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How To Stop Trying The Case Before You Hear The Evidence · Toxic Girls Zone

0:03
Speaker 1: Welcome back, or welcome if you're new here and you
0:06
Speaker 1: found this episode because something happened with the phone and
0:09
Speaker 1: you need someone to talk you down from the ceiling.
0:11
Speaker 1: Either way, I'm glad you're here. Okay, so I was
0:14
Speaker 1: standing on my balcony this week, which sounds peaceful, and
0:17
Speaker 1: it was not peaceful because I was staring at my
0:18
Speaker 1: plants and feeling like a failure. I have six plants
0:21
Speaker 1: out there. Six. I watered three of them this week
0:24
Speaker 1: and I did it out of guilt, not out of love,
0:26
Speaker 1: because I walked past them and two of them had
0:27
Speaker 1: that look. You know the look. The slightly dramatic lean,
0:30
Speaker 1: the yellowing edge of a leaf, that is clearly performing
0:32
Speaker 1: its own funeral, right? So I watered the guiltiest looking
0:35
Speaker 1: three and I said out loud, I see you. I'm sorry, please.
0:39
Speaker 1: One of them might actually make it. The other two are,
0:41
Speaker 1: let's say, in a complicated place. This is the life
0:43
Speaker 1: I manage. I keep a rescue dog who steals every
0:46
Speaker 1: single sock I own. I have a partner who leaves
0:48
Speaker 1: sticky notes on the coffee maker. And I am out
0:50
Speaker 1: here on my balcony genuinely negotiating with a succulent. Anyways,
0:54
Speaker 1: today we are talking about something that is going to
0:56
Speaker 1: feel a lot more personal than a plant. Here's what
1:00
Speaker 1: made me think of this episode, right? I was looking
1:02
Speaker 1: at the one plant that actually seems like it's going
1:04
Speaker 1: to make it. This little survivor with all its energy
1:06
Speaker 1: going into one new leaf. And I thought about how
1:08
Speaker 1: much we pour into watching for signs that something's about
1:11
Speaker 1: to die. And I started thinking about the phone thing.
1:13
Speaker 1: You know the phone thing. The screen tilts just half
1:15
Speaker 1: an inch. He shifts it slightly when you walk into
1:17
Speaker 1: the room. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe your brain just said
1:20
Speaker 1: he did. And now you're not sure which it was.
1:22
Speaker 1: And that not sure is its own whole situation. I
1:25
Speaker 1: want to talk about that. I want to talk about
1:27
Speaker 1: what happens in the 90 seconds after you notice. because
1:29
Speaker 1: that 90 seconds is where everything actually goes wrong. But first,
1:32
Speaker 1: I need you to know this is going to hit
1:34
Speaker 1: somewhere you did not expect. What I'm about to say
1:36
Speaker 1: is going to make part of you defensive, and I
1:40
Speaker 1: need you to know that part, the defensive one. She
1:42
Speaker 1: is exactly who this episode is for. The plant and
1:45
Speaker 1: I have genuinely the same energy right now, both of
1:48
Speaker 1: us clinging on, hoping nobody notices the damage we've been
1:51
Speaker 1: quietly accumulating. I'm not okay, she's barely okay, and together
1:55
Speaker 1: we are two organisms doing our best on a small
1:57
Speaker 1: balcony in a city I moved to from a place
1:58
Speaker 1: where everyone knew my name. Okay, let's get into it.
2:03
Speaker 1: Picture this. You're on the couch. It's a normal evening,
2:06
Speaker 1: nothing dramatic. He shifts his phone screen, maybe angles it
2:09
Speaker 1: slightly away, maybe just picks it up and puts it
2:11
Speaker 1: face down. You don't say anything. You keep your face
2:14
Speaker 1: completely normal, right? But something clocks it. Something in you
2:17
Speaker 1: takes a note. And from that second forward, the rest
2:20
Speaker 1: of the evening isn't happening in the room with him.
2:22
Speaker 1: It's happening inside your head in a courtroom you built
2:24
Speaker 1: in about four seconds flat, where you are simultaneously the prosecutor,
2:28
Speaker 1: the detective, and the very tired judge. He says, you okay?
2:31
Speaker 1: You say, fine. He says, you seem quiet. You say,
2:34
Speaker 1: I'm just tired. And you calculate very quietly how quickly
2:38
Speaker 1: you could check his things without him knowing. That's the
2:40
Speaker 1: thing we're going to talk about today. This episode is
2:43
Speaker 1: for the woman who has done the work. You've read
2:45
Speaker 1: the books. You know your attachment style. You can name it.
2:48
Speaker 1: You can explain it at a dinner party if someone asks.
