Q&A with Beatriz (Béa) Victoria Albina, author of “End Emotional Outsourcing: How to Overcome Your Codependent, Perfectionist, and People-Pleasing Habits”
1. What is End Emotional Outsourcing: How to Overcome Your Codependent, Perfectionist, and People-Pleasing Habits about?
The book is about naming and healing the habits so many of us live with but haven’t had words for. The old term codependency has never captured the full picture – it can feel pathologizing, like you’re broken, and it usually defines you in relation to someone else’s addiction or dysfunction. That leaves out the vast number of us who may have had “pretty good” families but still learned to outsource our sense of self by silencing our needs, managing other people’s feelings, or trying to earn love by being perfect or easy.
That’s why I coined and trademarked the term Emotional Outsourcing™, which I define as: when we chronically and habitually source our sense of the three vital human needs – safety, belonging, and worth – from everyone and everything outside of ourselves instead of from within, at a great cost to self.
This isn’t about becoming selfish or cutting off from others – healthy relationships involve mutual care and consideration. The key difference is choice. Emotional Outsourcing happens when we’ve lost the ability to choose our responses because our nervous system is running old survival programming so we’re living from default, unintentionally. When we can pause, check in with ourselves, and then decide how to engage, that’s healthy interdependence, which is the goal, not in-dependence.
End Emotional Outsourcing invites you to see these patterns not as character flaws but as survival strategies your body and nervous system developed to keep you safe. The book blends somatic science, nervous system regulation, psychology, and feminist analysis with my own lived story to help you understand where these habits come from and, most importantly, how to bring your energy back home to yourself.
2. How has codependency been misunderstood and how is Emotional Outsourcing different?
Codependency has often been misunderstood because it’s been framed too narrowly – as something that only happens in families with substance use issues, and as a label that defines you by someone else’s behavior. That framing can feel shaming and doesn’t reflect the reality of how widespread these patterns are.
Emotional Outsourcing is different because it centers you – your nervous system, your survival strategies, and the ways you learned to secure safety, belonging, and worth by turning outward. This shift matters because it recognizes that these patterns don’t just come from “dysfunctional families.” They’re reinforced by patriarchy, white settler colonialism, capitalism, and cultural messages that reward self-abandonment and over-functioning.
For marginalized folks, these patterns often carry additional layers. People of color may have learned that assimilation and people-pleasing were literal survival strategies. Queer and trans individuals might have developed hypervigilance around others’ comfort as protection against rejection or violence. Working-class people often internalize the message that their worth depends entirely on how much they can produce or give.
By naming Emotional Outsourcing, and using a feminist lens to address these experiences, we can see these habits as adaptive, body-based responses to the conditions we grew up in – not as personal defects – and begin the work of reclaiming our sense of self from the inside out.
3. Can you give any examples from your life of when you have been codependent and/or people-pleasing and what you do now to overcome that?
In my own life, Emotional Outsourcing showed up everywhere. Growing up with chronic illness, I learned to smile and make myself easy so I wouldn’t be “too much.” I stayed in an abusive marriage because my internal narrative that there was something wrong with me was so strong and all consuming, it made me easy to gaslight and manipulate into thinking I was the problem while my ex raged. For decades I played the “cool girl,” downplayed my pain, and said yes when I meant no – all in an attempt to gain love, care and understanding.
These days, I practice a very different way of being, focused on Being. Before I give an answer, I pause and check in with my body. If I feel a tightening in my chest or a flutter in my belly, I take that as information that my body is saying no – even if my brain wants to smooth things over for others’ comfort. I give myself permission to disappoint someone else if it means being honest with myself, and I give and give from my emotional and energetic overflow – I trust that my kindness and care comes from my big open heart full of love, and not from overfunctioning, or an unconscious attempt to manipulate and control others.
It’s not always easy, but it’s the only path I’ve found to real intimacy: letting people connect with the truth of who I am, not the performance my brain thinks they want.
4. Can you talk about where your habits come from, specifically the role of childhood attachment, survival strategies, and systems of oppression in our people-pleasing, codependent, or perfectionist patterns?
