Using Your Body to Recognize a Toxic Person or Situation
You can teach yourself to use your body to recognize a toxic person or situation.
It is so important to learn how to listen to your body as your barometer of truth
Your gut feeling level of intuition comes from the body, which is also the subconscious.
This is one of your most powerful tools to protect yourself against manipulative, abusive and toxic people.
You can learn to speak the language of your body. It’s so beneficial for you to understand yourself better so that you can rebuild your self-trust after the abuse, so you can feel a greater sense of self control over your body, your health, your life, your emotions and the bonus here is, this is like kryptonite for gaslighting.
When you trust your body and you have the tangible proof that something isn’t right, even when that other person is the most skilled gaslighter in the world, they will not be able to fool you.
You might notice it when a person is questioning your understanding that something’s not right for you and you say “no.”
Maybe they invite you to go somewhere and you say, “no thanks” and they say, “well why don’t you want to blah blah blah” you can say something like, “well several reasons but most importantly because my body is saying no.”
It’s really important that you learn to set these boundaries for yourself. Set the standard first, I’m gonna trust my body first and foremost, that’s number one.
I will trust my body first and foremost and number two, you have to be willing to set that boundary with other people when something happens and your body says no even if your mind thinks ‘nothing seems to be really wrong with that’ or ‘maybe I would even enjoy it’ or ‘oh just be more fun and go along with it.’
The mind came up with all that stuff but the bottom line is when your body says no, you just say no.
This is going to help relieve you from the pressure that you can get from people who want to push and push and push you to do something that you don’t want to do. They keep trying to get you to do it and every reason that you give them they have a counter reason for why that reason is null and void or it doesn’t matter or “it’s really not the way you think”.
You don’t have to argue or negotiate or keep having that conversation with that person because you’ve already said no.
It’s really important to recognize how your body communicates to you.
We’re all little unique but what you’re gonna notice is that we all have a lot in common.
I want to talk about some of the most common ways that your body could be warning you that something isn’t right.
These are things I’ve felt myself. These are things I’ve heard from clients, from friends, from family members who are going through this kind of abuse or still dealing with an abusive person or moving forward after the abuse and questioning new people that they’re meeting or even reevaluating old relationships that have been in their life for a long time.
So this can be really useful when you’re observing a new person, like if you go on a date or you meet a new friend or you’re at a networking event, which is a really great place to practice this by the way, there’s tons of people there and the whole thing is just about having little conversations with people. It’s really a great way to practice reading other people and really reading your body, how your body reads those other people.
You want to practice these things and recognize what your body is saying to see how you feel about that person or how you feel about the idea that they just presented to you — some kind of invitation maybe.
Maybe you want to recognize if this new person is worthy of your trust. Maybe you want to evaluate this person for toxicity, who’s already been in your life for a really long time. Maybe you’re just getting this feeling that something’s not right. You can use this for many different situations.
So let’s talk about these common ways that your body could be warning you:
The ick-factor
Something just feels icky about that person or what that person said or did and it’s really hard to pinpoint the epicenter in your body it’s just kind of this overall sense of ick.
Your stomach drops
You’re having a conversation and suddenly like it’s like your stomach falls on the floor.
What is that sensation?
It’s like something’s not right and it’s usually because someone is deceiving you or you’re in sudden fear of what’s happening because something’s not right.
Things on the surface are not as they appear.
I noticed this almost a hundred percent of the time when someone is lying and deceiving me and I’d never know it at the time so I never got confirmation right away. It’s in retrospect when the confirmation comes, but I always note to myself “okay my stomach dropped when he said this or that” and there might be no other rational reason to understand why I felt the way I felt at the moment.
For example maybe your stomach suddenly drops and you sense like you’re never gonna see this person again and you don’t know why and then that person ghosts you. And later in retrospect you realize your stomach fell because what they said to you in that moment was totally false, it wasn’t authentic at all.
Your body had fear because it already knew that person was gonna ghost you, you just had no reason to believe that yet because it wasn’t actually happening and they were telling you a big lie.
So anytime your stomach drops immediately, hit pause on that situation and really start observing what’s going on.
What did the person just say?
What was the thought that I just had?
What was the event that just took place?
Note that somewhere in your brain or write it down because in several hours or several days or several weeks that’s gonna make a lot more sense.
Light twitches with your eye just like involuntarily spasms
If it’s on the left side, it’s usually like you’re not saying what you feel or you’re not able to see the big picture of something. When it’s on the right side, it’s usually about being a perfectionist or not taking action because you’re afraid you’re gonna mess it up or you don’t want to make a mistake or maybe you know what you need to do but you’re just not taking the action, probably because you’re afraid that you won’t do it just right.