2:51
Speaker 1: which is either impressive or a little bit sad depending
2:53
Speaker 1: on the dinner party. You've been in therapy, maybe you're
2:55
Speaker 1: still in therapy. You know what anxious attachment feels like
2:58
Speaker 1: in your body and you can trace it back to
3:00
Speaker 1: childhood in a very articulate way. And still, still, you
3:04
Speaker 1: find yourself cross-examining a notification sound. You catch yourself running
3:07
Speaker 1: a background check on a three-second pause. Right? You are
3:10
Speaker 1: not paranoid. You are not wrong to notice. But the
3:13
Speaker 1: story you write in the 90 seconds after you notice,
3:15
Speaker 1: that is where we need to go today. Because real
3:17
Speaker 1: betrayal is real. A man who actually hides things deserves
3:20
Speaker 1: to be named and dealt with clearly. But this episode
3:22
Speaker 1: is for the moments when the evidence is a tilted
3:24
Speaker 1: screen and your brain has already written the verdict, sentenced him,
3:28
Speaker 1: and started drafting the breakup speech. Make sense? I once
3:32
Speaker 1: narrated an entire infidelity arc in my head during a
3:35
Speaker 1: seven-minute wait for a text back. Full narrative arc. Inciting incident,
3:39
Speaker 1: rising action, emotional climax, the conversation where I found out,
3:42
Speaker 1: what I would say, where I would go. The man
3:45
Speaker 1: was in the shower. He came out and said, you
3:47
Speaker 1: want to watch something? and I had to reconstruct reality
3:49
Speaker 1: in real time because I had been so deep in
3:51
Speaker 1: the fictional version that I'd forgotten he was just in
3:53
Speaker 1: the other room washing his hair. It's embarrassing. I've done
3:57
Speaker 1: this eight times, at least. It's not a quirk. It's
3:59
Speaker 1: a pattern. And that pattern has a name. It's not
4:02
Speaker 1: the phone you don't trust. It's the version of you
4:04
Speaker 1: that already decided he's guilty. That version has a name.
4:07
Speaker 1: She has a history. And she is not always right.
4:10
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about her today, where she came from,
4:13
Speaker 1: what she cost you, and the four steps that actually
4:15
Speaker 1: change how she fires. Sound familiar? Yeah, I thought so.
4:20
Speaker 1: So let me set this up clearly, right? The phone
4:22
Speaker 1: is not the problem. And also the phone might be
4:24
Speaker 1: the problem. Both of those things are completely true and
4:27
Speaker 1: they can coexist. And knowing which one you're in is
4:29
Speaker 1: literally the whole game. We're going to walk through four
4:31
Speaker 1: steps today. Notice the verdict before it runs the room.
4:34
Speaker 1: Trace where she learned to fire that fast. Separate real
4:37
Speaker 1: signal from shadow noise. And ask the one question out loud.
4:40
Speaker 1: These are not things you do once and graduate from.
4:42
Speaker 1: These are practices. Each one is a practice. But before
4:45
Speaker 1: we get into step one, I need to name the
4:46
Speaker 1: framework we're working in. because the whole thing rests on it.
4:49
Speaker 1: Shadow work is the practice of recognizing the parts of
4:51
Speaker 1: yourself you buried so deep you stopped knowing they were yours.
4:54
Speaker 1: Not your dark side in a dramatic, wearing all black
4:56
Speaker 1: kind of way. Not a villain origin story. Just the
4:59
Speaker 1: old wounds that got locked away because feeling them fully
5:02
Speaker 1: was too expensive at the time. Your shadow is made
5:04
Speaker 1: of every version of you that learned to adapt to
5:06
Speaker 1: something hard and then kept that adaptation running long after
5:10
Speaker 1: the hard thing was over. The verdict writer, the part
5:12
Speaker 1: of you that scans for evidence of abandonment before abandonment,
5:15
Speaker 1: has even considered showing up. She's a shadow part. She
5:18
Speaker 1: runs on old data. She's very fast, very confident, and
5:22
Speaker 1: she has not updated her files in years. Okay? The
5:26
Speaker 1: shadow has opinions, terrible timing, and absolutely zero interest in
5:29
Speaker 1: waiting for the facts before she files a report. She
5:32
Speaker 1: will have a full case ready before he's even put
5:34
Speaker 1: the phone down. And the wild thing is, she genuinely
5:37
Speaker 1: believes she's helping you. That's what makes this hard. She's
5:39
Speaker 1: not malicious. She's protective. She's the part of you that said,
5:42
Speaker 1: I will never be caught off guard again, and then
5:44
Speaker 1: took that job very, very seriously. So seriously that she
5:48
Speaker 1: started seeing the threat in rooms where it didn't exist yet.
5:50
Speaker 1: That's where we're going today. But first, step one. And
5:54
Speaker 1: step one starts in your body, not in your head.
5:57
Speaker 1: The jaw is usually first, right? Not a thought. Not
6:00
Speaker 1: a story. Just the jaw. Then the shoulders pull in slightly.
6:04
Speaker 1: Then the eyes go a little flat. Then your voice
6:06
Speaker 1: sounds completely normal and means almost nothing it says. You
6:09
Speaker 1: are in surveillance mode. You got there before you even
6:11
Speaker 1: knew you were going. That's step one. Notice, but not
6:14
Speaker 1: in a checklist way. Not notice as in label it
6:16
Speaker 1: and move on. I mean, feel it in the body
6:18
Speaker 1: before you do anything with it. The verdict writer does
6:20
Speaker 1: not announce herself. She doesn't knock. She arrives as a
6:23
Speaker 1: physical sensation. And if you don't catch it there, by
6:25
Speaker 1: the time she shows up as a thought, it's already
6:27
Speaker 1: a story. And by the time it's a story, it
6:28
Speaker 1: already feels like truth. Noticing means putting one breath between
6:31
Speaker 1: the sensation and the story. The feeling is data. The
6:34
Speaker 1: story you attach to it in the next 90 seconds
6:36
Speaker 1: may not be. Your body is telling you something feels familiar.
