Episode 131 - End Emotional Outsourcing with Béa Albina
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want. In this episode, I speak with Béa Albina about her new book, End Emotional Outsourcing: How to Overcome Your Codependent, Perfectionist, and People-Pleasing Habits. You’ll hear how this book not only outlines a clear path to end this painful way of living, but reframes emotional outsourcing in powerful new ways. Here’s what we cover:
The definition of emotional outsourcing and how it shows up in our relationships, careers, and decision-making
Why emotional outsourcing is a brilliant survival strategy, not a personality flaw
The truth about authenticity and why it’s often the cost of people-pleasing and perfectionism
How emotional outsourcing lives in the nervous system and why healing has to include the body
Béa’s five-part process for rebuilding self-trust through small, “kitten-sized” steps
Beatriz (Béa) Victoria Albina, NP, MPH, SEP (she/her) is a UCSF-trained Family Nurse Practitioner, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Master Certified Somatic Life Coach, author of the forthcoming "End Emotional Outsourcing: a Guide to Overcoming Codependent, Perfectionist and People Pleasing Habits" ( Sept 30, Hachette Balance) and Breathwork Meditation Guide with a passion for helping humans socialized as women to reconnect with their bodies, regulate their nervous systems and rewire their minds, so they can break free from codependency, perfectionism and people pleasing and reclaim their joy.
Find Béa here:
https://beatrizalbina.com/book/
https://www.instagram.com/beatrizvictoriaalbinanp/
https://www.facebook.com/beatrizvictoriaalbinanp
https://beatrizalbina.com/podcast/
Find Sara here:
https://pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
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https://www.tiktok.com/@sarafiskcoach
https://www.youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
What happens inside the free Stop People Pleasing Facebook Community? Our goal is to provide help and guidance on your journey to eliminate people pleasing and perfectionism from your life. We heal best in a safe community where we can grow and learn together and celebrate and encourage each other. This group is for posting questions about or experiences with material learned in The Ex-Good Girl podcast, Sara Fisk Coaching social media posts or the free webinars and trainings provided by Sara Fisk Coaching. See you inside!
Transcript
Sara Bybee Fisk 00:57
Okay, this interview has been waiting to happen for a long time because I have been so privileged to walk part of this book journey with you. I know I wasn't there for all of the long hours of writing and sweating and crying. I was there for some of it though. And so it is such a privilege for me to interview about your book, baby. It's just so good and emotional outsourcing, how to overcome your codependent perfectionist and people pleasing habits. And it's such an important work because it outlines not just a clear path to end this really painful way of living, but it reframes it in such important ways. And the first way that I think it's so essential that we reframe this is that you talk about emotional outsourcing as a really brilliant survival strategy and not something that is wrong with people who are socialized as women. So I want to speak to that really directly. First, give me a definition of what emotional outsourcing is.
Beatriz Albina 02:06
Yeah, with great joy. So emotional outsourcing is when we chronically and habitually source our sense of the three most vital human needs, safety, belonging, and worth from everyone and everything outside of ourselves instead of from within at a great cost to ourselves. And we enact emotional outsourcing through the survival skills or habits of codependent, perfectionist, and people pleasing thinking.
Sara Bybee Fisk 02:38
Okay, let's get some really concrete examples.
