Read. Forgotten. Devastated. (You've Been Both.)

What happens when you read a message, mean to reply… and then completely forget?

And what happens when someone does the same thing to you?

In this episode of Dating on High Alert, we’re talking about unread messages, forgotten plans, RSD spirals, ADHD, autism, AuDHD, avoidance, and the painful gap between intention and impact.

Because sometimes one person is distracted - and the other person feels abandoned.

This episode is for anyone who has ever forgotten to reply, gone quiet from overwhelm, spiralled when someone didn’t text back, or lost people to misunderstandings that were never about a lack of care.

We’ll talk about why the people we care about most can become the easiest ones to accidentally let down, how shame makes repair harder, and why small, honest messages can stop silence becoming a story.

Understanding changes everything.

If this episode landed, don’t just sit with it and spiral.

Come and work with me.

Head to iljaabbattista.co.uk and visit the Work With Me page to explore Inner First, JFAI, voice note support, coaching, and the support that fits where you are right now.

If this episode helped you feel seen, please support the podcast by leaving a review, sharing it with someone who needs it, or sending me a message with what landed.

Every share helps this reach someone who thought they were the only one.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

The phone lights up. You see the message. You read it? You think, yeah, you know, I'll reply to that in a minute. Uh, and they hear that. And it has absolutely nothing to do with not caring or because that person doesn't matter to you. It could just be that your brain was already mid-task, mid-thought, mid-something or other, and the message landed in the gap between your intention and your capacity. By the time that gap closed, the message was just away from your awareness. Now flip that story. Somebody reads your message. You can see that they've read it and then they don't reply. How does that feel? Different? Completely, sometimes even correctly different. And it's the same behaviour. Two different, two completely different internal experiences. And it doesn't stop at messages because this isn't really about messages at all. This is about what happens when the people we care about most. Become somehow the easiest ones to let down. Sorry about that. We were never meant to lose in the first place. Hi. Welcome to dating and highlights. This is about a cost of dating relationships and life in general when you live with ADHD, it is all live together. And maybe have a job history. Maybe you love somebody who does and what. I'm not a therapist. I just have lived experience and a real interest in how our brains work. And one thing before we go any further. This is the friends, the partners, the family, the ones that we really do care about. And this isn't about the workmail that you didn't reply to or the acquaintance that you forgot to text back. This is about the people whose silence lands differently, the ones whose unanswered messages you really notice. Because this dynamic only exists where there's something at stake. So let's actually name what's happening first. So for neurodivergent people, whether that's ADHD, autism, or DHD, or anything else, messages and plans don't always land at the moment where we can actually process them. ADHD means our attention is task-locked. When we're in it, we are truly in it. A message gets read before the notification pulled us, but it didn't really register because our brain is still upstream in whatever it was doing before. Now with autism, that means transitions cost something. Moving from one mental context to another requires a shift that feels small to somebody else and is genuinely significant to us. Now with Audi HD, which is my experience, means that you get both. So the message gets read and then it gets lost, and it's it's not deliberate or careless. Just lost in the architecture of a brain that was never built to multitask in the in the world the way in the way the world expects. But it's not just about the messages, it's it's plans to. Maybe you were so deep into something else that the plan just yeah, evaporated. And yeah, you could quite possibly have been really looking forward to it. But you know, your brain doesn't experience time the way the world expects it to. And what I've noticed about myself, that you know may resonate with with a lot of you too, the more I care about somebody, the more likely I am to be late. Because if we have a really solid relationship, if I know there'll be no consequence, the urgency doesn't register in in the same way. The meeting isn't sitting in my nervous system as a threat. It's something lovely I'm looking forward to, um, which means I lose track of time, which means I'm late for the person that I most wanted to see. And it's certainly not out of disrespect, but it's just how this wiring works. And then there's the question if you're the one that's left waiting, how how long do you give it? Now, when I was a lot younger, before mobile phones came around, I could potentially be waiting for somebody for maybe up to an hour, just standing there, no way to contact them, you know, just hoping, thinking of all the reasons why they might be late. And I wasn't able to leave because this is what had been planned. So I need to wait. I need to have that clarity to move on. However, now, I give it 15 minutes, maybe, because experience does teach your nervous system that waiting indefinitely is a form of self-abandonment. Now, somewhere