enough information. What's missing is the structure to get quiet enough to hear what you already know. And support, to trust it enough to act on it. And to get the tools to act on it too. And that's what I do. Not by telling you what your signal means, not by pointing you toward a predetermined answer. But by walking alongside you through exactly the process that we've been talking about today. Until the quiet thing becomes audible. Until the belief uh the belief is built from your own evidence. And until you trust yourself more than you trust the noise. And if that's what you're looking for, everything you need to take. The next step is in the show notes. And I want to thank you for being here today. Thank you for listening, not just to this episode, but to yourself. Even a little, even today. And that more matters more than you know. And as always, until next spiral.