These habits are rooted in both personal history and collective forces. On a personal level, they’re often attachment strategies. If your caregivers were emotionally immature, unpredictable, critical, or emotionally absent, your nervous system learned to hustle for love – managing their moods, perfecting yourself, or staying small so you wouldn’t cause waves, so you could still feel good, accepted, lovable.
But Emotional Outsourcing isn’t limited to those situations. Even if you had what you’d call a “pretty good” childhood, love may have been conditional, not a given. You may still have been praised for being the “easy kid” who didn’t need much or only loved-on when you got all As or weren’t a bother, were rewarded for being “mature for your age” and putting others first, being the “Good Girl” who takes care of the other kids, on and on. Those subtle dynamics also train us to look outward for worth instead of believing it’s just inherent (which it is).
On a broader level, systems of oppression shape these patterns. Patriarchy conditions girls and women to be caretakers and peacemakers and tells boys and men not to have a full human range of feelings. Capitalism ties our value to productivity and perfectionism – and we find ourselves believing our worth depends entirely on how much we can produce or give. White settler colonialism and assimilation pressures tell us that belonging comes from erasing parts of ourselves. Our nervous systems don’t grow in a vacuum – they’re shaped inside these systems in addition to our family blueprint and legacy.
For marginalized folks, these patterns carry additional layers. People of color may have learned that assimilation and people-pleasing were literal survival strategies. For Black women, the “Strong Black Woman” stereotype demands emotional labor while denying vulnerability. Indigenous people face pressure to assimilate and silence cultural needs. Queer and trans folks might have developed hypervigilance around others’ comfort as protection against rejection or violence.
Emotional Outsourcing is the body’s way of adapting to those conditions – a brilliant way, in fact.
5. What do you mean by “we can’t think our way out” of survival programming? How is learning to speak the body’s language using somatics a balm for folks who hate hearing things like “just meditate”?
When I say we can’t think our way out, I mean that these patterns don’t live in the logical, conscious parts of the brain. They’re stored in implicit memory, in the body’s survival wiring – encoded through the amygdala, hippocampus, vagus nerve, and stress hormone cascades. That’s why you can understand your patterns intellectually, journal for hours, and still find yourself people-pleasing or over-functioning in the moment. It’s not a failure of willpower or evidence that you’re defective or permaeffed – it’s biology.
Somatics gives us another entry point. By learning the body’s language – sensation, breath, posture, micro-movement – we can access the survival patterns where they live. For people who roll their eyes at being told to “just meditate,” somatic work can be a revelation. It’s not about transcending or overriding the body. It’s about listening to it, building capacity, and creating new options in real time.
Think of it this way: if your nervous system learned that hypervigilance keeps you safe, simply telling yourself to “relax” won’t work. But if you can help your body feel genuinely safe through grounding and orienting practices, then relaxation becomes possible. The body has to experience the new reality before the mind can believe it. And with time and care, the new reality becomes implicit memory – your new way of living and being.
6. What are examples of somatic practices you would suggest?
The key is matching the practice to what your nervous system needs in the moment. Here are some entry points:
When you’re activated or anxious: Try orienting (gently turning your head and eyes to take in the room, letting your body register safety) or pendulation (moving awareness between tension in one part of the body and ease in another, helping your system complete stress cycles).
When you’re collapsed or numb: Grounding practices work well – pressing your feet into the floor, feeling the chair beneath you, or placing a hand on your heart and belly to reconnect with your physical presence.
For ongoing regulation: Vagal toning through lengthening your exhale, humming, chanting, or singing to stimulate the vagus nerve and support regulation. Micro-movements like tiny shakes, stretches, or wiggles to discharge activation without overwhelming your system.
Start small – even 30 seconds of practice can shift your state. The goal isn’t to feel different immediately but to build your capacity to notice what your body is telling you and respond with care rather than override.
7. Anything else you’d like to share?
I want people to know that there is nothing wrong with them. Emotional Outsourcing isn’t a personal failing – it’s a set of nervous system strategies that once kept you safe but may now keep you stuck. You are not broken. You are adaptive and brilliant and got through the best way you knew how. And you can learn new ways of being that honor both your history and your present-day capacity for aliveness, joy, and connection. My book is an invitation to stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth – and to come back home to yourself.
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For more information about Bea and her book, please visit https://beatrizalbina.com/