Beatriz Albina 02:40
Yeah, absolutely. So let's start with like in relationships, we can really, really easily take on that role of the fixer. So we feel responsible for other people's emotions. We can't relax if someone's upset, if someone maybe doesn't like the movie, oh God, you don't like dinner, let me fix it. Let me fix it, let me fix it. We apologize constantly, even when we didn't do anything wrong and we're not even Canadian just to keep the peace because keeping the peace is the most important thing. We avoid conflict to that end at all costs, even if it means downplaying our needs, stuffing down our feelings, fibbing. We feel resentful, but we either don't express it and we just shove it down and just, you know, my feelings don't count as much as anyone else's, who am I to be upset? Or we let the resentment build and build and build and because we don't have any skills to like release the pressure valve, we all of the sudden explode on the people we love, like at them, or we scream and pound the steering wheel alone in the car. We take on a therapist role in all of our relationships with our partner, our parents, our friends, our kids, our employees. We are always listening, always supportive, always problem solving, but we don't get that same support in return, either because we are so over-functioning that we attract under-functioners into our lives, people who don't have the skills, capacity or desire to support us, or maybe they wanna help us, but what's our constant refrain? I'm fine. Oh, I'm fine. Yeah, don't worry, I'm fine, I'm fine. Oh, speaking of fixers, we are the only ones who see the true potential in that date, that partner, that person, you know, they don't want to be everything we want them to be, but give me a little time. I'll get them working out, eating better, communicating better, showing up. We take on humans as fixer-upper projects. We give and give and give and give until we are completely exhausted, and we believe that we have to take care of someone else in order for our lives to have value, and we also believe, you know, we have a deep, we often have a lot of really anxious attachment, and so if we're not taking care of someone, they're gonna leave, right? At work, we say yes to extra projects, unpaid labor and emotional caretaking. We're like the mom of the office, you know what I mean? We do not advocate for ourselves, for raises, fair treatment, credit for our work. I know you talk a lot about people-pleasing at work that's us to a T. Decision-making is really challenging because we don't value ourselves, we don't think that we're worthwhile, and so instead of just listening to our bodies and making an intuitive yes or no, we have to consult the entire peanut gallery and ask 473 people their opinion before we make a choice because we don't trust ourselves, and when we do say no,
Beatriz Albina 05:47
we're paralyzed by guilt. We're paralyzed by guilt even when we said no to something we absolutely have no desire to do.We are either under-responders or over-responders, so something bad happens and we're like, okay, we don't let ourselves have our feelings or something minor happens and we take everything so personally and make everything such a big deal, we are explosive at the smallest provocation, constantly and chronically offended by the whole world. I could go on for hours.
Sara Bybee Fisk 06:23
That is the most comprehensive list I have ever heard. You're right. We could go on and on because the ways that this shows up is as varied as the experience of people who are socialized as women. I think it's really interesting to come back to the core of what you said. It's this constant needing outside validation that you're safe, that you belong, and that you're worthy. We get it in all of these thousands and thousands of different ways. I'm particularly interested in how reframing it, not as a personality flaw, but as a brilliant strategic adaptation, how that helps people overcome it. First of all, tell me why it's not a personality flaw.
Beatriz Albina 07:16
because it's a strategy. It's not actually who you are at your core. It's a strategy that makes perfect sense when you understand the family systems, cultural norms, and the social structures and thus systems of oppression that we grew up in. So for so many of us, those systems, family, culture, society, religion, were and are shaped by the patriarchy, white settler colonialism, late stage capitalism. It's the air we breathe, the rules we were expected to follow, the invisible scripts that got handed to us that we were told over and over exactly how to be and who we needed to be in order to survive, to belong, to get love, or if we couldn't get those things, at least to be safe. So if you were raised and socialized as a girl in a patriarchal culture, you were rewarded for being a good girl. Agreeable, accommodating, polite. You were told to smile, to say yes. I can't help but go into that voice though, to make other, put other people's needs ahead of your own to keep everything copacetic and that your body isn't really yours. How good you are lives in how others perceive you, not in your own sense of integrity. Your integrity doesn't matter. So of course you learned to scan the room, to read the mood, to anticipate and preempt any possible conflict. And of course you made other people's feelings your job because of course you did. How else would you stay safe?
Sara Bybee Fisk 08:57
I think one of the things that is endlessly fascinating, you and I could go into a hundred different rooms with a thousand different women each and we could ask them what are the good girl rules? And every single one of them would know. And it was not ever something that was handed out with my third grade multiplication facts, right? But we all know. And I think what is so brilliant about reframing it as a survival strategy is we can actually appreciate and love those past versions of us that learned how to please because it got us where we are today. And we can want something different for ourselves now without having to shame or judge or criticize those past versions that really learn to please to get along and to get ahead and to survive.
