61: Beyond Numbing - Learning to Feel Instead of Escape

We all have our go-to escapes—food, wine, shopping, scrolling—when life feels overwhelming. But here’s the hard truth: most of what we call coping is really numbing. It silences the emotions we’ve never been taught to process and leaves us stuck in cycles of shame, self-criticism, and quick fixes that don’t last.

In this solo episode of Healing Beyond Words: Food, Art, and the Path Back to Self, I connect the dots between emotional eating and creative expression—showing how our bodies often reveal what our words can’t. You’ll learn how to recognize when you’re numbing versus healing, why awareness is the first step toward change, and what it looks like to move from self-abandonment into self-trust.

If you’ve ever asked yourself, “Why do I keep doing this when I know better?” this episode will give you the bridge to shift from numbing patterns into practices that actually bring wholeness, resilience, and freedom.

Connect with Darla Ridilla:

Book a free call: https://www.highvaluewoman.info/call

Website: https://www.highvaluewoman.info

Send me an email: highvaluewoman7@gmail.com

Sign up for newsletter: https://www.highvaluewoman.info/newsletter

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61550835718631

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/highvaluewoman7/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HighValueWoman-m7w

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/highvaluewoman7/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darla-ridilla-3179b110/

Transcript

Darla Ridilla (00:00)
Be aware of when it is you reach for things or devices, when you're feeling stressed, when you're feeling restless. And what is it for you? Is it food? Is it scrolling? Is it shopping? Or do you withdraw and just sit in silence and totally shut down?

and kind of a good guidance for you in knowing if it's a numbing or a healing activity is just ask yourself, is this numbing me? Is this distracting me?

Is this... is this productive?

Is it helping me to heal? Is it helping me to process?

And if it's not...

What can you do to help you through that?

Darla Ridilla (00:43)
Welcome to You Have the Power, the road to truth, freedom, and real connection. I'm Darla Radilla, a certified somatic trauma informed relationship coach for high achieving women who've been told they're too much. If you're exhausted from being the strong one in every room, if you're done second guessing yourself, and after every conversation, over explaining your needs or quietly carrying resentment in your most important relationships, you're not broken.

You're just stuck in a pattern that's no longer yours to carry. This podcast is your permission slip to break that cycle. demand self-abandonment, whether that's a partner, a parent, a boss, or even yourself. Because here's the truth, you're not too much. You're just accepting too little.

Each episode offers bold truth, nervous system tools, and radical strategies to help you reconnect to your voice, your worth, and your relationships on your terms.

If you're ready to stop settling and start living fully expressed, let's get started with today's topic.

Darla Ridilla (01:58)
Welcome to another episode of You Have the Power. This is going to be part two of the Healing Beyond Words, Food Art, and the Path Back to Self series. So in this solo, I would kind of like to talk about...

healing but from a different perspective. So if you listen to the last episode, episode 60, that was called From Emotional Eating to Emotional Freedom with Jillian Scott. And she talked about emotional eating and if you haven't listened to it just to kind of set the stage for that, sometimes when people are coping they aren't talking out their trauma or their stress or whatever it is that's bothering them. ⁓

their bodies are actually revealing what their words can't and that's why they reach for food. They do that to bypass the language. They feel stressed, they eat to self-soothe. And if you listen to Jillian's conversation with me, we talked about that. How it isn't just about the food, it's about those unprocessed feelings.

And trauma teaches us that sometimes we need something external. If it's not food, maybe it's alcohol. Maybe it's shopping. Maybe it's just scrolling on your phone. It's doing something that's distracting you from the feeling, but it's really not dealing with it. Because the real work is really when we start to learn to feel that emotion.

instead of feeding it with an activity that's just basically numbing you or suppressing it.

And in the next episode, we're going to have a guest and Susan Day is going to talk about how you can heal and you can process without words. But she's going to show you how she works with her clients and they do it through expression of art.

And she shows us that actually being creative and being messy really is a parallel to how healing works because healing's messy, right? It's not done perfectly. And it's often a lot of setbacks, a lot of two steps forward, one step back, maybe one step forward, two steps back. It's kind of like yoga. We don't have to be perfect when we do it.

What's just important is that we do it. We don't have to be good at it. We don't have to master it. But where there's a will, there's a way. You know, where there's a desire, that's far more important than the perfection. And so she demonstrates that art therapy shows us how even just scribbles can help process grief and anger.

and give you some relief from your stress.

