What Your Body Has Been Trying To Tell You

EPISODE OVERVIEW

This episode goes into interoception — the body's ability to perceive
its own internal states — and why it matters more than almost anything
else in this work. Research consistently shows that people socialized
as women receive stronger interoceptive signals than people socialized
as men, while also being more likely to distrust what they're feeling.
That gap between signal strength and signal trust is not a personal
failure. It is the predictable result of a culture that has spent
centuries teaching women to override their own knowing.

IN THIS EPISODE

•  What interoception actually is — and why it is the foundational mechanism by which you access your own emotional life
• The research on why people socialized as women receive stronger
    body signals and have a harder time trusting them
• The systematic, cultural process by which women are taught to
    dismiss their own interoceptive knowing — in medicine, in
    relationships, and internally
• What it actually looks like to start staying in the conversation
    with your body's signals — in specific, ordinary moments
  
  

FREE RESOURCE — THE INTEROCEPTION INVENTORY

Ten prompts over ten days to begin opening the channel between
you and your body's signals. Not a diagnostic tool. Not a course.
Just ten things to notice — one per day — structured to start the
conversation.

→ untamedsovereigntycoaching.com/free-resource


READY TO GO DEEPER?

The Reclamation Primer is the best two hours you can spend if you
want to actually experience all three modalities — somatic practice,
EFT tapping, and an inner world journey — before you decide whether
any of this is for you. Not an explanation. An experience.

→ untamedsovereigntycoaching.com/the-reclamation-primer

RESEARCH & REFERENCES

The following studies were referenced or inform the content of this
episode. 

• INTEROCEPTION — SEX AND GENDER DIFFERENCES:
  • Klabunde, M., Kaye, W.H., et al. (2017). Interoception and gender:
    What aspects should we pay attention to? Consciousness and Cognition,
    48, 42–52.
    — The primary study cited for higher interoceptive awareness in
    females (noticing bodily sensations more often, better understanding
    the relationship between bodily sensations and emotional states) and
    lower interoceptive accuracy (less efficient in consciously detecting
    heartbeats).
    → pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27866005
  • Ainley, V., et al. (2021). Sex differences in interoceptive accuracy:
    A meta-analysis. International Journal of Psychophysiology.
    — Meta-analysis examining sex differences across multiple
    interoceptive tasks, including heartbeat detection and gastric
    awareness. Finds that males tend to report greater confidence in
    interoceptive perception.
    → researchgate.net/publication/356412051
  • Mazgaj, R., et al. (2020). Sex-specific relationships between
    interoceptive accuracy and emotion regulation. PLOS ONE.
    — Examines the relationship between interoception and emotion
    regulation, finding sex-specific differences in how interoceptive
    accuracy relates to emotional processing in males versus females.
    → ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7324473
• MEDICAL DISMISSAL OF WOMEN'S SYMPTOMS:
  • Lichtman, J.H., et al. (2018). Symptom recognition and healthcare
    experiences of young women with acute myocardial infarction.
    Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes (Yale School of
    Public Health / American Heart Association).
    — Young women are more likely to have cardiac symptoms dismissed by
    providers as non-cardiac. Published in Circulation, a journal of
    the American Heart Association.
    → news.yale.edu/2018/02/19/heart-attack-symptoms-often-misinterpreted-younger-women
  • Safdar, B., et al. (referenced in multiple emergency medicine studies).
    Women presenting to emergency departments with chest pain wait
    approximately 29% longer than men to be evaluated for possible
    cardiac events. Women under 55 are up to seven times more likely
    than men to be sent home from the ER without proper cardiac testing.
    — Referenced in the Journal of the American Heart Association and
    cited across multiple emergency medicine research reviews.
  • Academic Emergency Medicine (referenced study). Women presenting to
    emergency departments with severe abdominal pain wait up to 33%
    longer than men presenting with the same symptoms.
    → northwell.edu/katz-institute-for-womens-health/articles/gaslighting-in-womens-health
  • NIH Policy on Sex as a Biological Variable (2016).
    It was not until 2016 that the National Institutes of Health required
    sex to be considered as a biological variable in most studies it
    funded — meaning the majority of prior clinical research, including
    pain research, was conducted primarily on male subjects.
    → orwh.od.nih.gov/sex-gender/nih-policy-sex-biological-variable

NOTE ON THE RESEARCH

The science of interoception and sex differences is active and
evolving. Some studies find clear differences in interoceptive
sensitivity between people socialized as women and men; others
find that differences in reporting confidence (women consistently
underestimating their own accuracy) account for some of the gap.
What remains consistent across the literature is this: people
socialized as women notice more, trust it less, and have been
given strong cultural reasons for that distrust. That is the gap
this work is designed to close.

