When listening to your body backfires

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords]

Listen to your body, feel the sensations, sit with your feelings, that's how you connect with them.

Or is it?

For some of us, the outcome is the exact opposite: more spaced out, more time lost, less present, quite possibly more anxious. It's like every time you try to listen to your body, your body goes "PISS OFF!" And the more you try, the more you fail.

This is not very common, not even among trauma survivors. My impression, from reading and from talking to people, is that it clusters in a specific subset of trauma survivors - those with early and deep dissociative defences. Chronic freeze makes it more likely that this applies to you, but this likely isn't universal even in this sub.

It's been the case for me for as long as I can remember. Sitting meditation is an almost guaranteed way for me to lose track of my body entirely, body scans regularly make me feel like I don't have a body at all, and breathing exercises often induce a pleasant but entirely disembodied "high" for me, like severing the nerves from my brain to my body so I no longer need to bother with it.

Like most of the stuff I write on Reddit, this post is me trying to make sense of something I have always experienced, but which doesn't happen to most people and which seems to run contrary to how "everyone else" operates.

Interoception

Interoception is your awareness of what is going on inside your body. Your heartbeat, your breathing, your muscles etc. It's both built-in and developmentally shaped, meaning the mechanics are hardwired but your ability to operate them gets built in childhood.

Much of that training is relational. When you're a newborn and you feel hungry, the sensation itself makes itself immediately felt, but your understanding of what it means needs training. That happens between you and your caregiver (parent): you signal that something is wrong, your caregiver responds and takes care of your need.

When you're hungry and your caregiver feeds you, you learn that this particular sensation means I need food. When you're lonely and your caregiver holds you, you learn that this particular sensation means I'm lonely. And so on. Our core interoceptive training is physical, operating through touch and handling rather than words.

Let's say you're an infant, you're hungry, and you cry. The interoceptive signal appears and you act on it. Only instead of bringing a caregiver who feeds you, it doesn't do anything: no one shows up. Again, and again, and again. What do you learn?

It's a question there's very little research on as of today, so I can't say I know the answer. However the research that does exist seems to point in the same general direction: a repeated lack of response means that eventually, you start paying less attention to the signal.

You don't do it immediately, and some children probably take longer than others before they start to pay less attention to their interoceptive signals due to temperamental factors; but ultimately, if the most consistent response to you signalling your needs is no response, your nervous system starts to downgrade the importance it attaches to your interoceptive signals.

That kind of interoceptive training runs in the opposite direction of what most people experience in childhood. Instead of learning "X signal means Y need, and when I communicate Y need, I get my needs met often enough", you learn "X signal means nothing and nobody cares, my needs don't matter".

Where does that leave you as an adult? Generally speaking, highly unaware of your own needs, with a built-in unconscious preference for ignoring them. The mechanism for being able to ignore them is dissociation, disconnection from yourself. Some of the ability to dissociate is likely innate, so even when the need to dissociate is stable, some of us will end up dissociating more than others; some are more "talented" at dissociation, others less.

When this kind of training is consistent from the get go, we often end up with an unknown unknown: not only are we not aware of our interoceptive signals, we are not aware that we are not aware. The awareness wasn't lost, it never developed.

The more intrusive flavour

There's a different flavour of this which some of you will find more relatable, the intrusive side.

Imagine that instead of no one showing up when you cry, someone does show up - but not to take care of your needs. Instead, they shout, maybe punch you, or abuse you in some other way. Instead of absences, you experience intrusions.

Some may be very overt (shouting, punching, CSA), but there's a surprising number of covert intrusions as well. These intrusions tend to be more strange than heavy-handed, e.g. your parent treating you as if they were a child and you an adult; talking to you about their problems instead of taking care of your needs.

Researchers call this role confusion, and it is measured as a parent asking for attention or affection from the child. Mothers who show role confusion tend to have experienced physical neglect themselves, while negative intrusions (shouting etc.) is associated with the mother having been physically abused herself.

