Ep #369: Reclaim Your Political Energy: End Emotional Outsourcing to Live Your Values (Part 3)

This is Feminist Wellness, and I’m your host, Nurse Practitioner, somatics and nervous system nerd, and life coach Béa Victoria Albina. I’ll show you how to get unstuck, drop the anxiety, perfectionism, and codependency so you can live from your beautiful heart. Welcome, my love, let’s get started.

Hello, hello my love. I hope this finds you doing so well. So my darling, for the last few weeks we've been talking about this political moment and some of the ways, due to our emotional outsourcing habits, we show up or don't. Episode one was about the freeze. Your whole self saying, this matters, and your nervous system going, absolutely not. We are checked out. We are playing dead now. Deer in the headlights, goodnight, goodbye, see you never.

Episode two is for my fire brands, so enraged at what's happening that you're burning down every room you walk into and then wondering why there's nobody left to play with or build with. And I know some of you listened to both of those and had a very specific, very tired thought, which was, oh, do I wish those were my problems.

You, my love, let's see if this resonates. You're not frozen in a moment. You're not burning hot. You're just, I mean, you're empty, running on fumes. As we say in Spanish, no doy más. I give no more. You've been managing your partner's feelings and your kids' needs and your mother's anxiety and your coworker's fragility for so long that by the time you get to the end of the day, there's genuinely nothing left in the tank.

And somewhere, underneath all of that, the world is falling apart, as it were. And you care. Oh God, you care. It like lives in your chest as an ache, but you can't figure out how to add one more thing to the pile of things that you feel you're already failing to hold. So you watch. You sign the occasional petition. You feel guilty about not doing more. You tell yourself you'll get involved when things come down, when you're less exhausted, when you've handled the 17 personal crises currently on your plate this week. But things do not calm down. And you do not become less exhausted. And the guilt accumulates alongside everything else.

And that's what we're talking about today. And here's the thing for most of us living in this particular energy, or lack of energy, really. It's not that you're just like, you're not the regular, oh, I'm just not a political person, kind of not politically engaged or actively politically disengaged. I mean, you're listening to me, who talks about white settler colonialism, late-stage capitalism, the patriarchy. We talk about that every episode, often very directly. I'm naming it. And the show's called Feminist Wellness.

So for you, I'm going to wager to say it's not that you're not a political person. I can't even begin to imagine what that means, but for you, it's probably that you're depleted. And those are completely different things. And the story you're telling yourself that you don't show up because, like, God, what is wrong with me these days? I'm being so selfish. I feel like I don't care enough, but all I do is cry about what's going on. Maybe I've just gotten too comfortable. Maybe it's my - I don't know what's going on. And you're being so mean to you. And all of that's probably missing the mark. And it's putting you into that cycle of beating yourself up and shaming yourself that does nothing to help anyone on this planet, personally, politically, in no way at all.

Let's back it up and remember that emotional outsourcing, this is it. This is it operating at the systemic level. Right? That habit of chronically sourcing your safety, your belonging, your worth from outside yourself rather than from within it. For so many of us, it hasn't just messed up our relationships, our partnerships, our careers. It has organized our entire lives around other people's needs and emotions, their wants, their thoughts, their cares, their everything, that there is no time, no energy, no bandwidth left for the things that actually matter to you, including this.

My beauty, you didn't run out of gas by accident. You gave it away because that's what felt like survival. How brilliant of you. You've been so busy making sure everyone around you is okay that your own values, your own sense of what matters, your own participation in the world has been quietly sitting in the corner, waiting for you to have enough left over to get to it.

And here's the part I really want you to sit with. That exhaustion, that chronic self-abandonment, it is exactly what these same systems count on. A woman who has used up all of her bandwidth managing other people's emotional worlds, she's not available to organize. A depleted woman, she stays home. She scrolls, and she feels guilty, and she doesn't move. And so it's vital that you hear me say your depletion is not a personal failing. It is the entirely predictable result of a lifetime of being rewarded for putting yourself last.

And for so many of us, not just rewarded for putting yourself last, but told you're selfish, you're not a good mom, you're not a good daughter, you're not a good sister, you're not good. You are failing at motherhood, at womanhood, at daughterhood, at, you're failing if you take care of you. Well, some of us don't do that. Well, some of us just don't make the time for that. You know? Because we're doing our duties. So we got to remember that, right? We got to remember that we were trained up to behave in these ways.

So what do we do about it? Well, the answer is not to just, like, add political engagement to your already impossible list of obligations like willy-nilly. Because that'll just become one more place where you're falling short, one more source of guilt, of shame, of blame, of I failed. One more thing that you abandon because you were never resourced enough to sustain it in the first place. So it should never have gotten added to the cart.

