Excerpt from END EMOTIONAL OUTSOURCING by Beatriz Victoria Albina, NP
Chapter 1
What Is Emotional Outsourcing?
I’ll never forget my client Luisa: a bright, successful, charming woman in her late twenties. On paper she had it all together as a first-generation college graduate with a fancy grad degree, an impressive job and great relationship, all the things we are told define us as Successful Women. We had just started working together and one day when she logged in for our weekly call she said, “So, um, Béa . . . I’m so sorry to ask—God, this sounds so stupid—but, um . . . how do I figure out what I want for dinner?”
We both laughed, but I knew what she was really asking: “How do I know what I actually want? How do I make decisions for myself? How do I trust that what I like matters?” Like so many of my clients, Luisa had inadvertently prioritized the other people and accolades in her life for so long that she lost track of herself, her wants, her feelings—so much so that, unless she had someone telling her what they wanted for dinner, she didn’t even know what to make.
In the decade plus that I’ve been supporting women to reclaim their lives, identities, and relationships, I’ve seen hundreds of Luisas. Vibrant, remarkable superwomen who feel broken—trapped in lives that don’t feel like their own, confused about how they got there, and not sure what to do differently. Card-carrying Good Girls who never rock the boat, who are always there to help and never, ever complain. The token woman of color, used to smiling through her colleagues’ microaggressions and stifling a scream while she educates her white colleagues yet again, but never letting her frustration bubble to the surface. The overfunctioning oldest daughters (bonus points for oldest immigrant daughters!) who grew up taking on too much, too soon, without support, and never realized that it wasn’t their job to take care of the people around them to their own detriment.
Each and every one of these women grew up learning that she was not good enough in subtle or overt ways that she maybe recognized or that lay just below her level of consciousness, impacting nearly every decision without her even realizing it. It’s a painful, deep-seated belief that shows up in our lives in ways we’re often too busy overfunctioning and people-pleasing to notice. I know, because I’ve been there, and I’m willing to bet that it’s where you are too. If . . .
- you do for others at the expense of your own mental, physical, financial, and emotional well-being;
- you please everyone except yourself;
- you know what everyone needs and what’s best for them . . . but you draw a blank when it’s your turn;
- you’re afraid of not doing everything perfectly because, if you don’t, they might not love you anymore (or some variation on this story);
- your mood depends on the mood of the people around you;
- you “just know” what someone else is feeling, what they need, and how they’re likely to react, but you don’t know (or give credence to) your own feelings;
- you’ve lost touch with your needs, wants, and limits;
- you believe that other people’s opinions about your life, your beliefs, your priorities, and the way you live matter more than your own;
. . . then, my love, you’re already familiar with Emotional Outsourcing—my term for the chronic habit of looking to everyone and everything outside ourselves for our sense of safety, self-worth, and emotional well-being, because we do not believe that we are inherently worthy of love and care. It’s a painful set of thought habits and nervous system experiences that are all too easy to come by and are the very reason we stay stuck in codependent, people-pleasing, perfectionist patterns that erode our sense of self and only serve to affirm that we are not good enough exactly as we are.
You deserve to live from your authenticity. You deserve a life that feels like it’s yours—not a life of painful, self-eroding martyrdom; of chronically attempting to “fix” the people around you; of trying to prove your worth and your value to make people care about you, so that you can finally feel safe. You deserve better than that, mi querida. We all do. And I’m going to show you how to get it.
As we take these first steps in our journey to reclaim your sense of self and your conviction that you matter, and to create mutual, nurturing interdependent relationships, we’re going to get clear together on what Emotional Outsourcing is, where it comes from (spoiler alert: It’s the patriarchy and other systems of oppression along with our family blueprint!), and why its impact on our lives is so darn hard to override.
