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I'm gonna start today with a story. A few years ago, my nephew, he was little, like full toddler energy, big feeling, zero filter, was telling us a story. Now, if you've ever been around a small child telling a story, you know that there is no such thing as getting to the point quickly. There's no clear narrative arc, there is no structure, there are just vibes. That's all you get. Just vibes and eye contact and expectation that you're going to be fully present for however long this takes. So he's going. He's telling the story. And somewhere in the middle of it, he starts adding these details. Details that have nothing to do with anything. Something like, and I had my blue shirt on, not the dinosaur one, the other one, and then there was a dog, and I think it was brown. Maybe it wasn't even there. And then, mid-sentence, he just stops, looks at us, and goes, Who even cares about that anyway? And then just keeps going. No hesitation, no circling back, no apologizing for the detour, just acknowledged that it was a detour, dropped it, and moved on. And even taken aback, we just laughed because it was adorable, because he's four and he said something extremely wise without even knowing it was wise. All of us had a moment of wait, that was actually kind of genius. And I have been thinking about that moment ever since for years. Because what my nephew did in two seconds, what he did without a single second of internal debate is something that most adults, and honestly, most women in particular really struggle to do. He recognized that the detail didn't matter to what he was trying to say, and he let it go, just like that. And that is what this whole episode is about. Hi, I'm Lisa, and this is Pattern Breakers Collective, the podcast where we dig into the patterns that shape us, survive us, and that we eventually finally break free from, whether those patterns live in our relationships, our families, or the way we've learned to think about ourselves. As always, quick note before we get into it, because I always want to say this. When I talk about harmful dynamics or abusive behavior, I'll often use he for the person causing harm. That comes from my own experience and the women I've worked with for years. But harm is not limited to one gender. If your story looks different from what I describe, everything we're talking about today still applies to you. The patterns are the same. Now, today's episode might be the one that feels the most like a regular life thing. Like this isn't about recovering from something traumatic. This isn't about heavy realizations. This is about something that happens every single day, sometimes multiple times a day, and quietly costs us more than we realize. We're talking about getting pulled off track. And specifically, we're talking about what happens in your head when that happens. The spiral, the second guessing, the going in 14 directions when you started with one clear, simple, true thing to say. If you have ever started a conversation knowing exactly what you wanted to say and ended up apologizing for something unrelated by the end of it, this episode is going to feel like someone read your diary. Let's go. You know how something felt. You know what happened. You know when something didn't sit right. You know what you want to say. You know what the actual point is. You start there, clear, and then something happens. Maybe you're in a conversation with a partner. You say something simple, something that felt clear before you open your mouth, something like that didn't feel okay with me, or that's not what happened, or I don't agree with that. And instead of being met with, okay, tell me more, the conversation moves, not forward, sideways. Suddenly it's, well, God, you're too you're too sensitive. That's not what I meant. You always do this. What about the time you said this thing two years ago? And now, without even fully realizing how you got there, you're not standing in your original point anymore. You're explaining yourself. You're defending, you're trying to trace your way back to what you were even talking about in the first place. The thread is gone. And here's what I want to name before we go any further, because this is the part that I think gets missed when women look back on these moments. You didn't start confused, you ended confused. And there is a massive difference between those two things. Starting confused means maybe you didn't have a clear point. Ending confused after you started clear means something moved you. Something or someone shifted the ground underneath you. And understanding the difference between those two things is where this whole episode lives. Because when women feel confused at the end of a conversation, the automatic instinct is to blame themselves, to assume that they weren't clear enough, that they said it wrong, that they need to explain it better next time. But what if you explained it perfectly and someone just didn't want to stay in that conversation? What if the conversation wasn't yours to begin with? You started clear. If you ended up somewhere completely different, that's worth paying attention to because you did not get there alone. And this is not an accident. This is how derailment actually works. And I want to spend some real time here because I think this is the piece that changes everything once you understand it. When a conversation gets derailed, when you start somewhere clear and end up somewhere completely unrelated, that is not usually an accident. It is not