Beatriz Albina 09:48
Because if you want to get into the C-suite, this is how, right? So it's not just folly, but it does hang your humanity out to dry. So that's the question, at what cost, right? And what's the payoff and what's leaving your truth behind?
Sara Bybee Fisk 10:13
Well, in that, when you define emotional outsourcing and you said, you know, we, we look for these things outside of us at great cost to us, I don't think we know what the cost is for a while, right? We're so busy getting into the C-suite or getting into the position of being rewarded and recognized, like for me, it wasn't a C-suite, it was being recognized as the best Mormon, the most religious, the most devout, right? And although the behavior looks the same, I'm acquiescing, I'm accommodating, I'm not making waves, I'm being agreeable, I'm doing what other people want. There is a moment, I think, increasingly as I aged that I began to become aware of that cost. And so let's talk about when you say at great cost to ourselves, what is the cost? The costs are all.
Beatriz Albina 11:10
The cost is, okay, so authenticity isn't just being yourself, it's knowing who you are in the depth of yourself. So it's the ability to stay rooted in your own wants, needs, preferences and values, even in the face of someone else's disappointment, someone's negation, someone else saying, no, that's not what a good girl wants, right? Even when your nervous system is quietly or loudly, quite frankly, begging you to abandon yourself to stay liked. Authenticity is staying rooted and honest with yourself and others, instead of being performative to avoid conflict or discomfort. And that's what we lose, right? We lose that ability to stay true to ourselves, to stay in our integrity, in our dignity, in our values. And instead, we go with, we go with the flow, even when that means laughing at someone's racist joke, or right, because you don't want to upset anybody, right? Well, certainly not. Certainly not. Right? It's just going along to get along, which when you add up those moments of what is conditioned self betrayal, at the end of the day, who do you have? Right? People who are attracted to and want a false you who want this, this facade, you who are you to you when you've spent your whole life putting you at the end of it all, right?
Sara Bybee Fisk 12:48
So it costs our genuine self connection and knowledge, who I am, what I want, what I really want to do with my time and energy and effort, you know, that kind of the life, my life source.
Beatriz Albina 13:03
And your sense of self-worth, right? Your own value is contingent on everyone else, right? So then the telling the truth of who you are can feel like a threat.
Sara Bybee Fisk 13:15
Right. And so if I can't show up as I really am and hang on to me, because I'm constantly kind of getting into the nervous system. At you know, the nervous system activation that tells me to just be what other people want me to be. It also has to have an effect on my ability to be in close connected relationships with other people. It's not just my relationship with me, right?
Beatriz Albina 13:43
Because you're never if you're not in the room, who are they relating to? Right? Right? Who are they? Who are they talking to? Who are they feeling with? We think that we're like protecting others when we're not vulnerable. Because then we're not burdening them. We're not complicating their life. We have the same feeling the same belief system when we try to save people from their emotions. Right? Like someone says, yeah, I'm really upset. Oh, they're there, it'll be all right. Right? And so we're not allowing others to have their vulnerable, truthful experience of life when we're not allowing ourselves to either.
Sara Bybee Fisk 14:21
And so then you're not connecting who you really are to who someone else really is. And I think that that creates the feeling of loneliness that a lot of us have in relationships where we are with other people and we are doing things for other people, but we don't feel really known or seen by them.
Beatriz Albina 14:42
Right. And what I want to pause here, because you and I are always talking about our no-blame, no-shame way of expressing this. The thing that's really keeping us from showing up and being vulnerable and sort of taking the mask off, as it were, is our nervous system and the window of capacity or tolerance in our nervous system to step outside the lines, right? To step outside what's prescribed for us and to possibly break a social norm or taboo, right? And by being our authentic self. And so I want to say it's the stories we grow up in, but it's also held in the body, right? If it's too scary to you as a mammal, then you're not going to do it, right?
Sara Bybee Fisk 15:29
I really love to spend some time kind of building out this idea because I think this is key. You say that emotional outsourcing lives in the nervous system, not just the mind, right? Because in our logical mind, I think we're adults and we understand, like you have, you know, we've talked about ruminating is not helpful. We should have a sense of who we are, self-esteem, and we should have some confidence and be able to go out into the world and, you know, advocate for ourselves, say what we want. Like we know that that is logical. We see other women doing it, but there just seems to be something in the way of that. Can you speak to how it lives in the nervous system?
