Ep #330: End Emotional Outsourcing with Bea Albina

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, Episode 330: End Emotional Outsourcing with Bea Albina.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. 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? If so, not only are you not alone, but I think you’re going to get a lot out of today’s podcast. Today, I have with me Bea Albina, the author of a book that is probably about released or about to be released as this episode airs, author of a new book called End Emotional Outsourcing: How to Overcome Your Codependent, Perfectionist, and People-Pleasing Habits.

Bea is someone I am privileged to call a friend, a long-time coach friend of mine. She’s also a nurse practitioner, master certified life coach, a somatic experiencing practitioner, and she is just a wealth of knowledge and has the best possible heart. So Bea is here to talk about emotional outsourcing, which before Bea was never a term that I was familiar with. And specifically, in our conversation, we dive into what emotional outsourcing looks like generally, but also what it can look like in grief and how to know if that’s maybe what’s going on for you and then what to do about it. So I will let you enjoy my interview with Bea.

And I don’t think she mentioned it in her interview, but she is also a podcaster as well. And so if you like listening to podcasts, you might also like her podcast. It’s called the Feminist Wellness Podcast. I don’t think she plugged it, but it’s a great listen, so you might enjoy it as well. All right, let’s get into my interview with Bea.

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Krista St-Germain: Bea, welcome to the podcast. I am glad that you are here.

Bea Albina: Krista, I’m thrilled to be here. You’re the best.

Krista St-Germain: Do you know someone in my Mom Goes On community just posted an episode to one of your podcasts?

Bea Albina: Oh.

Krista St-Germain: in our one of our channels inside of Slack. Because she found it very valuable and she wanted to share it with other people, and it was related to something that somebody else had brought up in a call, and she was like, “Here, everyone should listen to this podcast episode.”

Bea Albina: Wow.

Krista St-Germain: I know, right? I’m about to interview her for the podcast.

Bea Albina: Thank you for sharing that. It’s humbling in the most beautiful way.

Krista St-Germain: Oh.

Bea Albina: Because you know what it’s like? I sit here and I clickety-clack on these keys and I turn this mic on and I just talk into it. And I hope that it helps someone.

Krista St-Germain: Literally, the same person, Nancy, I’m talking about you. Nancy, the same person had said something about how she had emailed a podcast host and got a personal response. And that’s literally has happened today. And I was saying, that’s exactly what it’s like because we are on the other side of a microphone, and it does sometimes feel like you’re not having conversations with the real human. And so to hear that your work matters, it really does make a difference.

Bea Albina: Oh, wow, wow. Yeah.

Krista St-Germain: So let’s write a book.

Bea Albina: Let’s write it.

Krista St-Germain: Let’s write a book, which Bea has written a book, which we will talk all about, I’m sure. Yeah, so emotional outsourcing. It’s probably going to be a new term to a lot of people because it was a new term to me. I have never heard anyone say it besides you. So maybe let’s start there. You can tell us like what actually is emotional outsourcing, how does understanding it help people?

Bea Albina: Yeah, right on. So emotional outsourcing is the term I not only coined, but trademarked because I was really proud of it. I sat here making Venn diagrams for a very long time till I sorted it out. So it’s the name I created to name something I couldn’t quite find in the existing literature and language. So words like codependency, perfectionism, and people-pleasing point at parts of it, but they never captured the real like lived reality of what we do when we’re outsourcing, which is handing our worth, our choices, our energy, our sense of self over to other people as a way to feel safe, loved, and accepted. 

And emotional outsourcing is a survival skill, whereas in the culture, we tend to think of codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing habits as defects, as problems with us, right? As labels. I’m such a perfectionist. Like it’s a thing we’re choosing and it’s something that’s wrong with us. But outsourcing is something we do from this very core nervous system, somatic, usually little kid place as a way to feel safe enough to exist.

Krista St-Germain: Okay, talk more about why we do it. How is it related to the nervous system?

Bea Albina: Yeah. So it’s brilliant, by the way. The adult lived experience of it really sucks, but the place it comes from is just so beautiful and so vital and truly self-loving. Which I know is a bit of a cluster cuss in the brain because it feels so bad and it ruins our relationships, but it comes from love. Right? It’s our body saying, I don’t feel safe out there in the world. So I’m going to shut my authenticity down and I’m going to be the good girl or the martyr or whatever they want me to be so that they’ll love me, so that they’ll feed me, so that they’ll be kind to me, or just not even see me over in the corner with my A-plus gold star varsity jacket self. You know what I mean?

So if you grew up in a home where love and safety felt conditional, where your belonging depended on keeping the peace, reading the room, making yourself useful, walking on eggshells, your body, your nervous system learned very quickly. If I manage other people’s feelings, if I manage their life, their experience, then I’ll be okay. And so then over time, that survival code becomes our autopilot, and it becomes what’s called procedural memory in our bodies. So procedural memory is like driving a car, riding a bike, making toast. You don’t think about it, right? It’s just…

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Bea Albina: It’s just what you do.

Krista St-Germain: Sometimes you actually even forget that you are doing it while you do it.

Bea Albina: Yeah, all the time. The scariest of those is, of course, driving a car. 

Krista St-Germain: How did I get here? I do not recall the drive. 

Bea Albina: Where am I? Why am I in this hand basket? And so yeah, our default just becomes saying yes when you mean no, rehearsing conversation for days in your head, monitoring everyone else’s mood before you even know your own, and living from these habits because your nervous system says, acting in codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing ways is the way to literally survive. Rough sauce, huh?

Krista St-Germain: I think you’re the, I shouldn’t say first, but it feels first. So I will say it. Usually when people talk about our nervous system, I don’t hear people talking about it in a sense of it comes from love. It’s discussed in this very robotic, functional, I don’t know, it doesn’t feel loving when people talk about it. And it’s a breath of fresh air to hear you talk about it in that way.

