70: The Weight You Feel Isn’t Guilt — It’s Truth Asking for a Voice

This episode isn’t for the woman who’s “struggling a little.”
It’s for the woman who ends every day with that tightening in her chest — the ache that whispers, “I didn’t do enough.”

Here’s the truth no one ever told you:
That ache isn’t guilt. It’s your body begging you to stop living someone else’s story.

High-achieving women are suffocating under invisible emotional labor — carrying responsibilities they never agreed to, absorbing tension that doesn’t belong to them, and performing a version of womanhood that drains the life out of them.
And the holidays only turn the volume up.

In Episode 2 of The Magnetic Mother: Rewriting the Story of Womanhood, Darla exposes why burnout becomes your baseline, why you mistake overwhelm for failure, and why the story you inherited is the very thing holding you back.

Pulling insight from conversations with Jaime Weatherholt and Amanda Bearce, she reveals the shift every woman must make:

from fear to presence,
from emotional labor to agency,
from performance to empowered, magnetic connection.

If you’re finally ready to stop repeating the narrative you were handed —
and start living the one your truth has been trying to write —
this episode is your turning point.

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

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Transcript

Darla Ridilla (00:00)
High achieving women are carrying emotional loads that were never meant for them. And that ache that you feel, it's not your failure. It's your truth and it's asking for a voice.

I have lived many of the experiences that I'm sure that you are having.

And it's that you manage all the logistics of your home. You anticipate everybody else's needs. And you absorb the emotional tension in the room, everyone that you walk into.

You clean up the chaos that no one else sees. But somewhere inside of all of that, you're also trying to navigate the holidays, the blended families, divorce schedules, physical or mental distance from your children, and maybe even the complex reality of estranged family members. And you keep the peace even when it's costing you your own.

Here is the part that hits the hardest. You've been conditioned to blame yourself for the pressure that you never agreed to carry.

Darla Ridilla (00:56)
Welcome to You Have the Power, the road to truth, freedom, and real connection. I'm Darla Ridilla a somatic trauma-informed relationship coach for high achieving women who are done shrinking and ready to live life fully expressed. If you've done the healing work, you've set the boundaries, reclaimed your worth, and yet your connections still don't feel magnetic, you're not broken. You're just ready for your next evolution. This podcast is your guide.

through the magnetic connections pathway from presence to agency to empowerment. So you can create relationships that feel like home. Each episode brings bold truths, somatic tools and embodied strategies to help you stop over giving, stand in your power and connect from your deepest truth. Because you're not here to be chosen, you are here to choose from your power, your presence.

and your truth. Let's begin with today's topic.

Darla Ridilla (02:01)
Hello and welcome to another episode of You Have the Power, the Road to Truth, Freedom and Real Connection. And today is the second episode in the series of The Magnetic Mother, Rewriting the Story of Womanhood.

Darla Ridilla (02:17)
You ever noticed how you can be powerful, accomplished, deeply capable, and still go to bed with that tight, subtle ache in your chest? The one that whispers, I didn't do enough today. I didn't do enough for my kids, not enough for my partner, not enough for my family.

certainly didn't do enough for myself. But that isn't guilt. That's the weight of the story that you've inherited. And it's not a story that you consciously chose. And today, we're gonna rewrite that story

if you are ready to stop performing for love, to stop abandoning your needs to keep the peace, and finally,

ready to step into those relationships that are rooted in clarity, agency, and magnetic connection, you are exactly what you are meant to be.

I am going to say something that most people just won't. High achieving women are carrying emotional loads that were never meant for them. And that ache that you feel, it's not your failure. It's your truth and it's asking for a voice. So let's talk a little bit more about that because

I have lived many of the experiences that I'm sure that you are having.

And it's that you manage all the logistics of your home. You anticipate everybody else's needs. And you absorb the emotional tension in the room, everyone that you walk into.

You clean up the chaos that no one else sees. But somewhere inside of all of that, you're also trying to navigate the holidays, the blended families, divorce schedules, physical or mental distance from your children, and maybe even the complex reality of estranged family members. And you keep the peace even when it's costing you your own.