Beatriz Albina 16:11
Yeah, so it keeps our bodies in this hypervigilance, so like really revved up. It keeps us believing everything in the world is a potential existential threat. That if we aren't living in this absolute perfection, everything's going to fall apart. And so it can be like a constant micro tension in your muscles, right, this like readiness to spring into action. We can find ourselves holding our breath bracing for emotional, physical, energetic hit our own heart rate. And our vagal tone can be attuning to others. Hyper attune instead of tuning inward. And our stress chemistry can be a hot mess. So like elevated cortisol spikes and things like adrenaline when you even think about disappointing someone else. Okay, that's those are cool nerd words. What does that mean? It means that your entire mind, body and spirit is attuned fully outward towards other people, instead of tuned inward. So that you can say things like, no, I don't actually want to be the room mom this year. Thanks for the offer. No, you know, I actually don't want to go out to dinner with them. They're really negative. And it's just kind of exhausting for me. Thanks for the invite, though. Right on and on those no thank yous, those statements, those preferences, those desires that are opposite to our training, get buried, get subsumed are unfindable in a body and a nervous system that is hyper attuned to others. Right? Because you start to say no, are people going to be stay smiling? Probably not. Right. And when your body equates, someone's not smiling and doom, you're going to do everything you can to keep the smiles around, right?
Sara Bybee Fisk 18:14
You are because it's just too uncomfortable to not do that.
Beatriz Albina 18:20
And we grow up discomfort equals doom. Discomfort equals doom. Somebody's sad, right? My dad is sad. Well, I gotta be the jester. I gotta go make jokes, right? Mom is upset. She's storming around the kitchen again. Let me go show her my A plus. Let me tell her I made JV. Let me go and manage other people's feelings that are too uncomfortable because the line often for us between discomfort and danger, very blurry, right? And so someone being uncomfortable is an existential threat. So we don't allow it. Why would we allow it? We're not fools, Sara, right? We're just not fools.
Sara Bybee Fisk 19:03
So if someone is recognizing themselves in what you are talking about, right, that they have a very low nervous system capacity to say no, to choose what they want for themselves, to disappoint someone else, even when it's what serves them the best, where do they need to start working on that?
Beatriz Albina 19:29
Mmm, so they need to be brave. B, body first. R, recognize the outsourcing. A, ask what do I want? V, voice a small act of self-loyalty. And E, encourage yourself. Shall I go through my five-part process?
Sara Bybee Fisk 19:44
I would love you to go through your five part process. I will love you forever.
Beatriz Albina 19:49
Okay, so we start body first. Oh, and can I also put this out there? This is really important. This is not you alone in a silo work. No one is born codependent. I eschew the labels. They're bologna pants. These are survival skills. You were not born codependent. You were not born a people pleasing perfectionist. Forget about it. We learned these survival skills to survive in relationship. We heal in relationship. Right? So the fact Sara that I have you and let's give Judith Gatton some big love, right? The three of us can call each other for like really deep talk. But also like, remember last week when I sent you a video that I was like, Hi, I'm a fully grown Leo. And does this shirt look cute on me? Right? Like, we need each other. We need to lean on each other and let our nervous systems take comfort with each other. This is it is white Western wellness baloney to tell you that this is individual work. We heal in community beginning, middle and end. Because science. Right? Love it. I love it. Right. I just wanted to say that really clearly. This is why people we need coaches, we need communities, we need sisterhoods and sibling hoods. Great. So let's go back to being brave. We start with the body. So we've been talking about how when we are living in emotional outsourcing, we are not embodied. We are not present in our bodies. Being embodies is lived experience of inhabiting your body, not just being aware that like, I have a body, it takes me to work, it drives a car, it makes dinner. But it's really about perceiving feeling and acting from within your body as your primary home. So not just living from the neck up, where your socialization and conditioning live, but living in your body. And so embodiment is the integration of sensory, motor, emotional and cognitive processes into a cohesive, felt sense of self. Yeah? Yeah. Great. So the first step is of being brave is that work, right is coming into your body, which for folks who have a history of their body being the site of trauma, that can be challenging. And so we go slowly, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny steps towards becoming ever more present in our bodies. One of the simplest, easiest nervous system skills and tools that I can teach you is orienting. Everyone can do it. And you can do it in a crowded boardroom, you can do it while driving your car, you can do it one-on-one. And it's just this, you simply look around and let your mind body, visual cortex nervous system take in your environment. And I know that sounds way too simple to actually do anything. But think about like, you show up at a new job, and they're like, all right, here's the office. Good luck. It's disorienting. It's confusing. It's, you struggled to know how to do anything because you're not oriented. Whereas you show up at the office, they say here's Pam's desk, here's Jim's desk, the annex is back there. And they show you around the office, your nervous system can rest, right?