Bea Albina: I appreciate it. I have a lot of clinical training and a lot of science training. And so I feel like there’s this inflection point where I can choose to stay in that clinical brain, right? And talk about it mechanistically, but I don’t think it does the work I want it to do, which is to be an outlet for kindness, for compassion, for generosity, for gentleness. Because the original place with which I take umbrage with the old-school way of talking about codependency in particular is really it’s a conversation about why we’re so wrong and bad, why we’re defective, there’s something wrong with us. We’re enablers, we’re needy, we’re these labeled people. And so of course, our nervous system is going to sympathetic activation, right? That fight or flight, that oh my god, the lions are coming, I’m about to be lunch, panic about who we are, about our identity.

Krista St-Germain: Yes.

Bea Albina: It sets us up to be antagonistic with our very selves about who we are as our very selves. Gosh, that stinks.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah, it’s so different to talk about the actions that we take as opposed to then making that mean that we are codependent. I’ve always hated that term.

Bea Albina: Yeah. Listen, for the nerds listening who are like, the nervous system doesn’t have an emotion center per se. Yeah, duh. What if you pictured your nervous system as loving? Could you not treat yourself with more love then?

Krista St-Germain: And why not? What’s the downside?

Bea Albina: Right.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah, there’s no downside. And if we get to create the relationship we want to have with anything, so why not create a loving one with our nervous system?

Bea Albina: Exactly.

Krista St-Germain: I want to back up just a little bit too because I feel like we jumped in and because I know you, but other people, maybe this is their first exposure to you. So how did you even get to wanting to create a term called emotional outsourcing? Like, how did we get here?

Bea Albina: Yeah, before the Venn diagrams.

Krista St-Germain: Before the Venn diagrams.

Bea Albina: And I know since you know me, you can picture me with those bad cardboard and crayons, and then of course, crayon on my face and like marker in my hair. I’m a messy Jesse all. So from the time I was really little, like so many humans, but especially humans socialized as women, I believed that love and safety came from what I could give. How useful, how accommodating, how pleasing I could be and definitely not from who I was. And so that belief shaped everything, including why I went into medicine. So becoming a family nurse practitioner felt like the perfect extension of that survival code. I could care for others, I could prove my value, and in doing so, I could maybe secure belonging.

But what I started to see in my practice was really striking. So patients came in with digestive issues, with fatigue, with chronic pain, with anxiety, things that broad strokes couldn’t just get better with prescriptions or protocols. And so over time, I realized that the missing piece wasn’t just diet or labs or pharmaceuticals or supplements. It was all of that. Let us be holistic. Plus the elephant in the room, which was stress, distress, and trauma in the nervous system. So their bodies were carrying survival codes too. And folks getting to know me, I am a nerd’s nerd. A friend once described me as the most annoying toddler in the room, because give me a problem and I’m like, okay, but why? But also, why? And then why under that? And what’s the why under that? My brain won’t rest until I get to that the etiology below the etiology, the root cause under the root cause.

And where my Venn diagramming took me was to somatics, to the nervous system, to body-based work. And once I started really bringing that in clinic and then with my clients, everything shifted. And people weren’t just managing symptoms, they were actually reclaiming their lives because the stress of trying to perform self, the stress of trying to manage other people’s feelings so they could relax. Like all those stressors that are part and parcel of emotional outsourcing, just melted. And so that’s where my own story and my work really came together. 

So the patterns that drove me to try to prove myself in medicine, outsourcing my worth through caretaking, through fancy degrees, through another certificate, on and on, right? They were the same ones my patients were suffering under. And that’s what pulled me towards coaching, towards teaching, to help people build really the self-trust and embodied presence that medicine alone can never provide. And through that to name emotional outsourcing for what it is, this survival strategy, not ever a personal failure.

Krista St-Germain: Absolutely. What was it like for you to go through noticing what you were noticing in the people that you were working with and also simultaneously noticing it in yourself?

Bea Albina: Ugh, it was a lot. It was a lot. And there were many ego deaths along the way. Because you have to be able to in naming it. We started this by talking about humility and how humbling it is to see my work impacting others. And it’s humbling in the other way to see every time she goes home, she gets weird poop symptoms for… I’m going home next week. Huh. And like starting to see that mirror and how through all of our work, we’re just mirrors for each other. It was humbling, elucidating, disturbing sometimes. But all in all, I’m so grateful. I’m so grateful that I got to grow alongside my patients and clients and I got to come into this richer understanding that would change my life on Saturday, and then I could bring it to clinic on Monday and help people change their own lives. I’m really grateful.

Krista St-Germain: For sure. And then it just builds on itself. I can only imagine, because I haven’t written a book, what it is like then to also know that your work is about to go out into the world in such an available format that anybody can buy and pick up and read and…

Bea Albina: Yeah.

Krista St-Germain: The ripple of that has got to be wild.

Bea Albina: It’s pretty wild. Can I tell you two funny moments?

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Bea Albina: So I got this box of the galleys and I was like, “Okay.” So like the printed copy of it, but not the hardcover nice one. But anyway, so I got this box, 20 copies. I was like, “Oh, this is cool.” My partner was like, “What do you mean this is cool? This is amazing. This is…” There was an expectation that I’d be like, “Wow.” But I was like, “Whatever.” It didn’t hit me.

I took a copy to my best friend, Sunai, and she was like, “Sign it,” and handed me a pen. And the waterworks turned on. I was like, “Oh my God.” There was something about that human connection that made it super real. And then my PR team was like, “We’re going to try to get you on Good Morning America and all the big shows.” And I was like, “Okay, whatever.” She was like, “But just so you know, we’re going to start with trying to get you on cab TV.” Or whatever it’s called. And I was like, “What?” And she’s like, “The TVs in the cabs.” And my full New York heart just started sobbing. I was like, “Oh my God.” Brains are so funny, Krista. I was like, Good Morning America. Okay, fine.

Krista St-Germain: No big deal, but the cab cart.

Bea Albina: The cabs. Because it’s like, it’s this dissemination really out into the public. It’s really out to real people going to work and going to the supermarket and just like living. And that’s why I wrote the book, right? We need this.

