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Does Your Body Always Know When a Relationship Is Abusive?
Your body can pick up on danger before your conscious mind does. But butterflies aren't always intuition, and feeling safe isn't always evidence that someone is safe.
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There’s a piece of relationship advice I see everywhere these days: your body always knows. If you feel tense around someone, your nervous system is warning you. If your stomach drops when he walks into the room, your body knows he isn’t safe. If you feel calm and peaceful around someone, that’s your intuition telling you he’s good for you.
There’s something useful in this idea. Our bodies process an enormous amount of information before our conscious minds have worked out what we’re noticing. Sometimes you really do feel something is wrong before you can explain why. You become tense around someone. You start shrinking yourself or feel exhausted after interactions that seem perfectly normal on paper. Your nervous system may be picking up on a pattern your conscious mind is still busy rationalizing.
But ‘your body always knows’ takes a useful idea and turns it into a mystical one.
Your body doesn’t come with subtitles.
Anxiety can feel like intuition. Attraction can feel like agitation. Familiarity with chaos can feel like chemistry. Relief can feel like love. Dissociation can make you feel almost nothing at all.
And sometimes an abusive person genuinely makes you feel good. This one matters the most.
Otherwise, ‘listen to your body’ can quietly become another way of blaming women after the fact. If your body always knows, then why were you attracted to him? Why did you miss him when he was gone? Why did you feel safe in his arms even after he hurt you? Why did you want him sexually? Why didn’t your stomach start screaming on the first date?
Because the body often knows, sure, but not always, and you can’t make your body the main judge of a situation, even if it may know things.
Even when the body knows, it doesn’t always know what you think it knows...
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