Interoception and self permission
Most of us got some version of the same instructions when we were small, and they arrived so often and so casually that nobody involved would have called them instructions. You are not cold, put the jacket back. You just ate, you cannot possibly be hungry. You are not tired, you slept fine. That did not hurt. There is nothing to cry about.
Any one of those exchanges is typically no big deal. A parent who is late, or distracted, or working against their own exhaustion says the fastest thing available and moves on, and there’s no cruelty meant in any of it. However, what a child learns from the repetition is something nobody intended to teach. What they learn is that the information arriving inside their own body carries less weight than what comes from outside it.
A child can’t hold both. When the person who keeps you alive tells you that what you are feeling is wrong, you believe them, because believing them is how you stay in good standing with the people you depend on. So their inner reading gets filed as unreliable, and over enough years the child stops consulting it first. They check the room instead. They work out what is “supposed to be happening” and report that.
By adulthood this has become invisible, the way most of the deepest conditioning does. You feel something and run it past an external standard before you will let yourself have it. Am I actually tired or am I being lazy. Is this a real headache or am I making something out of nothing. Should I be this upset about what just happened. Every one of those questions is asking permission from an authority that stopped being in the room decades ago.
Interoception is the name for the stream of information coming up from inside you, the heat in the chest, the tightness in the gut, the heaviness behind the eyes, the fatigue that means something different from ordinary tiredness. This stream of information runs whether or not anybody is reading it. What gets damaged in a house like the one above is the reading, and what gets damaged along with it is the willingness to act on what you read.
Which is where most of the writing on this subject goes wrong, because the obvious advice is to trust your body, and that obvious advice is not quite true.
Sometimes the signal is miscalibrated. Let’s take a person who walks into a grocery store and their system floods with terror while nothing in the grocery store is dangerous. Their internal terror is doing exactly what it normally does, creating a debilitating physiological response, in a building full of produce. If this person follows the advice to trust their body, they end up housebound. And if they follow the advice to simply override it, they end up right back where they started, overriding a system that was already ignored too many times as a child.
The way through requires deliberately separating two questions that normally get merged into one.
The first question is: What is my body reporting? That question always has an answer, and the answer is always accurate, because the report is a direct description of your internal state. You feel unsafe. That is true. It is a fact about you in this moment and no amount of argument changes it.
The second question: Is what my body is reporting actually happening out there? You feel unsafe, and the grocery store is full of people buying bananas. The report was accurate about your body and inaccurate about the room, and both of those can sit in the same sentence without canceling each other.
Almost all the damage comes from fusing those two. The people who were taught to dismiss their signals handle it by answering the second question first and then throwing out the first one. There is nothing to be afraid of, so stop being afraid. That approach has never worked on anyone, and it is the exact same thing their parents did to them, but it’s now performed by the person themselves. The people who swing the other direction fuse it the opposite way and treat every signal as a verdict about reality. I feel unsafe, therefore I am unsafe, therefore I am not going. Living that way hands your entire life over to an alarm system that may be running on information from decades ago.
Peter Levine spent his career on why those alarms stay loaded. His argument is that threat prepares the body to do something, to fight or run or fend off, and when circumstances make the action impossible the preparation stays in the body without ever completing. A child in a house where the danger could not be fought or fled accumulates a great deal of that unfinished preparation. The system stays loaded because from its point of view the emergency never resolved, and decades later it’s still firing on the same settings in rooms where nothing is happening.
A miscalibrated signal is a correctly functioning system running on old information. The machinery is intact but the data is from another era. That distinction matters enormously because a person who believes their body is broken approaches it very differently from a person who understands it as faithful, yet out of date.
It also means these signals are measurable, which surprises people who have spent their lives being told their readings were imaginary. The researchers at HeartMath Institute have spent decades studying heart rate variability, the small shifts in timing between one heartbeat and the next, and they can watch a person’s pattern change in real time as their internal state changes. The thing inside your body that you were told you were making up actually shows up on their equipment.
Getting the reading back is its own piece of work, and it starts lower than most people expect. Ask somebody who has spent decades not consulting their body what they are feeling and you will often get nothing, or you will get a thought with a feeling word stapled to it. Ask that same person what is happening in their body right now and something usually comes back; maybe tightness somewhere, a weight, temperature, or breath sitting higher in their chest than it should be.
Sensation comes before emotion, and for anybody whose readings were discouraged early, sensation is the only door that opens. The naming follows eventually and it comes easier once there is something physical to attach it to.
The other half of it is timing. The override happens faster than thinking and most people don’t notice anything until they have already smoothed it over and moved on. So, the practice becomes catching it earlier in the sequence. That sounds impossible right up until it happens by accident somewhere with no stakes at all.
So what does trusting the signals from your own body actually mean, given that the signals are sometimes wrong about the world? It simply means letting the signal into the room as evidence. Nothing more dramatic than that. The report comes in and you receive it rather than immediately ruling it out.
You are tired. Fine, you are tired, that is now a known fact and it goes into the decision alongside everything else. Whether you rest is a separate matter but the tiredness is on the table instead of being argued with until it goes underground and comes out six weeks later as something worse.
Self permission turns out to be a smaller thing than the phrase suggests. What it amounts to is the end of needing evidence before you are allowed to have an experience.
That requirement runs deeper in people than almost anything else I see. They describe a week of something close to despair and then apologize for it, because nothing bad enough happened to justify their feeling. You don’t have to prove you are tired before you are allowed to rest. You don’t have to locate a tragedy before you are allowed to be sad.
Trust rebuilds slowly and is somewhat unglamorous. You leave a gathering when you first notice you want to leave instead of staying the extra hour you would normally stay, and then you notice what happens. Usually nothing. Nobody is wounded, the friendship survives, and you have one piece of evidence that the signal was worth something. You say no to a request you would have absorbed without comment, and the person says fine and moves on, and that goes into the file as well.
The scale stays deliberately small, because a system that spent decades being overruled doesn’t come back online through dramatic gestures.
Over time the readings sort themselves into rough categories. The body tends to be very good at other people, registering within a minute or two that somebody’s friendliness is all surface, long before the conscious mind assembles a reason for the impression. It is similarly good at environments, at whether a particular room or job or congregation is actually safe for you regardless of what everybody there says about it.
Outcomes are a different matter, since a stomach full of dread the day before predicts almost nothing about how an interaction will actually go the next day. And, we should keep in mind that the readings are at their least reliable anytime the present situation mirrors something you felt when you were much younger, which is unfortunately where they arrive the loudest and deserve the most examination.
What develops out of all of that is something resembling a working relationship with your own internal system, where the signals get consulted rather than obeyed or dismissed, the way you would consult anybody whose judgment is normally sound and only occasionally off.
None of this moves quickly. The internal reading was discouraged for decades, and it comes back slowly.
What people notice first is that the arguing stops. The energy that was going into arguing with themselves for having a feeling becomes available for something else.
Somebody asks how you are doing, and in the half second before you answer there is a place where you used to check the room. You worked out what was wanted, how much of your own truth the moment could hold, and then produced something that fit.
That half second is where both halves of this live. It’s where you find out whether you can read what is actually happening inside of you, and whether you are going to let it count. Eventually you answer out of your own intuition instead of out of the room, and what comes out is not always convenient, and it’s no longer anybody else’s to overrule.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: Relational Coherence
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