And there is a common thread. Why would I pair these two episodes together? Because I do try to take two guests and pair them together in a complimentary way. And that common thread is that food and art are languages of their own through our body. The food, it numbs us. And the art actually reveals us.

So this shift, when we go from using a coping mechanism that silences our feelings to using embodied practices, that's when we start to really process them.

You know, I can share some of my own stories of coping. Yes, I've done the endless scrolling on Facebook. You know, when you feel disconnected from people, you think you fool yourself that interacting with people online is a connection, but it's not really. It's a disconnection. I look at pictures of myself in different times in my life, and I can tell when I'm the most stressed because that's when my weight has been the heaviest.

I look at pictures of when I was going through my second divorce and my face is so full because I would tend to ⁓ not necessarily overeat, but eat the wrong things and in larger amounts than healthy things like salty chips. Sugar is a big thing for me. When I am really stressed, I crave sugar.

And what ends up happening, it's a weird dynamic for me, is that I actually lose my appetite for real food and want to snack all the time. So all the calories I'm consuming are bad for me, and they're leaving fat deposits on my body. And I really didn't know that for a really long time. And while it's something I'm still working with myself, I...

I'm aware of it now. And awareness is really a great first step because we can't fix something if we don't know there's something wrong, right? And so I've tried to look at other ways that I can relax or release stress. You know, of course, there's exercise, being in nature, playing with my dog. But if we want to talk about artistic expression, since that's going to be the focus of our next episode, I love crafts.

I love cross stitching. I used to sew my own clothes in high school. ⁓ I actually have gone to a paint and sip. And I actually last year took a watercolor pencil class at a local college. I really don't consider myself to be very artistic, but I was pleasantly surprised at how well I actually did. I mean, it wasn't as beautiful as the teachers, of course, but the teacher's the expert, right? This is how we show it messy. ⁓

I was willing to go ahead and paint with these pencils and try to recreate the picture he gave us to copy. And what's interesting is everybody's picture in the room looked different. Yes, some were better than others, but each of them were our own interpretation of the picture and our own capabilities of how we could reproduce it.

It was interesting how quiet the room was and how good I felt. I remember the first picture we drew was one of an apple and each picture each week got more difficult or higher level, but the quiet in the room as everyone was concentrating and then the friendly banter of us comparing and complimenting.

but there was kind of a feeling of being in kindergarten again with the crayons.

So if.

We really want to heal. We really have to be more conscious of refraining from the coping mechanisms that are hurtful and moving more towards those intentional healing behaviors that will help us through everything, right?

So something that I want you to take away from this episode is just really think about it. Be aware of when it is you reach for things or devices, when you're feeling stressed, when you're feeling restless. And what is it for you? Is it food? Is it scrolling? Is it shopping? Or do you withdraw and just sit in silence and totally shut down?

and kind of a good guidance for you in knowing if it's a numbing or a healing activity is just ask yourself, is this numbing me? Is this distracting me?

Is this... is this productive?

Is it helping me to heal? Is it helping me to process?

And if it's not...

What can you do to help you through that?

I have talked about

eating the wrong things when I'm stressed. ⁓ And my weight has gone up and down, particularly as an adult. I have never actually been severely overweight. Or, ⁓ you know, with the exception of a few pounds here and there, had a problem with keeping at least a decent weight. But I do know people that

have told me what that's like. And I also wonder if, you know, if we use food as an example of something that we use to numb. What if it's even deeper than the feeling? What if it's a programming from a child? If you came from my generation, you know what your mom and dad used to say when you didn't clean your plate.

Remember the old, know, kids are starving in China kind of thing that went on. There was guilt involved. You're a bad child. Or if you went to your grandmother's or aunt's house and they love their their love language as food. Right. And if you didn't eat all the sweets or all the large meals that they gave you, there was amount of pressure or

guilt associated with that, that you are being a bad kid. So for some of us, there is an association of not only comfort with food. I think for me, it's more of a comfort thing. But for some, the stronger message is if I don't eat a lot of food or if I leave food on my plate, I'm a bad person.

I'm letting mom down.

I'm wasting and that means I'm doing something bad and we don't want to be bad and we may not even realize that these narratives are going on in our head. They're probably very deep into our subconscious and that could be for any type of coping mechanism. If we go back to our teenage years, that was such a tumultuous time for all of us. Think about some of the things that we did. We drove fast.

