Episode 158 transcript: Stop People Pleasing: How to End Codependency and Reclaim Your Power | Beatriz Albina
[00:00:00] Béatriz: I sat down and I wrote out what it is that are the components of having codependent thinking, being a perfectionist, and people pleasing are. And I realized that in the middle was outsourcing our whole lives. That was the center of the Venn diagram.
And so I define emotional outsourcing 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 our own lives.
[00:00:39] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breath depth and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma, and join me weekly as I interview guests who have made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention, gratitude, and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.
Welcome back to Live The With Of Your Life podcast. My guest today is Béatriz Victoria Albina, and she's an AUCSF-trained family nurse practitioner, somatic experiencing practitioner, master certified somatic life coach, and the author of the forthcoming book "End Emotional Outsourcing: A Guide To Overcoming Codependent, Perfectionist, and People Pleasing Habits."
It's expected to come out in September of this year. Also, along with that is a breathwork meditation guide that she's created. She has a passion for helping humans, socializes 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.
She's the host of the Feminist Wellness Podcast, holds a master's degree in public health from Boston University School of Public Health, and a BA in Latin American Studies from Oberlin. She was born in Argentina and grew up in Rhode Island, and she's been working in health and wellness for over 20 years, and lives with her wife, Billey Albina..
We had the most amazing conversation. Beatrice is light. She is just so energized, and we talked about so many things, including nervous system regulation, how chronic health and unprocessed trauma shape our nervous system. The tendencies that many of us have towards perfectionism, people pleasing, overworking, and really just identifying ways to see if we are in a functional freeze.
How to end emotional suppression and remedies to really help regulate our bodies and create our capacity for more joy, more rest, more pleasure, and connection. It was an amazing conversation. I learned so much, and I'm excited for you to hear it. Take a listen.
Béa, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so excited to have you here.
[00:02:59] Béatriz: I am absolutely thrilled and super grateful for the opportunity.
[00:03:02] Aneta: For those watching, you and I both are in blue. I just thought that was just divinely orchestrated that we are here in an alignment-free call. Béa, I'm really excited to talk about your book because your book is called End Emotional Outsourcing. First of all, I love the title.
[00:03:22] Béatriz: I'm so glad.
[00:03:23] Aneta: I love the cover because I do believe that covers pull us in, and you've got these gorgeous colors. It's right behind you, the pink and the teal, and just like really clear. But I'm really curious to know about this title of End Emotional Outsourcing, and how it came to you?
[00:03:42] Béatriz: Yeah. I found myself deep in the habits of codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing thinking, feeling fully unavailable to attach myself to any of those labels. No, thank you. See you later. Bye. Because I wasn't codependent, I was deeply independent. Thank you.
[00:04:04] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:04:05] Béatriz: I wasn't a people pleaser. People were very displeased with me, and I certainly was not a perfectionist. Because look at all this stuff. I mess up. So I realized that I had a linguistic problem as much as I had a behavioral, relational, thought, mind, somatic problem, and that if I was getting hung up in the language, there had to be hundreds and thousands bajillions of people just like me who are like, oh no, that's not me. I am fine. I'll keep suffering till I die. The way we do. And so I sat down and I wrote out what it is that are the components of having codependent thinking, being a perfectionist, and people pleasing are. And I realized that in the middle was outsourcing our whole lives. That was the center of the Venn diagram.
And so I define emotional outsourcing 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 our own lives.
[00:05:19] Aneta: What was the catalyst for you to just sit with these questions and to reflect on Do I have these labels? Were people telling you that you have this? Did you sit down for an assessment somehow? Or, what was happening when you decided to spend some time and ask yourself these questions?
[00:05:39] Béatriz: It was actually, honestly, my patients were truly the catalyst. A dear friend of mine sat me down at one point at two thousand six, seven, or eight and was like, Girl, you are so codependent. And I remember being like, no. But spoiler alert, right? 20 years in a book later turns out. The kind of help out there felt really shaming, really blaming, was all about labels and about taking on this identity as a codependent person that just didn't jive and continues not to work for me.