Krista St-Germain: Indeed. Okay.

Bea Albina: Okay.

Krista St-Germain: You said several things, and then that planted several seeds. And now I have multiple questions. So first, I want to go back to what you were noticing in your patients and then in yourself. And I’m wondering, since my podcast and my listeners are all, not all, but mostly widows, yeah. And they’ve lost their person, I’m wondering if in hindsight what you noticed that’s relative to grief and emotional outsourcing. And if you can speak to that.

Bea Albina: Yeah. So grief, to be processed through the body and not to become a stagnant experience of tension, grief demands presence for its movement. It demands that you feel in your own body. And if you’ve been living by outsourcing, by tending to everyone else first, then it can add an extra layer of unbearable, even shameful weight to grief. And grief in its wake can then feel unbearable if you’re not actually in your body. Does that make sense to you? And so what does this mean? Most of us, unfortunately, are trained to apologize for things like crying.

Krista St-Germain: If I had a nickel, 

Bea Albina: If you had a nickel, I know, from here to the moon that stack of nickels. When we are so trained up to outsource, we reassure others, we rush to reassure them. I’m fine, I’m fine. Don’t worry about it. I’m fine, I’m fine. We shove our pain down because we don’t want to be a burden. I’m sure they have their struggles too. And that is so endemic, right? It’s the old training speaking so, so loudly. It’s the nervous system that learned, I’ll only be loved if I’m the strong one, the responsible one, the one that doesn’t fall apart, the one that takes care of everyone else, the one that keeps things like chill and cool and okay for everyone. But underneath that is the truth of loss, right? Grief is falling apart. It’s cellular, it’s somatic. Stress hormones shift, immune pathways fire, sleep gets disrupted. Your body knows loss and the body won’t be argued with, and yet we argue because we were trained to.

Krista St-Germain: Yes. And we continue. It’s not like a one time argument.

Bea Albina: Yeah. It’s constant. It’s chronic. It’s a chronic condition of arguing with our body.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Bea Albina: And so I believe that the work is to reclaim our right to grieve without performance. To sit with the messy animal pain of it all, to let your body truly move through it. So crying, shaking, wailing, resting, not being okay, but then also being okay and letting it ebb and flow without attaching story to it. And then to notice when those old emotional outsourcing habits creep in whispering like that somehow you should make it easier on everyone else.

Krista St-Germain: You’ve already said it in, you’ve said quite a few things, but if you were to come up with a list, say…

Bea Albina: I say a lot of things.

Krista St-Germain: You say a lot of things. Wwe like a lot of the things you say. If you were to come up with a list of, “Hey, these are the red flags for someone who is experiencing grief and also has some emotional outsourcing happening.” What are some kinds of things that they might be able to recognize in their own behavior that would point them back towards, “Oh, okay. This is what’s happening here.”

Bea Albina: Yeah. Grief feeling like a problem that you need to solve for other people. For other people. Okay. For other people. If your grief feels like a performance to manage. If you are experiencing the greatest loss of a human lifetime, or maybe top five, and you’re more worried about other people’s experience of your experience than your own experience of your experience, baby, baby. That’s when we need to really recognize our outsourcing training so we can unhook from it. Because we need to remember that our pain, our heart, our tears are not liability. They are our loveability. They’re not liabilities.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Bea Albina: They’re proof you loved, you cared, you lived. Right?

Krista St-Germain: Yeah. And having them doesn’t mean that you’re weak.

Bea Albina: Right. Or maybe it does mean you’re weak, and of course you are. You just lost your person. Like we can cut it either way, right?

Krista St-Germain: Yes. Yes. It’s just like conversations about selfish. Reclaim it or don’t, but…

Bea Albina: Pick one. Right.

Krista St-Germain: Pick one and go with it. Don’t go with the common narrative.

Bea Albina: Yes.

Krista St-Germain: Okay.

Bea Albina: Exactly.

Krista St-Germain: Was there anything else you wanted to say about that?

Bea Albina: Apologizing. That’s what I have noticed the most in my patients and clients who are in a grief process and emotionally outsourcing.

Krista St-Germain: Say apologizing.

Bea Albina: Oh, I’m sorry I couldn’t come out. I’m sorry this, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. And they’re like not even Canadian. They’re just like apologizing for existing, existing and grieving. Instead of just being in the truthfulness of it. Which takes me to a related point, which is that emotional outsourcing in its way is this, it’s not a truthful way of living. It’s not an honest way of living. It’s a performance performative way of living, which is to, I throw throwing stones at absolutely zero people. We’re in survival mode.

Krista St-Germain: No.

Bea Albina: But in grief, all of your resources are so low. Your nervous system is so tanked. So many of us are tired and wired. We’re jacked up but exhausted. And for folks with kids, there’s so much to do while trying to grieve, that going to that, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” becomes like just some sort of pressure gauge that actually puts more pressure on us.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah. Okay, so apologizing, performative grieving, worrying more about what other people think about how you’re doing than actually worrying about how you’re doing. What were some of the others? I should have taken notes. Not feeling safe being vulnerable with people who are safe to be vulnerable with. That’s a big one, right? Is because we don’t trust ourselves. So even if your whole body is like, “Darling, you can relax.” We still stay tense. It’s that default.

Krista St-Germain: Can I ask a follow-up question there about that?

Bea Albina: Yeah.

Krista St-Germain: Because a lot of people will say to me, either they’re very concerned about and don’t feel comfortable around their children and expressing emotion around their children.

Bea Albina: Yeah.

Krista St-Germain: So how does emotional outsourcing tie in there? Does it?

Bea Albina: I think it does, right? So emotional outsourcing is we chronically and habitually source our sense of safety, worth, and belonging to others. And so from that framework, we need to control other’s view of us as a way to keep safe. Okay. If they think I’m weak, they think I’m not a good enough mother. If they think I’m whatever my brain is telling me they’re going to think if I have a human emotion, they’re going to reject me, abandon me, not love me. And if they don’t love me, I’m unlovable, because I don’t believe I’m lovable. It’s a really problematic catch 22, right? Where we don’t let ourselves have our feelings and so our kids don’t learn that feelings are okay.