Beatriz Albina 23:13
Because you're oriented in time and space. And so one of the best ways to start coming into embodiment, and thus towards more authenticity, so you can step out of emotional outsourcing, is by finding our bodies in time and space. I like to do that by combining looking around and feeling my feet. So I always say find your feet, find the ground, connect with the earth. It's August, which is the month that in South America, we celebrate Pachamama or earth mother. So let's find the earth, right? Connect in with the ground, let your feet connect you with source, however you experience that. And let your body begin to be your GPS. Because your body tells you the truth about what's right, what's wrong, and what's meh, right? Even when your mind is doing mental gymnastics to people, please, so come into your body. Next, if you're in the midst of emotional outsourcing, the next thing we need to do is attune ourselves to our own habitual ways of outsourcing. So notice yourself in the act gently. What I like to do is have my clients sit down, orient their nervous system, find their feet, and then write out the ways they know they habitually outsource. Like, what's your classic go-to? Mine was to think my needs don't matter. Right? Like, that was a classic for me. For someone else, it might be watching people's face as you say something to see if it's okay. Right? Is it okay? I asked for time off. Like, I'm sort of like monitoring you. You might know that you have the habit of outsourcing a decision because you don't want to disappoint others. Oh, I used to do this one, Sara, where I like was worried about an outcome. And so I would kind of, in a way, manipulate almost someone else to make the decision for me because then if it didn't turn out well, I could blame them. I had no idea I was doing it till I did. Right? So make a list, come to understand your own habitual outsourcing, and then make it a fun game. Like, where's Waldo? You know, where's Waldo? Yes. Right? Like, Oh, I did the thing. Now, this goes towards my general philosophy, which I know you share, which is, let's make this light. Let's make this fun. This is some of the most important work of your entire human existence. But it doesn't need to be so serious. You know what I mean? Yes. Right? Like the job where we laugh, I've ever had where we laughed the most was when I was a hospice nurse. Everyone's circling the grave. Let's laugh about it. Right? Like, let's joke about it. Like my best friend has stage one of my best friends, one of my best friends, but another best friend has stage four terminal cancer. And all the time, she'll be like, Oh, no, I hold on, I need to move my phone. It's too close to my body. It's going to keep it light.
Sara Bybee Fisk 26:10
Yeah, there is such an air of seriousness about all the things we have to change about it.
Beatriz Albina 26:15
Take a breath. Yeah. So then, yes, shall I continue?
Sara Bybee Fisk 26:22
Yes, we've covered B.
Beatriz Albina 26:23
R, recognize that as A, ask, what do I want? So not what they want, not what would keep you out of trouble, not what they will approve of, but do you actually want, need, feel, or prefer right now? Even if it's foggy, even if the answer is I don't know, this is where we start. So what we're doing here is shifting our neuroplasticity, we're shifting the neural grooves in our brain that habitually, heuristically go to, I don't know, and that's a problem. We start by shifting towards, I don't know, and what matters is that I asked myself. So that's the new thought we're programming. So constantly asking yourself, when someone's like, do you want to go out to dinner? And you ask yourself, do I? And if your brain goes, I don't know, you go, oh, awesome, but I asked myself. Even if the thing coming out of your mind is, I don't know, help, you asked. And that's our goal. The goal is to self-ask and to really to start to pump yourself up in your mind, right? Because we don't matter to ourselves. So that's what matters, not the answer. Next is to voice small acts of self-loyalty. And here we don't just keep it small. We keep it kitten step sized. So do you know my funny thing I say, Sara, of kitten steps?
