198. Embodiment, Agency, and Choicefulness with María-Victoria Albina
Healing from Labels
Labels like co-dependent, perfectionist, and people-pleaser get used constantly. We’re told we shouldn’t be those things.
But for many of us, those labels stem from survival skills we learned in our early lives. And by using hard and fast labels, we can actually undermine our healing from those patterns of thoughts and behaviors.
María-Victoria Albina joins Erica for a discussion of survival skills, authenticity, embodiment, agency, and choicefulness within the systems of white supremacist patriarchy, colonization, and capitalism.
Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:
How labels like codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleaser undermine healing
Why problematizing the survival skills many of us learned as children is problematic in itself
How white wellness’s emphasis on authenticity diminishes the multi-faceted nature of being human
How our nervous systems impact embodiment, agency, and choicefulness
You Are Your Own Best Healer
María-Victoria Albina (she/her) is a Master Certified Somatic Life Coach, UCSF-trained Family Nurse Practitioner and Breathwork Meditation Guide with a passion for helping humans socialized as women realize that they are their own best healers by reconnecting with their bodies and minds, so they can break free from codependency, perfectionism, and people-pleasing and reclaim their joy.
She is the host of the Feminist Wellness Podcast, holds a Masters degree in Public Health from Boston University School of Public Health and a BA in Latin American Studies from Oberlin College. Victoria has been working in health & wellness for over 20 years and lives on occupied Munsee Lenape territory in New York’s Hudson Valley.
Honoring Survival Skills
On the Pause on the Play® podcast, María-Victoria Albina (she/her) says that white supremacist, white settler colonial thinking, the patriarchy, and late-stage capitalism all work together to “make us believe that our lives are not ours to live.”
However, she says, “When we are embodied, we are living our dignity. And when we are humans living in our dignity, we cannot be controlled externally.”
Which is why in her practice, she supports people in overcoming codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing habits so that they can reclaim their lives, and set and honor boundaries.
Erica (she/her) says that boundaries is a term she witnesses coming up over and over and again and asks María-Victoria to elaborate on how boundaries show up in the work she does.
María-Victoria first explains that she does not refer to people as codependent or use labeling language that implies there is something wrong with the person, but rather that these habits formed in response to circumstances as survival skills.
“My inner children learned to have codependent behavior as a survival skill and they were fucking brilliant to do that…I don’t talk about codependent people. I think that’s some bullshit. I talk about survival skills, survival thinking, survival behavior led by our wise and brilliant nervous systems and bodies.”
Instead she refers to emotional outsourcing, which is a constellation of experiences that lead to codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing habits, “which are the habits in which we chronically and habitually look outside of ourselves to everyone and everything in our world as a place to source our safety, our worth, and our validation.”
Those patterns of behaviors begin in childhood, if parents and caregivers are emotional outsourcers or emotionally immature, if there is real or perceived scarcity, or other challenges.
She says “one of the ways that we can learn to survive childhood is by outsourcing our value,” because children inherently understand that they require assistance and support from the adults around them.
“We are dependent. We can’t get food when we’re six. We can’t get water. We need adults. We need bigger mammals.”
When those adults don’t show up for us emotionally, physically, or energetically, children can internalize the message that there’s something wrong with them, and if their nervous system reacts by saying, “this home, this place, this person is not safe. If they are not safe, it must be my fault because I cannot blame them because I need them.”
Coming Back to Your Body is Your Birthright
Erica says that for her, coming from a childhood where she lacked safety and developing those survival strategies, what she is grappling with as an adult in her interpersonal relationships is that she is liable to overthink things.
María-Victoria responds that thinking is part of our brain’s job, and that we need to honor that. “We can be real quick to problematize everything and…it’s one of the problems of white wellness culture, is the problematizing everything instead of shifting into acceptance.”
Erica says that for her, it’s less of a “brain, chill out,” issue and more of an “uh-oh, I have given myself an existential crisis.”