YOU ARE NOT CODEPENDENT
My darling, let’s get this out of the way: You are not codependent and definitely not “a codependent person.” Nope. Not a thing. I know, you’ve probably been told that you are, the same way that you probably get labeled “a perfectionist” or “a people-pleaser,” but I want to say loud and clear that these terms are not your identity— they certainly don’t have to be if you don’t want to claim them, and I sure don’t. I know this flies in the face of traditional (read: old, unhelpful) narratives, so let me explain.
Historically, codependence has been understood in the context of relationships involving substance addiction (generally alcohol), coming into popularity during the war on drugs in the 1970s and 1980s. I’ll use the terms used then here to situate it in that moment: alcoholic and addict (versus the person-first less stigmatizing language I choose now). It describes a pattern in which one partner enables the other’s addiction. In these cases, the “codependent” person, often the spouse or family member of an “alcoholic,” would become overly involved in the “addict’s” life, taking on a caretaker role and attempting to manage or control their behavior. This dynamic allowed the alcoholic to continue their destructive patterns without facing any consequences, since the codependent person prioritized the addict’s needs over their own, lying and covering up for them, taking their problems on as their own— ultimately finding a sense of purpose in the role of “enabler.”
This pathologizing framework often shifted the blame for addiction-related dysfunction onto the enabling family member— disproportionately wives and mothers—and turned care and empathy into something wrong and excessive. Women were encouraged to blame themselves for their husbands’ behaviors and were taught that their emotional investment in others was a sign of illness and disease (which, to say the least, is a vast oversimplification of complex relational dynamics that ignores larger structural and societal factors that contribute to substance use issues, such as poverty, trauma, systemic racism, and the lack of social support services and community supports). Before long, care, empathy, and emotional investment in others came to be seen as wrong and excessive. And by the height of the war on drugs in the seventies and eighties, addiction was framed as a disease in recovery communities, and the psychological patterns of the addict’s family members came to be seen as a sort of parallel “addiction” to caretaking and control—a diseased way of relating that needed its own treatment. Yikes! No wonder so many women feel stuck, shamed, and permaeffed. I know I couldn’t see myself in those outdated definitions about codependent women being broken, defective “enablers” of their alcoholic husbands. That just wasn’t my situation at all, since I didn’t have any “alcoholics” in my life that I knew of. I also couldn’t accept that codependence was a “disease” to be “cured,” and, notably, I wasn’t and am not alone in that critique. As it turns out, there is significant disagreement in the psychological literature about what codependency actually is. It’s not in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders— the current standard for mental health diagnoses—and there is only one psychometric index (a fancy way of describing an evaluation tool) to evaluate whether someone “has” codependency. It’s called the Holyoake Index,1 and the dozen psychologists I have spoken to about it all turned up their noses at it. I would argue that this profound lack of agreed-upon diagnostic criteria exists because codependence isn’t diagnosable per se,2 and that’s because it’s not a disease, condition, affliction, or psychological issue like depression, ADHD, PTSD, or generalized anxiety.
After a decade plus of research, self-study, study with master teachers, and work with thousands of women on this topic, I do not believe that people are born lacking self-worth, destined to believe that everyone else’s feelings, wants, experiences, needs, and general well-being matter more than their own. Unlike the old paradigm, I do not believe that anyone is inherently codependent, and I do not believe that adopting that label as an identity serves us in any way.
When we think of ourselves as “a codependent person,” rather than a person who acts from codependent patterns, we deny ourselves the chance to see that we don’t have to be this way forever. But when we recognize that codependent living is a set of learned behaviors, rather than a disease or an immutable fact of your personality (ditto for perfectionism and people-pleasing), we open ourselves to the possibility that we can shift and change. If codependent, people-pleasing, perfectionist habits are just that— habits—then we can unlearn and rewire those patterns, the same way we can any habit.