Sara Bybee Fisk 27:48
Do you know this? It's a good one. So go ahead and tell.
Beatriz Albina 27:50
Okay, great. So, I think that folks in the self-help world telling folks to take baby steps is malpractice. I think it's ridiculous. A baby's foot is like what, two and a half, three inches? That's bananas. That is just wild and ridiculous. That is too big a step. You're going to fall over right on your sweet little snout. No, thank you. So, I implore my clients and you listening to take newborn kitten-sized steps. Like newborn, like this kitten's like hours old, little teeny tiny steps. Because when we take small steps, we're so much more likely to succeed.Right? And it really reduces the resistance within the nervous system to taking the first step. So, think of the situations that we listed above where you are most likely to outsource and write out what the tiniest thing you could do to reverse that. So, if your habit is to say yes to every project from people pleasing, maybe your kitten step is, let me get back to you. Right? So, instead of that automatic, yeah, maybe you're going to say yes in an hour, but it's irrelevant. Right? What we're programming into your brain is the pause and choosing self. Right? Maybe you never order what you want in case someone at the table wants to share. Right? So, maybe, maybe you order without asking others what they want. Right? It doesn't really matter. The work here is we, you are starting to become your own safe place. So, taking these small acts of self-loyalty, begin to shift it. And then finally encourage yourself like you would a best friend, like Sara and I encourage ourselves. Right? Celebrate each and every kitten step in your own mind if not out loud. Even better though if it's with a friend. Right? Because we heal outsourcing in community. So, I caught it. Yay. I paused. I asked myself something new. Right? This work is slow because it's deep and it's tiny steps because it's changing our entire lifetime of coding in our minds, in our bodies, in our spirits. So, that's how we be brave, Sara.
Sara Bybee Fisk 30:08
What does life start to look like as you are being brave and walking yourself with your community, with your sisterhood and the relationships that you're building, what does life start to look like on the other side of emotional outsourcing?
Beatriz Albina 30:29
You know what, the first place my brain went, and this is like the most Leo on Leo conversation. This is the example I love to use. I know my hair looks good anytime, any day, but I love, I love to receive praise now, to receive validation, to be told my hair looks good because I don't count on it as life's blood. I don't need it, but it's just icing, right? Okay, so here's one of my favorite metaphors, chapter 10, be the cake. When you are no longer emotionally outsourcing, you trust that you are the most delicious, incredible chocolate cake or carrot cake or whatever you want. And you let life be the icing, meaning it's something great to have, to have praise for someone to love up on you, right? To have that additional validation from the world, but you don't need it because you've got your own back. And so it means doing the things you want to, the things you dream of, not with no regard for anyone else, but with regard for yourself at the top and others right behind it, right? So it's me first, you second, us together with love. It's us together, right? It's always thinking about your values as the center of your life. It's living with integrity, it's living with dignity. And when someone says, hey, I don't like that shirt on you, you can say, okay, but like, that's it. Okay. Right? Because they get to have their opinion. It's not your problem. It's not your gospel. It's not yours to fix. It's not yours to even necessarily absorb, right? Oh, I don't like that you're what do. Okay. And you can allow others to have their own experience of life. You don't need to manage it. You don't need to fix it. If someone's upset or uncomfortable or unhappy, you can let them have those feelings and you can meet them with love. Oh, I hear you. You're really upset that I'm not going to change my entire life to meet your preferences.
Sara Bybee Fisk 32:42
It also has to just free people up to find places where nobody gives a fuck which shirt they're wearing, right? Well, there's also that, yes. They get to show up and be loved and seen and appreciated and fully known, which I think is, that's the best part of being a human, right, is when you get to be loved and seen and truly known.
