88: You’re Not Confused - You’re Avoiding the Truth

You’re not confused about him.

You’re over-processing inconsistency.

You keep replaying conversations.
Trying to figure out what you did wrong.
Trying to get back to how it felt in the beginning.

But the reality is...

You’re not trying to understand him.
You’re trying to avoid what his behavior is already showing you. 

And as long as you stay in your head…

you don’t have to make a decision.

This is where rumination keeps you stuck.

In Part 2 of this series, we break down the difference between rumination and discernment - not as a concept, but in real life.

What it actually looks like to:

•  stop questioning yourself 
•  start observing behavior 
•  and make decisions based on truth instead of potential 

Because emotionally unavailable men create confusion.

Emotionally willing men create clarity.

And the woman you’re becoming?

She doesn’t sit in confusion.
She observes.
She decides.
She moves.

If you’re ready to stop overthinking and start trusting yourself…

this is where that begins.

Connect with Darla Ridilla: 

Book a Magnetic Connections Call: https://www.highvaluewoman.info/call

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Transcript

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When I was in rumination, I was asking questions. What did I do wrong? How can I fix it? And when I was in discernment, I was making decisions. Instead of asking questions, I was making statements. This doesn't work for me. And when you think about your own relationships, and maybe you're in a rumination pattern, you're not attached to him. You're attached to the possibility of what he could become. Welcome to You Have the Power of the Road to Truth Freedom and Real Connection. This podcast is for women who are done asking why emotionally unavailable men keep showing up and are finally ready to change the way they relate. The chemistry is always there, the potential looks promising, but the consistency, death, and emotional presence just never fully arrived. And this isn't about fixing yourself. It's about recognizing for you. Here we work magnetic connection pathway. Agency empowerment. Because emotionally unavailable men aren't the problem. They're the feedback. And when you stop managing relationships that require you to disappear, emotionally willing men are magnetized to you. Let's begin. You're not confused. You are just overprocessing inconsistency. You have trained yourself to think instead of just trusting what you feel. And if you're exhausted and you've been replaying conversations, you've been trying to figure out what you did wrong, how you can fix it, this is where it's going to stop. If you listen to the last episode, we talked about why women ruminate. That was part one. Today is part two, the difference between rumination and discernment. Because the reality is you're not trying to understand them. You're just trying to get back to the way it felt in the beginning. That isn't how it's going to feel going forward. You don't trust what you see. So this is where the rumination comes in, the overthinking. And then you stay in your head because that is going to give you the permission to not make a decision, to stay right where you are. You aren't necessarily overthinking all the time. It's just at certain times when he does certain things. For example, in the beginning, when he is texting a lot or he's communicating a lot, he's taking you out a lot, he's investing a lot, and then he starts to drop off. That's when our mind starts to kick in. And all those thoughts of what I did wrong, why is he doing this? Did I turn him off? It's all focused on our behavior instead of his. And when we're in this state, we feel it in our body. That anxiety, that tension, the tightening of our muscles, our throat, our chest gets tight, our mind races. And we're trying just so hard to understand what happened. Why did things change? But that's our head thinking instead of our body listening. Because really all we want is just to get back to what he was in the beginning. And when we say all those things to ourselves about, you know, hey, what changed? Did I do something? Did I come on too strong? Did I say something that offended him? Maybe he just needs space. Am I moving too fast? Am I moving too slow? This is where we're focusing more on ourselves and our behavior instead of really using discernment and focusing on his behavior. So today we are going to talk about the difference between rumination and discernment. So let's talk about rumination first. Rumination is not really processing, it's not evaluating his behavior. It's basically your nervous system trying to create safety through overthinking, through analysis. And emotionally unavailable men love it when you ruminate because it keeps you in that loop of uncertainty, that anxiety, and it gives them the access that they haven't deserved. Because while we're trying to figure out what he's doing, we aren't paying attention to the signals he's sending us. And maybe it's more about what he's not doing that we should be paying attention to. And as women, we're fixers, we want to help people, we want to fix them, we want to fix the situation. But this isn't about understanding him so we can fix