Soul Sustenance - End Emotional Outsourcing

 

Thousands of people are stuck in cycles of people-pleasing, perfectionism, and codependency—and most don’t even realize it. And for those who do, the advice they’ve been given is outdated and perpetuates shame. Nurse Practitioner and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner Beatriz (Béa) Victoria Albina coined the term “Emotional Outsourcing” to describe these deep-rooted habits that keep us feeling stuck.  

In her forthcoming book End Emotional Outsourcing: How to Overcome Your Codependent, Perfectionist, and People-Pleasing Habits, Béa argues that these patterns are not moral failings or flaws, but nervous system responses, and that these intelligent survival strategies were likely formed in childhood.

Building on the conversation that the #1 bestseller Codependent No More started, Béa’s book offers a radically updated lens—one that moves beyond judgment or pathology and teaches readers how to rewire their relationship to themselves from the inside out. End Emotional Outsourcing is poised to change the conversation about codependency, and help an entire generation of women step into their power.

I had a chance to learn more in this interview with Béa Victoria Albina, NP, MPH, SEP author of End Emotional Outsourcing: How to Overcome Your Codependent, Perfectionist & People-Pleasing Habits.

What is codependency and how is it harmful?

Codependency is not a personality flaw or a “disease” in the moralizing sense some older models suggest - it’s a set of learned relational survival strategies. Often shaped in childhood, it’s what happens when your nervous system learns that your safety, worth, and belonging depend on managing other people’s moods, fixing their problems, or anticipating their needs before they speak them. While those strategies can keep you connected in unsafe or unpredictable environments, over time they erode your ability to trust yourself, blur your boundaries, and lock you into chronic stress activation. That long-term activation has real biological consequences, from hormone disruption to immune system dysregulation, and keeps you from building the kind of relationships where you can be fully seen and supported. That said, I don’t like the term and its history and I think it’s time we embrace a new, more loving term - which is how Emotional Outsourcing was born.

How do you define "emotional outsourcing?"

Emotional Outsourcing™ is the term I coined to describe the habits - codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing - that lead you to outsource your sense of safety, worth, and belonging to the approval, moods, or needs of others. When you’re emotionally outsourcing, you’re scanning for cues about how to be or what to do to keep the peace, instead of checking in with your own wants, values, or boundaries. These habits often live in implicit memory, wired into the body and nervous system, so they feel automatic rather than chosen. They aren’t moral failings, evidence that you’re broken, bad, diseased or defective - they’re deeply intelligent adaptations to the systems and relationships you grew up in. But without tools to shift them, they keep you disconnected from your own internal signals and stuck in cycles of over-giving, over-achieving, or over-controlling. Emotional Outsourcing™ leaves you constantly attuned to everyone else’s emotional weather, often at the expense of your own well-being. Over time, this self-abandonment can make your own needs feel foreign, inconvenient, or even unsafe to acknowledge.

Why is it important to have updated advice that helps reduce stigma and shame?

It’s vital to update the way we talk about these patterns because older advice often comes wrapped in stigma, shame, and outdated frameworks that pathologize what are, at their root, understandable survival strategies. The word “codependent” comes from the 12-step world and the disease model of addiction, framing these patterns as though there’s something inherently sick or defective about you. In the wrong hands, it’s been weaponized - used to call people “too much,” “too needy,” or to blame them for creating or worsening someone else’s struggles by “coddling” them. That framing doesn’t just fail to help - it actively deepens the wound, especially for women taught under patriarchy to make themselves smaller, quieter, and endlessly accommodating. Updated, nervous system–based approaches remove the blame and moral judgment, giving people the science to understand why these patterns formed and the tools to shift them. This reframing restores dignity, reduces shame, and opens the door to self-compassion and somatic (body-based) presence - which is where real change begins.

With a background in functional and integrative medicine, Béa is also the host of the popular The Feminist Wellness podcast and has been featured in Goop, MindBodyGreen, CBS News, WSJ, Well+Good, and on Apple’s top mental health podcast charts.