208. Bringing the Body Back to the Whole Self with María-Victoria Albina
Reclaiming Ourselves
Have you ever felt like you betrayed yourself?
We live in a culture that teaches us to forsake our own wants in favor of serving others. But moving from a place of obligation breeds resentment and disconnection from the self. We operate from a place of “I’m fine,” and get stuck in functional freeze, even when from the outside it appears we’re successful.
In order to reclaim our relationship with ourselves, we have to change the narrative of what we deserve and the standards we’re allowed to have. And we have to bring our bodies and minds together to support change without overwhelming our nervous systems.
María-Victoria Albina joins Erica for a discussion about resentment and obligation, setting and holding standards, and tending to your nervous system as you pursue embodiment and change.
Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:
Changing the narrative on obligation
Why setting standards and boundaries is a part of a self-reclamation
How our nervous systems get stuck in functional freeze
Why pushing too hard for ourselves to change can backfire
Reconnect to Reclaim Joy
María-Victoria Albina (she/her/ella) 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.
What Are You Available For?
On the Pause on the Play® podcast, Erica Courdae (she/her) and María-Victoria Albina open by discussing operating from a sense of obligation versus allowing themselves to say no.
Erica says “I’m not gonna put myself in that situation to feel a way about having to do the thing…I’m just not gonna do it. And whatever discomfort I think I’m gonna feel by not offering this magical thing that I feel obligated to offer, I have to really pause and question, why am I doing that?”
María-Victoria says that for the last couple of years she has been saying “I am no longer available for substances to dysregulate my nervous system, I’m no longer available to say yes when I mean no. I’m no longer available to fake friendships…I’m no longer available to chase people.”
She says that when she first moved to the Hudson Valley, making friends in her new community was challenging and she had to coach herself to stop chasing people to make plans.
And that connects with making offerings professionally by giving wholeheartedly and not from a place of obligations.
It’s “making the choice to not live in resentment,” María-Victoria says, as opposed to the sense of obligation and resentment that she was habituated to even in childhood.
She recalls a time when she had won a raffle at a birthday party and her sister insisted on her sharing the prize, and even though she didn’t want to even split it, María-Victoria gave her sister the whole thing.
“I felt like I wasn’t worthy of having good things. I felt like it was my job to take care of others and put their needs ahead of my own…I had this whole emotional outsourcing, codependent script in my brain…and that was [at] like eight or ten [years old].”
Narratives and Standards
Erica says that for her as a Black woman, “there are a lot of narratives that I am continuously tossing out and overturning of what I can have, what I should have, what I should want, what I’m allowed to keep, what I must share, what I must give away…”
She recalls a recent news story about a Black woman being vocal about what she wouldn’t accept in a romantic partner and the pushback she got about that, but also “part of the conversation that I heard around it, that I actually really appreciated, was that, why are we giving her flak for her sharing what her standards or wants or desires are for herself?”
If that person hadn’t been a Black woman, Erica says it’s unlikely there would have been the same kind of pushback about having high standards. “We don’t question some women in other cultures about what their standard is.”
She continues, “I think whenever that conversation comes up around worthiness or what I can have, or what I have to give away part of it, what's been connecting in my head recently has been this piece of like, but how much of this is simply the thing and how much is our need for somebody else to validate that it makes sense and it's okay to them.”
María-Victoria adds that “these oppressive forces make those of us living in bodies marginalized by those forces believe that our volition, our agency, our desires, our wants: not good enough…On any level, whether it’s who you wanna date, what career you wanna have, whether you can keep your own candy bar…And that instead…the imperative is to live from obligation, to live from the roles that are created for us and imposed upon us instead of really being actors and agents in our own lives, which is what lets those systems continue to perpetuate themselves.”
She says that’s why she teaches people in her Anchored program to create “energetic and emotional safety within ourselves.”
She clarifies that that is not the same as physical safety in the physical world, but it is about emotional safety and self-intimacy.
“It’s really about creating that safe container within ourselves, for ourselves, from which we can say, ‘I am no longer available to disappoint me.’”
Maintaining Standards as a Reclamation of Self
Erica points out that maintaining boundaries and standards is not just part of romantic relationships, but it is a part of how we operate in our familial, social, and workplace relationships as well, and sometimes those areas are harder to hold our standards.
“If we think about familial relationships, there is the pressure of, oh, well, it’s your fill-in-the-blank.”
María-Victoria says that attitude is bullshit and “just because someone’s your blood doesn’t mean shit if they’re not treating you right.”
Erica agrees and says that she’s made choices not to maintain relationships with certain family members in her life, and the response she often gets from people is “Aren’t you so sad? And it’s like, no.”
She says people tend to respond similarly when they hear someone is getting divorced and she’s witnessed it on multiple occasions in her life. “It always automatically goes as if there was a loss or a death, and this person was like, no, I actually had a rebirth happen.”