Krista St-Germain: Yes.

Bea Albina: And so then when we do have feelings, they have an intense reaction to it, or they don’t have their own feelings, and then they shove them down, and then they explode. It turns everyone into a tinderbox.

Krista St-Germain: So worrying about that could be a sign of emotional outsourcing, but not necessarily.

Bea Albina: Yeah, I tried not get too diagnostic, but yes, as part of a bigger picture absolutely could be. It also makes me think of my own parents and like a lot of boomers, and I’m not using that word pejoratively. I don’t use any word pejoratively, really. I’m pretty nice. I’m pretty kind. I’m never nice. I’m very kind.

Krista St-Germain: Very kind.

Bea Albina: Very kind. Thank you. It takes one to know one. Anyway, but like a lot of people from the boomer generation were taught to like really keep things from their kids. In the ’60s and ’70s, women often weren’t told they had cancer. Do you know about this?

Krista St-Germain: No. I’m…

Bea Albina: Oh, there was a whole thing to not give women in particular terminal diagnoses because they didn’t want to worry them. They didn’t want to upset them. They would just get sick and die, and no one would tell them.

Krista St-Germain: I have no words.

Bea Albina: Oh my god, it’s like a whole corner of patriarchy. Yeah, it’s a whole thing. It’s a whole problematic thing. It’s the infantilization of women.

Krista St-Germain: I shouldn’t say that it doesn’t track. It does. It’s just still stunning.

Bea Albina: Stunning. Stunning. Stunning. Yeah. I think my parents were very much raised with a “don’t bother the children, don’t burden the children.”

Krista St-Germain: Uh-huh, right.

Bea Albina: And so I remember my mom sitting at the dining room table like her face all streaked with tears being like, “I’m not hungry.” And my sister and I being like, “Oh my God, what’s wrong? Are you okay? What’s wrong?” And as kids feeling so uncertain and so, weren’t physically unsafe, but we I know I felt unsafe because here’s an upset grownup. He’s checked out and not present and not talking. And she’s tear stained and clearly upset, but no one’s acknowledging this and no one’s saying anything. I’m an 8-year-old looking at a 6-year-old and we’re like, “Dude, what?” And these grownups are say are it’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. So it creates this cognitive dissonance that I think they were trained to uphold, and then they raised us with that because they thought it was the right thing to do. Or they didn’t have the language and skills to do anything else.

And so when we live that same way with our kids, we’re creating this fear of feelings, fear of emotions, fear of authenticity, fear of reality, that I think just really harms everyone.

Krista St-Germain: It does.

Bea Albina: For sure as I can. my sister who like, I can picture her with like her 2-year-old, I can actually picture a time when she fell down the stairs and she sat at the bottom of the stairs crying, and her 2-year-old came up to her and was like, “Mama hurt.” And she said, “Oh, mama hurt, but mama okay, but also hurt both.” And he was like, “Oh, I kiss.” And then he kissed her knee and she was like, “I actually feel better.” And they got up and walked away. And it’s a stupid, simplistic example. And we’re talking in the framework of grief. It’s a very tiny little thing, but I think it exemplifies just like kids want our truth more than they want anything else. They want our realness.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Bea Albina: So how does shielding them from grief do anything? Not anything positive. And what do you think, Krista? You’re the expert.

Krista St-Germain: I’m totally on board. I think it’s possible for people to worry about their kids in grief and still not make it mean anything about them. It doesn’t come from a place that says I can’t be okay unless you’re okay, or my okayness comes from your okayness. But also still, I’ve just been socialized to believe that the goal of life is to be happy and emotions are some form of weakness or something. I’ve picked up something along the way that says I am an unfamiliar territory and don’t have confidence with how I’m supposed to navigate this. It doesn’t match the parenting book. Right. Or the living book.

Krista St-Germain: Yes. Which maybe the parenting is a subset. I don’t know, it’s a chapter in the big book.

Bea Albina: I think so. It’s a chapter in the \Book of Life.

Krista St-Germain: I wish someone would had given it to me.

Bea Albina: Oh, I’ve got a copy. Do you want me to fax it to you?

Krista St-Germain: If you could just text a link to a Dropbox.

Bea Albina: Sorry, I don’t do that, but I can get in my DeLorean, go back to 1986 and fax you a copy. Does that work?

Krista St-Germain: Works. I love you.

Bea Albina: Okay, great. I’m on it. I’ll go right as soon as we’re finished. I’ll get in my DeLorean.

Krista St-Germain: You crack me up. Here’s one of the things that I want to talk about. And because I know you and love you and because being in your presence, it feels amazing to me.

Bea Albina: Oh.

Krista St-Germain: It really does.

Bea Albina: Likewise.

Krista St-Germain: Just the way that you talk, it feels really good. So where I was actually going with this doesn’t seem related. Maybe it’s not. But this idea of healing being something we do as a solo project, right? This idea of, I don’t know, going it alone. I think what brought my brain to that is because as a coach, I have spent a lot of time doing things alone. And I love it when I get to hang out with my friend, my coach friends like you. And we get to pursue whatever we’re pursuing in the company of others. So in the context of emotional outsourcing and the self-healing idea that is pushed so heartily, what do you think about all of that? Doing it alone?

Bea Albina: No. It’s impossible.

Krista St-Germain: It’s no, next question.

Bea Albina: You would go a step further to say it’s impossible. Not only should we not do it, but you would say it’s impossible.

Krista St-Germain: Okay. Carry on. I’m listening.

Bea Albina: I shall. So yeah, no, we are pack animals. Right? We’re dogs, not cats, with all love. My cat just went. But we need each other. It’s part and parcel of how our nervous systems work, right? Our nervous systems are hurt in relationship. They must heal in relationship. We need to co-regulate our nervous systems. Regulating the nervous system means bringing it back into balance, right? Where we are safe at home within ourselves. And a regulated nervous system can get upset and can come back home to self, can check out and get overwhelmed, but come back home to self. That’s regulation. It doesn’t mean being zen and calm all the time.