And so many of the clients and patients I work with. Fast forward, I was a primary care nurse practitioner for many years, and then I had a science-based functional medicine practice in New York City with a focus on gastroenterology. Now, if there's anything that goes together, it's stress, nervous system dysfunction, nervous system dysregulation, and tummy troubles.
Let me tell you what I was treating: small intestine, bacterial overgrowth, chronic reflux, MCAS, all these complex things. And kept seeing the pattern that my patients would, I'd do all the right tests, all the right prescriptions, the right supplements, the right diet, and they'd get better.
And then they'd be up for a promotion, and they couldn't stop pooping, or they'd go visit their parents for a week, and then they couldn't poop for a month. And so I started to really see, again, another Venn diagram. Here's where I brag. I have A-D-H-D-I don't usually brag this early on, a girl's got to do it.
[00:07:12] Aneta: Please do.
[00:07:13] Béatriz: Brag away about being NeuroMag, as I like to call us. I feel very blessed with this brain, and so I started to look at that Venn diagram. When our emotions, our psychosocial world, would go topsy-turvy, and our digestion, our immune system, our thyroid, on and on, would also go all kinds of pear-shaped.
[00:07:33] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:07:34] Béatriz: And so I realized, you know what? I took an oath not to harm. And that oath is based on being an annoying toddler, clinically speaking, and saying, Why? Why do you have that symptom? Why do you have that symptom? Until I get to the true etiology, the root of it all, and for so many of my patients, it was emotional outsourcing that was running the show of their health and wellness and their insomnia and their depression, their anxiety and their digestive troubles, their bloating, their hormone troubles.
So it felt incumbent upon me once I saw it. Had to chase that rabbit. And it led me to do a really big, deep dive into the psychology of how we come to have codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing habits, not identity habits.
[00:08:19] Aneta: Not identity. I'm with you there. Once we claim those, that's our identity, it's like a life sentence, and I see a lot of people do that. Béa, really curious because I have not experienced in Western medicine the same level of curiosity, to get to what is the root cause? Why is this happening?
Let me not just write you a prescription for something that will treat the symptom. Were you always curious that way? Did you always permit yourself to maybe go outside of what I'm assuming you were taught in nursing school?
[00:08:56] Béatriz: I did, and part of why I went nurse practitioner instead of other trainings was because it really is whole person focused in a way that works for me as an animal. Not dissing anyone, but given the big ups to nps, we're pretty cool. It was a very conscious, thoughtful choice. As a second career after my MPH to become an np.
When I was working my butt off at a federally qualified health center, which is US code for low-income healthcare, and all of us working there really cared about the community and were strapped for time, for energy, for support. So yeah, there were years where I had to just throw a prescription at it because frankly, it was better than nothing. And it's not the clinician's fault. It's very much a broken system. That we are all struggling to survive with it. And I was lucky enough to be able to find my way out.
[00:09:52] Aneta: Yeah, it's interesting. My daughter is in NP school right now, so she'll finish in the year, but she also very much has a holistic approach, and so I think it was very, yeah, wanted to go that route. So you started doing some of this work, asking the questions, noticing what you were seeing with your patients, and then, they shone a light on you as well, because sometimes you wear all mirrors to one another. I love this emotional outsourcing. So tell me what you've learned as you were writing this book, and also as you started to pursue, really, creating something for others to benefit from. What did you learn about people pleasing and the fear of what happens if we stop, or the perfectionist tendencies, even if we don't want to claim these as our own?
[00:10:38] Béatriz: Sure, certainly. That we really need to frame this conversation about our survival skills and what makes my work really different is how much I celebrate these skills. So when a client comes to me and says, I was such a people pleaser yesterday. I go, oh, congratulations. What did you do?