usually just bad communication or a misunderstanding. There are specific tactics that do this on purpose and they are worth knowing by name. The first one I want to name is deflection. Deflection is exactly what it sounds like: redirecting attention away from the actual point. You say something true. The response is designed to make you follow a different thread. The topic changes. Your feelings get made into the topic. A completely unrelated grievance gets introduced. And before you know it, the conversation you started is nowhere to be found. Classic deflection sounds kind of like this. Oh, that's rich coming from you. Oh, so now we're keeping score. Oh, you want to talk about that? Fine. Let's talk about what you did last month. It's a redirect every time. The goal is not to address what you said, the goal is to make sure you stop saying it. The second tactic is called Darvo. And this one I really want you to sit with because once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Darvo stands for deny, attack, reverse, victim, and offender. It is a pattern that researchers have documented in manipulative and abusive dynamics, and it works like this. You name something that happened, they deny it, then they attack you for naming it. And then here's the move that is genuinely disorienting. They flip the script and position themselves as the one who has been wronged. So let's say you say that comment was hurtful. Then their response is, Well, I never said that. That's the denial. Then they back it up with, I can't believe you'd accuse me of that. That's the attack. And then they come back with, you know what? I'm the one who's hurt right now that you'd even think that of me. There's the flip. And suddenly you're comforting the person who hurt you. You're apologizing for bringing it up. You're managing their feelings about your pain. I remember being in that exact position so many times where I started a conversation with something that was legitimate and true and somehow ended up apologizing for starting it. Not because I'd done anything wrong, but because the conversation had been flipped so completely that I couldn't find my footing anymore. That is Darvo. And naming it doesn't make you dramatic, it makes you informed. The third thing I want to name is gaslighting. And I know we've talked about this on the show before, but I want to connect it specifically to getting pulled off track because I think there's a version of this that's more subtle than people realize. Gaslighting in the context of conversation often looks like this. You say something true, and the response makes you question whether it's true. Not through an argument, not through evidence, just through confidence, through a tone that implies that you're being unreasonable, through a look that says that you're doing too much, through phrases like, here we go again, or you're always turning things into a thing, that make you feel like your perception is the problem. And here's what that does. And this is the part that I find the most interesting from a psychological standpoint. It doesn't just pull you off track in the moment, it preloads doubt for the next time. So the next time that you have a clear, true, legitimate thing to say, there's already a little voice in the back of your mind that goes, but what if I'm making it into a thing again? What if I'm being too sensitive? What if I say it and it turns into this whole conversation about how I always do this? And so you hesitate, or you soften it, or you over-explain before you even start, or you don't say it at all. Which is, not coincidentally, exactly what someone who uses these tactics is hoping for. Deflection, Darvo, gaslighting, these are not personality quirks. They are moves. They are things that happen to conversations on purpose, and you deserve to know that so you can stop blaming your own communication skills for what they are actually doing. Now, before we go any further, I want to say something important. Not every derailed conversation is the result of manipulation. Sometimes conversations just go sideways. Sometimes people get defensive without intending to be harmful. Sometimes you hit a nerve you didn't know was there. I am not asking you to assume bad faith in every hard conversation you've ever had. What I'm asking you to do is notice the pattern, because one conversation going sideways is just a conversation. A pattern of conversations where you constantly start clear and end up confused, apologetic, or defending something that had nothing to do with what you originally said. That is the part worth paying attention to. He knew her soft spots. He knew she cared deeply about being a good mother, about her integrity, about doing things right, and he used that. Every time she tried to address something concrete, a schedule change, a communication boundary, a decision about the kids, he would pivot. He would introduce something just slightly off to the side of the actual issue. A comment about her parenting, an implication about her mental state, something that wasn't quite a direct accusation, but landed close enough that she felt she had to address it. And then she'd address it. Of course she would, because it wasn't true and she needed him to understand it wasn't true. Except the moment she started explaining, defending, clarifying, she'd lost the thread of the actual conversation. Whatever she'd originally raised was just gone. And now they were in a different conversation entirely, one that he had written and she was just performing in. I stopped her