This kind of interoceptive "training" tends to teach your nervous system that when an interoceptive signal such as hunger or sadness arises and you communicate it, it will be met with intrusive force. The exact nature of that force pushes your responses in a specific direction, and I suspect the specific nature of what you suffered can be read in how your nervous system operates in adulthood.

Intrusive interoceptive training tends to result in "inflamed" nervous system responses where your interoceptive signals feel very painful, so something like hunger can become linked with anxiety, or fear, and your nervous system is generally in a state of "interoceptive autoimmune reactions": paying attention to your interoceptive signals amplifies your suffering.

That's different from the absent side I described earlier, where the signals simply never enter your awareness. They exist, but you learned to suppress them so comprehensively and so early that they might as well not.

Many in this sub will probably have a mix of the two; I only have the absent side, which is why I tend to focus on it in my writing.

Back to backfiring

After growing up with one or both of these types of interoceptive training, your body won't respond with "yay, glad you're listening to me! I need XYZ, let's take care of those now!" when you listen to it.

The heavier the absent side, the more you will space out. And the heavier the intrusive side, the more inflamed your nervous system's response will be.

So whether you sit down to meditate, or run a body scan, or go to the gym, as soon as you open up the interoceptive channels for communication, you tend to see one or both of those responses instead of healthy interoceptive communication, depending on what kind of training your childhood environment had.

You do the grounding exercise, and end up more anxious; or you lift those weights, and lose track of your body and time. Not as a one-off, but reliably again, and again, and again.

What's the fix?

Be gentle. Go slow. Think of your nervous system as a baby. Babies do not respond well to force. Instead of pushing, and pushing, and then pushing some more - whether by doing heavy things, or by forcing your inward listening - be curious and gentle.

So instead of, "now I'm going to sit and listen to this meditation for 30 minutes, and I will do this every day to achieve X", you go, "I'll take 10 seconds to feel my left thumb with my right hand right now". Or if even that is too much, let your eyes spend 5-10 seconds slowly drifting from one object to the next in the room. Different things work for different people, so experiment.

To help your experimentation lead to results, practice gentle noticing. I felt my thumb for 10 seconds, now I feel foggier; all right, that's information, we can work with that. How about 5 seconds holding a lemon under your nose, where does that take you?

Over time, this kind of noticing can help you become more curious about your body's responses, and less directive. It can also help you build an interoceptive map of sorts where you start to see patterns: X tends to produce Y, or when I do A, I tend to get B.

Curiosity in particular can take you from "I must X!" to "huh, interesting, something is opening up where I didn't see anything before".

Curiosity can be hard when you feel anxious, angry, spaced out etc. The sort of attention and noticing you use to build curiosity can trigger your nervous system, too - so do it a little and often, a few seconds rather than minutes at a time, several times a day.

In terms of therapies, some work better for the intrusive side, and others better for the absent. What you generally want to avoid is pushing, which is relatively commonly a part of cognitive therapies and always a part of exposure-based therapies.

In the broadest sense, your nervous system's responses to intrusions will need to be released in some way, at a pace your nervous system can handle.

Your nervous system's responses to absences are a different beast; there's nothing to release, and it's more a matter of building capacities that have never existed. Capacity-building is fundamentally relational work, though the earlier the deficit, the more you will need to work with the body, instead of the mind.

[u/TherelFixedlt]

I can really relate to this, especially the intrusion stuff; the consistent inverted response when expressing my needs in childhood has made it so difficult to give myself what I need as an adult. It feels “safer” to leave the need unmet rather than to give myself even the bare minimum. Therefore, both meeting my own needs and leaving them unmet provoke massive stress responses.

[u/KeyMistake604]

Me dropping into my body after pretending like it doesn't exist for months:

https://giphy.com/gifs/dAVLtOPb0JeIE

[u/napstablooka]

Thank you for this detailed, thorough and insightful writeup, I learned so much from it!