She continues, “I think as somebody that has consciously chosen to address the desire to deprogram, to work on something, to try to fix it, but to also have to acknowledge I am also trying to not perpetuate the same things and I want to do better. And, I have my own fuckery to navigate…I wanna meet you where you are. I don’t wanna overreact, I don’t wanna underreact, and I’m also trying to fix my own stuff.”
María-Victoria says she stands by her point that overthinking isn’t the problem. “When we treat our survival skills as problems, we turn them into problems. We continue to habituate ourselves to see ourselves as a problem versus ourselves as fucking brilliant and these skills as something to befriend.”
She says she has shifted her own internal dialogue from berating herself for overthinking, to accepting it and turning back to the body. “We’re gonna pause and come back to the breath. I’m gonna come back to center…It’s okay, brain, go do your thing. But I’m gonna be over here in my body. I’m gonna find my answers here. And that’s our birthright.”
She continues, “That is decolonizing our mindset, is to come back to the body…And throw Descartes the whole way the fuck under the bus and come back to the body…That is the place for all of us to find the next level of healing in our growth, individually and collectively.”
Erica says that doing this kind of healing work, while supporting others around us in their own healing, while being present, is a large task that doesn’t come with an instruction manual.
“It’s very challenging to figure out well, how do I do this, while also acknowledging I have been harmed, I have my own traits and actions that I am trying to do better with, I’m trying to help y’all past, present, and future and…you’re building the plane as you’re flying it for yourself and everyone on it.”
María-Victoria says that an important part of her and her partner’s practice of ancestral healing is to say a “living grace” when they eat and expressing gratitude toward Pachamama, the present moment, and all the hands that brought food to their table.
“One of the things we’ve been doing is pausing throughout the day to say living grace. The love I am pouring towards you and receiving from you is living grace. And living into that grace, into love, into receiving, giving, being, experiencing embodied love and safety, that is a healing for our ancestral line.”
Acknowledging the Systems at Play
Bringing the conversation back to the way that María-Victoria refuses to use survival skills as labels, Erica says she agrees with using the language of skills and habit to address codependence, perfectionism, and people-pleasing.
Using those terms as labels for a person, “you lock someone into being something that they were in one moment for the rest of their lives, and that in itself is limiting and is absolutely a part of white supremacist culture.”
But when we begin to work on healing, she says that “when we think about the fact that these actions put in place for survival are also actually undermining our survival because they degrade our bodies and our minds…How do you even deal with that?”
María-Victoria says that “you meet it with love. I believe it is incumbent upon us to meet these parts with the three Cs of my work: curiosity, compassion, and care. Because if we’re not meeting self that way, we are unwittingly perpetrating more violence against ourselves and violence against self begets violence in the world.”
Getting out of those cycles of violence is a conscious choice and a conscious act.
Erica says there are many words and phrases that get used in relation to healing, “you can’t be a perfectionist, you can’t be codependent, check your attachment styles,” but it doesn’t often get acknowledged that “these are all part of white supremacy,” and it’s important to recognize and acknowledge that as part of an individual healing journey.
She says that acknowledging white supremacy culture’s place in how we perceive those skills and habits, “does change how we’re processing codependency or perfectionism.”
María-Victoria says that in her practice, she uses the political framework of white supremacy, white settler colonialism, capitalism, the patriarchy, for viewing codependent thinking and experiences, and she brings in science that address the impacts of multi-generational shame, blame, and guilt that is part of codependent thinking.
“So long as we’re treating ourselves like shit because we have this way of thinking, we will cower before others. We will put their wants and needs ahead of us. Because we’ll say, I’m inherently defective…there’s something wrong with my character, I am beneath others, I am unworthy, so I need them to validate me…so it’s the perpetual cycle.”
Breaking that cycle requires recognizing the systems at play, as well as recognizing the role of your nervous system.
“That first reaction, that’s not you. That’s a six-year-old, that’s a four-year-old, that’s a newborn having a nervous system. Don’t make it about you and say you’re wrong and bad.”
Embodiment is key because, “as long as we are unbodied, as long as we are not present in our physical form, we are so easy to shame, we are so easy to manipulate. And that’s what this work is, it’s that reclamation of self, mind, body, and spirit. And from there we can make different decisions.”