Moreover, it’s become clear to me that codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing tendencies are, in a way, the same thing, and so it behooves us to see them as such, to heal them together. Getting to the shared root of these super-duper common patterns, “Emotional Outsourcing” is the term I coined (and trademarked going back to January 2012) to describe the way we chronically source our sense of worth, value, significance, and emotional wellness from everyone and everything outside ourselves (to our own detriment), because we do not believe that we are inherently worthy of love and care exactly as we are. It’s a super-common set of thoughts and nervous system experiences that leave us tap-dancing for our lovability, desperate to prove that we are good enough, worthy of the care and belonging that all humans need to survive.
Those of us who identify with words like “codependent,” “perfectionist,” and “people-pleaser” have lost our connection to the three things that every human needs: safety, worthiness, and belonging. Unable to source them internally (i.e., know for our- selves, regardless of what anyone else says, that we are safe with and significant to the people we love and to ourselves), our brilliant minds and bodies work overtime to source them elsewhere. In this way, we outsource our emotional well-being to others.
Since it doesn’t feel safe or smart to be ourselves, our minds and bodies learn how to become who others want us to be, and over time we learn to live our lives for other people, instead of ourselves. When you’re stuck in Emotional Outsourcing, you live life constantly grasping for others to tell you you’re good enough. Pretty enough. Smart enough. Accomplished enough. Enough enough . . . and you always come up short. My clients struggle with resentment, exhaustion, and burnout. They ruminate constantly, paralyzed by indecision. They go along to get along. They go above and beyond to please everyone else, thinking it will mean they can be happy too . . . only to realize that it never really works that way. They fall into relationships because the other person likes them, or stay in lopsided romantic partnerships, convinced they can “fix” their partner, going along to get along, resigned to what is, even when they want something wildly different, avoiding conflict at all costs, and stuffing down all that hurt and disappointment with a simple “I’m fine.”
WHAT DOES EMOTIONAL OUTSOURCING LOOK LIKE IN PRACTICE?
Emotional Outsourcing is comfortable discomfort that we learned as a survival skill, often in childhood. It gives us a framework for relating that we believe will keep us safe and connected . . . at the cost of hiding away our truest, most authentic and beautiful self. When we focus our attention outward, we can’t worry about our own needs, desires, and capacity—both because we’re spending all our time and energy focused on others and because, well, what if they conflict with someone else’s? What if they’re inconvenient? What if they make us a burden? Instead, we mask our true feelings and thoughts, abandoning our sense of self until we lose track of our own inner voices entirely. Rather than knowing our own value, we use praise, affirmation, validation, busyness, jobs, responsibility, certifications, marriages, kids, to prove that we are worthy. It’s as though we’re performing our lives onstage before an invisible jury, doing everything we can to earn their applause and approval.
It’s no surprise, then, that we doubt our own voice. By the time my clients find me, they often sound like Luisa—so disconnected from their internal compass that they don’t feel like they know who they are anymore. Emotional Outsourcing and self-doubt go hand in hand, and to say we don’t believe in or trust ourselves barely scratches the surface. We think, rethink, and overthink every choice, then doomscroll and numb ourselves out just to get a break from the relentless anxiety and shame.
Desperate to feel in control of our lives, we overfunction and overachieve until there’s nothing left except resentment toward the people we care about. We learned that our okayness depends on everyone else’s, driving us to pour endless emotional labor— especially into our romantic partners and immediate family— convinced that if someone is sad, anxious, or upset in any way, it’s our job to fix it. We can’t tolerate our loved ones’ discomfort, pain, unhappiness, anxiety, any more than we can tolerate those feelings ourselves. Unable to manage our own feelings, and scared we don’t deserve to feel better anyway because we’re maybe inherently not worthy of love, we do the next best thing and step in to manage theirs.
True to our people-pleasing ways, we chronically take on too much responsibility, which leaves us perpetually overwhelmed— especially since we have to execute each and every one of those responsibilities perfectly, obviously. We blur the lines between our concerns and the concerns of others and lose sight of where we end and they begin. This over-involvement in other people’s lives often leads us to neglect our own needs and boundaries and, you guessed it, builds more overwhelm, emotional distress, and resentment, strengthening that core story that we’re not safe, don’t belong, and aren’t worthy of love or care.