We drank underage at parties, even though mom and dad told us not to. Some indulged in sex, some indulged in drugs. All of those are coping mechanisms, trying to fit in, trying to shut down all of the angst that's going on in our head. And it's interesting that as adults, we often do that as well.

Sometimes even as adults work, we overwork. We use that as our escape. Maybe we feel like that's our validation. If I'm very productive at work, I have value to my boss. And that means I have value within myself instead of seeking it from within. Or maybe you have a home situation where you just don't want to go home. I have been there. Where work is your escape.

It's where, you know, when my daughter, my gosh, probably toddler years and teenage years were difficult times because she was a lot like I was as a child. She was very rebellious. She was very vocal and she could be really difficult at times. And I almost felt like work was a vacation because I got away from all that drama, especially as a teenager. I just wanted to go to work because I just

didn't want to deal with all of that anymore. But in the long run, that wasn't good either because even though my daughter was being difficult in those teenage years, she really needed me. And so my escape mechanism was actually hurting our relationship. And it wasn't teaching me how to self-soothe in a healthy way when I did get triggered by her behavior.

Darla Ridilla (15:12)
If something you heard today spoke to you if you've ever been told you're too much yet you find yourself over giving, silencing yourself, or stuck in relationships that leave you drained. Listen closely. The truth is you're not too much. You're just accepting too little. Right now you're standing in a pattern that keeps repeating itself and what you actually want is wholeness. Relationships that feel mutual.

energizing and aligned. And that's the bridge my coaching provides. And it starts with a free pattern breakthrough call.

In 30 minutes, we'll uncover the real patterns that are keeping you stuck and we'll map out your next step toward the connections you've been craving. No pressure, no pretense, just clarity, truth, and the freedom to choose yourself. Check the show notes and book your free call today.

Darla Ridilla (16:15)
Our body's always going to tell us what we need. It's not our enemy. It's actually our friend. But we don't always treat it like a friend, do we? When we have body sensations that say, I'm not comfortable with this. You need to process this. You are stressed. We treat it like an enemy. We ignore it. We stuff it. We use these.

coping mechanisms to quiet those voices down. But then what ends up happening is our body starts to speak louder, right? We get sick. Sometimes it's small things, sometimes it's chronic pain, and sometimes it's chronic illness or even death.

it's never too late to start, even if you're already ill, because when you learn to process your trauma and your stress in a productive way, it's going to help you in the future. And if you are already ill with something,

Look at Joe Dispenza. He talks about this all the time about how our minds can heal our bodies. No guarantees. I'm not an expert in that. I can't make promises to you. But if you don't try, it's already a loss. And if you are meant to leave this earth and you've already got something serious like cancer or another disease that's gonna end your life sooner rather than later, wouldn't you rather go out at least

Feeling better than you did?

You know, the emotions that you experienced that caused that illness, is that really how you want to feel when your life ends? You know, it's kind of the same thing when women are in these long-term marriages or long-term relationships. I've already invested 10, 20, 30 years into this relationship. I can't leave now.

Well, do you want to spend the rest of your life feeling how you do right now? Is that really how you want to spend what limited time you have? It's the same concept.

The nervous system is such an amazing thing. It has so much power and we don't even realize it. You know, before I took my certification last year, I didn't know much about the nervous system and somatics and how the body can heal itself and how the body talks to us. I knew of Joe Dispenza many years ago, but I didn't actually start reading his book until recently. I didn't realize that it's not just about physical healing.

It's about mental healing.

Let's think of it this way.

If there's something in your life that you don't like, and you would like to change. One technique that I am starting to do, because I'm also reading a book about becoming my future self now is use your mind to think about if this situation was better, and it looked like how I want it to.

Let's say you're single. Let's use that. Let's use an example. Let's say you're single and you really want to get married and you can't seem to find a man that either wants commitment or respects you or whatever that quality is you're looking for. Instead of focusing on your loneliness, instead of focusing on

What you don't want? What if you focused on if you already had what you want, how would that feel? Your future self already had that husband in that healthy marriage. What would your everyday life look and feel like?

and focus on that.

There are other areas of my life where I have done something similar and those very things have come true.

You know, if you've been following me, you know that one of my...

Big goals for this year was to move back to Colorado and in January I made the decision to actually act on it. And there were a lot of obstacles that I had to overcome. But I focused on what it would feel like to live here.

what it would be like to find a home that was nice and affordable.

And I found those things. And in fact, within two weeks of making the decision in January to move.