between the person who waited an hour at 19 and the person who texts after 15 minutes now, trust quietly changed. Just collaborated, or calibrated, sorry, I should say. And when that calibration happens enough times, something shifts that's you know quite hard to shift back. And when you're the one who didn't reply, didn't show, lost track of time, you probably don't think about it much in the moment. The intention felt real, you weren't making any kind of statement, and then you forgot, or you just got the time wrong. Or it could have been that you were just overwhelmed by the time that you realize how late that you were, that you did something that probably made everything worse. It didn't go at all. And now we have the added element of shame, and what that does. It tells you that being an hour late is so unforgivable that there's absolutely no point in showing up now. So you might as well just stay at home. And now instead of somebody waiting 20 minutes or you know, for you, they waited the whole afternoon. And that shame spiral doesn't protect you from the consequence, it's just multiplies it. So when you're the one that's waiting, the unanswered message doesn't sit quietly, it starts to play its own story in your head. They saw it and chose not to reply. Ouch. I'm not a priority. Maybe I was too much, maybe I'm always too much. And standing somewhere waiting for somebody who doesn't come, that's even louder. Because now your body is physically in a space, it's exposed, visibly waiting, while uh the story in your head is just building. What do I do? Did I upset them? Did I miss something? Have I got the date wrong? And rejection sensitivity dysphoria isn't mildly an inconvenience, it's a nervous system event. And it's being triggered by something the other person didn't even register as a decision. And this took me a long time to really feel, um not just understand, but feel that the person who didn't reply was not in a state of rejection when they read your message, they were in a state of distraction. Those two things feel identical from the outside and nothing alike from the inside. That gap between how something feels to send and how it feels to receive is where so many relationships can quietly fracture. And most of us are on both sides of this, and we we we just simply forget to reply. And and we spiral when we don't get a reply. We run late and we feel quietly wounded when somebody is late for us. We cancel plans because we hit a wall. And we understand that completely. And we feel the sting of a cancelled plan from somebody else as you know something personal, and it does sound quite hypocritical, doesn't it? But you know, this is what happens when you can only feel what's happening um inside of you. Your own reasons are always present to you, your own context is always available, but you don't have access to anyone else's internal experience. You you only have the behavior, and the behavior without context almost always gets interpreted through the lens of how you would feel if if you did that thing deliberately. And I don't really think that I mean this isn't a character flaw. It's simply a feature of being human amplified significantly when you're neurodivergent and your nervous system is already primed for threat. And we have always been blamed for this. We have spent years being told that we're difficult, unreliable, selfish even, because we are not like other people. So the threat detection is already high. Every unanswered message lands on top of every other one, going back further, and then you can consciously track. And of course, there's always another layer to this, especially for those of you who are dating or have dated somebody that's neurodivergent. Or if you are neurodivergent and you've been told you came on strong at the start and then just seemed to disappear. In the early stages of dating, something quite specific happens for a lot of us. Uh the novelty is high. The person is new and exciting, and for an ADHD or an Audi HD brain, this is rocket fuel. We we can totally hyperfocus. We are responsive, attentive, present in a way that can feel intense and wonderful to the other person, and most likely very genuine. Probably completely genuine. It's just not sustainable at that frequency forever. And then, yeah, the hyperfocus settles, the relationship moves into something more comfortable, more familiar, possibly even safer, and the communication pattern changes. The replies get a little slower, the plans take a little bit more effort to arrange, and the other person who experienced that early intensity as the real you starts to wonder what actually happened. Did they do something wrong? Um, did they lose interest? Are you pulling away? And from the outside, it it can it can really look like you're losing interest. Um from the inside, it's probably just feeling like it's Tuesday. And this is one of the most common and most painful mismatches in neurodivergent dating. And if nobody names it, if neither person understands what's actually happening, it can end something real before it even had a chance to become what it could have been. Now, I'm not saying that every person who goes quiet after an intense start is neurodivergent and just needs understanding. And we've talked about avoidant attachment on this uh podcast before, and I want to bring it back briefly because it is quite relevant here. Avoidant behavior and neurodivergent communication patterns can look identical from the outside, and people can also present both at the same time. The withdrawal, the inconsistency, the warmth when you're together, and