This pervasive feeling that we’re trapped in a life that isn’t ours is suffocating. We don’t even realize that we’re out to win an Olympic medal in worrying and martyrdom (gold, obviously), and we corrode our physical health, mental well-being, and relationships in the process.
Physical Consequences of Emotional Outsourcing
As a family nurse practitioner specializing in evidence-based holistic medicine, I would be remiss not to mention the myriad serious chronic conditions that we can connect to Emotional Outsourcing. You see, when we prioritize everyone and everything else around us, life feels like a delicate tightrope walk or walking on eggshells, trying to keep everyone happy, which is both mentally and physically draining. Our nervous systems struggle to keep up with the relentless cycle of stress and vigilance, stretched to the limit by too many moons of living with all that adrenaline and cortisol (both stress hormones) flooding our bodies in unbalanced ways.
From lived experience as both a patient and a provider, I know that the chronic stress of Emotional Outsourcing can impact nearly every system in our bodies. The concurrent nervous system dysregulation can contribute to gut issues ranging from bloating to irritable bowel syndrome and small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, disrupt thyroid function (cue fatigue, weight changes, and mood disturbances!), and can increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, chronic inflammation, and so much more. The stress of Emotional Outsourcing can also disrupt sleep patterns, as much for logistical reasons (you, my perfectionist nugget, are likely burning the midnight oil at every turn to get it all done and are thus not getting enough or consistent sleep) as for emotional ones: Raise your hand if you’ve kept yourself up at night replaying that awkward thing you said or worrying someone was mad at you. And don’t forget the impacts of unbalanced hormones.
Folks who develop Emotional Outsourcing become adept at reading other people’s feelings—so much so that they supersede our own. We read people’s moods like the weather, watchful for the slightest shifts in posture or tone, poised to dive in and fix it. Good Girls and peacekeepers to the bone, we learned that our role was to manage the feelings of the people around us. It’s a familiar story: Mom’s upset at your sibling and you do something silly to break the tension. Your dad seems stressed, so you pull out that A+ you got on your test, hoping that showing him how amazing you are will cheer him up and take the worrisome (and potentially dangerous) feelings away. As a kiddo, I used to do odd chores around the house like ironing or scrubbing the kitchen floor (which, to be clear, exactly zero people asked or expected me to do), because I could tell that my new-immigrant parents were stressed, and I believed that if I could just create a little more order, a little more peace, maybe the chaos and tension in the house would settle down. Maybe they’d finally relax. Maybe, just maybe, I could feel safe. It was my way of trying to control the uncontrollable, to manage the emotional weather of the house by being the “good kid”—the one who fixed things, even if that meant doing things no one asked for, because in my mind, their peace equaled my safety.
Folks with Emotional Outsourcing habits are professional other-people prioritizers. We notice others, tending to every need, catering to every desire, secretly praying that maybe they’ll do the same for us . . . someday . . . if we earn it hard enough. I once had a client who told me that when she was growing up, her mother told her that the best relationships were ones where you focused completely on the other person’s needs: “You take care of them 100 percent, and hopefully they take care of you too. If they’re happy, you’re happy, you know?” Scared of asserting our needs directly—which could lead to judgment or abandonment—we muffle our needs under layers of hints, suggestions, and unspoken hopes. And, my love, that’s a one-way ticket on the Disappointment Express to Resentmentville, USA.
Underfunctioners can be emotional outsourcers too, but instead of taking on too much, they avoid responsibility, expecting others to carry the emotional and practical load. My ex-spouse was the textbook example—refusing to lift a finger around the house, leaving every bit of emotional labor, planning, and caretaking squarely on my shoulders. It wasn’t just about chores; it was the way they simply checked out, outsourcing their emotional needs and life responsibilities to me, as though I existed solely to handle everything they couldn’t be bothered with (the way their mother did). It was their subtle way of keeping themselves safe from discomfort, conflict, or growth, while I overfunctioned to keep the entire system running, never realizing how much I was facilitating their detachment and avoiding my own needs in the process.