Krista St-Germain: Say that again.

Bea Albina: Okay, great.

Krista St-Germain: Because I think people need to hear that again.

Bea Albina: In shocking news, Instagram Reels lied to you, and the nervous system is way more complex than any of us can say in 90 seconds. Regulating the nervous system does not mean being calm all the time. That’s not a human state. If you are calm all the time, you are a Stepford wife. It’s not good. It’s not good for you. It’s not a flex. It’s not like, oh, I’m calm all the time. My partner practices Tibetan Buddhism and meditates for hours a day and is not calm all the time. Not the goal. That’s not enlightenment. That’s being a robot. You’re supposed to get pissed off. The world is really challenging, and you’re supposed to freak out laughing and crying because your friend said something so hilarious, you’re going to pee your pants.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Bea Albina: That’s also part of it. That is technically a bit of dysregulation that feels awesome. Nervous systems ebb, they flow. That’s normal. That’s human. Don’t let the machine teach you otherwise. So it’s the same machine that tells us we should control our experience of life into this very narrow window of acceptability. Grieve just a little and move on. Right? Just grieve a little bit. It’s fine. It’s fine. You got things to do, right?

Krista St-Germain: Cry a little, but not too much.

Bea Albina: Just a little.

Krista St-Germain: And only, and only for a certain amount of time.

Bea Albina: Quiet at night. Don’t mess your makeup. Come on. Let’s go. But we need to co-regulate. Okay, here’s my favorite example. You’re with kids at the park. One of them falls. What do they do when they fall and they get scared and they hurt themselves? They come running to you and they show you the boo-boo and they say, “I hurt myself,” sobbing. And you do what my sister did, but the opposite. You snuggle them up, you kiss them, you listen to them, you give their nervous system your grounded, regulated love. And then what do they do? They stand up, give a little shake, and, “Okay, thanks.” And run off like nothing happened.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Bea Albina: That is a nervous system that went through a full stress cycle. Scary thing, regulated with another animal. I’m safe now. The lions aren’t here. Shaky, shaky, run off. That is the normal mammalian, normal in a medical sense, right? That is the mammalian way that the nervous system experiences life. We’re not meant to go this alone. We’re meant to live in small villages, maybe 20, 40 people max, not hundreds and thousands of millions of people on our phone all day. But that’s a separate issue. Right? We’re meant to take care of each other. We’re meant to have each other’s backs. No one’s meant to cook and clean all day long and make three meals a day while mowing your own lawn with your own lawn mower. You know what I mean? This is rugged individualism run rampant. We’re supposed to be in community with collective care.

Krista St-Germain: And I would say I have seen a lot where instead of going towards community after experiencing a significant loss, people will go hyper independent. They will go into a very much, I can do it on my own, I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone else. I’ve got to figure this out for myself. And wow.

Bea Albina: Yeah. Ouch.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Bea Albina: It really sucks. And I get it. So when we go into sympathetic activation, that’s fight or flight, that’s the lions are coming. Once we’ve been chased by proverbial lions long enough, we run out of steam. And the nervous system goes into the state of last resort, which is called dorsal, dorsal shutdown, dorsal disconnection. It’s when you’re at the back of the cave, like just hoping the lions aren’t going to find you here. So your heart rate’s low, your blood pressure is low. You’re like a deer in the headlights, a possum playing possum, just hoping the lions don’t come.

And I think when we not only have a staggering loss, but have that loss within the setting of loneliness, not enough community, not enough care, not enough support, not having robust family and friends and not having that co-regulation we need, plus the emotional outsourcing that tells us not to have all the feelings, it dysregulates us so significantly trying to keep that all at bay, that instead of running to a beloved grown-up and saying, “I’m hurt, help,” and getting a hug and shaking it off like the little kid, for lack of what else to do, we end up at the back of the cave. You know what I’m saying?

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Bea Albina: Just like really shut down to ourself and the world. And from there, the hyper-individualism, which is our training in capitalism, takes over. What else are you going to do? And then we can layer in, I have a podcast coming out soon about too much therapy speak. I don’t know if you want to go there, but I think it’s an interesting place to go.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Bea Albina: I feel like so many people are now armed with pseudo-therapeutic speak that just serves to disconnect us more. Don’t trauma dump on me. That kind of languaging shared human experience.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah, everyone’s a narcissist and…

Bea Albina: Everyone. Yeah. So I don’t, I think it can put us in a really problematic place where everything’s just telling us to move farther from each other and what we all need the most is one another.

Krista St-Germain: Okay, so somebody’s listening and they’re like, “Yes, she’s talking about me.” Okay. Next possible smallest step.

Bea Albina: If you find yourself isolating or if you find yourself in emotional outsourcing.

Krista St-Germain: I feel like it’s probably both. It’s the same.

Bea Albina: Yeah. So one of the big things I do with my clients are 911 cards. So when your nervous system’s disregulated, you can’t think so goodly. And that’s on purpose. Dear Krista St-Germain, if you were being chased by a lion, would you want to do calculus?

Krista St-Germain: It’s unnecessary for my survival in that moment.

Bea Albina: Great. Thank you. I’ll just make a note in your chart. Okay, great. No calculus. Great. We cannot think so goodly on purpose. And so expecting your brain to come up with a plan or remember to call your friend Susan, or remember to anything when you’re in the overwhelming grief or when you’re in the back of the cave, it is beyond unkind. It is actual cruelty to yourself. And in so is unkind to the people you love who want to support you, who want to care for you, who want to show up. In a moment when you feel okay enough, write future you some instructions.

Krista St-Germain: Yes.