CONNECT

Instagram: @untamed.sovereignty
Website: untamedsovereigntycoaching.com

If this episode resonated — share it with the person in your life
who has been doing everything right and still lying awake at 2am
reconstructing conversations. She needs to hear that the gap
between understanding and change is not her fault.

◆ UNTAMED SOVEREIGNTY COACHING
  Found in the Fire — Season 1, Episode 02
  untamedsovereigntycoaching.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

There was a moment when something in my body said no. This was not a no that I arrived at after thoughtful consideration. There was no deliberation or self-knowledge that led me here. This was a no that came from my chest, from my stomach, from my throat, from my whole body. My body was saying no before my mind had even registered that a decision had been made. My life was moving in a reasonable direction. From the outside I was making coherent, smart, rational, safe decisions, and my body finally said no, no more.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Quietly, clearly, and without drama.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

No crisis, just a very clear signal. And I talked myself right out of it. I was making the rational choice. I couldn't just stop. I had obligations, a direction, a version of my life I was already committed to. This signal is just fear. I have to be rational. I have to be the person who doesn't fall apart over a feeling. I have to ignore the signal and keep being rational, keep being safe.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

My story is not unusual.

SPEAKER_00 1:47

It is in fact all too common. The reason we keep talking ourselves out of what our bodies already know is not because we're bad at listening to ourselves. It is because we were taught very carefully and very thoroughly to be bad at it. That is what this episode is about. My name is Erica. I'm a neuroscience-based life coach, a somatic healing practitioner, and a folklore scholar. Which is a strange combination until you understand that every culture in human history has had its own version of this work. And my entire adult life has been spent understanding why. In the first episode, I talked about the gap between understanding and change, between the brain that knows the pattern and the body that runs it anyway, between the layer where insight lands and the layer where patterns actually live. We talked about the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex and the reason that all your excellent self-knowledge doesn't slow the pattern down. Today I want to go deeper into your body's intelligence, what it is, what it has been trying to tell you, and what got in the way of you being able to hear it, and when you do hear it, what keeps you from actually listening to it? Research shows that most of the standard healing frameworks which were designed for and by men built around male bodies and male nervous systems don't fully account for something important. You are receiving more information from your body than the average person. Throughout this episode, I want to say people socialized as women. I am going to say people socialized as women. I mean something specific, and I want to name it clearly. I'm not just talking about biology or even gender identity. I'm talking about the cultural conditioning that comes with being perceived and socialized as a girl or woman in this world. Some of you listening might be cisgender women, some might be trans women, some might be non-binary or genderqueer, and have been socialized with these expectations. Some might have been raised with these conditioning messages, even if that's not how you identify now. And some of you listening might be men or non-binary folks who also experienced this kind of be small, be agreeable, tune into everyone else's needs, conditioning. If you were taught by family, by culture, by the systems you moved through, to tune out what your body was telling you, to make yourself smaller, to distrust the signal, I'm talking to you. Whatever the label is, this is yours. The research I'm going to share speaks primarily to people who were socialized as women, because that's what the studies measured. But the mechanism we're exploring is universal. We all have bodies. We all receive signals, and we've all been taught in different ways to distrust what we're feeling. Research shows that people socialized as women tend to receive stronger interoceptive signals, more information coming through from the body than people socialized as men. And you've probably spent a long time being told that this information is too much, inaccurate, a liability, evidence of oversensitivity rather than of a more precise instrument. Let me name that before we go any further, because what I'm about to say in the rest of this episode about the body and its signals is going to land very differently if you're holding it alongside the belief that your body's signals are not to be trusted. So I want to put that belief down before we proceed. We'll come back to it. That belief deserves a direct examination, and it's going to get one. But for the next 30 minutes, just set it aside. The word I want to introduce today is interoception. You've probably heard it, or a version of it, mostly in wellness spaces where it gets used loosely enough that the actual meaning gets lost. I want to be specific about what it actually means. Interoception is the body's ability to perceive its own internal states, not proprioception, which is your sense of where your body is in space, the ability to touch your finger to your nose with your eyes closed, not the five standard senses that face outward into the world. Interoception faces inward. It is the sensory system that receives information from inside the body, from your organs, your cardiovascular system, your digestive system, your respiratory system, your connective tissue. It is the system that tells you when you're hungry, when you're cold, when your heart is beating faster than usual, when something in your stomach is tightening in a way that has nothing to do with food and you know it has nothing to do with food, but you call it hunger because that at least has a solution. It is processed in a part of the brain called the anterior insula, a deeply interior region that sits at the intersection of sensation and emotion and self awareness. When the anterior insula is active, you are in conversation with your body's internal landscape. Most of us were taught to put that conversation on hold.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