HOW DID WE GET THIS WAY?
It is so very easy to blame all our Emotional Outsourcing habits on our families of origin. But it’s not the whole story, my love. Emotional Outsourcing is born from an attempt to navigate complex emotional landscapes, generally when we’re way too small to be doing such things, and is modeled for us by our caregivers and community.8 The need to live from codependent, perfectionist, people-pleasing stories is one that has been shaped by generations of cultural conditioning in response to systems that thrive on keeping you disconnected from your inherent worth.
The individual factors of how we were parented, our personal history, and our lived experiences absolutely impact how we think, feel, and behave as adults (which is why we’re going to spend all of chapter 2 exploring the role of your caregivers). And! So much of the reason that Emotional Outsourcing exists in the first place is that this sh*t is in the proverbial water, thanks to three overlapping systems of oppression: patriarchy, white-settler colonialism, and capitalism.
Patriarchy isn’t just a system that disproportionately values men and masculinity over women and femininity—it sets the stage for Emotional Outsourcing by devaluing care, empathy, and collaboration, teaching people to outsource their emotional labor in exchange for validation from those in power. Under patriarchy, Emotional Outsourcing thrives because women, in particular, are socialized to prioritize others’ needs over their own, to seek external approval, and to tie their self-worth to how well they care for others. Women are told to keep the peace in their relationships, maintain harmony, and shoulder the emotional burdens of others, even when it leads to burnout and resentment. For example, if you feel pressure to be the emotional caretaker for everyone in your life, prioritizing their needs while ignoring your own, that’s patriarchy in action. If you believe that expressing your needs makes you “needy” or “selfish,” so you push them down and focus on serving others instead, that’s another manifestation of patriarchy.
At the same time, it’s also the patriarchy that tells men not to have feelings, especially “feminine” ones like tenderness and sadness (anything but rage, really). This dynamic keeps both men and women trapped in narrow emotional roles, with men outsourcing their vulnerability (’cause boys don’t cry, remember?) and women internalizing the idea that their worth lies in taking on others’ emotional weight.
White-settler colonialism is, at its core, a system of dominance over indigeneity and, by extension, over the land, its resources, and its people. Like patriarchal masculinity, colonialism privileges whiteness in a social and cultural context that colonialism itself created, where those who do not fit the dominant group are judged, controlled, and exploited—and it hurts all people, including, yes, white people. Its focus on extraction and accumulation seeps into the smallest details of life, teaching people to view relationships, work, and even their self-worth as transactional and conditional, and fosters a world where millions of people go hungry every night while billionaires exist, all on the same planet that institutionalized colonialist greed is quickly killing. White-settler colonialism builds Emotional Outsourcing into its very foundations, because it conditions people to believe that caregiving, emotional presence, and nurturing are valuable only when they serve the dominant structure’s goals. White supremacy leads us to view self-care as indulgent rather than necessary and to see relationships as investments for future favors, not ways to build more loving community and mutual aid; dismisses joy as unproductive or frivolous; and treats the Earth as a resource to be used and abused rather than a living organism to be loved and respected. In short, if you feel like your worth is measured by how much you can offer to others and what they do for you in return, that’s colonialism quietly shaping your sense of self and your relationships. It brings a whole lot of tit-for-tat into our lives when loving could just be what we do and who we are, not something we keep score around.