6:40
Speaker 1: Familiar is not the same as true. That's the thing.
6:43
Speaker 1: Familiar is not the same as true. After the jaw tightens,
6:47
Speaker 1: put one hand on your own arm. Just your own arm.
6:49
Speaker 1: Name the feeling with one word, not a sentence. Not,
6:52
Speaker 1: I feel like he's hiding something and this reminds me
6:54
Speaker 1: of how my last relationship ended and I knew it
6:56
Speaker 1: then too. One word. Alert. Scared. Old. Just one word.
7:01
Speaker 1: And that single word is the gap between reacting and responding.
7:04
Speaker 1: Between the verdict and the question. It's small and it
7:06
Speaker 1: changes everything. My body is extraordinarily good at going into
7:09
Speaker 1: full detective mode. My face, however, is committed to performing
7:12
Speaker 1: a perfectly unbothered woman who is definitely not building a case.
7:15
Speaker 1: The gap between those two things, that's what we're working with.
7:18
Speaker 1: Can we see this? Yeah. Good. Because step one is
7:21
Speaker 1: the foundation of everything that comes next. Okay, here's my confession.
7:25
Speaker 1: Because this is the part where I tell you I
7:27
Speaker 1: know the exact shape of this from the inside. In
7:29
Speaker 1: my mid-twenties, I dated someone who traveled a lot for work.
7:32
Speaker 1: And every single time he traveled, the phone thing happened.
7:34
Speaker 1: Screened down on tables. Texting in the bathroom for just
7:37
Speaker 1: a little too long. A beat. Just one beat. Too
7:39
Speaker 1: long before he answered. And I became a forensic accountant
7:42
Speaker 1: of Vibes. I cataloged everything. I did not ask him
7:45
Speaker 1: a single direct question. I just gathered. I had a
7:48
Speaker 1: whole running record in my head of every suspicious thing,
7:50
Speaker 1: and the gathering felt like strength, right? It felt like
7:52
Speaker 1: I was too smart to be fooled. It felt like discernment.
7:55
Speaker 1: It did not feel like fear. It felt like being
7:57
Speaker 1: a woman who pays attention. Sound familiar? My best friend
8:01
Speaker 1: went quiet on me for a week. The deliberate kind
8:03
Speaker 1: of quiet, not the busy kind. The kind where you
8:06
Speaker 1: know she's seen your message and she's waiting for you
8:08
Speaker 1: to be ready. And when she came back, she said
8:10
Speaker 1: one thing. She goes, you've been building this case for months,
8:13
Speaker 1: and I think you already know it's not about him.
8:15
Speaker 1: She was right about the case. She was wrong about
8:17
Speaker 1: who it was about. It wasn't about him. It was
8:19
Speaker 1: about the man before him. And the one before that.
8:22
Speaker 1: And somewhere underneath all of them, it was about my dad,
8:24
Speaker 1: who worked long hours and came home tired, who was
8:27
Speaker 1: physically in the room and somewhere else entirely at the
8:29
Speaker 1: same time. Who was kind. He was not cruel. But
8:32
Speaker 1: he was hard to reach. And I had learned, very young,
8:35
Speaker 1: to read the room before I entered it. To check
8:37
Speaker 1: his posture from across the kitchen to know if tonight
8:39
Speaker 1: was a night he was available. That skill, reading a
8:41
Speaker 1: person's availability from the smallest physical cues, is the exact
8:45
Speaker 1: same skill that turns a tilted phone screen into a
8:47
Speaker 1: five-alarm emergency 20 years later. Step one would have saved
8:50
Speaker 1: me months of miserable detective work, and I didn't know
8:53
Speaker 1: it existed yet. I became so good at reading emotional
8:57
Speaker 1: vibes that I once convinced myself a 45-minute delay on
8:59
Speaker 1: a reply about dinner reservations was a sign of emotional withdrawal.
9:03
Speaker 1: It was autocorrect. He had typed the wrong restaurant, felt embarrassed,
9:07
Speaker 1: retyped the whole thing, and the whole drama I had
9:09
Speaker 1: constructed in the meantime was entirely fictional. Totally made up.
9:13
Speaker 1: By me. In real time. With real feelings attached. It's
9:16
Speaker 1: genuinely embarrassing. I've done this eight times, and I'm only
9:19
Speaker 1: counting the times I can remember clearly. The verdict writer
9:22
Speaker 1: was running the whole show, and she was so confident,
9:25
Speaker 1: so fluent, that I didn't know there was another option.
9:27
Speaker 1: So when I tell you step one is notice, I'm
9:29
Speaker 1: not telling you something easy. I'm telling you the first
9:32
Speaker 1: thing I learned that actually changed something. Right? Okay. Keep
9:36
Speaker 1: that in your body. So here's what we're building toward.