Wow. You really got through that situation unscathed, huh? You really used all your best skills to not have your heart hurt, way to go, tender. And so I think we really need to start with celebrating what got us through. Listen, is it the best way to move forward? Of course not. Or we wouldn't be having this conversation. I want to spend the last two years right in this book. But what I know is that the skills you have today got you to today. Wow.
[00:11:26] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:11:27] Béatriz: Wow. So let's celebrate instead of fighting ourselves or making ourselves feel like poop. because that helps no one.
[00:11:33] Aneta: I love that. You take the shame away and acknowledge that those behaviors were coping skills we developed as young children to survive, to get through whatever we were getting through. I remember doing an assessment, the positive intelligence assessments, which looks at our saboteurs. I don't know if you've ever taken that.
[00:11:54] Béatriz: I have. How interesting.
[00:11:56] Aneta: It's really good. I think it comes out of work in Stanford, and it's really helpful to do with clients because it identifies the common self-sabotaging behaviors, as we call them, that are saboteurs that really come up when we are most stressed and people pleasing, being a victim.
Restless, high achiever. There are, I think, nine or 10 of them that usually rear their ugly heads, but they really are all rooted in childhood behavior, and we tell ourselves that we actually are successful or that we've been able to get to where we are by maintaining these behaviors. So do you find that people sometimes resist letting go of behaviors that, even if they know that they may not be the healthiest.
[00:12:42] Béatriz: Yes, and.
[00:12:44] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:12:45] Béatriz: I take a wee bit of umbrage with people resisting, because again, we're making it sound like a choice when really it's all about the nervous system. So I don't think anyone's really consciously using all of their capacity to fight for their own struggle. I think the window of capacity or tolerance in their nervous system is quite small. So it's the best they can do on, and I mean this literally. Not like hashtag literally, but in a quite literal neurological kind of way.
[00:13:20] Aneta: Yeah. And I think I meant, when you are in a place of regulation and you can look at things objectively, like you, when you were saying I'm not a people pleaser. I don't identify with these.
[00:13:31] Béatriz: Right.
[00:13:32] Aneta: Upon reflection, acknowledging. Maybe there are some things that I do that aren't healthy for me. Maybe I can do things a little bit differently and still trust that I will be able to survive. So that's maybe what I was curious about is when you work with clients, how do you help them acknowledge maybe there are new ways to try things, maybe we can regulate, and then from that place we can see things a little bit differently.
[00:14:01] Béatriz: Such a vital question because everyone's out here giving advice.
[00:14:05] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:14:05] Béatriz: And not enough people are talking about that chasm, that river of doubt between you and a new thought, a new feeling, a new behavior, a new action, a new way of being. It's a dark, murky waters. So what's the bridge?
The bridge is safe. The bridge belongs to you. The bridges, believing in your own worthiness, being able to validate yourself. Then, really building those muscles up. And we do that by regulating the nervous system, and really working with the nervous system to change procedural memory, change the way we habitually relate to ourselves in the world.
We do that through I love a good metaphor, and I love silliness. I think silliness is actually incredibly important. But we do it through kitten steps. So in my world, I deeply believe you've seen a baby's foot, or you were a baby at some point.
[00:15:02] Aneta: I have two daughters, too.
[00:15:03] Béatriz: Okay, great. Remember, they had feet?
[00:15:05] Aneta: Yes.
[00:15:08] Béatriz: Well. Little but pretty big. If you're thinking about change, three inches is a heck of a jump, right? When you're petrified, when you've never said no before, you've never set a limit. You've never set a boundary. Someone wants you to take a three-inch jump. Get out of here. No, thank you. So we take newborn, teeny tiny kitten-sized steps, the tiniest and out of the tiniest of baby kitten steps, because we need to go slowly.
We need to step by step, day by day, breath by breath, show our nervous system that it's okay, first of all, for us to be present to it. Because even though for a lot of us is, it's pretty scary, and so we need to build the new habit, the parallel neurological habit of being present to ourselves, of affirming ourselves, of validating ourselves, of hearing the negative thought.