Bea Albina: When you feel like monkey poop, do this. When you are fully shut down, here are the four friends who consented, write that in bright red letters, to you calling them. And then you’re going to take a picture and you’re going to text Susan and Karen and Lisa and you’re going to say, “Hey, girl, hey, I’m really struggling. This is my plan. Is it okay for you to be on my list of the gals I call?” And then screenshot that and put it in the same note on your phone as your instructions. So when future you says, “Oh, I can’t bother Lisa. Her alpaca has a cold. Like things are rough for her too.” You can look at the note and remind yourself Lisa gave me consent.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah. Beautiful. What kinds of other things do people put on their cards?

Bea Albina: What kind of other animals have colds, turtles, possums. I love making you laugh. Y’all, if you’re not watching the video, Krista laughing is such a magnificent thing because her smile fills her whole face. Like her ears actually move and it makes me so happy to make her giggle. It makes me so happy. Can you imagine a turtle with a cold? I mean, their paw can’t even reach their nose. How do they Kleenex? I don’t know. It’s really cute. You put on the 911 card, eat. Eat. You make a list of your safe foods. So now I’m going to go nurse practitioner on this.

Krista St-Germain: Please.

Bea Albina: Honey bear, eat. So is it oatmeal? Is it steak? What do you eat when you cannot eat? And then you text your friend and she goes and buys those things and you fill your freezer with the safe foods to eat. Sleep. If you know that you are a person with the habit of, and hear how I phrase this because there’s nothing wrong with you. You have habits of doom scrolling late at night, put a breaker on your internet so it turns off at 10:00.

Krista St-Germain: Beautiful.

Bea Albina: So that you can’t Wi-Fi till 3:00 a.m. Water. Really, when people are in the depth of grief, drink a glass of water and leave the water glass on the counter so you can physically see how many you had.

Krista St-Germain: Good idea.

Bea Albina: I do this with elders too, right? If you can’t physically see 10 cups of water by night, we got to work on it.

Krista St-Germain: We got more work to do. Yeah.

Bea Albina: Get two minutes of sunshine on your face. Nobody told you to go outside. I’m wild, but I’m not that bonkers. In the first couple weeks, you don’t have to go outside.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Bea Albina: But open the blind and put your face in the sun and be seen. And sure, do we want you outside on a walk in the sun? Yeah. I’m not going to imagine people can do that right away, right? So the things on your 911 card that may make you feel some semblance of being you.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah, and I love how everything you’re talking about is so accessible. It’s really like back to basics of foundational, what do we need at a bare minimum?

Bea Albina: Yes.

Krista St-Germain: Water, sleep, sunshine.

Bea Albina: Yeah. I was a hospice nurse, right?

Krista St-Germain: How do I not know that?

Bea Albina: I don’t know. We’re complex creatures. I was a hospice nurse. And so this is a conversation that I had with the family of the dying. Because we can tell, like we can tell when someone’s getting close. It’s energetic. Oh, I just got like full body shivers. It’s energetic more than physiological. And we’re not doing vitals and stuff in hospice anyway. So you can just tell. And so I would sit people down and I would give them these instructions. I need you to go home and make soup. I need there to be 60 gallons of soup in your freezer by tomorrow. Yeah, it’s back to basics. It’s simple. And it’s really within the context of emotional outsourcing, it’s knowing your own habits so that you can get ahead of them and can get community support.

Now, if you’re like, I don’t have people. I just moved from Chicago to Albuquerque. I don’t have people here. Get a coach. Hire us. Hire Krista. Join a group. Go talk to the librarians. Yeah, I’m not kidding. Librarians want to talk to you about what’s real. They are frontline workers, right? Join groups where you can get support, like parasocial support, while you’re building actual community, but isolating, as you said, is really one of the most dangerous things we can do.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah. I 100% agree.

Bea Albina: Yeah.

Krista St-Germain: I don’t think so much of what is normal in grief gets normalized when we’re isolating.

Bea Albina: Yeah. For sure. One of the things that I find most amazing about doing this work is how I will name something about my lived experience that like was shameful or felt so weird or felt so like whatever, and people would be like, “Oh yeah, me too. Oh yeah, I do that all the time. Oh, I totally did that.” That’s a co-regulating force. That lets your nervous system like exhale, right? In this profound way. And I’m not broken. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not weird in a bad way. Turns out I’m just a human.

Krista St-Germain: I’m a human. Yeah, the thing that makes me weird is that I didn’t ever share anything that I thought was weird about me to get it normalized so I could realize I wasn’t.

Bea Albina: So one of the things I say in Anchored, in my program with my clients that raises an eyebrow at first is when you’re first beginning this work, lean on your skills. What are your skills? Being super codependent. Meaning, if you’re only going to eat, if you think about your sister being upset that you didn’t eat, use that as leverage. If you’re only going to join a group because your friends would be so sad if you’re suffering alone, use it.

Krista St-Germain: Use it. Whatever gets you in this space.

Bea Albina: That’s right. Towards more healing, towards more care, towards more love, use it. And then slowly build your own sense of self, your own sense of worth, become your own guiding North star. But eventually, the depths of grief is not the moment. It’s the moment for collectivity.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah. That’s such a great thing for people to hear.

Bea Albina: For sure.

Krista St-Germain: I also, I’m thinking about, I love this 911 card idea coming back to that. Another thing that I wondered, do you ever have people put on their cards how they want to talk to themselves?

Bea Albina: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So we call that care bear stare and care bear stare in the mirror. So care bear stare is the love we give each other. And then we take that care bear stare and we put it into a mirror where we’re picturing ourselves and we send all the tenderoni that we send to one another back into our own hearts.

Krista St-Germain: As a child of the ’80s, oh, yes.

Bea Albina: Yes.

Krista St-Germain: The care bear stare.

Bea Albina: It’s vital. A woman showed up to coaching in Anchored the other day with a care bear shirt on that made her torso look like the bear.

Krista St-Germain: That’s pretty cute.

Bea Albina: It was outstanding. I’m giving Rose a big shout out from here.

Krista St-Germain: I love it. I mean, how we speak to ourselves makes such a difference.