Here is the part that hits the hardest. You've been conditioned to blame yourself for the pressure that you never agreed to carry.

And in my conversation with my last guest, Jamie, she talked about how women compare themselves as mothers to their own childhood memories, societal expectations, and those images of the perfect moms that we see everywhere, whether social media, TV shows, family expectations. But those comparisons

actually create a war inside of her body, because the thought that the pervasive thought is that no matter what I do, it's never enough.

in the next episode with my next guest, Amanda, she shares how burnout has become a way of life and it's become so pervasive in our society. We don't even call it that anymore. It's seen as functioning, surviving, or just pushing through. But the emotional cost of burnout is that it builds up quietly.

but we start to feel it in the tension in our shoulders and the breath that's very shallow and our inability to sleep well.

and in our reactions to others' And it also starts to affect our relationships.

This burnout or collapse, it's not a weakness. It's actually exhaustion.

your body sending you a message that it's time for a change.

Because the truth is you're not overwhelmed because you can't handle your life.

You're overwhelmed because you're living inside a story that you've inherited.

One that was never designed for your body, your voice, and it's certainly not your truth.

So here's the truth. You don't need to do more. You need to stop living in this outdated story of womanhood. And this is where the magnetic connections pathway comes in. Because presence, agency, and empowerment, they all lead to magnetic connections. Presence is that moment when you recognize the pattern. Agency is when you name what you need.

and empowerment, that is the moment where you hold the boundary. A magnetic connection is that moment where your relationships shift. They shift because you have. So let me kind of tie this into lived experience because I've also been the working mom that's working 50 hour weeks. I've been the single mom trying to keep it all together.

I've missed moments with my daughter. I've had to have early mornings and late nights where I walk through the door and I'm exhausted because I've carried the weight of the day.

And then I've had those times in my life where I thought I was failing my daughter. I felt it often actually, even though I was doing everything that I could to survive.

nothing to do with our truth. It has everything to do with our conditioning.

Society has asked us to be quiet, to be compliant, to be the peacemakers, to carry the weight, to tiptoe around everybody else.

Darla Ridilla (08:29)
If something in today's episode stirred something in you, and if you've done the work, but something still just feels off, it still feels like something's missing. This is your moment to come home to yourself. You're not asking for too much. You have simply outgrown the patterns that no longer fit the woman that you've become. And you don't need another mindset shift. You need embodiment.

the kind that moves you through the magnetic connections pathway from presence to agency to empowerment.

so you can create relationships that feel magnetic, grounded, and true.

And it doesn't have to take years. I created this process to shorten the timeline because most women are much closer to peace, clarity, and connection than they realize. and it begins with a free call, a space to get clear on what's keeping you stuck and what it looks like.

to lead from your truth instead of your old story. No pressure, no performance, just resonance, clarity, and your next aligned step.

You're in the right place and you're closer than you think. Go to highvaluewoman.info slash call and book your free call today.

Because you already have the power. Now it's time to use it.

Darla Ridilla (10:02)
but I'm gonna share with you three chefs that changed everything for me. And it's also helped change the women I work with.

So the first one is we have got to stop parenting from guilt and start parenting with presence. And this is what Jamie and I explored in the last episode. When you stop comparing yourself to your childhood or to what a perfect mom is supposed to be, you actually start relating to your child and you start relating to yourself, who you actually are, not who you're supposed to be.

And when you come from a place of presence, you're no longer operating from fear.

Number two is you need to stop managing everyone else's emotions and start naming what your needs are. And this connects to the conversation that's coming up with Amanda. Burnout happens when we stop listening to ourselves.

It stops the moment we say, this is what I need. And you shift from survival mode into agency.

Number three, stop performing expectations and start choosing aligned connections. Especially during the holidays, there is so much pressure from so many sources, particularly from family during this time to do things, to be places, to act a certain way. But you do not owe access.

to people who require you to betray yourself so they can feel comfortable.