him. This is about observing patterns so we can make a sound decision. Because when you are discerning his behavior, you're not trying to decode it, you're not trying to figure it out, psychoanalyze them. You are simply observing what he does and then making a decision based on that. And often when we're ruminating, it sounds like those questions. What did I do? What have I done to turn him off? All of those questions that we referenced earlier in this episode about what we are doing, what we need to change, what we need to fix, that is rumination. But discernment, it's more like decisions. I said this, he did this, I have a decision to make based on that behavior or that reaction. When we look at what rumination looks like in my life, I stayed in a relationship for 10 years trying to figure him out, trying to figure out why he was getting mad, why he was going quiet, why his energy was shifting. What did I do wrong? Why is he mad at me? Could I have done something differently? Could I have changed it? Could I have fixed it? And how do I make this stop? And during that 10-year relationship and marriage, what I found myself doing is appeasing him, of doing everything to make him happy, not looking at the reality of his behavior being not only abusive, but dismissive, of giving my power away to him. I was in this constant loop of believing his crap, that he told me I was the one who was at fault. I was creating the tension. And I believed it. Instead of listening to my signals, I ignored all of those body signals that said, this is not okay. This is abuse. This is unhealthy. This is not a shared dynamic. This is an emotionally unavailable man. I didn't listen to any of that. I was more concerned about keeping him happy and appeasing him. And the rumination loop that was going on my head kept me there. It kept me distracted. And it actually, in a way, was serving a narrative in my head that I deserved to be treated that way. And as long as I was focused on him and how I could do better with him, I wasn't focused on his behavior and the reality that I needed to leave the marriage. I was more concerned about making the pain in the moment stop. If I understood why he was doing those things, why I caused him to do those things, I can fix it. I can fix him. And then after 10 years of overinvesting, compromising what I needed and wanted, I left. And then it took me another year after leaving to figure it out. I had been in an abusive marriage. I had been gaslighted. I had been taken advantage of. That is rumination in real time. But if you go to the other side and you look at discernment, what does that look like in my life? Discernment showed up in my last relationship. I only stayed for two and a half months. And it started the same way. The love bombing, the future faking, the dopamine hits, the intense connection and investment. But then I saw the pattern again. After that love bombing phase was over, he started to withdraw. He started to break promises. He started to um create anxiety within me. And what was interesting is the anxiety was more so when I was not with him than I was with him. And instead of taking 10 years to figure it out, it took me a couple of months. And the difference also is I confronted him directly. When his communication was dropping off, when he was breaking promises, I came to him and said, Hey, you said that you would call me when you got safely to work. I didn't hear from you today, and I was really worried about you. Why did you make a promise you didn't intend to keep? Or when you make a promise and you don't follow through, that breaks trust. If I can't trust you in the small things, how can I trust you in the bigger things? I never said those things to my ex-husband because I was more concerned about not upsetting him and staying in his good graces instead of honoring the truth of the relationship and what I really needed from him. And when I confronted this last boyfriend, his reaction, it confirmed everything. And because now I was observing his behavior, I realized he wasn't emotionally available. He wasn't capable of the committed relationship he said he was interested in. He went from talking about a long-term committed relationship to the night I left saying I'm not ready for one. And I think part of that was is because I held my standards this time. I didn't give in. I tried to have constructive conversations with him. I needed certain behaviors from him. I needed him to invest in himself so we could invest in the relationship together. I needed him to keep promises. I needed him to earn the access I was giving him. And when I addressed him in those moments where I didn't see him meeting those standards, he got defensive. He turned it back on me. He said, You're you're asking for too much. You want too much. It's not that big of a deal. But it was a big deal because he was showing me who he really was, and that wasn't working for me. So after just two and a half months, I left. I didn't love him any less than I loved the other man. The difference was I love myself more. And I trusted my body, I trusted my intuition, and I used discernment to make a decision, even though it was a painful decision. Because I knew in the long run that discernment was going to get me to where