Bea Albina: Oh literally. I mean, it Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, like what we literally hear ourselves saying out loud, especially to ourselves, changes physiologically our brain. Listen, I love light, fluffy self-help. But this is science. The auditory processing center changes the way your medial frontal cortex in your brain experiences self. And that positive self-referential positive regard. I mean, you kind of feel like I need to breathe through that one. When we have positive self-referential regard, it literally changes our experience of self. What in the science? That’s cool.

Krista St-Germain: I want you to say more about that.

Bea Albina: Yeah. So it…

Krista St-Germain: I don’t know, what is it? What actually happens?

Bea Albina: What happens like in Broca’s area and Wernicke’s? 

Krista St-Germain: Yeah. 

Bea Albina: Okay, so our medial frontal cortex, oh man, you’re opening up a can of nerd. Here we go. It’s great. So this is how somatic experiencing works. So your medial frontal cortex is the part of your brain, it’s your third eye, it’s your watcher. It’s the part of self that like watches…

Krista St-Germain: Self-awareness.

Bea Albina: And so it’s constantly recording, frankly, if you’re being meany pants or care bear to you.

Krista St-Germain: Okay.

Bea Albina: Okay. And so it’s creating a sense of self talking to a bunch of different areas, but it’s creating the story of self based on how you self-refer. So if you’re like thinking about a trauma in the past and you’re like, “God, I can’t believe that I walked that way or I can’t believe that I dated him or I can’t believe…” Whoa, mean to self, mean to self, mean to self.

Krista St-Germain: I can’t believe that I froze and didn’t stand up for myself.

Bea Albina: Exactly. Or that I screamed and threw that plate or I just, whatever. Medial frontal’s like, “Oh, okay, I guess we don’t like us. Let’s be meaner to us.” Being meaner to us is now the heuristic. It’s now the shortcut. It’s the neural groove that has been exercised. And so it’s the shortcut we take. So we started 16 hours ago when we started talking today about procedural memory. It’s not technically procedural memory, but it becomes like procedural memory.

Krista St-Germain: We could just say habit.

Bea Albina: Sure, it becomes habit, but like my nerds, it becomes like procedural memory. So like, have you ever driven to the kids’ school on a Saturday when you meant to go to the grocery store? My mom would do that all the time. That’s that like default autopilot go. And so being mean to you especially like the tracks that you hear for, oh, I’m so stupid. Oh, I’m so it becomes your brain’s go-to thought. It’s really wild how it then becomes like our ego’s whole sense of identity becomes wrapped around that story.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah. And…

Bea Albina: And…

Krista St-Germain: It can be changed.

Bea Albina: It can be changed. Like pretty easily, which is really amazing. That’s the part that’s wild to me. The oldest person I’ve had in my group is this woman, Ethel, who was 76 when she joined. And the changes that happened in her in 6 months together were actually mind-boggling. Like the way she talked to herself, referred to her mess-ups. We have a thing called Oopsie Club, where we celebrate our F-ups because like how delightful is that? To just be like, “You guys, I walked into a wall.” No, literally, I was just so out of it and I was like, “Oh, what’s a door frame?” Walked into it. And then everyone cheers you on. How fun is that? I love Oopsie Club. Okay, whatever. Turns out I’m a human.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah, I don’t have to criticize myself for the oopsies. I could celebrate them.

Bea Albina: Yeah. Because you’re cute. Be whimsical, be fun. The other thing I love to teach people to do is to be their own narrator.

Krista St-Germain: Mhm, yes.

Bea Albina: And then she walked into a wall because she is such a silly little goose.

Krista St-Germain: Yes. We did a master’s call, and I called it David Attenboroughing it. And we did it all in the voice of David Attenborough.

Bea Albina: That’s amazing.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah. Good times.

Bea Albina: That’s incredible.

Krista St-Germain: Time is flying by, and there’s a couple of other things I wanted to know. One, because you are such a somatic, like when I think of who understands somatic practices, you’re my person.

Bea Albina: Thank you.

Krista St-Germain: You’re welcome. You earned that title. But I do understand that a lot of people don’t know what the heck that means. So can you just give us like a 101?

Bea Albina: Sure. So somatics is in general, it’s a way of relating to self through the body. Right? It’s a way to come back into connection with our internal world. So somatics are any set of modalities or practices that help us return to knowing who we are and what we want through the body, not just experiencing ourselves through our minds. So not just through stories, but as an actual felt experience. So like that feeling in grief where the whomp bottom drops out of life, that’s a somatic experience, right? Our body speaks in sensation. So tightness, looseness, heat, cool, a million sensations, but our body tells us what’s up, what’s going on, what we need, how we feel, and it tells us that in a way that is not impacted as much by the conditioning and socialization in our minds. 

So like our good girl stories are in our brain, and show up as tension in the body. And so those tension patterns in the body that say, “Be good, be quiet, order a salad, don’t say too much. Don’t have an opinion. Agree with everyone. Don’t grieve too hard.” The tension that comes with that, we can work with it in somatic modalities and somatic practices to allow it to release on its own without forcing it, without coercing, but just letting the body truly experience what it needs to experience so it doesn’t stay in tension patterns that don’t serve us anymore.

Krista St-Germain: Tension patterns. I like that phrase.

Bea Albina: Yeah. It’s very cool on the internet to say anger gets stuck in your body. And I’ve have had so many people say, “Wait, what? Where is the anger?” But what we’re really talking about is tension patterns, right? Is chronically bracing, chronically not being flaccid, like not showing up in your life, like too much going with the flow. Our somatic response to life becomes the posture that we move through life with and keeps us rigid when what does grief teach us? Grief more than anything teaches us that we need to be flexible. Like bamboo in the wind. But stress, distress, and trauma make us rigid.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah, and I think that they’re many challenging aspects to it, but one of the things that I think is so challenging is that when it is the way that you are used to moving through the world, you do not see that it is not the way you have to move through the world.

