Do you tend to be codependent in your relationships, a perfectionist at work, or a people-pleaser amongst your friends? Have you noticed how these patterns affect your health and your wellbeing? In today’s episode, we’ll talk about this and give you some tools and somatic practices to start addressing this.

For today’s episode, I sat down with Victoria Albina. Victoria is a Certified Life Coach, UCSF-trained Family Nurse Practitioner, and Breathwork Meditation Guide with a passion for helping women realize that they are their own best healers, so they can break free from codependency, perfectionism, and people-pleasing and reclaim their joy. She is also the host of the Feminist Wellness Podcast and holds a Masters’s degree in Public Health from Boston University School of Public Health. 

Listen to the full episode here:

MY 5 BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE

1- In codependant thinking, we don’t know how to source safety internally, we are always looking to someone else to tell us we are worthy of love and we loose our own compass of control. Because of that, we seek to control everything and everyone around us, because we think it will make us feel safe. We also adopt this black and white, all or nothing way of thinking.

2- To be regulated in our nervous system, means we have the capacity to recognixed when we are away from ventral-vagal (safe, social and connected) in either direction and bring ourselves back into ventral-vagal. To be disrugaleted is when we go into sympathetic response (fight or flight) or dorsal-vagal (shut down) and stay there longer than useful.

3- To start to shift out states of codependency, people-pleasing and perfectionism, we need awareness. Start observing sensations like thingliy, numb, hot, cold, tense, relax…, emotions words and the narratives that led to it the emotion-sensation.

4- Orientation practices (external mindfulness), grounding practice, glimmers (opposite of triggers) can help you get back to ventral-vagal creating a safe container for yourself to look at yourself and your patterns with curiosity and compassion.

5- Remember that anxiety, panic (sympathetic energy) is struck movement that often comes with the thought “I don’t matter”. This energy wants warm, pressure, skin inteactions, smells like lavender, orientation to time and space, walking, pressing into wall, shaking, dancing. In freeze mode (dorsal-vagal), we disassociate from time and space, we loose track of who we are, we check out. That energy often comes from thoughts like “I have no choice”. It wants slow, cold, orientation to time and space, walk or moving with a little more intensity, and laughter.

EPISODE ANNOUNCEMENTS:

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QUESTIONS SHE ANSWERED IN THIS EPISODE

• I know you use healing modalities and somatic therapy like yoga, ecstatic dance, and breathwork. Why did you get interested in these modalities?
• How can being codependent, perfectionist and people-pleaser affect our health?
• What are some of the somatic manifestations people can experience?
• How can we do expressive journaling if it’s a practice that usually brings us deeper into focusing on the negative?
• How do we start shifting out of codependency, perfectionism and people-pleasing?
• What’s the importance of connecting to our intuition, and learning to trust it in all this?

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Victoria Albina (she/her) is a Certified Life Coach, UCSF-trained Family Nurse Practitioner, and Breathwork Meditation Guide with a passion for helping women realize that they are their own best healers, 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’s 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.

• Her Website (download her meditaiton and grounding practice for free)
• Instagram: @victoriaalbinawellness
• Podcast: Feminist Wellness
• Facebook
• LinkedIn

Reference

Stephen Porges PHD and Deb Dena : Polyvagal Theory