And here’s why “just trust your gut” might be the worst advice you’ve ever been given
Let’s talk about something that doesn’t get nearly enough airtime in the wellness world.
You’ve heard it a thousand times. “Trust your body. Your gut never lies. If it feels wrong, it is wrong.” And honestly? In theory, that’s beautiful advice. Your body is an extraordinarily sophisticated instrument, wired over millions of years of evolution to keep you safe, signal danger, and guide you toward what’s good for you.
Except — and this is the part nobody puts on a motivational poster — when you’ve experienced trauma, your body’s alarm system can get stuck on a frequency that no longer matches your reality.
It’s not lying to you. But it is absolutely misfiring. And there’s a significant difference.
Your Nervous System Is a Brilliant Historian. Not a Prophet.
Here’s the science, delivered without the snooze factor.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s landmark research — yes, The Body Keeps the Score — established something that trauma-informed therapists have been working with for years: the body stores traumatic experiences as physiological memory. Not just emotional memory. Physical memory. Your muscles, your gut, your heart rate, your breathing — they all hold the imprint of what happened to you.
Dr. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory takes this further. Your autonomic nervous system is constantly scanning your environment for cues of safety or danger — a process called neuroception. The critical detail here is that this scanning happens below conscious awareness. Your body is making decisions before your brain has even had its morning coffee.
When your nervous system has been shaped by trauma — whether that’s a chaotic childhood, a relationship that kept you walking on eggshells, or years of emotional unpredictability — it learns a very specific lesson: danger is everywhere, and you need to stay ready.
The problem? It keeps applying that lesson long after the danger has passed.
Real Life… – Meet Misfire….
Let me paint you a picture. A few, actually.
You meet someone new. They’re kind, consistent, emotionally available. They text back. They show up when they say they will. They don’t create drama. And instead of feeling relieved and excited, your body is crawling with unease. Something feels “off.” You tell your friends it just doesn’t feel right. You call it a lack of chemistry.
Plot twist: that’s not your intuition talking. That’s your nervous system looking for the chaos it was trained to recognise as love.
Or this one. Your partner goes quiet for an afternoon — they’re tired, they’re in a work deadline, they’re just being a human being. But your stomach drops. Your chest tightens. Your mind starts running through every possible thing you might have done wrong. By the time they resurface three hours later with “sorry, crazy day,” you’ve already mentally packed a bag and rehearsed the breakup conversation.
That’s not intuition either. That’s a nervous system that learned, somewhere along the way, that silence means abandonment is coming.
And my personal favourite: the relationship that felt electric from day one. The instant connection, the intensity, the feeling that you’d known this person forever. Your body said yes so loudly you could barely hear anything else.
Six months later, you’re exhausted, confused, and wondering how you got here again.
That electricity? In many cases, that’s trauma recognition — not soul recognition. Your nervous system spotted familiar patterns and called them home.
The Misfire Mechanism: What’s Actually Happening
Here’s where it gets genuinely fascinating, and I say that as someone who has spent years sitting with people in the middle of these exact patterns.
When trauma occurs — particularly relational trauma, the kind that happens between people — it creates what researchers call incomplete stress cycles. Dr. Peter Levine’s work on Somatic Experiencing shows that when the body mobilises for a threat but never gets to complete the natural response (fight, flee, shake it off), that activation energy gets stored. Your nervous system remains partially switched on, scanning for the threat that never fully resolved.
Add to this what we now understand about state-dependent attachment – emerging research from 2024-2025, confirms that attachment responses aren’t fixed personality traits, they’re contextual nervous system responses that shift based on your current state, stress levels, and the specific relational dynamics you’re navigating.
What this means in plain language: your body’s signals in relationships are being filtered through the lens of every unresolved experience you’ve ever had. It’s not reading the present moment clearly. It’s pattern-matching against the past.
It’s doing its job. It’s just working from outdated data.
3 Signs Your Body Might Be Misfiring (Not Truth-Telling)
Before you act on that gut feeling, run it through this quick check.
1. The signal shows up before anything has actually happened.
You’re not responding to something real — you’re responding to a possibility. Your partner hasn’t done anything. The date hasn’t gone wrong. Nothing has been said. But your body is already in full alarm mode, bracing for an impact that exists only in your nervous system’s threat library. Authentic intuition responds to what is. Trauma misfires respond to what might be, based on what was.
2. The feeling is disproportionate to the situation.
A three-hour silence shouldn’t feel like abandonment. A slightly distracted text shouldn’t feel like rejection. A minor disagreement shouldn’t feel like the relationship is ending. When the intensity of your body’s response is wildly out of proportion to what’s actually in front of you, that’s a significant signal that you’re not reading the present — you’re reliving the past. The technical term for this is emotional flashback. The lived experience of it is exhausting, and you deserve to understand why it keeps happening.
3. Safety feels suspicious.
This one is the most telling, and the most heartbreaking. When someone consistently shows up for you, when a situation is genuinely stable and good, and your body responds not with relief but with suspicion — waiting for the other shoe to drop, looking for the catch, unable to fully relax into something healthy — that is your nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do in an environment where safety was never guaranteed. It learned that calm before the storm. It doesn’t yet know how to trust the calm itself.
If any of these landed — sit with that. Not with judgment, but with curiosity. Your body has been working incredibly hard to keep you safe. It just needs updated information about what safe actually looks like now.
So Can You Trust Your Body At All?
Absolutely — and this is the part I really want you to sit with.
Your body is not broken. It is not your enemy. It is not conspiring against your happiness. It is doing something genuinely remarkable: it is trying to protect you using every piece of information it has ever collected.
The work is not about silencing your body’s signals. The work is about updating the database.
When you heal the underlying trauma — when you complete those unfinished stress cycles, when you expand what researchers call your window of tolerance, when you integrate the parts of yourself that are still living in the past — your body’s signals start to recalibrate. The misfires become less frequent. The distinction between a genuine red flag and a trauma echo becomes clearer.
You start to develop what I’d call regulated intuition — body wisdom that’s rooted in your present reality, not your personal history of pain.
That’s when “trust your gut” actually becomes useful advice.
The Question Worth Asking
Next time your body sends you a strong signal in a relationship — whether that’s inexplicable unease with someone safe, or magnetic pull toward someone chaotic — try asking this before you act on it:
Is this my nervous system reading the present? Or is this my nervous system remembering the past?
You won’t always know immediately. That’s okay. The awareness itself is the beginning of the shift.
If you’ve been nodding along to any of this — if you recognise yourself in those examples, if you’ve wondered why your body keeps leading you back to the same kinds of dynamics — this is exactly the territory I work in.
Understanding the difference between a trauma misfire and authentic intuition is one of the most liberating things a person can do for their relationships, their choices, and their life. It’s also one of the core threads running through everything I do with clients.
If you’re curious about what that work looks like, or you simply want to keep exploring these ideas, you’re welcome to follow along here. There’s a lot more where this came from.
Because your body isn’t lying to you. It’s just been waiting for someone to help it update its story.
Mona-Lize Moolman is a trauma-informed therapist specialising in human connection, working with clients globally. She combines Western psychology with holistic methodologies to address the root causes of relationship patterns — not just the symptoms.
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