Ep #374: Self-Resourcing: The Path to True Interdependence (Part 2)

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. Listen, this is part two of a two-parter about this concept of self-resourcing. So if you haven't listened to last week, I'd go do that first. This week can stand alone, but I'm, we're building. We're building. So listen to part one, come on back. I'm not going anywhere. Where am I going? All right.

Okay, so about last week. It was a good time, huh? We started to explore the question, the oft-heard question, does learning to resource yourself, so to stop outsourcing, does that effectively mean you like stop needing people? The worry is this: does this work make you more isolated? Will you end up living alone in a cave on a mountainside with nary a cat to keep you company, for thou art so self-sufficient?

Last week we built the foundation of what self-resourcing actually is, and it's not the alone without cats. Today, we answer that question. Okay, so the short answer is no. Longer answer is this whole episode.

So let me tell you about someone, a composite, we'll call her Simone. She came to this work because her relationships kept falling apart in similar ways. She'd meet someone, a romantic partner, a brand new, very close friend, a colleague she really admired, and she'd feel like this rush of relief. Finally. Finally, someone who gets me. Finally, someone who makes me feel okay.

She'd pour herself in, generous, attentive, tuned in. She'd notice what the other person needed before they asked, cancel her own plans, quietly sand down her own preferences until they fit in perfectly with the new person. She was, by all accounts, an incredibly devoted person to be close to. And then, eventually, always, something would shift. The other person would do something that felt like withdrawal, like cancel plans or seem distracted or be less warm than usual. And Simone would feel it like a physical, like a drop, like the floor had given way. Like it was visceral, a gut-level ugh.

And so, as one might expect, the anxiety that followed that like bottom falling out of this story she had about this person and the friendship and their future and all the, the rest of it, not just the friendship, the romantic partner, just the, the anxiety was enormous, consuming, and with love, I will say disproportionate.

She'd spend days analyzing and over-analyzing and over-analyzing herself trying to figure out what she did wrong. And from there, how to fix it, how to get back to the feeling of okayness that she'd had just moments before. By the time she found this work, Simone had decided her problem was that she cared too much, that she needed, essentially, to need people less. Understandable conclusion, wrong direction entirely, says I, because the problem, it was never the caring. It was that she'd outsourced the entire architecture of her inner safety to other people. Their emotional states, their approval, their constancy. All those things were doing a job that nothing inside her had yet been built to do.

That is emotional outsourcing, the habitual pattern of sourcing safety, belonging, and worth from outside yourself instead of from within. A brilliant nervous system adaptation that doesn't serve us later in life. What Simone's system learned to do probably very early, probably for very good reason, was making life way more ouchy than it needed to be now. So the work for Simone was not to detach or disconnect, not to push them away, but rather to build something inside herself. Some internal ground, some capacity to truly feel and experience her own okayness even when the external signals were uncertain. So she didn't need other people to carry all of it.

When she started to build that ground, she became more present with the people she loved. Because she was no longer relating to them primarily through the terrified background hum of, am I still okay? Prove it to me.

So, back to the question. Does self-resourcing, learning to have your own back, does it make you need people less, pull away, end up alone on that mount? There's more than one thing tangled up in that fear, and they're worth pulling apart one at a time.

First, is a conflation between needing and depending. So we've collapsed these in our culture and it has genuinely cost us. So needing feels like weakness, like something to fix, because we've been told not to need people if we are to heal. So when people hear, learn to resource yourself, have your own back, they hear, learn to stop needing, which sounds like, to me and I'd say to our guts, learn to stop being human, which is understandably alarming to a biological system built on needing one another, perfect pack animals that we are.

Self-resourcing is about building enough internal capacity that your needs can exist without being so urgent, so totalizing, so frightening when they're not immediately met by others. That's the goal. Here's an analogy: two people, both thirsty. One hasn't had anything to drink in three days. The other had a full glass an hour ago. Both of them need water, but the quality of that need is completely different. The first person's need is urgent, consuming, dysregulating. The second person's need is present, but not acute. They can wait. They can ask without it feeling like a crisis. Let me get a glass of water. And so they can hear, not right now, without the bottom dropping out.

You feel the difference there? Right. So self-resourcing, having your own back, is simply building your internal water supply. Not so you never need the external source, but so your need for it isn't always running on fumes. Camelid goals if I ever heard one.

The second layer is the self-sufficiency myth, and this one has very deep cultural roots, especially here in the USA, in the US. We live in a society that treats needing others as a developmental failure rather than a biological fact, that celebrates the person who has figured it out alone, who has transcended the messiness of genuine interdependence as if maturity means needing no one, as if arriving means being an island. This is the ye old, pull yourself up by your bootstraps garbage, as if anyone ever did absolutely anything 100% on their own. It's impossible.

In wellness culture, this myth speaks fluent spiritual-ese. Become so full up with yourself that you overflow into others. Your vibe attracts your tribe. Also, ew, non-natives or First Nations folks saying tribe. Stop looking for someone to complete you. Like each of these contains a grain of something real, except for ever saying tribe, and each of them can curdle in the wrong hands into a kind of like emotional isolationism that leaves people lonelier than when they started while they're lighting their candles and calling it growth.

My work is explicitly committed to interdependence, the understanding that we are wired for connection, that our nervous systems are social organs, that we genuinely need each other. The goal is to relate to that need with more agency, more choicefulness, more capacity.