Your power is in your presence, not your performance. And this is what makes you magnetic.

If you listen to the last episode, it was actually recorded five months ago. And at that point, I was having some issues with my new dog Gala. And I had mentioned I was going to the dog trainer the following weekend. And so what has happened since then has not only opened my eyes to the relationship I have with my dog, but actually how it relates to all relationships in my life with people.

five months ago, when I took Gayla to the trainer, she was anxious, she was reactive, hyper vigilant, She didn't trust me, and she probably didn't even trust herself. I don't have a lot of history about her past.

She came in as a stray and had at least two litters of puppies and had been in the shelter for several weeks because she was a black pit bull and no one wanted her.

And if we put ourselves in her position, I'm sure in some ways we can relate.

We're lost in our world. No one seems to choose us. And we seem judged for one reason or another.

But today, she's calmer and she's grounded. She's much more attentive my expectations. She's more connected to me. And it's not because I fixed her.

It's because she finally feels safe in her environment. But how did we get there? And it was something very simple that shifted everything for us. The trainer gave me a very simple technique called correct, redirect, and reward. Correct is...

When she's doing something I don't want her to do say we are taking a walk.

She loves to eat grass. So we're taking a walk and she's eating the grass a lot to the point that we're not even walking. I will say leave it. And what that means is stop doing whatever is you're doing. That's her signal to stop doing it. Then I redirect her. Come on, let's go. Let's go for a walk. And when she does it, I reward her.

either with a treat or most of the time it's verbal praise. Yes, that's great. Good girl. You're a good walker.

What didn't work was just telling her, don't do that, because she didn't know what to do next. She didn't feel safe. It felt confusing and chaotic.

But this new technique is what safety and reciprocity actually looks like. And it isn't just a dog training method. It's a relationship method. And just like it changed everything between the relationship with my dog, because her nervous system finally had clarity.

It shifted everything inside of me as well. Because as women, we're exactly the same. Our nervous systems respond better to clarity, not so good to chaos. We need truth, not guessing. We need boundaries, not confusion.

and consistency, not manipulation.

when you correct and you say, this doesn't work for me, you're creating your presence.

When you redirect and say, here's what I need, you create agency. And when someone meets you there, or when you meet yourself, you create empowerment.

And that empowerment and that reward, that's transforms every relationship.

It transforms the relationship with others and most importantly the one with yourself.

And this is what I want every woman to You rewrite the story of womanhood, not by being perfect, but by being clear, by being honest, present, aligned, even during the holidays, even in chaos.

You can find your peace, even in blended families. You can find your consistency. Even with the distance from your kids, you can have clarity.

even with estranged relatives.

even when you're the black sheep, Because peace is not found in compliance, it's found in your truths.

And the moment that you choose your own truth, that's when your entire story shifts.

You are not asking for too much. You've simply been accepting too little.

And you don't have to repeat the story that you've inherited. You don't have to keep accepting it and telling it. You get to rewrite it with presence, agency, and empowerment. And you get to create magnetic connections. You are the story breaker, the pattern ender, because you are the magnetic mother.

You have the power. And now it's time to use it.

Darla Ridilla (17:18)
Thank you for listening to You Have the Power, the Road to Truth, Freedom, and Real Connection.

If you've done the work, you've healed, grown and set boundaries, but your relationships still don't match the woman you've become, then this is your moment to rise into the next level of connection. Because this isn't just about staying stuck in the story of what went wrong. It's about stepping into what's possible when you lead your relationships from presence, agency and empowerment and finally experience magnetic connection.

If this episode sparks something in you, share it with the woman who's also ready to come home to herself. Subscribe so you don't miss what's next. And if you're ready to live this, not just to listen to it, let's connect. Go to highvaluewoman.info.

slash call to take the next step toward connection that feels alive, aligned and true to who you are. Because you don't need another podcast episode, you need a new pattern. And you're the one who gets to choose. Stay in the old story or write a new one.