Last but not least, capitalism is an economic system based on a logic of accumulation; however, its impact has ballooned far beyond the financial sphere. These days, internalized capitalism has come to shape how we value ourselves and others. Our social capital comes from the accumulation of praise, validation, and success (through competition, not cooperation). As a result, we’ve come to prioritize doing over being, and we’ve come to believe that we have to earn and win love, care, respect, and even rest. Treating burnout as a badge of honor? Capitalism. Turning self-care into a commodified industry? Capitalism. Seeing time spent with loved ones as unproductive? Capitalism. Struggling to ask for help from friends because it feels like a burden? Capitalism. All systems of oppression challenge the three things that all human mammals need to survive: safety, worth, and connection. Together, capitalism, white-settler colonialism, and the patriarchy insist that our personhood is not guaranteed unless we are wealthy, white, and male. You are not of value unless you’re producing. You’re only worthwhile because you’re pleasing to others. You’re only as good as what you give. Your sovereignty and self-determination are negotiable, and your status is less-than because you’re a woman; fat; queer; Black, Indigenous, and/or a Person of Color (BIPOC); disabled; chronically ill; neurodiverse— anything that “deviates” from the white Western capitalist norms. These systems of oppression are harmful in their own right and have impacts on our psyches, lives, and relationships that merit books of their own (and many have been written). What I want you to see, though, my love, is that your Emotional Outsourcing habits exist and persist precisely because they are logical, natural adaptations to living under these systems. For example, when you are living in a marginalized body in a white patriarchal society, living as your authentic self is often dangerous, both emotionally and in the most literal, physical sense. BIPOC folks, fat folks, and folks with visible disabilities receive constant and prolific messages about being unattractive, not good enough or smart enough, and on and on. Those messages are often backed with real, material forms of systemic oppression, poverty, discrimination, and violence.
Code-switching or modifying/shape-shifting your speech, behavior, appearance, or way of being in the world to adapt to different sociocultural norms and to make others more comfortable with you is a useful skill and survival strategy long employed by marginalized communities to attempt to find more acceptance and to be safer in the white world. Same goes for masking (in the case of neurodivergence) or closeting yourself (for 2SLGBTQIA+ folks). They are brilliant strategies for getting ahead, for being more “palatable” (such a gross word and experience) at work, or when interacting with systems of power-over like the police.
Adding insult to injury, these systems of oppression train us to think that we—and not the system—are to blame. Women aren’t just called codependent like it’s some kind of personality flaw—we’re shamed for it, dismissed as doormats, ridiculed as wallflowers. We’re gaslit out of our own reality, told that needing or relying on others is a personal failure. But here’s the thing: Until shockingly recently, our dependence wasn’t just cultural—it was legal. Codified. Enforced. Not a flaw, but the system working exactly as designed. In the United States, women couldn’t have homes or bank accounts in their own names until as recently as the 1970s.* Marital laws treated women more like property than people of equal standing with their husbands. Women were not legally required to be part of medical studies until 1993—meaning that our understanding of our bodies was as a “deviation” from men’s bodies. As of this writing, women in the United States do not have nationally guaranteed rights to decide their own reproductive healthcare. My love, the very structure of the world that we live in requires us to depend on men and the institutions they’ve created. What could our mothers, their mothers before and their mothers before them do but learn not to rock the boat—and teach you to do the same.
ENDING EMOTIONAL OUTSOURCING IS A FEMINIST ISSUE
We have so much more opportunity today than those women who came before us—and we owe a debt to our feminist foremothers. And yet, and yet, I hear from women day in and day out who feel trapped in their lives, unable to find that mythical balance between the demands of family life, keeping up households, maintaining social bonds, and working full time while also trying to grow as humans and to heal from their own childhoods. Forget enjoying their lives or taking care of their own needs—who has the time or energy?!
For all the progress we have made, women are still socialized to put other people ahead of themselves in almost every context. For this reason, we can’t talk about Emotional Outsourcing without acknowledging that it’s an inherently intersectional feminist issue. We juggle it all while thinking and believing what we’re taught: that other people’s needs, moods, wants, desires, and wellness are more important than our own—and it shows. So often girls are socialized to be good, quiet, docile, diminutive, to control and suppress our anger, appetites, bodies, authenticity, to the point where we forget who we are. We’re “Mother’s Little Helper,” training for the day when, as wives, we will meticulously plan every meal, every outfit, every moment of our family’s existence, well accustomed to the weight of unvoiced desires and our needs perpetually penciled in for “later.” We doubt ourselves endlessly and struggle to make decisions for ourselves (after making a bazillion decisions for everyone else all day). Of course we struggle to own what we want and to live our lives on our own terms.