When the eyes are twitching something is going on in your life, you want a journal to write it down.
Any of these things that happen, you really want to write these down in the moment because you might forget and this is such a validating thing to help you learn the language of your body.
It is like learning a foreign language, only it’s your native language you’ve simply forgotten what your native language was like.
Imagine you were born in China and you got adopted by a family in say Michigan so you grew up speaking English and you never knew Chinese even though it was the native language where you were from and it was what your parents spoke. So it’s like going back to China and learning how to speak Chinese.
Sudden exhaustion or almost narcolepsy
This is when you’re so tired or falling asleep while you’re hanging out with someone or maybe right afterward.
Sometimes I’ll notice this in the moment but more often it’s like as soon as I leave. You’ll notice just how draining that person was to your energy and maybe it was because they were talking, talking, talking, talking the whole time or maybe it was the drama effect of what they were talking about or maybe it was just their energy in that vampiric sort of way where they were just trying to take your energy. Those are big signs that that’s a toxic person.
Anxiety
Anxiety is when your chest tightens and maybe you get some tingling, fluttering palpitations.
Your heart starts racing, you get a little short of breath, maybe even a sense that there’s some fear but you don’t know what the fear is yet. It just kind of comes on out of nowhere but it’s not out of nowhere.
Now let me also differentiate what happens in the early stages of PTSD/C-PTSD recovery. I talked about this in my book “The Journey” and in that very early first stage there are intense and a lot of symptoms like anxiety, panic attacks, dread attacks. It can be constant.
It’s not necessarily that something’s wrong in that moment, it’s just that you’re trying to resolve and get back to a sense of equilibrium after what you’ve just escaped.
So this is gonna be a lot harder to recognize in stage one when you’re still in the middle of those really intense symptoms because it’d be hard to differentiate if this one of those symptoms or is this my body, my barometer, my intuition telling me something is off.
This is a lot easier down the road once those initial heavy symptoms wear off because it’s no longer the constant.
You feel pretty good most of the time and then all of a sudden you get a phone call and maybe an invitation to go somewhere and all of a sudden your body goes into this state, that’s when your body’s saying no.
Your body doesn’t want to go. Maybe it sounds like a lovely invitation. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it. Maybe you even want to hang out with that person but it’s not that person it’s the invitation. It’s either the invitation, where you’re going, the other people, or something like that your body is not okay with.
Panic attacks
A panic attack is next-level anxiety.
This can feel like a heart attack.
It can feel like you’re going to die.
It can feel like you can’t get enough air.
It can feel like you want to jump out of your clothes, jump out of your skin.
You might spontaneously break out into sweating and feel like you’re overheating or you might suddenly lose all of your body heat and it’s like you’re shivering to the bone.
These can definitely be signs that something is off, that something’s wrong.
Your body is telling you that you don’t want to do something.
Your body’s just telling you no.
Again it’s gonna be very hard to differentiate in stage one.
Sudden nosebleeds
This could happen maybe when you’re thinking and thinking about something and you’re really worried about it.
You’re scared about it or you’re trying to justify why you don’t have to do it and you’re feeling angry that this person is trying to pressure you into doing something you don’t want to do and your nose just starts gushing blood.
You didn’t get hit in the face.
Nothing happened but you’re just gushing blood.
That’s a sign something’s not right.
Now there could be physiological reasons like blood pressure.
Maybe your blood pressure suddenly spiked because you were stressed, if that’s not a constant thing for you like a chronic illness, it just suddenly spiked because some idea really stressed you out and then that caused the nose to bleed.
Sudden pain in your body with no reason
This is when you just hugged someone for example, and a few seconds or a minute later you have stabbing pain in your guts that won’t go away for hours or longer.
Or maybe you were just thinking about someone and you turn your head to the side and suddenly your neck freaked out and now you have this horrible pain. Something’s out of place, it won’t go away and it hurts to turn your head to the side and literally all you did was turn your head.
It wasn’t like you got a whiplash or something crazy happened.
These kinds of sudden pains like that with no real reason where is this coming from, what’s going on, pay attention.
Was it something you were just thinking about or it was that person that you just had contact with?
It could be like I mentioned, the gut pain, that you can get from hugging someone it could also be like a sudden pain in your lower back and that might last for days. It wasn’t bothering you and all of a sudden now it hurts really bad.
These kinds of weird things can happen.
