“Vulnerability is the first thing I look for in you, but it’s the last thing I want you to see in me. In you, it’s courage. In me, it’s inadequacy. In you, it’s strength and lovability. In me, it’s shame.” –
Brené Brown
Like Brené Brown, vulnerability has never been easy for me. I went to a therapist once for the express purpose of developing vulnerability. It sucked. Connecting with my emotions was like a middle-school square dance, awkward circling and trying to make only minimal eye contact. During this time, my boyfriend got a job offer a couple of states away. At first, I stayed neutral, stuck to questions about logistics, and reflected his excitement as best as I could. After we were done hanging out, I went back to my car, and being by myself, I couldn’t hold the emotions anymore. Sadness at the thought of him moving states away, overwhelmed by the distance, the change, and the thought of one day joining him in this completely unfamiliar place to me, was terrifying. I sat in the car for a while, and I felt so alone. It wasn’t that he hadn’t asked or cared what I was feeling and thinking; I hadn’t felt strong enough to share what I was feeling with him. I wasn’t sure if he could handle my pain.
After a good 15 minutes of hyping myself up into thinking this was what all my vulnerability practice had been preparing me for, I knocked on the door again, red-eyed, and said we had to talk more. I couldn’t look him in the eye, but I still poured out all my worries, my fears, and my sadness at what this change could mean. As long as I had been alone in my car, there wasn’t room for healing; the sadness didn’t have anywhere to go. Once I wasn’t alone with this sadness, it started to change. My fear lost its power once I stopped believing I had to deal with it all on my own.
When we talk about vulnerability in group therapy, it almost always comes up that not everyone is safe to be vulnerable with. This is important. Emotional vulnerability is not “trauma-dumping” on everyone around us. There’s an album by Sleeping at Last I love, with a song for each of the 9 Enneagram personality types. The song for type 8 describes the pain and beauty of vulnerability better than I can. Most of us have experiences, often as children when we didn’t have a choice, where life circumstances or other people made us vulnerable. Most of us put a lot of energy into making sure we never feel like that again. We protect ourselves by numbing our emotions or creating false certainty. Cutting ourselves off from emotional connection by always having to be strong is a false sense of protection. It is a guarantee of a different kind of pain.
When I went to therapy to work on vulnerability, I understood all of the reasons vulnerability was a positive thing; I wanted to be “wholehearted” and connected to life and the people around me. What I didn’t understand was what was keeping me from putting it into practice. In Brené Brown’s second TED talk, she shared about her “vulnerability hangover” after the success of her first TED talk; she freaked out about telling so many people that she had had a breakdown, and after that talk, she didn’t leave her house for 3 days. It comforts me that vulnerability is so hard that even post “spiritual awakening,” Brené Brown had second thoughts. What makes vulnerability hard is our shame. Shame tries to protect us from being known because it believes we are bad. The key to transforming our relationship with vulnerability is getting curious about our shame and shining the light on it. What reinforces the part of you that believes you are not enough? What keeps you holding onto it? Not only are our behaviors capable of change, but so are our beliefs.
I ended up meeting some of my best friends in that new state and found a community of like-minded people I couldn’t have imagined a year earlier when all I could see was the unknown. Starting to be more vulnerable feels a lot like stepping into the unknown. We don’t know how others will react, and we probably hold strong beliefs that they will react negatively, which keeps us from opening up. Vulnerability is hard. It’s also life-changing. What would change if you believed you are enough? What opportunities could open up if you let yourself be seen?
What has been your go-to method for reducing feelings of vulnerability?
Who is someone you want to be seen by, and what is one act of vulnerability you could take? Will you do it?
Stay curious,
Laura Danese
P.S. You are Enough
Photo Credits: Untitled (Cracked Watermelon), Charles Ethan Porter American, ca. 1890
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