9:39
Speaker 1: And I want you to know what's coming so you
9:40
Speaker 1: can settle in. We've named her. We felt where she
9:43
Speaker 1: shows up next. We're going to trace where she actually
9:45
Speaker 1: learned to do this because she didn't invent that speed
9:48
Speaker 1: on her own. She learned it somewhere specific and what
9:51
Speaker 1: it costs you in every relationship before you maimed her
9:54
Speaker 1: that's what's coming next and i'm gonna be honest with
9:56
Speaker 1: you that's the part that's gonna land somewhere you weren't
9:58
Speaker 1: expecting yeah so stay with me he said i just
10:02
Speaker 1: wanted some privacy and you heard i am already gone
10:05
Speaker 1: that's the thing about the verdict writer right she doesn't
10:07
Speaker 1: translate she interprets and her interpretation is always the same
10:10
Speaker 1: story just with different actors in the same ending so
10:13
Speaker 1: step two is trace and i'm gonna warn you this
10:15
Speaker 1: one asks you to go somewhere before him The verdict
10:19
Speaker 1: writer didn't build herself for this relationship. She was constructed
10:21
Speaker 1: somewhere earlier, in a house you grew up in, in
10:23
Speaker 1: a dynamic you didn't choose, by a person who wasn't
10:26
Speaker 1: trying to hurt you and did anyway, in the small,
10:28
Speaker 1: invisible ways. For a lot of us, it's a parent
10:30
Speaker 1: who was physically present and emotionally somewhere else entirely. My
10:33
Speaker 1: dad wasn't cruel. He wasn't absent in the obvious way.
10:36
Speaker 1: He worked long hours, came home tired, sat in the
10:39
Speaker 1: same room as us, and was somehow still unreachable. And
10:41
Speaker 1: I learned, I mean really learned it in my body,
10:43
Speaker 1: to read him from across the room. His shoulders. The
10:46
Speaker 1: way he set down his keys. Whether he said anything
10:48
Speaker 1: when he walked in or just went straight to the television,
10:51
Speaker 1: I was doing threat assessment on my own father at
10:53
Speaker 1: probably age eight. Sound familiar? Yeah. And the thing is,
10:57
Speaker 1: that skill felt like love. It felt like paying attention.
11:00
Speaker 1: It felt like being a good daughter who knew how
11:02
Speaker 1: to read a room. It wasn't until therapy that I
11:04
Speaker 1: understood it was also survival. That same skill graduated with me.
11:09
Speaker 1: It packed its bags, got in the car, and showed
11:12
Speaker 1: up in every relationship after. And it got sharper each
11:15
Speaker 1: time there was a real betrayal. which for a lot
11:17
Speaker 1: of us happened in our 20s when we were drawn
11:18
Speaker 1: to the emotionally unavailable ones and got genuinely hurt by them.
11:22
Speaker 1: My mid-20s relationship, the one with the traveling, the screen
11:25
Speaker 1: down on tables, the bathroom texting, that one confirmed every
11:28
Speaker 1: theory the verdict writer had ever had. So by the
11:31
Speaker 1: time a calm, steady person shows up, someone who leaves
11:33
Speaker 1: sticky notes on the coffee maker that just say, have
11:35
Speaker 1: a good one, someone who falls asleep 10 minutes into
11:38
Speaker 1: every movie I actually care about, her pattern recognition is
11:41
Speaker 1: so well-trained that she finds threat in things that aren't threats.
11:44
Speaker 1: She doesn't know how to stop, Nobody told her the
11:46
Speaker 1: war was over. Right? She's still at her post. And
11:50
Speaker 1: here's what makes this so hard to untangle. The verdict
11:53
Speaker 1: writer doesn't feel like a wound. She feels like a
11:55
Speaker 1: personality trait. She feels like discernment. She feels like being
11:58
Speaker 1: a woman who is nobody's fool, who notices things, who
12:01
Speaker 1: doesn't get blindsided. Can we see this? Because I spent
12:04
Speaker 1: years in that framing. Years. After the breakup at 26,
12:07
Speaker 1: I started therapy. And for the first several months, I
12:10
Speaker 1: genuinely insisted to my therapist that I was just perceptive.
12:13
Speaker 1: I noticed things other people miss, I told her. She
12:15
Speaker 1: was very patient. She didn't argue with me. She just
12:17
Speaker 1: kept asking one question over and over. When you notice,
12:20
Speaker 1: what do you do next? And the answer every single
12:22
Speaker 1: time was the same. I built a case. I gathered.
12:25
Speaker 1: I cataloged. I never asked. And she let me sit
12:28
Speaker 1: with that for a while. She wrote something down. She
12:30
Speaker 1: always wrote something down right when I said the thing
12:32
Speaker 1: I believed most. It's not suspicious at all. Not even
12:35
Speaker 1: a little bit, right? Because here's the actual difference between
12:40
Speaker 1: intuition and shadow projection. And it matters. It really matters.
12:43
Speaker 1: It's not the feeling. The feeling can be identical. A tightness,
12:46
Speaker 1: a knowing, this doesn't feel right. The difference is what
12:49
Speaker 1: you do next. Intuition moves toward information. It says something
12:52
Speaker 1: feels off. Let me find out what's actually happening. The
12:55
Speaker 1: shadow moves toward confirmation. It says he's guilty. And now
12:58
Speaker 1: I'm going to find the proof. Intuition is open. The
13:01
Speaker 1: shadow has already decided and is collecting evidence for the
13:03
Speaker 1: verdict it already wrote. And the terrifying thing is that
13:06
Speaker 1: the shadow is very good at finding what it's looking for.
13:08
Speaker 1: You look for evidence of guilt, and the world is
13:10
Speaker 1: full of tilted screens and dry text and 20-minute silences, right? Yeah.
13:15
Speaker 1: The search always finds something. That's the trap. So what
13:18
Speaker 1: does it actually cost you? Okay, picture this. Two years
13:21
Speaker 1: of a relationship. Maybe 12 real conversations. The rest? Verdict.
