Emotional Outsourcing™ is the term I coined to describe the codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing thought habits that train you to hand your worth and emotional steadiness to everyone but yourself. It’s not who you are. It’s a set of survival codes your nervous system once relied on when keeping others happy felt like the only way to stay safe.

The nervous system doesn’t just “remember” these skills in your mind - it encodes them deep in procedural memory, the kind of memory that runs automatically, outside conscious thought. Just like you don’t have to think about how to ride a bike once you’ve learned, you don’t have to think about saying yes when your body believes no is dangerous. The pattern fires before your thinking brain has time to intervene.

👉 In my book, I teach you how to interrupt those automatic codes and rewire them so your nervous system learns that safety doesn’t require self-erasure. Preorder End Emotional Outsourcing™ here.

Because “codependent” never captured the full picture. It labels people, freezes them in an identity, and leaves out the nervous system entirely. Emotional Outsourcing™ names the process - the outsourcing of your emotional safety - without reducing you to a “type” of person.

I also don’t use the term “codependent” because it comes from the 12-step disease model, which pathologizes love and care and has often been weaponized - especially against women - as shorthand for “needy” or “too much.” That framing turns survival strategies into a character defect instead of what they actually are: brilliant, protective adaptations your nervous system developed to keep you safe and connected.

And it’s important to note the history here: “codependency” emerged during the height of the War on Drugs, framed through an individual-illness lens. The focus was on “fixing” the so-called pathology in the person - usually women - who attached to or cared for someone struggling with addiction. What that model missed entirely was the broader sociopolitical context. It didn’t account for how patriarchy, white-settler colonialism, and capitalism train so many of us to source our worth through caretaking, compliance, and self-erasure. It ignored the reality that what gets called “codependency” is often a natural, understandable response to growing up in environments where love, safety, or belonging were contingent on tending to others first.

Emotional Outsourcing™ shifts the focus from pathology to process, from individual defect to collective conditioning. It highlights the biology - how procedural memory and automatic reactions override affirmations and mindset work every time - and it brings in the sociopolitical truth: these patterns don’t arise in a vacuum. They’re trained into us by family systems and reinforced by culture. I coined Emotional Outsourcing™ to take the shame out, bring compassion and love in, and name these habits as both survival strategies and products of the world we live in - strategies that can be rewired once we see them for what they are.

👉 This book shows you how to actually retrain those reflexes instead of fighting them. Order your copy here.