And so the answer, and stay with me here, is that reclaiming your capacity to show up politically is the same project as the personal work you're already doing. Not adjacent to it, not after it, the same work, concurrent work. Because the woman who stops over-explaining her no to her boss is building the exact same muscle as the woman who makes the call to her senator, and you can do both. The woman who stops abandoning herself in her marriage is practicing the exact same thing as the woman who shows up to the city council meeting, even though her mother-in-law is going to have a lot of feelings about it. There's going to be a lot to say at Sunday dinner.

My beauty, it's the exact same thing. It's choosing yourself, acting from your own center, treating your values as real and worth protecting. So we start there, with an honest look at where you're hemorrhaging energy that could be yours. Where are you saying yes when your body is screaming, oh my god, no? Where are you managing emotions that are simply not yours to manage? Where are you performing, "I'm totally fine"-ness that is actually costing you your honesty and your sense of self and your capacity to be part of the work you want to be a part of.

So we start with that, with that audit, with that understanding of like, where is my time, my energy, where is it going? And then once you start to have a handle of that, that's when you start pulling it back. One yes when I mean no at a time, one emotion you hand back to the person it actually belongs to. Like one more time, someone hands you a rope and says, let's play tug of war, and you say, nah, no thanks. One moment where you let someone be uncomfortable instead of sprinting to fix it.

And so what this is not is simply a vibe shift. This isn't simply a reframe, right? This is a concrete, uncomfortable, your nervous system will surely protest this practice of choosing yourself in the smallest, realest, tiniest, kitten-steppest daily moments. Because when you do that, even imperfectly, even just a little, something does shift. Some of that energy becomes yours again. Not all of it, not immediately, but enough. Enough that you start to feel things that aren't other people's things, enough to hear yourself, enough to feel maybe for the first time in a long time what actually matters to you, separate from what you're supposed to care about or what will make you look like a good person.

That's when you find your one thing. And watch out because emotional outsourcing will try to hijack even this. You're trying to figure out how to get involved and suddenly you'll be picking a cause based on what your friends are doing, on what's most socially acceptable in your circles or what you think will make you look good in other people's eyes. And that's just like activist people-pleasing, right? And we're not doing that. No, thank you.

So when you want to get actively involved and you don't know where to start, it's like everything else we do when we're stepping out of emotional outsourcing. We listen to our body. Which is easier said than done. Please, I teach literal classes about this. I get it. But here's the work, right? To learn to listen in and to ask where does something in me say, yeah, this one, this is mine. Right? Again, not the cause you think you should care about, the one that lives in your body.

And then you begin to take action for that cause, or against that cause. You know what I mean. You make the phone call, you sign the petition, you find your local organization. Slowly but surely, you kitten-step into being active, learning, reading the books, writing the letter. And maybe you actually just need to start with letting yourself feel the grief and the rage you've been keeping at arm's length. A lot of us, it would do us well to start there. Right?

Here's what I need you to hear. Noticing the depletion is step one. It is vital, and it's not the whole job. Noticing without then taking action, it's just a more sophisticated way of staying stuck. And your nervous system, and honestly, the world needs more from you than that. So you do the one small thing. Not because it'll fix everything, but because your nervous system needs evidence that you're someone who acts on what she values. And because that part of you has been sitting quietly in the corner waiting for you to have enough leftover to get to her, she's excited for you to begin to take action. Because my beauty, she's waited long enough.

Next week, we're talking about what happens once you're in it, how to stay engaged without burning out or shutting down, which is its own whole nervous system conversation. Make sure you're subscribed so you get the show automatically via, as always, the magic of the interwebs.

Drop me a line, podcast@beatrizalbina.com.Let me know, how is this series landing? Are you enjoying this? Is this supportive information? If there's a topic you'd like me to cover, I'd love to hear about it. And don't forget to send your questions in for the Tenderoni Hotline. We are about, we got about six months' worth of questions on the docket, but I'm on it. I'm on it. And if you want me to answer your personal questions in a private podcast that you will get the same week, if not the next week, join one of my courses now. I have several programs where we actually interact, and I'm excited for you to learn more about them at BeatrizAlbina.com/courses.

As always, thanks for listening. I'm so freaking glad that you're here. Let's do what we do. Gentle hand on your heart, should you feel so moved. And remember, you are safe. You are held. You are loved. And when one of us heals, we help heal the world. Be well, my beauty. Go call your senator, and I'll talk to you soon.