Using one of my favorite tools, which is, no, thank you. We don't need to complicate it. When that negative thought crops up, I just turn into, oh no. Thank you. No, we're not doing meanie pants. My thighs are gorgeous. We're not doing meanie pants. Sure. Again, A-D-H-D-I walked into a wall.
That's what we do. Let's move on. We're moving on. I'm not interested. But it really is about moving slowly towards building that best friendship with yourself, that positive self-regard.
[00:16:35] Aneta: And what are some of the ways that you help clients create the safety and work on nervous system regulation?
[00:16:41] Béatriz: Yeah. So we use the BRAVE framework. BRAVE stands for Body first, Recognize the outsourcing, Ask what do I want? Voice, a small act of self-loyalty. And then encourage yourself like you would a best friend. Do you want me to go through it bit by bit?
[00:16:56] Aneta: Let's practice this. I would love to see it. Okay.
[00:16:59] Béatriz: So this is our nervous system and sanity-saving approach to start healing emotional outsourcing. Body first, so often we'll try to use really helpful frameworks like CBT, cognitive Behavioral Theory to change our thinking, and I teach a ton of thought work. I think it's super important. Mindset matters and science, right? If your body is in a spin and your nervous system is screaming no. What's your brain going to be able to change?
[00:17:30] Aneta: Right.
[00:17:32] Béatriz: We also remember when we're talking about these habits, emotional outsourcing as survival skills. They come from our family, from our religion, from our culture, from our society, and from living in systems of oppression, right? The patriarchy. White, settler, colonialism, late-stage capitalism, they all keep us on these hamster wheels, walking on eggshells, thinking there's something inherently wrong with us.
Or we wouldn't need a thousand diets and bleaches and creams and shaving. A thousand things to improve our perfect human bodies. So with all of that said, all that conditioning and that socialization live in our minds. It's the scripts, our habitual scripts, so when we come into the body, we can connect with the wisdom that's inherent to us as living beings.
Yeah. So step one, when someone says, let's give folks an example, you're trying to stop saying yes out of habit. You're at the PTA meeting, and they say, Hey, will you make four dozen cupcakes by tomorrow? Your habit is to go, yeah. Well, inside you're like, absolutely not. Kill me. No way. I feel like we've all been in our version of that.
[00:18:45] Aneta: Absolutely.
[00:18:46] Béatriz: Yeah. So what we need to do is come into the body. Now, if your body has been the site of trauma, doing a full body scan is not going to work for you. So please don't start there. What tends to be safest or safe enough for most people is to find our feet.
So I want to invite us to find our feet on the ground and connect with the earth from below, and then orient our nervous systems. So if your folks walk away with one tool, let it be this, the anchor scan orienting exercise. And so when we get activated in our nervous system, when we go back into these once brilliant survival skills, we're not in the here and now.
We're time-traveling. We're in the past. We're ruminating on the future, but we're not here and now. And so to begin to regulate our nervous systems, we just remind ourselves of when and where we are. We do that by simply looking around and taking in what's around us. It sounds too simple to work.
[00:19:44] Aneta: No, it works. I think we're given our senses for a reason, and it really brings us back to the body, reminds us to bring our energy in.
[00:19:54] Béatriz: For sure. And really well put, we are given our senses for a reason. I love that. Yeah, so for a low-stress thing, most of us can just look around, and that can orient us enough. If you need a little more. Name the things you see. So what we're doing, it's a little sneaky here, is we're inviting our prefrontal cortex back into activation with us by naming things and naming patterns of things.
We come out of the amygdala, the limbic system, the fear center of the brain, just a little bit, and toward the prefrontal, which, oh, it is like a release valve for the nervous system. So painting, light switch, door, trampoline. I love my trampoline. Painting lamps. You, screen, plants, crystal. Plants cat, right?
And so just name things. Keep it simple. Yeah. So that's my first place I go. When your mind's doing gymnastics to people, please. When you're trying to keep up with the Joneses and make the perfect lunch for back to school, and you're out of time. Come back home to yourself.