13:26
Speaker 1: He puts his phone face down just to concentrate on
13:28
Speaker 1: what you're saying, which, by the way, is technically a
13:30
Speaker 1: sign of respect. You say nothing. You clock it. You
13:33
Speaker 1: file it. Three days later, in a fight about something
13:35
Speaker 1: else entirely, something from a year ago surfaces. He says,
13:38
Speaker 1: where is this coming from? And you don't have a
13:40
Speaker 1: clean answer. Because the real answer is that it's coming
13:42
Speaker 1: from a courtroom that's been in session for months, and
13:44
Speaker 1: he wasn't notified he was on trial. Make sense? That's
13:48
Speaker 1: a compound interest on a verdict you never named. You
13:50
Speaker 1: are paying a mortgage on a house he didn't burn down.
13:52
Speaker 1: It's genuinely extraordinary how expensive this gets. She calls you
13:57
Speaker 1: the present tense first. Every moment you spend building the
13:59
Speaker 1: case is a moment you're not actually in the room
14:01
Speaker 1: with him. He's there. You're in your head running the prosecution.
14:05
Speaker 1: And the version of him on trial isn't him. It's
14:07
Speaker 1: the composite of every man who actually left. Every father
14:10
Speaker 1: who was physically present and emotionally gone. Every person who
14:13
Speaker 1: taught you that privacy meant danger. He didn't do those things.
14:16
Speaker 1: But he's being sentenced for them. Right? And then she
14:19
Speaker 1: calls you the repair. Because when you finally do react,
14:21
Speaker 1: you react to the composite. And he doesn't know what
14:24
Speaker 1: he's being tried for because he didn't do it. And
14:26
Speaker 1: then there's the slow, quiet tap she levies on him
14:28
Speaker 1: over time. A calm person who is genuinely not hiding
14:31
Speaker 1: anything will eventually feel the surveillance. And a person who
14:34
Speaker 1: feels like a suspect stops feeling like a partner. That's
14:37
Speaker 1: not a dramatic ending. It's a slow erosion. It's the
14:40
Speaker 1: relationship losing pressure the way the plants on my balcony
14:43
Speaker 1: lose water. Quietly. Until one day it's just a lot
14:46
Speaker 1: more dry than it should be. It's not the phone
14:49
Speaker 1: you don't trust. It's the version of you that already
14:51
Speaker 1: decided he's guilty. And she's very expensive, baby. Very, very expensive.
14:56
Speaker 1: She's been running this operation at full cost and the
14:58
Speaker 1: receipts are in every relationship where you were technically present
15:01
Speaker 1: and actually somewhere else entirely. Yeah, I know, I know.
15:05
Speaker 1: So let's talk about step three because this is where
15:07
Speaker 1: it starts to actually shift. The message you never sent was,
15:11
Speaker 1: did something happen I should know about? The message you
15:14
Speaker 1: sent instead was no worries. And I get it, truly,
15:17
Speaker 1: because asking feels like exposure and the verdict at least
15:20
Speaker 1: gives you the illusion of control. If I already know,
15:23
Speaker 1: I can't be caught off guard, right? But step three
15:25
Speaker 1: is separate real signal from shadow noise. And it's not
15:28
Speaker 1: about dismissing your gut. It's about learning to sort the
15:30
Speaker 1: mail before you respond to all of it like it's
15:32
Speaker 1: an emergency. Real signals are patterns over time. A change
15:36
Speaker 1: in behavior across weeks. Consistently less present. Foam protected in
15:40
Speaker 1: a new and deliberate way for a sustained period. Real
15:43
Speaker 1: signals are things you can name in a sentence without catastrophizing.
15:46
Speaker 1: Shadow noise is a single moment. A tilted screen. A
15:48
Speaker 1: one-word text. A distracted Tuesday evening. And the instant full
15:51
Speaker 1: story your nervous system generates around it. And here's the practice.
15:55
Speaker 1: When the verdict starts forming, write down just the behavior.
15:58
Speaker 1: Not what it means. Not the ending it points to.
16:01
Speaker 1: Just what literally happened. He turned his phone over. He
16:04
Speaker 1: didn't answer for 20 minutes. He went quiet at dinner.
16:07
Speaker 1: Then write what you told yourself it meant. Then ask
16:09
Speaker 1: two questions. Is this a pattern I've seen across weeks
16:11
Speaker 1: or is this one moment? And where have I felt
16:13
Speaker 1: this specific fear before? Not just in this relationship, but
16:16
Speaker 1: all the way back. Usually the fear predates him by
16:19
Speaker 1: at least a decade. The sorting is not about deciding
16:21
Speaker 1: he's innocent. It's about deciding to get actual information before
16:24
Speaker 1: you file the judgment. He is guilty of the evidence,
16:27
Speaker 1: not the story. Right? Just the evidence. He is guilty
16:32
Speaker 1: of turning his phone over. That's all we have. And honestly,
16:35
Speaker 1: he might be turning it over because the lamp is
16:37
Speaker 1: in his eyes. I have done this. I have turned
16:40
Speaker 1: my phone over because the angle was uncomfortable, and if
16:42
Speaker 1: someone had been writing a verdict on me in that moment,
16:44
Speaker 1: they would have been building a case on ergonomics. Right? Yeah.
