“I hear all the time — I’m 35, 45, 55, 65, 75 — and I have no idea who I am. I don’t know what I want, I don’t know what I need, I’ve only lived in a role. Good girl, good daughter, good wife, good employee, good grandma … who am I?” Beatriz Victoria Albina says of the thousands of women she’s specialized in serving for the last decade. “From there, we struggle to make decisions. We take on a therapist role in relationships, always listening, always supporting, always problem-solving, but we don’t get that support in return for so many reasons.”

Shelf Help is a wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life.

A certified somatic life coach, breathworker and former nurse practitioner, who resides in Brooklyn, Albina is the author of “End Emotional Outsourcing: How to Overcome Your Codependent, Perfectionist, People-Pleasing Habits” (out in paperback this September), which educates readers on these phenomena and shows them how to live a more fulfilling life. Her book guides readers through techniques such as body-based somatic practices and thought work, building to the capacity for utilizing healthy boundaries and direct communication.

Albina is also the host of the popular podcast “Feminist Wellness.” In the podcast, she serves as a loving alternative auntie figure and often addresses her audience with quirky pet names such as “my tender ravioli.” A queer Latina who immigrated from Argentina at 3 years old with her family when they fled the dictatorship of the 1980s, she has grown a following for her sage advice, warm sense of humor and loving voice, as well as for contextualizing how ending emotional outsourcing actively confronts the external systems of oppression that govern our world.

“We learned, often when we were preverbal or very young, that our authentic self is not OK, is not appreciated, is not welcome, is not the right way to be. Whether that’s in our family of origin, in our extended family or in institutions,” Albina says.

With her background in healthcare, Albina also leans into the science behind what she teaches, educating her readers — “my nerds,” as she calls them — on science-backed, trauma-informed techniques to connect with themselves and transform their relationships from codependence to interdependence. Her aim is to reroute individuals from relying on the approval of the people and systems outside to instead deepening our relationships with ourselves and our community in ways that are more fulfilling.

Albina spoke with us over Zoom from New York. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

“End Emotional Outsourcing” author Beatriz Victoria Albina.

(Photo courtesy of author.)

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You coined the term “emotional outsourcing” — why? Do you hope that people will adopt it rather than using the other terms that make up the subtitle of your book?

I really wanted to delineate that these aren’t who you are. They’re verbs. They’re what you’re doing. They’re survival habits, so they are brilliant and laudable ways that you learned to secure safety, belonging, and worth outside of yourself when that felt like the only option. So we really need a sea change where we move away from, “It’s who I am.” Instead, let’s really talk about, “It’s what I was doing, and sometimes it’s what I still do out of habit, but it’s not inherent to who I am as a mammal.”

Are these three subtitle terms — codependent, perfectionist, people–pleasing — interchangeable or interlinked? What differentiates them from one another?

They each inform each other. Codependent habits are really about managing other people, and then people-pleasing is one way we can do that. Perfectionism is when we bring it home to ourselves — ‘I’ve got to control who I am and, thus, how I’m being seen so that I’m not rejected.’ It all really comes down to attachment wounding in a really deep way, and the ways that we seek to feel not-so-freaked-out when that wounding gets activated.

How can readers identify if this book is for them?

Downplaying our needs, stuffing down our feelings. Not knowing what we want, because we’ve spent so long prioritizing others. If you believe that if you don’t take care of someone, that they’ll leave or stop loving you. If you accept less than optimal treatment because you don’t want to be left. If you avoid advocating for yourself because it feels selfish or scary or bad. Overexplaining, over-apologizing, over-justifying. Not resting. Feeling guilty when you take a break or set a boundary. I could go on.

In your book, you guide readers toward becoming interdependent, rather than codependent or independent. How does one make this distinction in their relationships? What implications does this transition have on day-to-day life?

The way you know the difference is felt in the body. In a codependent pattern, in a codependent survival habit, we are doing things, saying things, being things to attempt to get someone else, to have an emotion, to try to manage or control the way someone else thinks about or relates to us. The choice that we’re making is not centered in self. Reciprocity within capitalism and white supremacy is tit for tat. In codependency, it’s also tit for tat.

Meanwhile, interdependence is when we are two autonomous humans, relating from mutuality and reciprocity that is flowing like water. We’re not manipulating or pushing ourselves, we’re not manipulating or controlling them. In interdependence, we’re giving from our emotional overflow, and the love and care we receive in that reciprocity, for caring for the people in our lives, balances out. But we’re not putting ourselves out to the point where we’re living in resentment, because we’re not making it mean anything about ourselves, or them, or our relationship.

We hear often about the epidemic of loneliness that we are living in. In your book, at the end, you talk about how through ending emotional outsourcing, you’ve cultivated a fulfilling chosen family, and that you make a practice of showing up for community care. What advice might you have for folks who recognize that they’re craving something different from how they’re presently experiencing their day-to-day realities but can’t see how to change it?

All right, listen, community care, babies. You’ve got to do the day-to-day banal stuff with your friends. You know, if you want a village, you’ve got to be a villager. Villages aren’t made in one coffee date and a lunch date, and drinks at a loud bar where you can’t hear anything anyway.

So, like, my friend and I go to the supermarket together on Mondays, and I go with her to pick up her kid because I want to spend time with her and that’s what she’s got to do. Go with your friend to the community garden, help them weed their tomatoes. Your body needs a new coat? Go thrifting together. Do the daily dumb stuff. Help your friends, you know? Not to brag, but I’m very good at laundry. The life I want is in doing the things of life. It’s having a soup club where we take turns dropping off soup at each other’s houses. That’s what community building is about.

Could you talk about the connection between the thought work and the body-based somatics that you teach?

When we’re daydreaming and ruminating and self-reflecting and mentally time-traveling or imagining other people’s thoughts, we’re not present. Somatic and nervous system support helps us to step into presence. When we are actually present in the moment, we’re in conscious awareness and we’re present in our bodies. It’s not any more complicated than that. That allows us to step into choiceful-ness. I can pick the meaning-making here. And I can listen to my body, and I can make a choice that is supportive of the collective, but it’s not self-abandoning. It respects the people around me without disrespecting myself. We drop into the present moment, and we write a new story in real time, hopefully with the whole body on board. And that’s how, very slowly, through somatic (body-based) practices, we start to create a lot more room to actually be a real person in our lives.

You’ve included journaling questions to work with, especially in the thought–work section. What advice do you have for folks who want to do the journaling but are struggling with adding it to perhaps our perfectionist-created to-do list. Any tips?

Yes. The kitten step is community. Text a friend, ‘Do you want to do these stupid journals together?’ And then hopefully she says, ‘Yes.’ And then you meet every other week for an hour on Wednesday, and you friggin’ do it. And you body double, or you read them to each other. You make a plan that involves another person, or a group, because we’re pack animals. We need to co-regulate. When the book first came out, I had a free book club, because we need each other. So, make a book club! Or tell your therapist or your coach you’re going to be doing these questions and then bring them to the session.