once. We were talking through a recent exchange and I said, hold on, what was the actual point you were trying to make when this conversation started? She had to think about it for a second because she had been so deep in the defending and the clarifying that the original point almost felt distant. And once she named it, it was so clear, so reasonable, and so completely separate from everything the conversation had become. Nothing he had said had changed the truth of her original point. Not one word of it. It had only moved her away from it. That's the thing about derailment tactics. They don't actually have to disprove anything. They just have to make you forget that you were saying it long enough that you stop saying it. And what I work with women on in situations like this is holding on to the thread, to being able to say, even internally, that this is what I came here to say, and I'm still saying it, regardless of what just got introduced. You don't have to engage with every version of reality someone creates to distract you from your own. The thing that he introduced to derail the conversation, it was not the conversation. Your original point was. And your original point didn't stop being true just because someone worked very hard to make you forget it. And this is where my nephew comes back in. Because what he did instinctively at four years old in the middle of a rambling story about a dog that may or may not have existed is exactly the skill that most adults spend years trying to rebuild. He recognized a detail that wasn't serving his story. He identified it, he dropped it, and he moved on in about two seconds without a committee meeting on it. Who even cares about that anyway? Now, obviously, a toddler cannot teach us how to handle manipulation tactics or navigating high-conflict co-parenting situations. I want to be clear about that. But the underlying skill, the ability to recognize when something is pulling you away from what actually matters and consciously choose not to follow it, that is something most of us have genuinely lost. Or maybe we never had it in the first place. And the reason women in particular struggle with this is really worth understanding. Because it's not weakness, it's conditioning. Women are socialized from a very young age to be thorough, to be considerate, to make sure everyone feels heard, to not dismiss things too quickly because what if they're missing something important? To give people the benefit of the doubt, to be open, to be fair. These are all genuinely good qualities. I'm not saying they're not. But here's what happens when those qualities run on autopilot. You end up giving the same amount of energy and attention to a distraction tactic designed to pull you off course as you give your own actual, legitimate, important point. You give it consideration. You try to address it fairly, you turn it over and look at it from multiple angles. And meanwhile, your original point is sitting there going, hey, I was kind of in the middle of something. The nephew move is this not everything that gets said requires full engagement. Not every detail has to be addressed. Not every distraction has to be followed. Some things are just not the point. And you are allowed to name that at least internally and just keep going. Just because something was said does not mean it deserves your attention. You get to decide what matters to the conversation that you are actually trying to have. And I know that sounds simple. I know some of you are already thinking, yeah, but that is not easy in real life. Believe me, I know we're gonna get there. I have you. Scenario one, the co-parenting or custody situation. Let's say you want to talk about consistency in the drop-off schedule. That's it. That's what this conversation needs to be about because the kids are getting confused and it's not working. So you bring it up. And the response is you're being controlling. You never compromise. You make everything so difficult. The kids are fine. You're the one making this into a thing. And now you're pulled into defending your character, your co-parenting style, whether or not you compromise, whether you make things difficult, whether your perception of the kid's experience is even accurate. You have left the schedule and now you're in a completely different room. The nephew move here is noticing that not one of those responses actually addresses the schedule. And that means the schedule is still the topic, whether or not he wants it to be. His discomfort with the topic is not new information about the topic. It's just discomfort. You can say out loud or just to yourself, I hear you feel that way, and I'd like to come back to the schedule. Full stop. Come on back. You don't have to fix what he said about you in order to have the conversation that you came to have. Scenario two: the argument that becomes about your personality. You say that comment felt really disrespectful. The response, well, it was just a joke. You can never take a joke. You're so sensitive. I can't say anything around you without you turning it into a whole thing. And now you're in a conversation about your sense of humor, your sensitivity, your tendency to turn things into things. Your personality has become the subject. Here's the thing to hold on to. Those are completely different things. Your sensitivity is not the point. Your sense of humor is not the point. Whether you make things into things is not the point. The point is something was said, it felt disrespectful, and you named it. That is a complete and valid