16:48
Speaker 1: He is guilty of one behavior, and the shadow just
16:50
Speaker 1: wrote a feature film. Those are two very different things.
16:53
Speaker 1: I spent years confusing them, which in retrospect explains a
16:56
Speaker 1: lot about why I was exhausted all the time. Being
16:58
Speaker 1: a full-time prosecutor is a terrible second job. So here's
17:03
Speaker 1: the scene. It's an ordinary Tuesday. My partner is cooking,
17:06
Speaker 1: which they do most nights, because I have the culinary
17:08
Speaker 1: confidence of someone who has never successfully timed two things
17:11
Speaker 1: to be ready at once. I'm in the other room.
17:13
Speaker 1: I hear them laugh at something on their phone. They
17:15
Speaker 1: put the phone in their pocket, and I felt it.
17:18
Speaker 1: The jaw thing. The old familiar. The radar going on.
17:21
Speaker 1: And I didn't say anything in the moment. I went
17:23
Speaker 1: to sort. Okay. Behavior. Laughed at something on their phone
17:27
Speaker 1: and put it in their pocket. Story I told myself.
17:30
Speaker 1: They're keeping something from me. Pattern or moment. This was
17:33
Speaker 1: the first time this week that specific thing happened. Where
17:36
Speaker 1: have I felt this before? The mid-20s situation. The unavailable men.
17:39
Speaker 1: My dad going quiet and unreachable in the same house. Sorted.
17:43
Speaker 1: And then I went back to the kitchen and I
17:44
Speaker 1: just said, what was funny? And they showed me a
17:47
Speaker 1: picture of a dog wearing a little hat that looked
17:49
Speaker 1: exactly like our dog looks when she's been asked to
17:51
Speaker 1: do something she considers beneath her dignity. That was the
17:54
Speaker 1: whole thing. The entire arc. The verdict would have cost
17:56
Speaker 1: me three days of cold distance and a fight that
17:58
Speaker 1: started about something completely unrelated. Instead, I got a picture
18:01
Speaker 1: of a dog in a hat. You know, that's a
18:04
Speaker 1: much better outcome. The dog agrees she would never wear
18:06
Speaker 1: a hat voluntarily and found the whole comparison defamatory. She's
18:09
Speaker 1: very sensitive about her image. So the practice is real.
18:14
Speaker 1: It works in ordinary weeks on ordinary Tuesdays with ordinary
18:17
Speaker 1: moments that feel enormous until you sort them. And I
18:19
Speaker 1: want you to hold on to that because what's coming
18:21
Speaker 1: next is the part that actually changes how the verdict
18:23
Speaker 1: writer fires, not just once, but over time. Step four.
18:28
Speaker 1: And the thing that the other side of this actually
18:29
Speaker 1: looks like when you're living in it. Yeah, that's what's coming.
18:33
Speaker 1: Stay with me. Okay, step four. And I'm going to
18:36
Speaker 1: be honest with you. This is the one that actually
18:38
Speaker 1: changes the wiring, not just the behavior in one moment,
18:41
Speaker 1: but the pattern over time. right? Because steps one through three, noticing, tracing, sorting,
18:46
Speaker 1: those are all internal. They happen inside your own head
18:49
Speaker 1: and they're essential. But step four is the one that
18:51
Speaker 1: goes external and that's where it gets real. So here's
18:55
Speaker 1: the dare. For seven days, every time the verdict writer
18:57
Speaker 1: shows up, you say one sentence out loud to yourself
19:00
Speaker 1: before you say or do anything else. Just what I saw,
19:03
Speaker 1: not what it means, not where it leads, not the
19:05
Speaker 1: whole arc, just the literal thing that happened. He turned
19:08
Speaker 1: his phone face down. He took a while to answer.
19:10
Speaker 1: He went quiet over dinner. That's it. One sentence. Out loud. Yeah?
19:14
Speaker 1: Because saying it out loud does something that thinking it doesn't.
19:17
Speaker 1: It slows the story down right at the point where
19:18
Speaker 1: the story wants to sprint. And then you decide, is
19:22
Speaker 1: this worth one honest question or is this my disort?
19:25
Speaker 1: If it's my disort, you already know how to do
19:26
Speaker 1: that now. But if it's worth asking, you ask it clean.
19:30
Speaker 1: Something like, hey, you seem far away tonight. Everything okay?
19:33
Speaker 1: That's a clean question. It's genuinely open. It can receive
19:36
Speaker 1: any answer. It can receive, I'm just tired or work
19:39
Speaker 1: has been a lot or actually there is something I
19:40
Speaker 1: want to talk to you about. Right? All of those
19:43
Speaker 1: are valid landing spots for a clean question. What it
19:45
Speaker 1: can't do is receive a verdict. A clean question is
19:48
Speaker 1: the opposite of a verdict. Here's what a verdict dressed
19:51
Speaker 1: as a question sounds like. Why are you being so weird?
19:54
Speaker 1: Or is something going on with your phone? Those aren't questions.
19:58
Speaker 1: Those are sentences in a trench coat. They've already decided.
20:01
Speaker 1: They're just looking for a confession. And he can feel that,
20:03
Speaker 1: by the way. He can feel the difference between a
20:05
Speaker 1: woman who is genuinely asking and a woman who is
20:08
Speaker 1: presenting evidence. Most people can. Make sense? The experiment is
20:12
Speaker 1: not about monitoring his answer for signs that he passed
20:14
Speaker 1: or failed. It's about training your nervous system to move
20:17
Speaker 1: toward information instead of toward confirmation of what it already decided.