Beatriz Albina 33:09
Yeah. And the noise in your head gets quieter. That constant like ticker tape of like, did I say the right thing? Should I text them? Did I upset them? It starts to lose volume. Your anterior cingulate cortex, the brain region that's been like an overdrive scanning for interpersonal threat stops firing quite so hot, right? And you get more fluidity in your nervous system. And so you can like notice social tension without your heart rate spiking, without your gut, like nodding up, you can just notice, oh, it looks like they're not loving the party we planned. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I also noticed, let me just talk to some things in my own life, I don't fear being wrong when it's appropriate. Okay, because this is what people push back, but like someone could get hurt. If I'm prescribing insulin, I'm going to check it 27 times. When I put an IUD in, I am appropriately nervous. I should be. I don't care how many I put in. I intend to keep that edge of nervousness. When I tell someone my feelings, how they receive it's on them, and that's great information about them. It's not about me anymore, right? And to your point, I now trust my intuition and my body and my discernment that I pick people to tell about my feelings who are going to meet me the way you do, right? Who are going to meet me with love and care.Who are going to either say like, oh, sweet pea, I hear you that you're upset, or going to do what you do, which is you say, I hear you that you're upset. Would you like some coaching on that? Right? So I believe in my consent. I think it's vital and important, and I believe the people I trust with my heart should ask for it. And so I've called those people in. I remember when I called our friend Cara and I told her I was getting divorced. She was the first person who responded. So how do you feel about that? And I remember my shoulders just going, I feel so happy, joyful and relieved. Like this painful multi-year saga has finally come to an end, then like, I'm going to reclaim my life. I'm already doing it. And she was like, oh, okay, cool, then can I take you out to celebrate? She was the first person who didn't say, oh, honey, I'm so sorry, right? And so you call those people in and you let people know this is how I live. My opinion around my life is what matters. And when I want yours, I will ask for it. And I do. I ask your opinion all the time, but not because I distrust mine, but because I value yours. And that's the shift. That's the move towards interdependence. Your opinion matters. Give me. But if at the end of the day, then I'm going to go with me. And I'm never going to blame you for giving me your opinion because I don't play that game anymore.
Sara Bybee Fisk 36:01
There's such a relief in being able to live with that kind of having your own back and that kind of the spaciousness that other people get to have their response that doesn't mean anything about me. It's good information for me to have. And I think a lot of people listening might think, gosh, that sounds amazing, but they are still feeling exhausted. They're still feeling stuck. Like they have tried things before that have not worked to get them that kind of self-connection and connection with the other people in their lives that they really want. So what would you want those people to know who want what you have been describing, but don't know what to do next? Values work.
Beatriz Albina 36:48
What do you actually value? This comes to mind because Friday I was coaching a group of women and there was so much talk about their exhaustion, and I had everyone stop and write out what are the things that are exhausting you, keeping this house spotless, keeping the car clean, keeping my kids clothes organized, keeping my whatever. Why are we attempting to continue to live up to these exigent standards? Right, back in the day, we had villages for this. And so now in this capitalist hellscape, we each have our own house and our own lawnmower and our own laundry and our own cooking and our own cleaning that is generally on one side of shoulders and that's moms, and you have to do all of the everything. And so the challenge I gave my people was to spend the weekend not cleaning and taking pictures of their dust bunnies as they grow, and we're having a dust bunny challenge. Not because I want us to be gross, but because we are working ourselves to the bone to keep up with the Joneses. Right, so that like what if a neighbor happens to drop by, they'll see that your countertops clean and that's the most important thing about you?Like what really matters to you? Is it spending time with your kids or is it keeping their whites white? Like who cares if their sneakers are dirty? Right, versus like y'all played board games last night and had so much fun laughing. Like were the snacks impeccable? Nobody cares. I think that's when I get all former hospice nursing on it, right? At the end of the day, what matters to you? When you're on your deathbed and someone like me is giving you morphine, what do you want to think about? What do you want to have allowed to matter to you? And I think a lot of our exhaustion, it comes from these ridiculous external standards. And the sooner we can release them and step into our own values, everything shifts. Like do you need to take on more work so you can buy more designer goods that are going to end up in the landfill as soon as that micro trend is over? Do you need to raise kids who are so consumeristically focused that they need the like boo boo boos, whatever. I'm not breaking copyright by saying it wrong. And like do you need to be feeding into that? Or do you need to simplify your life because your values are friendship, community, being of service, honesty. Like what really matters to you? And when you focus on that, I think a lot of the exhaustion falls away because you're not people-proving. We talk a lot about people pleasing, but where are you people proving? Are you Romy and Michelle trying to look amazing at your high school reunion? Like what are you doing? It really comes down to like what are you building a life on?
