Finding what works for you can be frustrating because it is you probably won’t identitfy in a very concious fashion.
Never been a foot tapper myself but I hear myself in my mind singing the rhythm
“deeeng dekke dekke deeng deeng” 
When I come up with rhythmic ideas, i sing the dekke deng deng in my head but my head bobs on the 1-2-3-4 counts. I can refinforce it by mimicing me hitting a drum with a stick with my dominant hand, also on the count. It could be hitting the table gently, or my knee…
Take things apart to smaller, more granular items. In this case, the rhythm. Try to find rhythmic exercise that help you engrain rhythms without having to focus on guitar. (like the one I described above). train your feeling and autopilot on the rhythm of the part you want to learn without guitar first.
next up, Sing the rhythm and just do a strum movement without guitar…air guitar style. Sounds funny? not if it works! You can focus now on when to time the strums because oyu can’t make mistakes and your fingers don’t need to be put somewhere. You can tie the most important strums in the pattern on certain vocal emphasis’. This point, you can leave the actual counting behind and and trust your feelings of how long a measure is and how much rioom you have in there.
in short, take your challenge apart, layer by layer and work on separate layers to encode the information in a more dedicated way in your memory