20:21
Speaker 1: That's the whole game. And it sounds small, and it's
20:23
Speaker 1: actually enormous. A woman who asks instead of sentences is
20:26
Speaker 1: running a fundamentally different internal system than the verdict writer.
20:29
Speaker 1: That system is what secure actually feels like from the inside.
20:32
Speaker 1: Not fearless. Not naive. Curious. Actually curious about the person
20:37
Speaker 1: in front of her. Can we see how different that is?
20:40
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what the experiment felt like for me
20:42
Speaker 1: the first time I tried it. I said it out loud,
20:44
Speaker 1: standing alone in the bathroom. My partner hadn't done anything.
20:47
Speaker 1: Just been quieter than usual. I said out loud, they
20:50
Speaker 1: came home quiet tonight. And I stood there waiting for
20:52
Speaker 1: the catastrophic story and it didn't come. Because the sentence
20:55
Speaker 1: was too small for it. The catastrophic story needs a
20:57
Speaker 1: running start. It needs the interpretation already baked in. When
21:00
Speaker 1: you strip it back to just a fact, the story
21:02
Speaker 1: loses its fuel. And then I went out and I said,
21:05
Speaker 1: you seem a little quiet, long day. And they said, yeah,
21:08
Speaker 1: rough meeting. I'll tell you over dinner. That was it.
21:10
Speaker 1: The whole thing. I almost built a three-day arc out
21:13
Speaker 1: of a rough meeting. I've done this eight times. It's embarrassing, honestly.
21:17
Speaker 1: Asking a clean question feels so exposing when you're used
21:20
Speaker 1: to the verdict. It's like showing up to a trial
21:22
Speaker 1: you spent weeks preparing for and then just asking the
21:24
Speaker 1: other side, wait, what actually happened? Your whole case is
21:27
Speaker 1: in your bag. You don't need it. That can feel
21:30
Speaker 1: almost physically uncomfortable when the verdict writer is well-trained, okay?
21:34
Speaker 1: And I want you to know that discomfort is not
21:35
Speaker 1: a sign you're doing it wrong. It's a sign you're
21:37
Speaker 1: doing something new. So that's the four. Notice it in
21:41
Speaker 1: the body. Trace where she learned to fire that fast.
21:44
Speaker 1: Sort the real signal from the shadow noise. Ask the
21:47
Speaker 1: one honest question out loud. Four steps, one practice, ongoing.
21:52
Speaker 1: Not a test you pass once and move on. Something
21:54
Speaker 1: you come back to every time the jaw tightens and
21:56
Speaker 1: the eyes go flat and the voice sounds completely normal
21:58
Speaker 1: and means nothing it says. Right? Now, the other side.
22:04
Speaker 1: Because I don't want to just hand you a four-step
22:05
Speaker 1: framework and leave you wondering what it actually looks like
22:07
Speaker 1: to live on the other side of this. My sister,
22:10
Speaker 1: who says exactly what she thinks about everything, including her
22:13
Speaker 1: own engagement planning, which she approaches with the energy of
22:15
Speaker 1: someone reorganizing a crime scene, said something to me recently
22:18
Speaker 1: that I keep thinking about. She goes, you know what
22:21
Speaker 1: the terrifying thing about trusting someone is? It works until
22:24
Speaker 1: it doesn't, and you can't control which. She said it
22:26
Speaker 1: so casually, like she was telling me what she had
22:28
Speaker 1: for lunch. Sound familiar? And I sat with that for
22:32
Speaker 1: a while. Because my first instinct was, yeah, that's why
22:35
Speaker 1: the verdict writer exists. That's her whole argument. You can't
22:38
Speaker 1: control which, so you stay ready. But the more I
22:40
Speaker 1: sat with it, the more I realized my sister wasn't
22:42
Speaker 1: making an argument for hypervigilance. She was just telling the truth.
22:45
Speaker 1: Trusting someone is genuinely risky. There is no method that
22:48
Speaker 1: removes the risk. The verdict writer doesn't protect you from betrayal.
22:51
Speaker 1: She just makes you miserable before it happens, and sometimes
22:54
Speaker 1: when it was never going to happen at all. The
22:56
Speaker 1: other side of this is not a relationship without fear.
22:59
Speaker 1: It's not a woman who never feels the jaw thing
23:01
Speaker 1: or the radar going on. Right? It's a woman who
23:03
Speaker 1: can sit with not knowing long enough to find out.
23:06
Speaker 1: And what she usually finds out is that he tilted
23:08
Speaker 1: the phone because the lamp was glaring, or he went
23:10
Speaker 1: quiet because he's got his own inner weather that has
23:12
Speaker 1: nothing to do with her. That's usually it. The mundane explanation.
23:16
Speaker 1: The one the verdict writer never considers because mundane doesn't
23:19
Speaker 1: fit the narrative she's building. But here's what I also
23:22
Speaker 1: want to say. Sometimes you ask and the answer is hard.