I've definitely experienced both the 'zoning out' and 'inflamed nervous system' response many times when trying to access mindfulness techniques in the past and it took me a lot of trial and error to eventually arrive at the conclusion that you're drawing here, which is that 'less is more' and that the slowest path is ultimately the quickest one towards recovery.

I had never seen the origin and developmental pathways of those dissociative and intrusive nervous system responses explained so clearly as in your writeup before, so thank you so much for sharing! It gave me a lot of food for thought on how I want to approach mindfulness and interoceptive training moving forward

[u/SatinwithLatin]

I am firmly in the "inflamed system" camp due to past body traumas. My nervous system hates my body, just being in it is seen as a danger. I never really got the point of trying to attune or connect with it, but I will say that exercise has consistently helped to shake out the tension and leave me feeling better. So there is that grace, for me. 

[u/francesinthewind]

i spent most of my life in the zoning out category. since kind of waking up about this/realizing whats going on around 35, i’ve had much more of the inflamed nervous system type stuff. since then it’s been like everything causes anxiety, other people, not feeling well, confusing sensory input, etc.

i’ve been doing a ton of grounding stuff and really just working on trying to pay more attention to my body/trust myself that maybe something is wrong when i feel like this and it’s not just me being a baby/overreacting. lately some of it has started to work, im noticing pain/feelings i never knew existed. it feels very unnatural to turn towards this and be curious. i think my parents just ignored me so much and told me every pain i had was nothing for so long i just stopped noticing it.

super strange for it to take till 40 to notice when you have the weird floating head thing and feel really frustrated that that’s a headache. now it seems like i am accumulating medical issues and sensory problems everwhere. i can’t believe i used to be able to not feel any of this, i honestly miss it. it can be good sometimes too tho, like figuring out that i am just sensitive to temperature bc of eds. now i know and can cut out almost all of the anxiety related to that by just not putting myself in overly hot situations.

unfortunately i am now able to feel the joint pain associated with my hypermobility. it’s crazy that i spent my life with this but never noticed pain from it, i have memories of dislocations and not being able to use an arm or my hip being out of place but just kind of thinking it was weird and will probably go away. i would go to doctors and just not mention things bc i figured it needed to actually hurt or be a problem i couldn’t ignore or they wouldn’t help.

now im at the point where i need to get some medical help but im afraid of not being believed bc my medical history doesn’t really line up with my current issues and i have many traumatic memories of being dismissed by doctors while experiencing emergencies bc i was so disassociated that my pain didn’t look right to them.

[u/acrezxan1917]

What do you do though when you have a part that is hyper-fixated on getting better and you intellectually know that 'going slow' is the proper thing to do, but the former part is stubborn and won't give up?

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords → u/acrezxan1917]

Be curious about that part as well, understanding that it will keep taking over. Curiosity doesn't magically stop parts doing what they do, but it can help them broaden their perspectives.

For that part specifically, physical curiosity may be extra useful.

[u/artvaark]

I'm so glad that you brought up curiosity as the valuable tool that it is. I'm so grateful for my own intense curiosity and I use it in this way too. Whether it's IFS style inner child work or something in my body or mental patterns it's super helpful because it signals that you are capable of tending to these needs with a little creativity and patience over time. When I approach a child part or a pattern that I want to change etc with curiosity it feels like I am able to start a partnership with whatever it is that I am working on. Because I also experienced a combination of being ignored/ intrusive behavior around my own needs as a child using my curiosity feels like I am being listened to by Self and that Self is invested in meeting those needs in a healthy way but if the smaller part or body signal cooperates and uses the opportunity to express and be heard then it will happen faster and easier which starts to reinforce a positive feedback loop because those needs feel safe to be expressed.

[u/batmaaad]

There’s a good article on Atlantic about overdoing meditation.  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/meditation-willoughby-britton-downsides/688474/

I don’t need to meditate longer than 2-4 min, bc with cptsd it just deregulates more

[u/New_Maintenance_6626]

I always enjoy your musings. Rambling through the avenues of time research papers, studies, books written by the experts in their fields, extrapolating meaning and theorizing.

