There's a difference. And until that difference becomes conscious, a woman will keep treating those two things as the same.
I had a client recently, sharp woman, self-aware, doing real work on herself. She told me her man had started being more decisive. Planning things. Holding his ground in disagreements. And she said it made her feel uneasy. Like something was being taken from her. I asked her what, specifically. She went quiet for a long time. Then she said, I don't actually know.
That's the thing about old pain. It just quietly shapes how you read the present.
He wasn't taking anything. He was finally being himself. But her nervous system had already filed it under threat. And so she was pulling back from the exact thing she had wanted from him for years.
Consciousness is the practice of asking whether what you're reacting to is actually happening, or whether you're somewhere else entirely, in a different time, with a different man, and you've brought all of that in here with you.