communication. You do not have to prove that you're not too sensitive in order for your experience to be worth acknowledging. What the response actually tells you is that there is no interest in addressing the comment. That is information, but it is not a reason to abandon your original point. Scenario 3. The boundary that suddenly becomes a negotiation. Clean, simple, a boundary. The response, wow, okay, said in one particular tone, or I guess I know where I stand, or wow, you've really changed. Or just a long silence and an energy that lets you know something has shifted. And suddenly you feel this pull to explain yourself, to soften it, to give them something so that tension goes away, to backtrack just a little so that they don't feel rejected. I want to name what's happening there. That pull you feel, that's not guilt about your boundary. That's a trained response to someone's discomfort. You have been trained, probably over a very long period of time, to take responsibility for how other people feel about your limits. And the nephew move here is recognizing their reaction to your boundary is not additional information about whether your boundary is valid. It's just a reaction. People are allowed to react. You are allowed to hold firm anyway. I can't do that does not require a paragraph of justification. It is a complete sentence. Scenario four, the one that happens entirely in your own head. This is the one I want to spend the most time on because I think it's the most common and the least talked about. No one else is even in the room. This conversation is just you and your own brain. You start with something clear. I don't feel good in this relationship. And then your brain, bless its heart trying to help, starts introducing things. But what about the good times? But they're really trying. But it's not always this bad. But what if you're wrong? But what if you regret leaving? But what would people say? But what about the kids? But what if this is just a rough patch? But what if you can't do better? But what if you're just being selfish? And now you are so far from I don't feel good in this relationship, that you have basically argued yourself back into staying. Not because anything Changed, not because any of those butts actually disproved how you felt, just because your brain generated enough noise to drown out the original signal. I want to say something about this, and I mean it gently. Some of those butt thoughts are legitimate things to consider. Some of them are real factors that deserve your attention, and I'm not saying that none of them matter. But there is a version of that mental spiral where you're not actually thinking through your situation. You're just using thinking as a way to avoid sitting with the thing that you already know. And that is a very uncomfortable thing to hear. So I'm gonna say it again more slowly. Sometimes the overthinking is not you trying to find clarity. Sometimes it's you trying to outrun clarity. Because clarity can be scary. Clarity means you might have to act. Clarity means you might have to change something. Clarity means that you have to take yourself seriously. And if you've spent a long time in a dynamic where taking yourself seriously was punished or dismissed or treated as selfishness, clarity can feel genuinely dangerous. So you spin, you analyze, you introduce every possible counter-argument. Not to get to the truth, you already know the truth, but to buy yourself a little more time before you have to do anything about it. The spiral is not always confusion. Sometimes it is avoidance wearing confusion's clothes. And the kindest thing that you can do for yourself is to learn to tell the difference. Alright, let's just be fully honest for a second because I cannot sit here and talk about overthinking and getting pulled off track without admitting that I am extremely, profoundly, almost professionally good at it. If overthinking were an Olympic sport, and honestly, I think there's a case to be made, I would at minimum make regionals possibly nationals. I would have a very specific pre-competition routine. I'd probably be sponsored by some chamomile tea brand and a journaling app. I have spent entire nights replaying a single conversation so many times that by the end of it I'm basically having a full argument with an imaginary version of a person who is not even in the room anymore. A version of them that I have constructed in my head and apparently given a really compelling position because somehow imaginary them keeps winning. I have turned a simple, clear, completely valid feeling into a 14-layer internal debate, complete with counter-arguments, potential responses, responses to those responses, and at least one moment of, okay, but what if I'm the problem? Meanwhile, the original situation was someone was unkind to me and I didn't like it. That was it. That was the whole situation. And I somehow needed three business days and a complete mental infrastructure project to get back to that. No snacks, no map, no exit plan, just me, the scenic route, and a lot of hypothetical conversations with people who didn't ask to be in them. And I say this not to be funny about it, although I do think it's a little funny in the way that only painful things are funny when enough time has passed. I say it because I think there is something really important in the recognition that this is not a rare and unusual thing that only certain women struggle with. This is extremely common and it's not a character flaw. It is a trained response. A lot of us, and when