Find your feet, find the ground. Orient your nervous system. Next, we recognize the outsourcing. So notice yourself in the act, gently. Notice I didn't say catch yourself. No. It's carceral thinking. You don't need to be a cop in your own head. Gently notice yourself. And what I do to help us really succeed in this is take some time where everything's chill.
Maybe you know those five minutes before the rest of the house wakes up, if you can get those five minutes. But take a few minutes and write down your habitual ways of emotional outsourcing. For example, I tend to watch people's faces to see if I'm okay. Really good information. I tend to outsource decisions because I don't want to disappoint anyone.
So like, where do you want to go to dinner, Megan? Oh, I don't know. Where do you want to go? Yikes. Right. Yeah. So, really getting real about where you tend to outsource your life. Not as a way to beat yourself up, but just as a fun way to get ahead of it. You know what I mean? So then, when you've got that in a little note on your phone and you review it, it's like playing Where's Waldo?
[00:22:08] Aneta: Absolutely.
[00:22:10] Béatriz: And I think the more we can gamify these things, the less we get heavy, serious. We can create some spaciousness for the nervous system to stay pretty chill instead of making it a big, heavy thing. I did that codependent thing again. No, baby, you just did a survival skill. It's okay.
Next, once we've noticed it and we've not judged ourselves, we've just noticed. Then we pause, and we ask, What do I want? What do I need? Now, the goal here from the jump isn't to actually find the answer. I will say that the answer to me is irrelevant. What matters is that you experienced you asking you.
Does that make sense? So, really building that skill of letting your body experience you as your most important person. Now, if for a year or two or three, the answer is I don't know. That's okay. That's a valid place to begin. Again, the asking, that's the transformation V, voice, a small act of self-loyalty.
So this is where you do the thing you want to do. If that's within your capacity, make it small, make it kitten stepped. So if you want to say no to the cupcakes in our example, instead of the automatic yes, maybe you say, Let me get back to you. You don't have to jump or expect yourself to jump to doing it perfectly.
because that's more of the same trouble. You start becoming your own safe place by giving yourself a little pause so you can get present, you can orient, and you can actually do what's best for you. And then E, encourage yourself like you would your best friend. So celebrate every kitten step.
I noticed, I paused. I asked myself something new. Really let this work be slow because it's deep work. We're literally rewiring our nervous systems, our whole sense of safety and survival. So treat yourself like a little sapling. Learning to stand on its own, like really encourage yourself.
[00:24:12] Aneta: Thank you, Béa, for walking us through that. It actually was very relaxing in my nervous system, even like going through it as I was listening to you, and I was just struck by a couple of things. One that, I think, I wish all children were taught this in school, so we don't have to decondition decades and decades of work, and also, just how difficult it is for many of us to not approach any of our shortcomings.
Or I am using your quotes, there's no right word for it, with like shame and judgment, and how even reprogramming and deconditioning from that in and of itself can take so long. And many of us, I think, struggle with that because from the youngest of ages, people in authority, well-intentioned or not, maybe place that on us, and we assume that we have to judge ourselves, and we have to be perfect.
And if we don't that there is shame associated with it because we know better, we should do better. And just to be able, as you said, to just acknowledge and say, I just noticed, I did that. Okay. That's interesting. Just allowing it to be, without having to label it and just allowing it to be a neutral observation, that in and of itself is so powerful.
[00:25:36] Béatriz: Yeah. It really gives us that spaciousness just to remember that it took years and years for these habits to solidify, and it's simply unkind to expect our neural grooves to completely re-pattern in one minute. In fact, we know it takes about 28 days for a new neural pathway, a new neural groove in our brains, meaning a new heuristic, a new habit to begin to take shape, and for the old one to begin to wither.
[00:26:06] Aneta: With consistency. Even with consistency. Yeah.
[00:26:09] Béatriz: Yeah. So who are you to be faster than biology?