the silence when you're apart. And the difference is in the pattern over the time, the consistency of behaviour across all relationships and crucially what happens when you name it. Somebody whose pattern is driven by wiring will generally respond to understanding with relief. Somebody whose pattern is driven by avoidance will possibly respond with more distance. It's not always clear, and I'm not going to pretend that it is, but your body usually knows before your head does. And learning to listen to that rather than override it with hope is some of the most important work any of us can do. Friendships can end this way. Not with an argument, but with a drift, a message that didn't get replied to, and then the next one felt just that little bit too awkward to send, and then the silence just got too long, and the friendship was just, well, over. And neither person really knows what actually happened. And I've lost friendships that way. I've been the one who stopped reaching out because I assumed that the silence meant that they just weren't bothered. And I have probably been the one who didn't respond. You know, I might have been distracted, meaning to come back to it, while somebody else quietly quietly concluded that I just didn't care. And both of those things do break my heart. Um, even now. And in relationships, romantic ones, the cost is higher still. The partner who stopped believing that you were present, not because you weren't, but because the evidence kept pointing that way. And if nobody gives them, you know, if nobody ever gives any concept, uh context, the relationships can pay the price. And the people on the receiving end aren't wrong to feel what they feel. Their pain is real. Their interpretation makes absolute sense given what they've just experienced. They just don't have the context. And if nobody ever gives them that context, there you go. The relationship pays the price. And I've been in both of those places many times. I've watched a message sit on red, built a whole story about what it meant. And until that reply came and the story collapsed, because actually it meant nothing. It just meant that they were busy. And I've been the person who forgot, who let the shame keep me from going where I needed to go and stay at home when I should have just shown up, even if it was late, and just came out with it. And I've lost people, you know, quietly without fully understanding why, until I started doing the work of actually looking at my own patterns. What shifted things wasn't a strategy, it was just learning to go inside first, to ask before the story gets too loud. What am I actually feeling right now? Is this a response to what actually happened, or is it the story that I'm telling myself about? And what might be happening for them? You know, what do I actually know versus what I'm what I'm actually assuming? And the distinction sounds quite simple, but you know, it's not that simple, but it does change everything. And I also want to say something about the information that's also out there, because I think that really matters too, and I think you deserve honesty about it. The research on neurodivergent relationships is quite thin. Most of us, most of what exists is built on neurotypical attachment models, neurotypical communication expectations, um, neurotypical nervous systems. So when you try to apply those frameworks that we just mentioned to, you know, an Audi HD brain, for example, especially ones that carry complex trauma, they won't necessarily fit. And some of them are actively unhelpful, and some of them will make you feel more broken than you were before you even read them. Now, I'm not a researcher and I'm not a therapist, but what I am is somebody who has read widely, felt deeply, and yeah, I question everything, including the things that were supposed to help me. And what I found is that most, the most reliable guide that I have is my own internal experience. One once I learnt how to listen to it properly, of course. Now that's not me telling you to ignore any professional support. Please don't. Um, but it is me saying, question what you eat, including what I say. Take what fits and leave what doesn't, and keep going back to what your own body is telling you, because you already have more answers than you give yourself credit for. And this is what I mean when I talk about inner first. Not inner work in the abstract sense, but inner first as in the inside comes before the outside. What's happening in your body and your nervous system is the starting point for everything that follows. The first place you look, not the last. So when the message sits on red and the feeling starts to rise, go inward before you go outward. What is this feeling? Where exactly is it in my body? What what story is it telling me? And what and is that story about this moment or something older? Because RSD doesn't always respond to the present. It responds to a pattern. And the pattern usually started way before this person, this message, or even this moment. And for the side where you're the one who forgot, who was late, or who just didn't show, inner first works there too. As genuine curiosity. What was happening for you when that message arrived? What does your pattern look like? And can you understand it well enough to work with it? Nothing is broken because you know how you work. The shame spiral that keeps you home when you're late. That's your nervous system choosing the pain over of choosing the pain of avoidance over the discomfort of honesty. And the avoidance always costs more. Understanding your own internal experience