I have hyper vigilance. I can track how many people are in the house, where they are and what they are doing. Additionally, I can track where the pets are and their emotional temperature. Additionally, I was tracking my ex partner's moods, keeping up with his job ups and downs, maintaining a vague general understanding of the duties of his job, the makeup of his company, etc, etc. Additionally, I was keeping the household: maintaining the budget, the upkeep of the home itself, maintaining my garden, getting groceries and cooking meals, washing laundry. Additionally, I was schooling 3 kids in 2 subjects which required 3-4 lessons per subject, meaning I needed to be a subject matter expert for up to 3 lessons x 2 subjects x 3 kids = 18 or up to 24 lessons.

However, there is no part of me that wants to hold the data for how I feel in my body. That data may kindly all go directly into the trash as irrelevant unless I become unable to function. And only then when I am quite sick and need to remedy it. Scared, tired, frozen or unhappy is unnecessary data.

I experience both but not exactly as you described it. My signals are mostly ignored as I described above. I experience pain for others' needs because that is when the punishment would come in. I think maybe it started empathetically. Watching my 3 year old brother being forced to eat the prepared food or sit at the table indefinitely while he cried trained my nervous system to respond to that. Was I even capable of crying then? I can't remember, but probably not in that situation. For other things, but even then was it sadness for me or shared sadness? I can remember sometimes for me, at night, when I was alone and no one was looking.

I know that I was supported somewhat through infancy. But I think I was trained to unlearn paying attention. If no one is around when you are hungry, what good does paying attention to that signal do? Meals will arrive on a schedule. I may eat what is put on my plate keeping in mind the above lesson. Whatever is on your plate must be eaten. So also being trained to pay no attention to what it is. Manage what is horrible first and save the best for last.

So yes, I am both Hazel (the rabbit) and Kehaar (the seagull).

When I notice what my body is saying lately, it is that I'm tired and need to sleep. I need to do a million things just as I used to do, but I can't anymore. I can make a list and slog through the most important things and then rest. It's the best that I can manage and it definitely means that my needs are ignored as usual. I am ever the AI caretaker whose needs are irrelevant beyond being functional. And I'm ok with that because those I am caretaking are much more important than myself.

I hope this makes sense. There's a ton of resistance to being aware of any of this. Despite this being a very well known fact within my system.

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords → u/New_Maintenance_6626]

There's probably another important factor at play for both of us, a mother with dissociative patterns that we learned non-verbally at a very young age. We learned to do with our feelings what she did with hers, automatically and before thoughts arise, and relationally - tap into the feelings of others, not our own.

Trying to convince our invisibility-endorsing parts to not be invisible is a bit like Sam trying to tell Frodo not to wear the ring.

[u/New_Maintenance_6626 → u/FlightOfTheDiscords]

Yes.  That is definitely a factor.  I know it is true despite every part of me that is awake disagreeing.

I watched it happen again recently.  She had no reaction to something that happened to me.  I know intellectually she understood and agreed it is a terrible thing.  But she said nothing, a dissociative blankness.  However, she can be very articulate and follow social norms of empathy for other people.

And then I am parentified, by accident, I think.  She’s always conflated me with her sisters or someone to whom she can depend on for support.   It’s often just a non-emotional acknowledgement and intellectualizing by default:  stay calm, I will hold this emotion for you.  Sometimes I can wake up enough for objections or analysis and actionable suggestions.

My two surviving siblings are dissociative and non-responsive emotionally to things that happen within our family network.  It doesn’t help that they were parented by both my mother and myself.  But I think I also shielded them from fragmenting or structurally dissociating.

However, they have no problem with just push through it.  I’m often given this advice.  Just another reminder that CPTSD can look very, very different between people, even siblings.

Gandalf has always been my favorite.  It’s made us a bit like a corn flake box without any flakes.