[00:26:12] Aneta: Yeah. No, I love that. I love the reframing here of so many things. I know that one of the other things that you talk about is that we are not inherently codependent as humans. Tell me about that. Tell me a little bit more about why you believe that.
[00:26:28] Béatriz: Because we're born perfect and just wanting love and safety. That's it. And we know that kids who receive attunement, who receive love, who receive care, receive it in the way they want and need. I guess I should say that because a lot of parents out there are doing their darnedest. But I just don't think it's part and parcel of who we are as animals.
To be in these extractive relationships with each other. I guess I have more faith in us. I have more trust and belief in us as animals that it is our orientation to be loving and kind and generous and good.
And that it's only in response to a lack of safety and attunement that we begin to develop these habits. And I think part of what gives me the evidence is how much I've changed. And how much I've shifted from a lot of codependent habits to really feeling like an interdependent human in all of my relationships.
And I've coached hundreds of women through this process and heard from thousands that it works. That we can stop living in these codependent ways. And if that's possible, then how can it be who we are? I'm just not buying it.
[00:27:42] Aneta: Yeah, no, I'm with you. Tell me more about attunements and the role that they play, especially if you do it early enough, and how that impacts us as adults.
[00:27:50] Béatriz: Sí. So attunement is a part of co-regulation. Yeah. So regulating our nervous system, just a quick refresher for your folks, means that we can leave our safe and social calm grounded place called ventral vagal and get activated by life as needed because, sometimes life gets lifey, we need some adrenaline in a driving situation or crossing the road, or stick it up and put on pants in the morning. And we're able to experience that adrenaline rush and come back to our baseline. We're able to check out in a grounded way, like in Shavasana or in meditation, and we're able to come back home.
We're also able to react to danger. And return to a grounded state. That's the process of regulating the nervous system. It's not about being calm all the time. It's about having the skills and tools to come back home to presence in yourself. Now, children are obligate co-regulators. They don't have the skills and tools to regulate themselves without a loving, caring grown-up.
So they need someone bigger than them, older than them, to help their little, teeny, tiny, dependent nervous systems do that work to come back home. And so the process of attunement is about giving another creature a kid or a grown-up. But here I think we're really talking about that developmental attunement.
[00:29:11] Aneta: Yep.
[00:29:12] Béatriz: Giving a kiddo the kind of love and care that lands best for them. That lets them feel most loved and supported and helps their nervous system to regulate with yours so they can come home to safe and social, to ventral vagal. So that's going to be super different for every kid. I have eight nephews. Wow. A lot of nephews.
And amongst them. Some want oh, sweet pea, you fell, huh? Tell me how you're feeling. Because I'd be upset. I think that would be really ouchie. And there are ones that are like, all right, babes, you fell. What's your next move, Superman? You going to get up and run?
Let me see it. And so there's not one way to attune, there's not one way to be with someone else. It's really about meeting the kiddo where they're at. And learning who they are through your nervous system. So, not through the conditioning of the mind to say when a child falls, I should say this, but rather showing up with presence with a full open heart to be there and to be there for what's coming up for them and how they need to be met.
So attunement really calls a lot on our intuition and our discernment, and to properly attune and not as a judgment word, but as a like attuning in the way that most serves the other person, we really need to be in presence, and emotional outsourcing inherently takes us out of presence and into performance.
[00:30:49] Aneta: Oh, it's so good. What does healthy interdependence look like in real life for us?
[00:30:54] Béatriz: It's so lovely. I'm thinking of my spouse who's cooking lunch right now because doing back-to-back interviews today. Interdependence is about mutuality and reciprocity between two autonomous humans. So two people who really each see themselves as an autonomous animal, meaning I can get through my day.
I don't need my spouse or anyone else in a, what the Buddhists would call, a grasping way, like in that clutching grasping. I need your way. My goodness. Do I need my spouse? Do I need my best friend? Do I need the friend who's having us over for a barbecue tonight? Of course, I need my people. I'm a pack animal just like you.