She acknowledges that varying levels of privilege will of course influence what choices are available, but “what it all comes down to is choicefulness and agency and stepping into an embodied sense of that. That then allows us wisely code shift, to wisely show up the way we choose to, not from default.”
Code Shifting and Authenticity
Erica says that code shifting often gets maligned as acting differently in different spaces, “but I think it leaves behind the nuance of the fact of we are not the same at all times. We are not that unilateral. And so to dwindle us down to needing to be one particular way at all times does us all a disservice.”
María-Victoria says it’s silly because we all code shift. She doesn’t talk to her father the same way she talks to her dog. She says this is also reflective of another issue in the way that white wellness culture upholds the “authentic self as though it was one stagnant, solid thing that…doesn’t ever change.”
She says that conception of authenticity does us a disservice, because we are multifaceted.
But code shifting can be a problem “when we are shifting in order to attempt to create an emotion within someone else toward emotional safety we could create for ourselves.”
This isn’t the kind of code shifting where literal safety is at stake, like when people from BIPOC communities interact with institutions or with the police.
What’s problematic is code shifting because “we’re scared to be ourselves because we don’t fully believe that we are worthy of love or valid as who and what we are from our codependent thinking, from our emotional outsourcing, from those survival skills from our childhood.”
She continues, “That’s when we’re not being authentic versus being one other aspect of our authenticity.”
Erica agrees and says it’s important that “authenticity” doesn’t get whittled down because it isn’t accurate and doesn’t acknowledge that their is literal safety on the line, “but then there’s also the fact of like, if the system is rigged, why am I looked at sideways because I’m playing the game?”
María-Victoria says in that case, it’s important to ask yourself whose gaze you’re reacting to and do you want to care about what they think.
Embodiment and Agency
Erica says that agency is another word that has been co-opted by white western wellness and gets overused without context.
María-Victoria says that agency is “each human’s ability to make their own decisions and live their own free lives.”
She continues that agency is “a conceptually beautiful thing, and through embodiment, we can step into ever greater internal agency and choicefulness.”
It’s important to remember that agency is limited and mitigated by the systems we live in and alongside–finances, culture, socialization, geopolitics, laws, health, immigration status, etc.–and choicefulness “is what we hold within our hearts and is embodied within us, within our form.”
Erica asks if our survival actions have actually limited our access to agency, or just our perception of it.
María-Victoria gives a dive into the physiology of the window of tolerance and how our nervous systems respond to safety and danger, real or perceived.
When we feel safe, our biological systems work optimally in what’s called a ventral-vagal state, but when we perceive danger, we go into sympathetic activation–the classic fight or flight of adrenaline, cortisol, worry, and stress–or dorsal shutdown, where we freeze, disconnect, and may even disassociate.
Each individual has a window of tolerance in their nervous system for “how much bullshit we can tolerate and our nervous system can rebound, adjust, and adapt.” In her own practice, María-Victoria prefers to refer to it as the window of capacity or window of bodily dignity.
She says, “when we are embodied, when we are present in our bodies and we have malleability, flexibility within our nervous system, when we are able to regulate ourselves, when we have the skills and tools to regulate our nervous system to come back, to experience sympathetic fight or flight, dorsal shutdown, and come back to ventral-vagal on our own terms, in our own way, from our own agency, our own choicefulness, we are able to make different decisions within our own selves.”
She continues, “embodiment allows for agency. Embodiment allows for dignity. From our dignity, we have choicefulness.”
Practice Ebodiment
María-Victoria says that to practice embodiment, “pause, return to the breath, and mark [the] sensation in your body. Feel into it in every way. Feel into the color, the taste, the temperature, the texture, the weight of that energetic. Whatever it is that resonated, echolocate it in your body, and mark it, be present with it, befriend it.”
She says that “the work of being alive isn’t in the neocortex…but in the body so that the nervous system may grow, may shift, may widen that window of bodily dignity from our choicefulness, to come into embodied presence within our physiology.”
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