María-Victoria says of her own divorce, “it was like the greatest moment of self-liberation and self-reclamation.”
Erica adds that when people share information about their relationships, it’s key to pay attention to how they’re communicating it and sharing about it before responding.
Functional Freeze
María-Victoria says that the nervous system is wired to listen for tone when connecting with others.
“It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it…meaning, our autonomic nervous system, which is controlled by the vagus nerve, which controls our mood, our energy, how we take in cures of safety and danger and how we react or respond to cues of safety and danger; that nervous system is listening to words, but it’s really listening for tone.”
Erica brings up an example from the book Bittersweet, by Susan Cain of a conference attendee who shared about a loss in their life, but their affect and tone was like “you could have been talking about the weather.”
She asks María-Victoria, “where does tone betray the truth for us?”
María-Victoria says this is likely an example of functional freeze, which is a nervous system state where we’re “bouncing, often quite quickly, from sympathetic to dorsal…from fight or flight to freeze and collapse…and we’re sort of experiencing life in this in-between state. And it’s called functional freeze cuz we’re functional, we’re out in the world, we’re doing things.”
She says she experienced this state of being perceived as highly functional, getting degrees, getting married, buying a house, starting a business, but being frozen to her own emotions.
“I was ‘fine’ for like thirty years. I was just fine…I’m actually dying inside, but I’m fine…It’s this combination of feeling this pull of dying inside, but also fine…It feels like you’re feeling both at the same time. And it’s that functional freeze of the nervous system trying to protect you. So you’re never really in ventral-vagal, which is the safe and social part of the nervous system.”
She says this is a super common occurrence in AFAB people she works with who are otherwise considered successful, but are still unfulfilled and unhappy.
“They know that they could be feeling more, feeling better, could be just more present, more alive, more intentional, more attuned, just more in their bodies, in their lives. And the…way to there lies, yes, through mindset, but mostly through the nervous system, through the body, through somatics, body-based modalities that return us to a deep presence with the wholeness of the self.”
Erica shares that somatics was initially scary for her because of a feeling that her body had betrayed her in the past.
María-Victoria says that you have to start with the story that your body betrayed you. “Because it didn’t…It’s impossible for our bodies to betray us because our bodies are inherently, by definition, animal machines. Little animal machines that are moving always towards the goal of our greatest good, as understood by our bodies. That may be different than what our conscious minds want, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong or bad.
Erica agrees and says that getting all of the parts of the self on the same page can be a challenge, but “the betrayal is to think that any of them were part of a betrayal.”
She continues, “There are definitely gonna be times where your thoughts or your feelings might catch something before another part of your body has integrated or processed it, but know that everybody can play in the pool together.”
Kitten Steps
María-Victoria says that for her the gift of somatic practice is that she has learned to give herself a little more space to pause and reclaim her agency.
Erica acknowledges that pausing is a privilege that isn’t afforded to everyone, and that for some people who are steeped in hustle culture it’s very difficult to process slowing down.
María-Victoria says that this can be where even baby steps are too big when trying to make changes in your life. She suggests thinking in terms of kitten steps instead.
“Kitten steps are very, very, very tiny. And we start there because one of the worst things we can do to ourselves is to try to push ourselves to make huge change, to take massive leaps. And then we send ourselves right into sympathetic activation–fight or flight–flood our bodies with adrenaline, eventually cortisol, and what does that tell us about us? Oh, she’s not safe.”
Kitten steps would be something like committing to walk in your apartment for the length of one song instead of making a New Year’s resolution to go to the gym everyday.
“That’s it. And allowing yourself to trust that you’re not only going to keep walking the whole two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, but you’re not gonna keep walking past that without a check-in with yourself.”
She says that we break trust with ourselves by pushing past our boundaries and limits. “And so we start with these teeny, tiny kitten steps. We start with making small, daily-capable promises to ourselves…in the framework of a minimum daily baseline and we just slowly build up from there.”
A minimum daily baseline is the tiny promise to yourself of something that you’re going to do every single day. María-Victoria suggests starting with something you’re going to do anyway, like drinking a glass of water.
“What you do is you create the mental script, the mindset shift. So we’re working our neuroplasticity, our brains’ capacity to change and shift and believe new things.”
When you keep those tiny promises to yourself, “your mind and your body begin to believe that you are someone who does what they say. You are someone trustworthy in mind and body.”
And if you do skip a day, it’s done from a place of intention and choice, it’s not a betrayal of the self.
“It’s not the doing of the thing, it’s the intentionality, it’s the choicefulness.”
Run a Consent Check
One kitten step that María-Victoria recommends is running a consent check with yourself.
“We talk a lot about consent with other people and how we’re talking to others, how we’re controlling them…like outward consent. And culturally we talk about outward consent, but inward consent. Are you actually consenting to the way your brain is talking to you right now…Would you consent to someone else talking to you that way? Absolutely not. So why are you consenting to you talking to you that way?”
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