But there's that reciprocity and that mutuality, that ebb and that flow. Meanwhile, in Codependence, there's tit for tat with all I did for you. You can't drive me to the airport. Seriously, last week when I did this, and two months ago, remember 26 years ago when I did that for you?
[00:31:59] Aneta: Keeping track.
[00:32:00] Béatriz: Exactly. because it's all about performing. It's performing lovingly, it's performing, being lovable. It's tap dancing for your lovability. It's not about presence. So in the presence, we can ebb and flow. And so my pastor, grad school, again, we're collecting master's degrees around here.
And when she started school last year, I picked up a lot of the slack, and it was great. Because it was what we needed. And there's a profound interdependence here where I know it'll reverse. And now, I'm doing all these interviews for the book and talking about the book, and I'm not lifting a finger in that kitchen. Let me tell you what.
[00:32:37] Aneta: That's beautiful. That's so beautiful. Without having to ask, I mean, that's the thing, it's just choosing to serve one another, to show up for one another in a way that's just, because.
[00:32:48] Béatriz: Just because it's really lovely and it's absolutely vital for us to be able to step into our authenticity. So when we are in our autonomy, we can be authentic, we can be our real selves. I can be a total weirdo. Because all of me is accepted. It allows me to be the biggest, most expansive version of myself, which allows me to be a better podcaster, a better writer, a better coach, a better friend, a better partner.
Because I'm all of me. I've never been, oh, is it okay if I'm me? Do you approve of me? Is this me? Okay. And I think part of that comes with life and with time and with midlife, honestly. I think it's something we can grasp onto in our teens and twenties and thirties and early forties, of saying, this is who I really am, and I'd rather be disliked for being my real self than liked for being a false self.
I'm not interested in that. And that's been a huge part of my work in the last decade, which is just this is me. I am kind and I am loving and I'm a real weirdo, and I walk into doorframes and come and get it or don't, but I won't apologize for being me.
[00:34:02] Aneta: That's real progress for all of us to be able to get to a point where we say, This is who I am, and I like myself, and I'm not going to apologize. Of course, we're not doing anything to harm others. But I think it's beautiful and the work you're doing is so important. Béa. Tell me what your hope is for this book, because as you and I know, as authors, most authors do not make a living just by writing.
And it takes a lot of time. It's a labor of love. There's a lot of loneliness. I think sometimes that comes with the process. And so with all of those disclaimers, yet here we are, you're promoting this book. You spent two years writing it, and you're so passionate about it. What is your hope? What is your hope for everyone with this book?
[00:34:49] Béatriz: Yeah, when I was so deep in the habits that will not be named. I couldn't find help that was feminist, that was progressive, that didn't blame me or shame me or make me feel really bad. Those who want to label me, who didn't tell me if I wasn't labeling myself, that meant there was something wrong with me.
I just didn't want help, which made me feel bad because that doesn't feel like help. I also couldn't find help that was really based in science and neuroscience and somatics and what we really understand in the here and now about human minds and bodies within their cultural milieu. And so I wrote that book, and I really hope that it helps everyone, but particularly humans, socialized as women, to see ourselves within our social context and the context of our training and our families and societies, so we can stop blaming ourselves, and then we can regulate our nervous systems and live our lives really differently.
So I hope that it just helps people to live the life I know we all can live. Because if we're all living interdependently, then we're all kinder. We're all more loving, we're less frustrated. We snap at customer service lefts, we're kinder to waitresses. I love thinking about the ripple effect and how each person who feels better about themselves is kinder and kinder, and it can hopefully ripple out to this whole great big world.
[00:36:15] Aneta: It's so interesting. I was going to use the word ripple effect because I do believe that when we do our own work, when we allow ourselves to be the best version of ourselves, to be this kinder version of ourselves. We're then able to do it to others. And I do think that when we do snap, when we are unkind to strangers over things that don't really matter, it.
It tends to also be a reflection of what we're doing to ourselves, and how could you possibly extend love and kindness and compassion and empathy to another human being, and also hate yourself or treat yourself so unkindly? I think it's very difficult to do that, and that's why this work is so critical.
