98: Silence Reveals What Love Couldn’t

You can love someone and still need to walk away.

Read that again.

Because too many women are staying in relationships that cost them their peace simply because love is present.

Love is not the same thing as trust.

Love is not the same thing as emotional availability.

Love is not the same thing as healthy connection.

And love alone is not enough to build a relationship with someone who refuses to do the work.

In this episode, I'm sharing the painful story of why I divorced my alcoholic ex-husband after giving him a second chance, what happened when sobriety didn't create emotional availability, and why I eventually realized that missing someone doesn't mean they're aligned for you.

I'm also sharing how the same lesson showed up in my family, leading to permanent no contact with my sister after years of repeated ruptures, broken trust, and ignored boundaries.

Here's the truth most people don't want to say out loud:

Sometimes the person you love isn't the person you can build a healthy life with.

And sometimes silence reveals what constant connection was hiding.

In this episode, we'll explore:

• Why no contact isn't punishment - it's about access
• The difference between forgiveness, trust, and reconciliation
• Why emotionally unavailable people aren't always bad people
• Why missing someone is not evidence they belong in your life
• The questions that helped me choose peace over potential
• How to know when love alone isn't enough

And perhaps the hardest truth of all:

My peace is not worth the cost of your dysfunction, your drama, or your emotional unavailability.

If you've ever struggled to let go of someone you still love, this conversation is for you.

Because some people lose access because they never changed.

Some lose access because they changed too late.

And some lose access because the woman they once knew no longer exists.