is not self-indulgence, it's the foundation of every relationship you will ever have. So, what do you actually do with this? Now, here are three small things. Just three starting points. One, next time you read a message and you can't reply, just notice that. Name it. Um I've read this and I'm going to lose it. And then just reply with something that holds that space. It doesn't have to be the full reply. Just maybe something like saw this, we'll come back to you properly later. That tells the other person that you're not invisible. I'm just not here yet. And it's it's okay, you know, to also ask to be reminded. That's what I do. I just say, oh, please remind me that I need to message you back. Two, if you're running late or shame is spiraling and you're tempted not to show up at all, send the message before the shame wins. I'm running late, I'm so sorry, I'm I'm on my way. No performance of remorse, just the truth in time for it to actually help. And three, if somebody hasn't replied and the story is starting to build, try this before you let it run. Something warm, not accuracy, not as an accusation. Hey, did you forget about me? With humor, with affection, with the the signal that you get, you know, that you just get it and you're not making it heavy. That message keeps a friendship alive without loading it with weights that it just doesn't need to carry. Now these are not fixes, they are just starting points. And the starting points are the next steps to making it work. And some of you, the work right now is inner first, going inside, understanding your patterns, interrupting the story before it runs. And that's where we start. For others, the ones who are ready to stop waiting to feel ready before they act, that's where Jeffy comes in, which is just friggin' action it. Because sometimes the understanding comes from the doing, not before it. Now both are valid, both are available. Where you start depends on where you are right now. And if you're not sure which one is yours, that's exactly the what the work with me page is for. So head over to illiabattista.co.uk and let's figure this out together. And the link is also in the show notes. And here's what Changes when you do do this work. It's it's not immediately and it's not perfectly, but gradually over time enough, you know, to make it a habit. And you stop losing relationships to misunderstandings that were never about what you thought they were about. You stop accumulating evidence for the story that you're too much, not enough, that people always leave because you catch that story before it even says. And you start extending to other people the same generosity that you'd want extended to you. The assumption that their behavior has an internal context that you can't see. Friendships that would have quietly drifted don't, because now there's language for it. Light touch, check-in instead of a loaded silence, an honest message sent before the shame takes over. And the RSD spirals don't disappear, they just get shorter. Um, because you have you have a question to interrupt them. Do I actually know what's happening for them? Or am I filling in a silence with my own story? What are the actual facts that is genuinely the difference between relationships that survive and ones that slowly quietly don't? And understanding changes everything, not as a concept or as something you just read and nod at, but as something that you practice in the moment and when the feeling is loudest and the story is most convincing. And that's the way. And it starts on the inside. And if you recognize yourself in any of this on either side, um, or both, you're you are already paying attention. And paying attention is where everything starts. And if you're ready to go deeper to actually understand your own worry, stop losing people to patterns that you didn't choose and start showing up in your relationships in a way that finally feels manageable. Just come and work with me. My work with me page has absolutely everything that you need to know about how we can work together, whether that's through Inner First, GFI, or both, or the mix. Um, and it's not about fixing you, it's about understanding yourself well enough that the people that you care about stop paying the price for something neither of you fully understood. Go to illiotapatisco.uk. The link is in the show notes, don't sit on it. If this episode had landed, that's your signal. And if this episode resonated, please support the show. Leave a review, send me your feedback, or share this with somebody who would love to hear themselves in it. Every review helps more people find content made for them. And one more thing. Because there's a question I haven't answered yet, and I think you may have been sitting with it. Everything that we've talked about today assumes that the person on the other side cares about you. Their silence is about their wiring, not their feelings for you. What about when you can't tell? What about when it's warm and easy in the room, and then you step back into your own lives and that ambiguity floods in? And what about when you can't work out whether this is ADHD autism or DHD or avoidance or even you know, both? What about when safe feels boring and the person who keeps keeps you guessing feels like the one you just can't stop thinking about? And if any part of you just felt a flicker of recognition, that's exactly why you need to come back. Okay. Next week it's all about oversharing. When is it too much? When is it too early? And how can you possibly tell? And as always, I'm really glad that you're here, and until next spiral.