It's so important. So where can people find the book? When will it be available?
[00:37:05] Béatriz: Yeah, so it hits the shelf September 30th, and it's in pre-orders now, which is so exciting. For folks who don't know, pre-orders are vital for authors, especially first-time authors, because they tell the publisher how much interest there is in it, so it actually dictates how many they print. So if you really want this book in libraries as much as I do, because that's my huge goal.
That everyone gets it for free. Your pre-ordering now makes it more likely it'll be in libraries. So it's a community service
[00:37:36] Aneta: Where can they pre-order it?
[00:37:37] Béatriz: You can find it at my website, which is Beatriz, Beatrice, but with a Z albina dot com slash book. Keeping it simple there, and you can get it at Amazon or bookshop, or Barnes and of all the great, big booksellers have it. Yeah. And there's an audiobook too.
[00:37:53] Aneta: Did you record that yourself?
[00:37:55] Béatriz: I did, I spent a week in the studio. It was so much fun. It was exhausting, but so much fun.
[00:38:02] Aneta: Yeah. Did you do it for an hour, and then you took a break? What does that look like? Reading, because how many pages is your book?
[00:38:09] Béatriz: 337.
[00:38:10] Aneta: Okay, a lot of pages.
[00:38:12] Béatriz: It's a lot of pages. But yeah, it was like all day for a week.
[00:38:16] Aneta: Wow.
[00:38:17] Béatriz: Yeah, we take a little lunch break, but we went nine to five for a whole week.
[00:38:22] Aneta: Did you find yourself wanting to edit the book when you were reading it?
[00:38:29] Béatriz: There were whole sections. I was like, Can I rewrite this, please? This is terrible. And then of course, the sound engineer was like, Wait, really? No. That was amazing. So again, you know these perfectionist brain habits, they are sneaky. And she was like, No, that was awesome. I was like, Oh, wait a second, I'm doing that old thing. No, thank you. Perfectionism. No, thank you.
[00:38:53] Aneta: Yeah. No, I know. It's hard when you put something out and you're so intentional about every single word, and when one thing doesn't sound right, even in our own head, or we say it out loud, the instinct I think is always there because, yeah, if you don't want to be judged, don't write a book and put it out there.
[00:39:10] Béatriz: There's that. Yeah. But I definitely took some notes for the next book, so.
[00:39:14] Aneta: Yeah. No, Béa, this is so wonderful. And if folks want to find you to learn more about all the work that you are doing in this world and just connect with you, what is the best place for them to find you?
[00:39:25] Béatriz: Yeah, my website's a great place at Beatriz, beatrizalbina.com, or on Instagram. It's my whole big name. breatrizvictoriaalbinanp.
[00:39:35] Aneta: I love it. I love it. And I ask everyone a final question, which is, what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
[00:39:44] Béatriz: I believe the essential human task is to live from our big open heart and to live in our authenticity from our open heart, which means radiating that kindness out like a care bear stare. And so that feels like the width of my life is a grounded, centered life where I'm able to be in love first and foremost. Which means strong boundaries, which means strong limits, which means saying no from love.
[00:40:15] Aneta: So good. Béa, it was just such a delight to meet you and to spend time together. I'm holding that vision for you with your book. I hope every single person grabs a copy for themselves. Grabs a copy for four loved ones. In time for the holidays. Get some early shopping in, and of course, do the pre-orders as much as possible.
It is really important to make sure that people get the visibility and that this becomes a bestseller. So yeah, thank you for all the amazing work you're doing in the world, and look forward to hearing whatever is next for you.
[00:40:48] Béatriz: Thank you.
[00:40:48] Aneta: Thank you for listening to today's episode. If today's conversation inspired you to dream again, break out of your comfort zones or reflect on what it means to you to live more fully, then please follow this podcast because every week you'll hear more stories from people just like you who took imperfect action towards their goals, created more joy and are living the life that they always dreamt of living.