I wanted to be. It was going to help me find the relationship that I wanted with an emotionally willing man. Emotionally unavailable men create confusion, but emotionally willing men, they bring clarity. When I saw the same pattern happening all over again, I knew it was time to go because I knew what the future held for me. And I didn't want to go there again. I didn't want to spend 10 years of my life trying to fix something that couldn't be fixed. And so as you can see in these two stories, when I was in rumination, I was asking questions. What did I do wrong? How can I fix it? And when I was in discernment, I was making decisions. Instead of asking questions, I was making statements. This doesn't work for me. And when you think about your own relationships, and maybe you're in a rumination pattern, you're not attached to him. You're attached to the possibility of what he could become. And when you're in rumination, that possibility becomes that carrot on a stick and you just keep chasing it. But when you're in discernment, you can look at the possibilities, but you're also looking at the reality. If he's an emotionally unavailable man, there's no amount of time or investment that's going to change that if he doesn't want to change it. But when you are with an emotionally willing man and you bring discernment to the table, that's refreshing to him. He may have also been in a lot of relationships where women weren't showing up in their best selves or in a way that he wanted them to. And when you say, This is what I need from you, you're showing strength, you're showing power, not control, power. And he wants you to say what you want and need. So he can decide if he can meet you where you are. An emotionally willing man isn't going to do it perfect. And he might do some of these things not meaning to. Maybe he gets busy at work or distracted or overwhelmed in his life and he forgets to call you. But he's going to come back and say, I messed up. I said I was going to call you at two o'clock and I forgot. And I know that upset you. I'm going to work really hard at that so I don't do that again. You know what? I think I'm going to set a timer on my phone. He's going to not just say I'm sorry. He's going to, he's going to take an action to fix that. He's going to say, let's talk about it. And once again, that is showing you a behavior that helps you to make a decision whether you want to continue or not. Because when you're in rumination, you're dysregulated and you're spiraling. But when you are in discernment, you are grounded. You may be making a difficult decision, but you are making it from a place of power. Because the woman you're becoming, she doesn't entertain confusion. She may observe it, she may see it. It may show up in her dating or relationship experiences. But she's going to evaluate the situation. She's going to observe behavior. And she's going to make a decision based on that. And she is going to not only love herself more than anybody else, she's going to trust herself more than anybody else. She's going to listen to her body. She's going to stop asking questions about herself. And instead of saying, What did I do wrong? Why is this happening? She's going to say, What does his behavior or his reaction tell me about him and his emotional availability? Is he emotionally available? Is he emotionally unavailable? Or is he emotionally willing to do that and make that decision based on the answer to that question? And in the next episode, we are going to talk about how you do that. Now that you know the difference between rumination and discernment, we're going to talk in more detail about how you make those decisions, how you stop the overthinking in real time, how do you build internal trust? And how do you find the courage and the power within yourself to say no when your mind is telling you to say yes. I've been giving him too many passes. I've been feeling unhappy in my relationships, in my dating experiences. And I am ready to go from rumination to discernment. I am ready to be able to observe his behavior and make those decisions that are the best ones for me and what I need and deserve. I am ready to stop being with men who create confusion and find that emotionally willing man who's going to create clarity. If this is you, I'm going to invite you into a magnetic connections call. This is not a coaching session. This is for us to talk about your patterns, where you are, and what is the next step to get to that place of discernment. Because an emotionally unavailable man is not going to meet you where you are. An emotionally willing man, he's going to want to bring clarity to the table. Thank you for listening today. You have the power. Now it's time to start acting like it. Thank you for listening to You Have the Power, the Road to Truth, Freedom, and Road Connection. If something landed while you were listening, pay attention to that. Emotionally unavailable men aren't a mystery to solve. They're information. They show you exactly where you've been waiting, minimizing, or tolerating what doesn't actually work for you. This podcast isn't here to teach you how to manage that better. It's here to help you stop participating in it. Share it and subscribe. You're just done returning yourself.