These expectations are invisible by design and become normalized through our socialization and conditioning and the endless demands of our emotional and physical labor. With love and compassion I’ll say: Everything is working against women coming to the realization that we’ve been trained to externalize our sense of worth, value, and importance in life—writ large. We were raised to “be codependent.”
You see, systems of oppression thrive by keeping all of us who are living in marginalized identities separated from our lived experience in our bodies, to see our bodies as object and commodity, something to be managed, controlled, tamed—as a problem or vulnerability to distance ourselves from. The powers that be train us to believe them that there are so many, many ways we’re not enough, in order to control us and sell us creams, bleaches, treatments, diets, exercise regimes, and so on that might just cure us of the self-loathing they instilled in us. Too busy riding the roller coaster of not-enoughness and unworthiness, we remain detached from our physical bodies, primed to change who we are and how we appear to the dominant cis white male gaze via capitalist consumption (which, by the way, rarely even works to make us feel good about ourselves).
At the same time, women are taught that we are incomplete on our own and what we want, need, and desire in our own lives has to take a back seat to caring for children, partners, parents, and the feelings of every man we encounter. We continue to be asked to define ourselves in relation to others, to see our value only as doers, martyrs, creators, and nurturers—through our roles as mothers, wives, and daughters—never just us. In the patriarchy women are seen as “natural caregivers,” as somehow inherently more nurturing and capable of offering care, taught that putting others’ needs before our own is what women just “naturally” do (even after studies have debunked that nonsense).
Now, am I saying that it’s a bad thing to take care of people? Absolutely not. Not for one second. None of that “every man for himself” white-settler colonialist nonsense here. No human is a rock or an island—we need one another. Each and every single human on this planet needs love, care, nurturing, and community
to survive. It’s natural and so beautiful to take good care of the people we love—to call or text to check in, to do nice things to see them smile, to want the very best for them and support them in their lives. But taking care of others above ourselves as a chronic, unconscious obligation is where Emotional Outsourcing rears its ugly head. Doing for others so that they’ll think highly of you or need you or make you feel good about yourself isn’t caretaking— that’s Emotional Outsourcing. It’s manipulative without realizing it, and it hurts everyone involved.
As long as women and girls are taught to disconnect from our desires, minds, and bodies, healing Emotional Outsourcing will continue to be a radical, political act. And so long as BIPOC, disabled, queer, femme, neurodivergent, fat, and other marginalized folks think the problem is us and not the system, you can bet the farm that we’ll all stay spinning in Emotional Outsourcing, because of course we will.
WHERE WE’RE HEADED INSTEAD: INTERDEPENDENCE
Most folks think that the opposite of codependence is IN-dependence. And there’s a certain logic to that: When you no longer orient yourself around others, who else is there to orient your life around except you? The patriarchy and Western colonialism certainly glorify that rugged individual mind-set, unabashedly making a moral argument that all people can and should pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps. But Emotional Outsourcing is an inherently relational issue. We didn’t gain these survival skills in a vacuum, and we can’t heal them in a vacuum either. Instead, my love, my goal for you— and for all people—is interdependence.
Interdependence is a relationship dynamic where two autonomous people rely on one another with mutuality. It’s a relationship characterized by a balance of reciprocity—give-and-take, where each party both contributes to and benefits from the relationship, without obligation or keeping score. In the context of personal relationships, interdependence often looks like a healthy dynamic where people who care for one another support each other emotionally as well as practically, while at the same time maintaining a sense of their own identity, capacity, and worth. In other words, you can count on your people to show up for you, and they can count on you to show up for them—but never at the expense of either’s well-being.