Psychosomatic illnesses and issues
This could be temporary things like hives. You just break out into hives, start itching, rashes, blisters for no reason.
It could be that sudden muscular tension or even like a knot that suddenly appears in your back or your neck or somewhere and you’re wondering where’s this even coming from. You didn’t go crazy at the gym or some kind of sport activity, it just came out of nowhere.
These short-term things are representing something in the moment that bothered you.
So it was usually a thought that you just had or contact you just had, whether in person physically or on the phone or you’re thinking about what you’re gonna say to that person about something.
Injuries and chronic illnesses
These are usually caused more by long-term toxicity in your life, a long-term person in your life and maybe you’ve got fibromyalgia for years.
Maybe you’ve got chronic fatigue system syndrome for years and your doctors are like “well we don’t really know where it’s coming from”, they can’t really give you much information.
Maybe there’s some other chronic illness that you’ve gotten, it just doesn’t go away and the doctors are like “yeah we don’t really know, we tried everything.”
These are likely coming from some kind of psychosomatic thing when you’re in a relationship with an abusive person.
Your body eventually starts to shut down mostly so once your mind wakes up because the whole thing about ‘ignorance is bliss’ is kind of true to a point.
You don’t want to live your life in ignorance because you’re living your life in ignorance and not realizing the self-actualization levels of human life.
But there is a sort of protection of the foo. The “fool” meaning the ignorant, is kind of protected for a period of time when they don’t know. But as soon as you find out what’s going on narcissistic abuse, so and so is a narcissist, psychopath etc, now your body is like you better get out of there, you better get a plan and you better get out. And if you stay, that’s when you’re gonna notice your body takes a toll for the worst, like it just starts shutting down. It’s very sad to see that happen to people but that is a sign that you have got to get yourself out when your health is falling apart like that. You’ve got to get out.
There’s two books that can help you with this:
One is Louise Hay “Heal Your Body”
This is a classic.
It is so good.
She goes into all the different parts of the body, different illnesses, different symptoms, different vertebrae decoding what’s going on.
Another one is The Body Is The Barometer Of The Soul by Annette Noontil.
This is fantastic as well.
Also you get a map of different areas of the body telling you what each vertebrae, what each bone can represent, what each illness or part of the body mean when things show up like inflammation, pain or other issues.
They can really help your intuition understand really what’s going on but the most important question you want to ask yourself when any of these things that I just mentioned happen is:
- What was I just thinking about before that happened, before the pain, before the panic, before whatever symptom? What was I just thinking?
And stop everything until you backtrack and come up with what was that thought. If you can’t remember in that moment, darn right? But remind yourself, keep reminding yourself to keep asking that question.
The more it becomes a conscious effort to remember to backtrack immediately, the easier it’s going to be to be able to backtrack because sometimes your mind might be going a thousand miles a minute and you went from one topic to another so quickly that you don’t know which one it was. But this practice of continually asking yourself is gonna help you isolate that.
Then you want to say what does that want to tell me?
What does my stomach want to tell me?
What does this anxiety want to tell me?
What does my eye twitching want to tell me about whatever’s going on?
What does this want to tell me?
And be still and listen.
You might want to close your eyes and sit in meditation for a little bit to really focus on on what that is.
Now the good signs like when your body is telling you “this is good, like I like this interaction”: You’re gonna feel more relaxed.
You’re gonna feel more at ease.
You’re gonna feel more comfortable other than of course that little bit of nervousness that you get when you meet new people or when you meet somebody when you’re hanging out with somebody that you really like.
You might notice you get a little nervous and tense but for the most part you feel comfortable and there’s this bliss response to touch, to eye gazing.
So when you’re looking into someone’s eyes, and this is a good connection it’s like your body feels a kind of bliss. It doesn’t feel on edge, it doesn’t feel nervous and anxious. It just feels kind of blissed-out and especially when they touch you you can really notice that.
How does your body feel?
So when you’re letting someone new touch you be sure you’re really connecting with that feeling. How do I feel right now?
What does my body say about how this touch feels?
So my question to you is — has your body ever given you a sign like one of the ones I mentioned, something I didn’t mention, where you were in trouble or you’re with someone who was deceiving you or draining you, some kind of toxic person? Maybe when you knew that your ex was lying or cheating and you’re trying to confront them.
Please feel free to share those in the comments below. I think that’s going to be really helpful for other people because it’s so validating to realize, “oh my god that happened to me” or “oh my god I didn’t even think about when that happened that meant this or that and now I can see the Big Picture”
They can be really helpful for other people.