Sara Bybee Fisk 39:55
I think that's one of the gifts of midlife, actually, for many women, right? You just, you've been doing it for so long, you realize it just doesn't have the currency that you thought it did. It hasn't been the return on the investment. And so I think a lot of that just comes naturally as you age, but if you're listening to this podcast and you don't want to wait for midlife to kind of point these things out for you, what you need to do is buy Bea's book and emotional outsourcing so that you can get a jump on how to arrange your life so that your time and energy and effort is actually going toward creating the connection, the safety, and the self worth that is going to see you through the decades of living as a human and not constantly be requiring you to go get more from other people because you control it, right? It's a source of value, safety, and connection that comes from inside of you that you control and is not controlled by other people outside of you.
Beatriz Albina 41:05
Exactly. Bring it on home, baby. Bring it on home. And then find the people you can be weird around.
Sara Bybee Fisk 41:10
That's right. Yeah. Creating the- Be weirder.
Beatriz Albina 41:15
Be weirder. Come on. Just no one's out here actually that normal. I know you've got it in you.
Sara Bybee Fisk 41:22
We all do. We all do. So thank you so much for writing this book, for being a voice for the authentic, confident, really free lives that I think women want. We're never taught how to get. And that if we want to kind of go globally, which I know you and I think very similarly along these lines, the world right now needs women who are connected to themselves and to their communities who are shaping different discussions because it's kind of a shit show out there right now. And I think when we have women who can advocate for what they want and what they need, what we see is women who advocate for peace, community for everybody getting fed, for everybody being safe and having as much of their needs met as possible, which we could use that right now. We sure can. We sure can. Thank you for adding to the resources that are available to achieve that. Is there anything that you didn't get to say about your book, about the process of writing it, really about anything that you just want to end with if you back up here?
Beatriz Albina 42:38
So, I want to name the importance of somatics and the nervous system, which like we had so much to talk about, we didn't get to there. If you are like so many people, you're looking at Instagram and you're seeing somatics thrown around, whether it's like somatic accounting, somatic workout, somatic whatever, and you just don't get it. I describe it in the book, I break it down in the book, I make it accessible and tangible and applicable to your own life, so don't stress about it. It's in the book, so yeah, but it's really important that we talk about the role of the body in all of this, so yeah, so there it is.
Sara Bybee Fisk 43:19
For more from Bea, where can they find you? I know buying the book is essential. Where else can they learn more about you and what you do?
Beatriz Albina 43:28
Yeah, you can pre-order at béathrizealbina.com slash book, and that's got all the popular booksellers are on there for pre-order. Quick note, because people don't realize this, if you want this book to be a free resource at libraries, it's vital if you've got the financial capacity to pre-order that you pre-order. So the more pre-orders there are, the more copies get published, which means it's more likely to end up in libraries. Isn't that wild? It's bananas to me. I didn't know that a month ago. You can listen to my podcast, Feminist Wellness, wherever you get your shows, and you can follow me on the Gram. I give good Gram at my whole name, béathrice, Victoria, Albina, and P.
Sara Bybee Fisk 44:10
All of those links will be in the show notes because I want everyone to be able to benefit from this. Thank you.
Beatriz Albina 44:16
I love you. Thank you.
Sara Bybee Fisk
I love you too. Talk to you soon.