This episode is about what it costs and what it opens when you pick it back up. Here is why this matters for you specifically.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

Your emotional experience, what we call feelings, is not primarily generated in the brain. It is primarily generated in the body, and then read by the brain. The feeling is in the chest, in the stomach, in the throat, the constriction that arrives before you found the words for it, the thing that tightens before your mind has caught up. The brain receives the physical signal, contextualizes it, gives it a name, assigns it meaning, but the signal itself is somatic. It originates in the body, which means interoception is the foundational mechanism by which you access your own emotional life, your own knowing, not a secondary skill, not a nice to have for the spiritually inclined, the thing everything else depends on. When interoception is clear, when the channel between the body's signals and the brain's awareness is open and relatively undistorted, you have something no amount of intellectual self knowledge can replace access to what you actually feel as opposed to what you think you should feel or what makes sense for you to feel or what you're performing feeling. Most people spend their entire adult lives in the gap between those two things and call it being reasonable. You can already feel why this matters for the work we're doing here. The pattern I talked about last week, the one that fires automatically before your conscious mind can intervene, that pattern is a body level event. It happens in the interoceptive landscape before it rises into cognition. And the gap between understanding the pattern and being able to interrupt it, that gap, the one that makes insight feel useless is an interoceptive gap. It is the distance between knowing what happens and being able to feel what is about to happen, which is the only point at which you can actually do something different. The research on this is specific, and the implications are worth sitting with carefully. Studies on interoception have consistently found that people socialized as women score higher than people socialized as men on measures of interoceptive sensitivity. Interoceptive sensitivity is the amplitude of the body's signals, how loudly the body speaks. Research using heartbeat detection tasks, gastric awareness tasks, and other somatic measurement methods reliably show that people socialized as women on average receive stronger interoceptive signals than people socialized as men. You have a louder instrument, more information coming through the channel. The same research shows something that stops most people cold. That same research shows that people socialized as women score lower on measures of interoceptive accuracy. Whether what you believe you're feeling matches what your body is actually doing. Whether you trust the signal you are receiving.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

More information coming through, less trust in what it's saying.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

This is the research level description of something you have lived your entire adult life inside. You are receiving more information than most of the frameworks you've been handed were designed to process. And you have been taught through a thousand small corrections and a handful of large ones that the information you are receiving is unreliable, that your body's signals are noise rather than signal, that the volume you're experiencing reflects a problem with your sensitivity rather than a problem with the world's tolerance for it. And so you learned to agree, and you have become very skilled at managing it, at translating the body's input into something quieter and more acceptable, at tuning down the volume, at functioning quite brilliantly at a fraction of your actual perceptual range.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Let me be specific about how this happens.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