And here's the thing about emotional outsourcing that tends to get missed. It doesn't create the closeness we crave, it quietly dismantles it. Because when your sense of okayness depends entirely on another person's behavior, you are never actually with that person. Whether you realize it or not, and I want to say we don't realize it, right? It's unwitting. We aren't conscious of it. But baby, you're monitoring them. You're constantly running a check. Right? You're running never-ending background calculations about whether they're happy enough, warm enough, present enough. You're relating to them as a regulator to be managed rather than a human being to be known and present with.

So real intimacy, the kind where you can be fully seen, stay present through the difficulty, weather the moments of distance that are just part of being two different animals, requires somewhere inside yourself to land.

About five months into this work together, Simone had a moment with her partner that she described to me afterwards as the most intimate she'd ever had in a relationship. They were in a disagreement, nothing enormous, but real enough. And she felt the familiar pull. Shrink, appease, make the discomfort stop, chest tight, the urgency there. But this time she did something different. She oriented. She felt her feet on the floor. She took a breath. She let herself notice, I'm activated. I'm scared he's going to pull away. And I'm okay right now. I'm okay right now. I can stay in this.

And she stayed. She said what was true for her, not like perfectly, not without trembling a little, but she said it. And he heard her and something opened between them. Afterwards, she said, "I've never let someone actually meet me in a disagreement before. I've always either gone away or made the whole thing stop. I didn't know it could feel like that." And that's presence, the capacity to stay, to be known, to actually let someone reach you. That's what we're building.

The third layer, and I think the most surprising one, is about what we've learned to think love is supposed to feel like. So many of us learned love as urgency, as the feeling of someone being the answer to something that hurts, as that rush of relief, finally, when someone's warmth reaches us. And because that feeling is so powerful, so physically distinct, we come to mistake it for love itself. A lot of what we're feeling in those moments isn't love. It's the temporary relief of emotional outsourcing being satisfied, like that nervous system exhale because the external regulator has arrived.

When we start to build self-resourcing, to have our own backs in a real way, that particular feeling changes. The urgency settles like the snow in a snow globe. The relief rush, it's less intense. And for some people, that shift is genuinely alarming, like something is going wrong rather than going right. The thought that surfaces sounds like, "I'm losing my ability to feel. I'm becoming less capable of love."

What's actually happening is a different kind of love becoming available, a love that doesn't require the other person to be a certain way in order for you to be okay. A love that can stay curious when it might otherwise panic, that can be disappointed without being devastated, that can give freely because it isn't secretly a transaction, to give to the people we love. That love is quieter than the urgency we mistook for love. It is also much, much deeper.

There's a quality I keep coming back to when I try to name what we're actually building here, and the best way I can describe it is being anchored in yourself, which like, sure, yeah, is literally what my program is called, and no, that's not a coincidence. Being anchored in yourself, yourself, your capital S self, is the capacity to be fully yourself in the room, to know what's true for you, to stay in contact with your own experience, to not quietly dissolve or evaporate into someone else's reality, while also being in genuine relationship with another person. A different thing entirely from walls, from detachment, from the performance of not caring.

Being anchored in yourself and being intimate with someone, they aren't opposites. They're actually conditions for each other. You cannot be genuinely known if you've dissolved yourself into someone else. You cannot be genuinely close to someone who you're constantly monitoring and managing. To be in real relationship, my beauty, my darling, my perfect Tenderoni, you have to be present as yourself. And that requires somewhere inside yourself to stand.

Self-resourcing builds that ground. Being anchored in yourself is what you have when you've built enough of it. And interdependence, healthy, chosen, mutual interdependence is what becomes available when two people who are anchored in themselves choose each other freely from that place. Rooted enough, grounded enough, anchored enough to really let people in. That's interdependence. That's the destination.

So when you hear learn to resource yourself and your nervous system files that under learn to be alone, push them away, catch the filing error in progress. Because what self-resourcing and having your own back is actually saying is build enough inner ground so that your love is no longer a form of hunger, so that you can be close to people without disappearing into them, so you can care without collapsing. So that when someone you love is struggling, you can actually be with them, present, warm, attuned instead of quietly managing your own terror about what their struggle means for you. So that when someone hurts you, you can stay in your own experience long enough to figure out what you actually need and can then ask for it instead of either going sideways or going silent. So that you can be loved, really loved, seen and met and held without the undertow of unworthiness pulling you away from it. That's what we're building, the most relational work there is.

So something to sit with, not a practice, more of a question to carry around this week. Think of one relationship where you want more closeness, realness, more of that feeling of actually being known, and ask yourself, what's the kitten step? How can I be 1% more real, more present, more here in that relationship? Can I stay in my own experience while also being in contact with theirs? Or is some part of me always monitoring, adjusting, and managing the temperature? And you don't need to do anything with what comes up. We're starting with noticing. The path towards the intimacy you want with friends, with family, with lovers, it runs through you, through your own body, through your capacity to stay. So that's the work.

Thank you for being here for both of these episodes. Thank you for enjoying Feminist Wellness. If something landed, share it. Send it to someone who's in the middle of this exact confusion. Write a review. Come find me on Instagram. My beauty. If you feel called to do this work, I have a number of fantastic courses available at BeatrizAlbina.com/courses, which I hope will tide you over until our next gathering of Anchored.

Thanks for being here, my love. 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. I'll talk to you soon. Ciao, ciao.