I say a lot, I mean a lot, grew up in environments where our perceptions were frequently questioned, where we learned that our clarity was not always welcomed, where being certain about how we felt sometimes made things worse rather than better. Where being too sensitive or too much was a recurring theme. So we learned to interrogate ourselves before we spoke. We learned to pre-run everything through about 47 filters before we let it out. We learned to doubt our own read on things because enough people had told us that our read was wrong, that we started to believe them. And then we wonder why we overthink. The overthinking is not a mystery. The overthinking is the answer to well, what do you do when your clarity isn't safe? You blur it before anyone else can. And now, outside of whatever situation trained you to do that, you're still doing it out of habit, out of protection, out of a deeply human desire not to be wrong about something important. Understanding that doesn't fix it overnight, but it does mean that you can start to look at the spiral with a little more compassion and a little less, ugh, why do I do this? You do this because at some point doing it kept you safe and you were smart enough to learn it. You're also smart enough to unlearn it. Okay, so here's what I'm not going to do. I am not going to tell you to just stop overthinking. I am not going to say just trust yourself as if that's an instruction that means something on its own. I am not going to give you a list of affirmations that are technically true, but do nothing in the actual moment when your brain is six layers deep in a spiral and you can't find your way out. What I want to give you is something that you can actually use in the moment, in real life, when it's happening. Tool number one, find the original sentence. When you feel yourself getting pulled off track in a conversation or inside your own head, ask yourself one question. What was the first thing I knew about this? Not the thing that you've been arguing about for the last 20 minutes, not the thing that got introduced to distract you, the first thing before any of it started. Maybe it was that comment hurt my feelings, or this schedule isn't working, or I don't feel safe here, or something is wrong. Get back to that sentence. Write it down if you need to. Say it out loud to yourself, but find it and hold on to it. Because everything else that entered the conversation after that is not necessarily more true just because it came after. The first thing you knew, that is usually the clearest thing. Your brain, before it started protecting itself and second guessing and running things through filters, that is where the actual truth tends to live. Tool number two. Name the detour out loud or at least to yourself. This is the nephew move applied consciously. When something gets introduced that has nothing to do with what you were talking about, a dig at your character, a reference to something from years ago, a complete pivot to a new grievance. You are allowed to notice it and to name it internally. You can say that's a detour. That's not what we're talking about. Who even cares about that anyway? Let's come back. You don't have to say any of that out loud. The naming can happen entirely inside of your own head, but the act of naming it, of calling it a detour rather than just following it because it appeared gives you choice. You see it, you decide whether to go there. You are not just automatically reacting. If you want to say it out loud, you can. Something like, I hear you, but I want to come back to what we're talking about. You don't have to address every side road to have the main conversation. You are allowed to redirect back to the original point. Tool number three, feelings first, analysis second. This one is specifically for the internal spiral. When the conversation is just you and your brain, we tend to try to think our way through emotional experiences, but emotions are not logic problems. You cannot analyze your way to clarity about something that you're feeling. You have to feel it first. So before you open the filing cabinet of every possible counter-argument, before you start weighing and measuring and considering all the angles, just sit with what is actually true right now. Say, I feel hurt. I feel unsafe. I feel exhausted. I feel like something is wrong. Just that. Without immediately going to, but why? But is this rational? But what if I'm wrong? Let the feeling be information before you try to fact-check it. Because here's the thing: your feelings are not submitted for peer review. They don't have to pass a test before they count. You felt what you felt. That is data, and you are allowed to start there. Tool number four, give the spiral a time limit. Okay, this one sounds a little silly, but I promise it works. If you know you're someone who spirals, and at this point we've established that I am very much this person, one genuinely useful practice is to give yourself a container for it. You're allowed to spiral. You're allowed to turn it over and look at it from 14 different angles. You can do the whole thing. But you get, say, 15 minutes, set a timer if you need to. And when the timer comes off, you come back to what you knew first. This works because it respects the part of you that genuinely needs to process while also preventing the spiral from becoming infinite. You're not suppressing anything, you're giving it a lane. And you might be surprised at how often when you come back to the original point after 15 minutes of spiral, that it hasn't changed. The truth that you started with is still there, exactly where you left it, waiting patiently while your brain went on its little adventure. And last, tool number five, ask, is this mine? When you find yourself deeply engaged with a detour, defending your character, explaining your intentions, proving that you're not what someone is implying that you are, pause and ask, is this mine to carry right now? Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes there's a real thing to address and you need to address it. But sometimes, and this is the one to watch for, you are working very hard to fix someone else's perception of you instead of saying in the truth of your own experience. And those are not the same job. You cannot make someone understand something that they are determined not to understand. You cannot explain your way to being believed by someone who has decided not to believe you. You cannot logic your way into someone respecting your boundary if they have decided that they don't want to respect it. At some point, the most powerful thing that you can do is to stop trying to change their version of the story and come back to your own. You don't have to prove your truth to someone who is committed to misunderstanding you. You get to know what's true. You get to hold it, you get to act from it, even if they never agree. I want to zoom out for a second because everything that we've talked about today might sound like it's about communication skills or about managing arguments better or about thinking more clearly. And it is all of those things, but it's also something bigger. For women who have been in dynamics where their perception was consistently questioned, where they were gaslit, where their clarity was treated as a problem, where they were talked out of their own experiences over and over, learning to come back to their original point is not just a communication strategy. It is a form of reclamation. Because when you have spent a long time in an environment that trained you to distrust your own read on things, coming back to what did I know first is actually an act of trust in yourself. And trust in yourself is one of these dynamics most reliably destroy. When you hold your thread in a conversation, when you refuse to follow every distraction down its rabbit hole, you are doing something that might feel small, but it is genuinely significant. You're acting like your own perception matters. You are treating yourself like someone whose clarity is worth returning to. You are being your own witness. And after a long time of not being that, of outsourcing your reality to someone else's version of it, that is not small. That is enormous. Every time you pause and come back, every time you name the detour, even just to yourself, every time you find the original sentence and hold on to it instead of letting it go, you are rebuilding something. You are rebuilding the relationship between you and your own truth. And that relationship is the whole thing. Everything that we work on here, the pattern breaking, the healing, the getting back to yourself, it all runs through that. You know what you know, and trusting that you know it is not a small thing. It is the foundation that everything else gets built on. So this episode, this slightly unexpected episode, is in some ways a tribute to a very small human in the middle of a story about a dog that may or may not have been there, said something that the rest of us could stand to remember. Who even cares about that anyway? Not as a way of dismissing things that matter, not as a wall or a defense, but as a genuine grounding question. Does this thing I'm about to follow, this detail, this detour, this version of the story that someone else is trying to tell me, does it actually matter to what I know to be true? And if not, leave it. Come back to your story, keep going. You started clear. You are allowed to come back to that again and again and again as many times as you need to. And if you've been in a place where your words got twisted, where your doubts were used against you, where you felt yourself being pulled off track so many times that you started to wonder whether you even have a track anymore, I want you to hear this clearly. You did, you do. It might be buried under a lot of noise right now, but it is there. And every single time you come back to it, every time you pause the spiral and find the first thing you knew, you are finding your way back to yourself. That is the work. That is all of it, really. Before you go, two quick things. First, if this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who might need it. Maybe she's in the middle of a conversation that won't stop spinning. Maybe she's someone who has been talked out of her own clarity one too many times. Maybe it's just someone who would appreciate knowing that a four-year-old accidentally said something wise that applies to all of us. Whoever comes to mind, send it to her. And second, if you haven't left a review yet, wherever you listen to podcasts, please take 60 seconds to do that. It genuinely helps more women find this space. And there are a lot of women out there right now who need to hear that their clarity is worth coming back to. Okay, that's it from me this week. Be patient with yourself, hold your thread, and maybe this week when you catch yourself three layers deep in something that started simple, just pause, come back and ask. Wait, who even cares about that anyway? Until next time, keep breaking every pattern that was never yours to carry on.