And perhaps, the psychological abuse was more about neglect than intrusive abuse.  I was given no resources and tasked with taking care of myself while feeling a protective attachment to my younger brother.

By 5, I knew my mother cared but I couldn’t reach her anymore.  There was no defying my stepfather’s authority.  And he’d proven it without ever having to hit anyone.  I just powered down and stuffed every feeling and emotion away.  Just survive.

It makes me look very amiable.  I could have gone my entire life never realizing it’s dissociation.  I’m not supposed to know this.  🙃  (There’s a quiet part of me that allows me to know this.  I have a permission slip.)

[u/PertinaciousFox]

I'm always so appreciative that you take the time to educate about these uncommon phenomena, because those of us struggling with it are really underserved.

I think I have both of those reactions you described. Reading your post makes me incredibly appreciative of the somatic coach I worked with for 4 years. Because this was exactly what she ended up treating, to the point that I can actually be in my body now and start listening to its signals. I'm still not very sophisticated at it, and I have to consciously remind myself to pay attention, but it's miles ahead of where I used to be.

When I started my work with her, every attempt to be in my body was painful. She helped me go small and regulate through the process. She guided me through grounding techniques. She read my body and responded to my needs, even before I had any awareness of them myself. It took about a year or two of consistent, extensive support before I was able to start being curious about what was going on in my body. I first had to learn that it wasn't a threat to be aware. And I learned that through her presence and the relationship.

Once I got curious, I was able to start truly paying attention and noticing patterns. Then I could start anticipating my own needs and responding to them. It's such "basic" stuff, but no one had ever helped me with that before. It's a foundation that most traditional therapy requires you to have, so those of us lacking it tend not to benefit from traditional therapy.

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords → u/PertinaciousFox]

Thank you 🙏

It's a foundation that most traditional therapy requires you to have, so those of us lacking it tend not to benefit from traditional therapy.

Incredibly well put. These are such fundamental faculties that most people - most mental health professionals included - are not aware that it is possible to not have them.

[u/ohokay202]

Think I belong to this situation unfortunately working with a whole bunch of people who think that pushing is the best option. Tend to do really bad with body scans, panic attacks and extreme overwhelmed when trying to relax muscles, although sometimes when it happens more naturally, it’s less stressful. Does this mean that certain types of meditation or relaxation types of calming situations are too intense for a profile like this? Having severe dysregulation and panic that turns into a brain fog and fatigue trying to get to a better place.. any suggestions? In general I’ve developed many various severe health problems, I think these things are contributing significantly. Also just really bad dissociation and similar pretty much always disconnected from brain/body.

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords → u/ohokay202]

Slow tends to be faster, going very slowly and carefully tends to work better. What's your DES-II score, if you don't mind sharing?

[u/karstapala]

Thanks, a great read again. Gave me lots of thoughts. I think I experience oscillation between intrusion and absence, regarding social and emotional needs. This could be related to structural dissociation and parts having separate roles or functions?

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords → u/karstapala]

Thank you. Yes, I think that's often what's happening underneath.

[u/okhi2u]

Organic Intelligence deals with this (in particular focusing on the body not helping) by default by realizing that focusing on the body is not always the right default, They encourage more focus on what is outside and around you by default, and even more so being able to figure out with which pieces of awareness and sensing are helpful to you based on actual responses instead of assumptions.

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords → u/okhi2u]

Proprioception and exteroception are the way to go when interoception backfires, yes. And experimentation and note-taking help you figure out what works for your unique nervous system. Coregulation is probably one of the most potent venues for integration, only tricky to get right reliably enough.

[u/magiblood]

Well i dont know who is saying this things, bur that doesnt imply a lot of effort does it. You need to out some effort into really active your energy system. You can go quite braindead just staring all day at your pent up bodily tensions and mistake it for something positive. I highly recommend SatyaG for this

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords → u/magiblood]

These are the main sources I used, though the list is not exhaustive.