Connect with Darla Ridilla: 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You can love someone and still lose peace in a relationship because silence has a way of revealing things that being in constant contact just doesn't. Without that constant interaction, the patterns actually become easier to see. When we miss someone, that doesn't necessarily mean they are right or wrong for us. We can miss someone and they can still be bad for us. And that silence, that is also where so many women begin realizing something that they just couldn't see while they were still in the relationship. Welcome to You Have the Power, The Road to Truth Freedom and Real Connection. This podcast is for women who are tired of feeling unseen, unheard, and disconnected from their own voice. Whether it shows up in dating, relationships, business, leadership, or just the conversations that you're afraid to have. The results are the same. You bite your tongue, second-guess yourself, talk to yourself about what you are, and call it patience, understanding, or being a bigger person. I'm Darla Rodilla, voice and podcast launch mentor, and creator of the magnetic connection pathway. This is about becoming offered, it's about becoming unavailable for anything that requires you to manage yourself. Here, we explore the magnetic connection pathway. Because the most unavailable men are the only reason that stops being their breakfast. They're just one of the places that it happens. And when you stop drinking, softening, and silencing yourself to keep peace, you stop feeling invisible in your own life. You stop wondering if you're asking too much, and you start showing up as the woman who knows her point, knows it matters. Let's begin. You can love someone and still lose peace in a relationship. And I think that that's one of the hardest truths for women to accept. Because we've been taught that if love exists, that we should keep trying. We should keep explaining. But sometimes silence reveals what the connection was hiding. Today's conversation is about what happens after connection or access is removed. And this is when we've done it, not from a place of punishment or manipulation, but from a place of self-leadership. Because silence has a way of revealing things that being in constant contact just doesn't or could. Many women, they feel that no contact, it changes the relationship, but often it just simply exposes what was already there. When we're in no contact, that silence removes the distractions. It's going to remove the excuses that he makes or we make to ourselves. It removes that constant cycle of hope and the dopamine hits. And without that constant interaction, the patterns absolutely become easier to see. When we miss someone, that doesn't necessarily mean they are right or wrong for us. That is not the gauge or the barometer of what is good or an alignment. We can miss someone and they can still be bad for us. And that silence, that is also where so many women they begin realizing something that they just couldn't see while they were still in the relationship. Because the reality is some relationships, they don't end because love was absent. They end because love by itself, it was insufficient. It just simply was not enough. I have personally experienced this. I almost think, in some ways, when something falls apart, when you still love someone, it's even harder to walk away and go no contact. I do believe that my last husband genuinely loved me. No question about it. The issue wasn't his lack of love for me, it was his lack of love for himself that destroyed the relationship. He was an alcoholic. So those behavior patterns definitely caused some damage. He would frequently get fired like clockwork every six months. And so I was left holding the gap. I was the one who had to cover all the bills over and over and over again. As you can imagine, by the end of the marriage, when I finally had had enough, I was in debt up to here. Our savings was gone. And my nervous system could not handle one more job loss. So I decided to get legally separated and I kicked him out. I was already paying the bills all by myself. So what did I need him for? In fact, one of the things I said to him when I kicked him out was, You are dead weight to me. He was like a block of cement tied around my neck, holding me underwater. There was no way I was going to get out from under that financially, because at least I had the expenses of one person and not two. And all of the emotional drama that went with it. At some point after we became separated, he did get sober and he did stop drinking. So I decided that I was willing to give him another chance with the relationship before I filed for divorce. We did remain legally separated and we did remain in separate households. We were not living together during this trial reconciliation. And I'm so glad I did that because I wanted to see what he did before I gave up my housing. During this time, I only saw him on the weekends because we lived about an hour apart. And so it just wasn't viable to see each other after work during the week. And I really valued those two days with him because that's all I got. But unfortunately, he didn't. While he did stop drinking, he became what's known as a dry drunk. He regularly attended his AA meetings to keep from drinking, but he didn't dive deep enough into the whole reason he drank in the first place. I understand that he experienced a lot of abuse as a child, and that's what caused him to want to escape from his reality. But he didn't have the capacity to face that on his own. And because of that, and because he no longer had the alcohol to soften the edges of his anger, it came out and he directed it at me. Way more than when he was drinking. And so what ended up happening is those one or two days a week that I got to see him turned out to be totally miserable experiences. There was one weekend where he was sick on the Saturday. So I only got to see him on Sunday. And let me add, he got sick a lot. And it was very annoying because it interfered with our plans. It made me miserable because he complained. He was no fun to be around. And it cut into our precious time. And on this weekend, the one day that I did see him, I was so excited because we were going to go out to breakfast at this really nice restaurant in Tacoma and the Proctor section. If you're familiar with Tacoma, that's a very nice up-and-coming area. And it's clean and there's nice restaurants. We're at this delicious breakfast at this really nice restaurant. And he starts complaining that the iced tea costs $3. In any restaurant, that wouldn't be a bad thing, let alone this nice restaurant. I was amazed that he was going to act like this on the one day of the week I was going to see him. This was a pattern I was starting to notice. The following weekend, we were walking along the Puget Sound on this beautiful sunny day, which in Washington you have to maximize. And he was complaining the whole time. And it was during that final weekend that I realized I can't continue this. This second chance is not working and it's not in my best interest. And I have grown and I have changed, and he hasn't. And he's not going to. I felt like I gave him more than enough opportunity to show me that things were going to be different this time because I couldn't go back to the way it was or something worse. So the following weekend, I went to his house and I ended it for good. And shortly after filed for divorce. It was a