Bea Albina: Yeah, there’s no other way, right? But the rigidity. Oh, it’s just the way we do things. It’s just the way I am. I’m just a codependent perfectionist people pleaser. It’s just who I am. Which is that double-edged sword of it keeps you stuck, but it also abdicates responsibility. Oh, it’s not my fault. I’m just a codependent.

Krista St-Germain: There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just a perfectionist. Yeah.

Bea Albina: You just throw your hands up. And so you can’t actually participate in life. You just live in resentment.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah. Or there’s just like that, no, it doesn’t come with any sort of negative label. It’s just the no, this is just the way that it is. I’m fine. This is just how, yeah, just what it’s like.

Bea Albina: It’s just what, yeah. I guess it will never change. Too bad.

Krista St-Germain: Definitely don’t read your book.

Bea Albina: Don’t.

Krista St-Germain: Here’s what I want to make sure people understand.

Bea Albina: Yeah.

Krista St-Germain: I haven’t read all of your book, but I did get the preview. So I can vouch for the fact that if you read this book, you will not get overwhelmed by big scary words, even though Bea knows a lot of them. For the layperson might be a little overwhelming. But talk about what actually, why would someone want to read your book? What would they get out of it?

Bea Albina: Yeah. And it’s true, I really do love big words.

Krista St-Germain: You own them.

Bea Albina: Thank you. I try to. Listen, so my goal in writing the book is I’m a nurse first. I’m a lot of things, but I am practical and accessible, like you said, right? The world doesn’t need another set of tips and tricks for fixing ourselves, right? Because we’re not broken, we’re brilliant. Right? And so I wrote this book as a way to show us the truth of what’s underneath our codependent perfectionist and people-pleasing habits so we can own it and take responsibility in a way that helps lift us up instead of keeping us stuck and trapped. 

And so the first half is all about explaining why we have these habits, how we have them, how they show up, what we learn from our families of origin, archetypes about how we tend to show up so we can start to see ourselves and our family more clearly and thus with more compassion. And then in part 2, I share tools that we can use to begin to reset our ways of thinking and rewire our nervous systems. 

So there’s a section about somatics and the nervous system that gives you a really clear, accessible 101 about the nervous system and somatics and like skills like anchor scans or orienting tools you can use immediately to help ground yourself so that regulating we were talking about, you can start to do that for yourself and you can do it for the people you love. If you’re a parent who’s grieving, you can regulate your own nervous system so you can show up for your kiddos. And then I talk about thought work and I teach thought work, my framework for thought work, the thought work protocol, so that we can change our mindsets.

Krista St-Germain: Love. Is there anything you hoped to talk about today that we didn’t cover? I didn’t ask you.

Bea Albina: Oh, you’re such a brilliant interviewer. But I feel like we covered everything. I feel like this was also so fun.

Krista St-Germain: Good. Yay. I know you’re doing a lot of these. I know it’s got to be…

Bea Albina: Yeah, but it’s so fun. We were talking about this before we started recording that it feels so amazing to be at this point in my career, in my life where I’m really talking about the stuff I most passionate about, and it’s just so incredible to get to help people and support people. So thank you for allowing me to talk to your beautiful people.

Krista St-Germain: Oh, my pleasure.

Bea Albina: To be coming to Mom Goes On again.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah, when you’ve been…

Bea Albina: Wow.

Krista St-Germain: Every time you have, we have gotten rave reviews.

Bea Albina: What a great group of women. Like, oof. Yeah.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah. Okay, people are going to want to buy the book. So tell them where they can buy it and tell them how they can connect with you, all of the things.

Bea Albina: Okay. So if you go to beatriz, B E A T R I Z, Albina BeatrizAlbina.com/book, you can read more about the book, you can buy the book, and you can get presents. There’s presents. Yeah, there’s pre-order gifts. So right there, you can get all sorts of presents. There’s a 45-minute workshop all about our emotional outsourcing habits. There’s a set of journals, there’s, oh, like similar to 911 cards, there’s these like morning and afternoon self-love like printouts that you print out and put on your bathroom mirror.

Krista St-Germain: Oh.

Bea Albina: Remind you to be sweet to you. Yeah, they’re really nice. And they’re free because I love you and I’m really grateful. People don’t understand why pre-ordering matters so much. The publisher is like hedging their bets, right? They don’t know if people are going to like the book. And so when you pre-order, you tell them, “Oh, no, we like this. We want this. Please print more.” And then they print more. And so what does that do? It makes it more likely to get into your library. So if you want to support your public library and you’re financially able to pre-order, please go pre-order. The more copies you pre-order, the more likely it is to get not into just your library, but libraries across the country and across the world. So the more copies you buy, the more presents you get. And here’s, do you want to hear a really exciting one I just added?

Krista St-Germain: Of course.

Bea Albina: A 6-week live course with me for folks who order 10 copies or more.

Krista St-Germain: Wow.

Bea Albina: I never do anything like that. Like you usually have to be an anchor in my 6-month program to be with me live. So it’s pretty exciting. I’m really jazzed. It’s going to be a hoot.

Krista St-Germain: And you could just give all of your good friends, all of the people that you would put on your 911 card, they’re…

Bea Albina: There you go.

Krista St-Germain: Also get a book.

Bea Albina: Give them a copy. Give it to your friends, give it to your enemies.

Krista St-Germain: Amazing. I’m so proud of you.

Bea Albina: Oh. Thank you. It means a lot. Thank you, friend.

Krista St-Germain: Having watched from the sidelines of all that it took to write this book and the great care that you put into it. And I know it’s a lot of heart and I know that you don’t – you’re not the type of person who just glosses over and says the thing that’s going to get the likes or the attention. Like you go deep and you figure it out and you, yeah, and you don’t see a lot of that these days, sadly, or at least as much as I would like to see, so.

Bea Albina: Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that.

Krista St-Germain: Thank you for coming on. We’ll have you back.

Bea Albina: Thank you for having me. I can’t wait.

Krista St-Germain: Love you, friend.

Bea Albina: Love you, friend. Ciao.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence. 

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than what you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click Work With Me for details and next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.