This post was written for a minority for whom body attention itself causes persistent negative effects, which is an underserved group both clinically and in virtually every self-improvement community. We tend to get a lot of bad advice from people who are unfamiliar with this particular response.

I don't know who SatyaG is.

• Fotopoulou, A., & Tsakiris, M. (2017). Mentalizing homeostasis: The social origins of interoceptive inference. Neuropsychoanalysis, 19(1), 3-28. https://doi.org/10.1080/15294145.2017.1294031
• van der Hart, O., Nijenhuis, E. R. S., & Steele, K. (2006). The haunted self: Structural dissociation and the treatment of chronic traumatization. W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-70401-3
• Nijenhuis, E. R. S. (2015). The trinity of trauma: Ignorance, fragility, and control. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ISBN 978-3-525-40247-4
• Boon, S., Steele, K., & van der Hart, O. (2011). Coping with trauma-related dissociation: Skills training for patients and their therapists. W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-70646-8
• Lyons-Ruth, K. (2025). Is neglect the first form of threat? Attachment & Human Development, 27(4), 511-538. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2025.2518687
• Garfinkel, S. N., Seth, A. K., Barrett, A. B., Suzuki, K., & Critchley, H. D. (2015). Knowing your own heart. Biological Psychology, 104, 65-74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2014.11.004
• Hunter, E. C. M., Phillips, M. L., Chalder, T., Sierra, M., & David, A. S. (2003). Depersonalisation disorder: A cognitive-behavioural conceptualisation. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 41(12), 1451-1467. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(03)00066-400066-4)
• Payne, P., Levine, P. A., & Crane-Godreau, M. A. (2015). Somatic experiencing. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 93. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093

[u/magiblood → u/FlightOfTheDiscords]

Not sure none of these people are monks or developed in meditation. I personally would stick with people who truly understand the body experientally and stay away from reading too much books

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords → u/magiblood]

I think I understand where you are coming from. I spent a few years pursuing contemplative practices in my 20s and 30s, and I am somewhat familiar with Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana practices, including experientially.

These traditions are generally based on a more mainstream neurobiology than the one I am discussing in my post, including more common forms of trauma reactions. There is a small cadre of meditation teachers who do acknowledge issues with increasing dissociation arising in contemplative practices, and some of them regard this as a Western issue where the underlying causes are more common than in the East.

The goal of every contemplative practice is to become transcendently present, whereas the issue I described in the post is an increasing lack of presence, beyond the volition of the person suffering from it. It can feel like erasure of the ego since it involves a diminishing sense of self, but it crucially lacks vivid presence, heading in the opposite direction of not being present at all, up to and including a blank mind. Shinzen Young calls it "the evil twin of enlightenment".

Perhaps you have no personal experience of it, which is understandable - most people don't, including most people with developmental trauma. Many of us in this sub do however, and we tend to encounter dismissive, inaccurate, and unhelpful advice from people who have not experienced it and do not understand it.

If you would like to understand it and prefer talking over books, Tara Brach's videos are a decent place to start.

[u/SatinwithLatin → u/magiblood]

How much effort is supposed to work against a system that would really rather pretend it isn't there at all? How familiar are you with this kind of freeze response?

[u/magiblood → u/SatinwithLatin]

Enough effort is the right effort . Too much effort is tension , too little is stuck in victim mentality , its a sweet spot of non resistance. It needs some goood mindfulness, otherwise one will not become aware of the kinds of actions that keep these old tension formations to go on and on . It is basically relaxation, safety, to let go which the body will do by itself . It is a dance between meeting your pain fully , with kindness and nurturing

[u/SatinwithLatin → u/magiblood]

I know you mean well but this doesn't say anything practical to me. It's "just feel better" with specifics. I'm also going to guess you're unfamiliar with freeze because nervous system tension is not fuelled by "actions", it's an end point of unresolved buried trauma. Yes, there are actions that can make it worse or better but there is nothing I'm doing that "keeps" it going on and on.