painful experience. But I realized I can love someone and still choose not to stay in connection with them. I know that he wanted to love me in a healthy way, but for whatever reason, he wasn't able to face his demons and do the work. And so he remained emotionally unavailable and sabotage the relationship. Sometimes the sad reality is an emotionally unavailable man isn't a bad person, per se. They just aren't capable of healthy love. They just aren't able to face the things in their life that they need to change to be able to be emotionally willing. And this doesn't just happen in romantic relationships. While that is the focus of this podcast, it does show up in other areas of your life. I've definitely found that how we do one thing, we do everything. When we change how we interact in one sort of relationship, it kind of has a domino effect and it changes all of the relationships. For many years, I have been estranged and in a permanent no contact with my sister. This decision was not something I took lightly. But after several years of repeated ruptures and broken trust, I gave her repeated opportunities to show me that she could be different. But over and over again, things would go well for a while. And then the clause would come out. And this happened one too many times. There were so many ruptures of trust that I was no longer willing to go back and give her any more chances. And so, in order to protect my peace, I had to cut off all contact and walk away from her life. And the patterns that I saw before I went to no contact, unfortunately, they continued afterwards. Sometimes what happens is that when we cut someone off, they don't want to accept that we have walked out of their life. They don't want to take ownership for their behavior that caused that rupture in the first place. And they certainly do not want to let you go. And this is the situation that I have been dealing with repeatedly over the past several years, where she completely ignores my boundary of no contact, where she reaches out in many ways. And every time she does that, it creates another rupture because it reinforces the pattern that I've already seen in her. And the ignoring of my boundary, all it does is it validates the whole reason that I cut her off in the first place. And I can choose to forgive her or not. I can choose to love her, but not like her. Because forgiveness and love and reconciliation are not the same thing. Trust and access are earned, not given. So you can decide that you want to forgive someone, but still not give them access to your life. You can accept their apology if you choose to, but still say, I can't have you in my life. Because no contact, it doesn't reveal that there wasn't love. What it reveals is that love alone just wasn't enough. And if we pause here and we look at the two different stories, they're different situations, different types of relationships, one romantic and one a family relationship. They may be different circumstances, but the lesson is the same. You can love someone, you can wish them well, you can wish the best for them. And then you can still recognize that staying connected comes at too high of a cost. Remember what I said in the first episode of this series? That no contact isn't about punishment or manipulation. It's not about control, it's about access. And my peace is simply not worth the cost of your dysfunction, your drama, and your emotional unavailability. And that's why I can realize that staying connected to some people, it comes at too high of a cost. And this is when I walk away because my peace, it is not negotiable. Now, before we wrap up, I want you just to sit with a few questions. And these aren't questions about the other people, they're questions about your life, and they're questions about your peace. So just take a breath and ask yourself this is this relationship bringing more peace or more chaos? Am I staying because things are good today? Or am I hoping that they'll be different tomorrow? Have I been accepting behavior that no longer aligns with the woman that I'm becoming? Am I confusing history with compatibility? Am I holding on to someone because of who they could be instead of accepting who they really are? If nothing changed, would I still choose this relationship one year from now? Do I feel calm in this connection? Or am I spending most of my time managing my uncertainty? Am I protecting this relationship at the expense of protecting my peace? And this is probably the most important question. Does this relationship align with who I have become? Because sometimes we keep revisiting a door that no longer fits the woman who's standing in front of it. And not because someone's bad or there wasn't love present, not because you didn't have good memories. I had many with my ex-husband, but because we've grown, we've changed. And growth, it changes what we're available for. And remember my piece, it is not negotiable. As we start to wrap up, I want to leave you with this one final thought. So many women spend years staying silent, silent about what they need, what they know, and what they've experienced. Silence about the truth that's sitting right in front of them. And eventually that silence becomes its own kind of prison. Maybe you have spent years questioning yourself, or you spent years explaining away behavior that never should have been explained. Maybe you spent years shrinking your voice so someone else could stay comfortable. And if that's you, I want to invite you into my free course. You have something to say. Three shifts to help you start your podcast. Because the opposite of emotional unavailability isn't just healthy relationships, it's self-expression, it's trusting your voice and it's saying what you mean, it's standing in your power and deciding that your experiences they matter and that your story deserves to be heard. And if you've ever been waiting for permission to speak up, share your message, start a podcast, or simply stop hiding parts of yourself. This is it. The course is completely free, and you can grab it from the link in the show notes. Because the world doesn't need another woman who's making herself smaller. It needs more women who are willing to use their voices. And next week, we're taking this conversation about no contact even deeper. What happens when they come back? What if they're sober now? What if they've been in therapy? What if they finally understand? What if they have genuinely changed? And perhaps the most important question of all, does reopening this connection align with who I've become? We're going to talk about why some doors are meant to stay closed, why forgiveness and reconciliation are just not the same thing. And why change does not automatically restore access. Because some people they lose access because they never changed. Some people continue to lose access because they changed too late. And some people lose access because the woman they once knew no longer exists. I'll see you next week for part three of the series on no contact and the power of silence. You have the power. So now it is time to act 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. This isn't about becoming louder. It's about becoming unavailable for anything that requires you to abandon yourself. If this episode moves something in you, share it, like it, and subscribe. So you stay connected to what's next. You deserve to be seen and you deserve to be heard. So the question is when are you going to stop violencing yourself?