I came here, looked at housing, and had signed a year lease on an apartment, in fact, larger than the one that I had in Arizona. Yeah, a little bit more expensive, but well within reasonable pricing as far as Durango goes. If I had focused on all of the obstacles in my way, proving my income,

all of the talk of there's limited housing, you can't get rentals here. If I had focused on what I was up against instead of I'm just gonna do my best.

and I'm going to look at places and I'm going to have conversations with potential landlords and explain to them how I'm good for the money and show them my integrity, that's what got me here.

And I think understanding how the nervous system works also really helped. Yes, it was stressful. Yes, I was scared. And yes, even after I got here, there were all kinds of other obstacles I had to deal with and some I'm still dealing with.

But it's interesting, I had a conversation with someone just today and while there are still some challenges here with me finding my tribe, when I think about living here, there are a lot of pluses.

And the pluses might just outweigh the minuses. And maybe the minuses aren't deal-breakers. Maybe they're things I can live with or will change in the future. Colorado is definitely my home for sure, for good. Whether Durango is my forever home is not a decision I have to make now. And taking that away to...

I used to have to feel like I have to make a decision right now, putting a lot of pressure on me. And that will also cause a lot of stress. That will also cause the binge eating, know, putting stress on yourself when I don't even have to make that decision yet because I still haven't finished saving up money for a down payment. I'm going to be running for a little while and until I'm actually ready to buy a house, I don't have to make that decision. I'm going to see how the chips fall and how I feel.

at that time.

Sometimes giving ourselves some space and grace is also a great way to self-soothe and cope in a healthy way.

And I'd really like to express to you that not only do I teach these kind of techniques and my coaching, my coaching, but I live it. In fact, I teach what I live. I live it first and then I'm like, so this is how it's done. This is what's working. And then I share it with others. I also have learned some of this in certifications as well, but.

This is not just something I read in a textbook and got a degree on and have no experience in.

I have been through all of those same emotions that many of you feel. The shame of I two bowls of ice cream tonight and I should not have done that. And I was stressed. I was always stressed before I ate the ice cream and now I'm really stressed because I ate two bowls.

Now I'm beating myself up. I've there.

I've done the scrolling.

And I've done the shoving the feelings and all that under the carpet.

I know what it feels like to numb, and I know what it feels like to self soothe in a healthy way. I know what it feels like to go from shame to wholeness.

Healing sometimes goes beyond words. Sometimes it happens through art. Sometimes it happens through listening to our body and what it's saying, not what our mouth is saying.

Sometimes it's being willing to sit in the discomforts because on the other side of that, that's where the wholeness is. That's where the aha moments are. That's where you start to say.

I did eat that second bowl of ice cream tonight and I probably shouldn't have done that. I can't undo that. But next time I'm feeling this emotion and I feel that urge to do that, what can I do instead?

What can I do next time? And be okay and have grace.

And that's what I teach my clients.

getting from feeling like crap to feeling whole and graceful towards yourself.

I'm really excited about this next episode with Susan. It was a really interesting conversation. When I first met her, I was kind of skeptical. Like, I don't know if this is really a thing, but the more we talked, the more I realized she was onto something. And it reminded me of, I used to attend a domestic violence support group. There were many women there who had been physically beat.

And as they were talking or listening to others talk, they always provided adult coloring books. And I never understood why until I talked to Susan and then it all made sense. I want to thank you so much for letting me share my thoughts with you, my revelations and my own journey. I'm always grateful when people listen. I hope that there's one little nugget that you got out of it.

I'd love to hear from you. Send me an email. If there's something that just really touched your heart in this episode, I would absolutely love to hear from you.

And always remember, you have the power.

Darla Ridilla (28:02)
Thank you for listening to You Have the Power, the road to truth, freedom, and real connection. If you're a high performing woman who wants deeper love, real connection, and relationships that meet you at your level, but behind closed doors, you feel like you're always the one who's holding it together. If you've done the therapy, read the books, but still find yourself shrinking to keep the peace, you're over giving to feel valued, or questioning your worth when someone pulls away, you're not too much.

You're just accepting too little.

This podcast is here to name what's not working so you can finally create relationships that do. Ones that are safe, ones that are honest, ones that honor your power instead of asking you to do

If today's episode hit home, share it, subscribe, leave a review, or send it to a woman who's ready to stop proving and start choosing. If you're ready to go deeper, to break the pattern at the root, check the show notes. You'll find ways to connect with me and take that next step in your reinvention. You don't have to carry it all anymore. You have the power, and I'm here to walk that road with you.