This is why the work of ending Emotional Outsourcing is so radical: It asks us to take care of ourselves, precisely so that we can be in community with others, while also participating in mutual aid and caring for community as self. When Audre Lorde wrote about self-care in the epilogue of her essay collection A Burst of Light, it was never about self-centered independence. As she says, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.”9 The endless parade of face masks, bubble baths, and calls for “me time” has stripped Lorde’s words of their original meaning. Self-care was always intended to be radical, political, and paradigm shifting. You must learn to care for yourself in order to care for others. And by letting others care for you, you remember that you are lovable. You must rebuild a relationship with yourself to be in true relationship with others—and through healthy connections with others, you learn how you want to relate to yourself. Because in the end, it has to be in service of collective liberation—otherwise, it’s just the same old oppression, repackaged with better skin and a fresh coat of gloss.
YOU ARE WHO YOU WERE TAUGHT TO BE
My sweetest sweet pea, I say again: Your Emotional Outsourcing habits formed and are challenging to rewire because they came from a super-duper smart place. When you live in a society and a culture that jeopardizes your very dignity; when your safety (psychological, financial, social, physical, mental) is not assured; when your value depends on how much you do or how well you play the roles you’ve been assigned without your consent (like Good Girl, Perfect Daughter, Selfless Wife, Model Employee, Tireless Caregiver); when you can’t count on your community to show up for you unless you’re indispensable and constantly “adding value”—my love, no wonder you learned to be vigilant about everyone and everything around you, and to use their needs, feelings, and opinions as the rubric by which you grade yourself. It just makes sense.
Your Emotional Outsourcing habits are not dumb, bad, or evidence of failure—they once served you. Deeply. Pinky promise. But, well, you wouldn’t be reading this book if you didn’t already see the ways that they were keeping you stuck. Living from our Emotional Outsourcing is like trying to squeeze into an old baby sweater: There’s nothing at all wrong with the sweater, or with you, my tenderoni—you’ve simply outgrown it. It’s time to knit a new sweater, and a new identity to wear inside it.
The good news—yes! there’s good news!—is that since codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing habits are learned and not at all inherent to you, they are also changeable. You do not have to stay in that overwhelm and burnout and resentment forever, my softest bunny. You get to remind yourself over and over that it’s not you, it’s the system—and find new, powerful ways to show up for yourself and the communities you love. Because no matter how much the world wants us to believe otherwise, I know deep in my soul that your worth does not depend on anyone but you. It’s time that you reclaimed that knowledge for yourself. Once we ditch the story that we’re broken, we stop fighting for our lovability and hustling for our worth, and start to believe that we’re inherently lovable. From that grounded place, we can take real personal responsibility—knowing we’re inherently good— which lets us acknowledge when we’ve done an oopsie (or really effed things up) without questioning our sense of Self.
In part 1, we’re going to explore the specific scripts that we learned from our caregivers, how they got written into our nervous systems, and the way shame drives us to abandon our own needs, feelings, and experiences. This is complex stuff, lovebug. Give yourself time and space to metabolize it, and remember— to borrow once more from Audre Lorde: “Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.”
Do you say “yes” when you mean “no”? Do you end up in lopsided relationships, feeling resentful but not sure how to speak up? Do you feel anxious, struggle with perfectionism and imposter syndrome, or feel like you’ve lost touch with your true self? You’re not alone: Thousands of people, especially those of us socialized as women, struggle with Emotional Outsourcing—a term nurse practitioner and life coach Beatriz Victoria Albina coined to describe the codependent habits that keep us stuck.
In End Emotional Outsourcing, Albina explores the origins—both personal and systemic—of these tendencies, and coaches readers through a science-backed program of thought work and somatic practices. Readers will learn to:
·Regulate their nervous systems
·Reframe their habitual thoughts and actions
·Take back their time and energy
·Improve relationships with parents, friends, and partners
·Discover their inherent self-worth and lovability
Groundbreaking, healing, and urgent, End Emotional Outsourcing is poised to change the conversation about codependency, and help an entire generation of women step into their power.