23:26
Speaker 1: Sometimes the real signal is real. A secure woman can
23:28
Speaker 1: hold both. She's not protected from betrayal by being a
23:31
Speaker 1: better detective. She's protected by knowing she can survive information,
23:35
Speaker 1: because she survived her 20s. She survived the breakup at
23:38
Speaker 1: 26 and three years of therapy and the version of
23:40
Speaker 1: herself that gathered evidence in the dark instead of just asking.
23:43
Speaker 1: The other side is not certainty, my love. It's knowing
23:46
Speaker 1: you're someone who can handle what's actually true. Yeah, that's
23:49
Speaker 1: the other side. The other side of the verdict writer
23:52
Speaker 1: is not a woman who is never suspicious. It's a
23:55
Speaker 1: woman who is occasionally suspicious and asks about it before
23:57
Speaker 1: she builds the gallows, okay? Like, She's not the woman
24:01
Speaker 1: who never notices. She notices and then she goes, huh,
24:04
Speaker 1: let me find out. That's the whole difference. And I
24:07
Speaker 1: will die on this hill because I've seen what the
24:08
Speaker 1: verdict writer costs over time. And I felt what it
24:11
Speaker 1: feels like to start replacing her with a question. And
24:13
Speaker 1: the question wins every single time, even when the answer
24:16
Speaker 1: is hard. Now I want to name a trap before
24:19
Speaker 1: we close. Because I know this audience. Are you doing
24:22
Speaker 1: shadow work to heal or to have better arguments inside
24:24
Speaker 1: your own head? Right? Because here's what I've watched happen,
24:27
Speaker 1: including in myself for a hot minute. You can learn
24:29
Speaker 1: all of this. Name the verdict writer, trace her back,
24:32
Speaker 1: do the sort, practice the clean question, and still use
24:35
Speaker 1: every bit of it to run the same pattern with
24:36
Speaker 1: more sophisticated language. I noticed my verdict writer activated, so
24:40
Speaker 1: I did the sort, and I think my shadow is
24:42
Speaker 1: projecting abandonment fear onto your behavior. That is still a verdict.
24:45
Speaker 1: It just has a wellness degree now. The tools don't
24:48
Speaker 1: replace the risk of trusting someone. They prepare you to
24:50
Speaker 1: take it. If you're doing the work and you're never
24:53
Speaker 1: arriving at a place where you actually ask him anything honest,
24:55
Speaker 1: where you stay in the sort forever and never get
24:57
Speaker 1: to the question, The work has become the new detective kit.
25:00
Speaker 1: The verdict writer got a promotion. She's running shadow work
25:03
Speaker 1: seminars in your chest while he is in the kitchen
25:05
Speaker 1: leaving sticky notes on the coffee maker that say, have
25:07
Speaker 1: a good one and actually meaning it. The verdict writer
25:10
Speaker 1: dressed in wellness clothes is still the verdict writer. She
25:12
Speaker 1: just has better vocabulary and worse accountability. Okay. And I
25:17
Speaker 1: say this with love because I was that person fully
25:20
Speaker 1: fluent in attachment theory, still cross-examining the notification sound. If
25:24
Speaker 1: you notice that this kind of hypervigilance is constant, that
25:27
Speaker 1: it's affecting your sleep or your work or your ability
25:29
Speaker 1: to actually be present with someone you care about, that
25:31
Speaker 1: is worth talking to a therapist about, not just a podcast.
25:34
Speaker 1: A podcast is a starting point. The real work happens
25:37
Speaker 1: in a room with someone trained to help you go
25:38
Speaker 1: all the way back. Don't just stop here. So the
25:43
Speaker 1: phone might be the whole thing and the phone might
25:44
Speaker 1: be nothing, but the verdict writer will not let you
25:46
Speaker 1: find out either way. She sentences before the evidence arrives.
25:50
Speaker 1: She costs you the present tense, the repair, the ordinary
25:53
Speaker 1: Tuesday that could have ended with a picture of a
25:54
Speaker 1: dog in a hat, and eventually the relationship itself. She's
25:57
Speaker 1: expensive and she's been on the clock for a long time.
26:00
Speaker 1: It's not the phone you don't trust. It's the version
26:02
Speaker 1: of you that already decided he's guilty. And she made
26:04
Speaker 1: sense once. She was built to protect you when the
26:06
Speaker 1: people who were supposed to be present weren't. And she
26:09
Speaker 1: did her job. Baby, she did her job. But that
26:12
Speaker 1: job is yours now. You do the questioning from here.
26:14
Speaker 1: She can rest. The verdict writer served an excellent purpose.
26:19
Speaker 1: She has also been overdue for a very long sabbatical.
26:21
Speaker 1: I mean it. Give her the sabbatical. She's earned it.
26:25
Speaker 1: So when you notice the verdict forming, can you sit
26:27
Speaker 1: with not knowing long enough to ask one honest question instead?
26:31
Speaker 1: That's the whole question. That's where this episode lives. If
26:34
Speaker 1: you've got someone in your life who goes quiet and
26:35
Speaker 1: catastrophizes and builds the case in her head and would
26:38
Speaker 1: never in a million years describe herself as someone who
26:40
Speaker 1: doesn't trust her partner, send this to her. She needs
26:43
Speaker 1: it and she's going to be a little defensive about it.
26:45
Speaker 1: And then she's going to sit with it. And that's
26:46
Speaker 1: exactly right. That's how this works. Take care of yourself.
26:51
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you soon. This show is made by
26:54
Speaker 1: Opal Media.