You were told you were too sensitive, not once, but many times in many different registers. Some of it was direct, you're too emotional, you're overreacting, you're too much. Some of it was structural. The medical system that dismissed your symptoms as anxiety or hormones, that documented the same physical pain differently depending on the gender of the person reporting it, that sent people home from emergency rooms with diagnoses of panic attacks when they were having cardiac events. The system that when you said something was wrong handed you a diagnosis that meant we think this is you, not us. The research on this is consistent and damning. Some of it was relational, the environment in which your accurate read of a room, of a person, of a dynamic was repeatedly corrected, in which you learned that saying something feels off here was dangerous, in which the cost of naming what you were sensing was higher than the cost of staying quiet. And some of it was internal, the voice that developed over years of correction that says the signal is wrong, that your body's data cannot be trusted, that what you're feeling is disproportionate, irrational, too much, the voice that sounds by now exactly like your own. It is not accidental. None of this is the result of any individual failure on your part. It is systematic.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

It has been produced carefully and incrementally by a specific cultural inheritance.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

I have sat with people who can describe with absolute precision the exact physical sensation that preceded a catastrophic decision by a decade. The thing their body knew before their mind was willing to look at it. The signal that came through clearly and was overridden, not out of stupidity or weakness, but because overriding it was for a very long time the safest available option. The body keeps the record. It does not forget what the mind has been allowed to manage away, and the work of beginning to trust interoception again, to stay in the conversation with the body's signals rather than translating them into something more manageable is not simple. It asks you to accept something that took me a long time to fully believe. The instrument was accurate. The signal was real. What you felt was not evidence of a problem with your perception. It was evidence of a reality you were not at the time resourced to act on.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

That is a difficult thing to sit with. And it is also the beginning of everything.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

Working with interoception has nothing to do with meditating more or becoming more spiritual in the soft focus sense of the word, and it's not about trusting everything your body says without discernment. Your body can be activated by old patterns, the amygdala we talked about last week, the threat detection system that cannot distinguish between a lion and an unanswered text, that lives in the body too. Not every sensation is insight, not every discomfort is wisdom. What interoceptive work actually involves is learning to stay in the conversation, to notice the signal without immediately either acting on it or overriding it, to bring curiosity to what the body is communicating rather than immediately routing it through the management system.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

In ordinary moments, it looks like this.

SPEAKER_00 21:23

Your stomach tightens slightly when you agree to something. You notice it. Not performing noticing, actually pausing for two seconds to register. Something happened in my body when I said yes to that. You don't immediately analyze why or decide whether it's rational or manage it into something presentable.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

You just note it. Flag it. Leave it open not because you know what it means yet because you don't not yet but because you've decided it's worth finding out you are in a conversation and your jaw clamps. You notice my jaw clamped. Not why, not whether that's appropriate, just the fact of it. Someone says something that lands strangely.

SPEAKER_00 22:41

Not obviously wrong, not something you can articulate yet, but your body registered it before your mind did. Instead of telling yourself you're reading too much into it, you leave a small flag, something to return to, something to investigate. None of this is dramatic. None of it requires a retreat or a major life restructuring. It is the practice of staying in the conversation with your own interior, which is not something most of us were taught to do. It is a skill.

SPEAKER_01 23:27

It can be learned.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

And when it is, the instrument you were born with, the one that has been sending you information your entire life becomes exactly what it always was, the most reliable thing you have. That is not a metaphor. That is what I watch happen with people I work with. And it is available to you, not as a distant possibility, but as the next thing. The work is learning to hear what it has been saying. There's something in the show notes this week I want you to actually use. I'm calling it the interoception inventory. Ten prompts, one per day for ten days, designed to start the conversation with your body that this episode has been about. Not a diagnostic tool, not a course, just ten things to notice over ten days, structured to begin opening this channel. It's at Untamed Sovereignty Coaching dot com and I'll link it in the show notes. The reclamation primer is where this work begins in your body, not just your understanding. Two hours with me somatic practice EFT inner world journey, not an explanation of these modalities, an experience of them. Two hours that give you the felt sense of what this work actually is. So you arrive ready, not just curious. It's ninety seven dollars and it's at Untamed Sovereignty Coaching dot com. Next week I'm introducing something I call the performing person, the specific texture of being capable, competent, the person everyone calls when they need something handled, while quietly running out of fuel on the inside. If you know someone who lives there, share this episode with them. They're who I'm talking to. I'll talk to you soon.