Vulnerability: Why it’s so important to share things that move you on a deep level
How we think about vulnerability is able to revolutionize the way we live and love, how we shape our relationships with people around us – with family, friends and romantic partners.
What we know is that connection – the ability to feel connected – is it’s why we’re here. We‘re naturally driven to feel connection, we seek connection with other people.
How is connection build up, how is it working and what is it between people when they say they feel connected to each other?
What turned out to be the counterpart of connection is shame. Shame is understood as the fear of disconnection: „Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won’t be worthy of connection?“
„I’m not good enough.“ We all know that feeling in different variations: „I’m not educated enough, not thin enough, not beautiful enough, not lovable enough.“ In this case, we feel terribly vulnerable. No one wants to talk about it. But the less you talk about it, the more you have it.
„Shame is universal. We all have it. The only people who don’t experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection.“ – Brene Brown
Emotion Reflection and Emotion Regulation
In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen.
This can happen when we reflect on what we feel and regulate our emotions. Not by shutting them down but to let them flourish and bring them into communication with people we care about.
You see a tremendous difference between people who have a sense of worthiness, love and belonging and people who struggle with it.
The variable that separate people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who struggle with it is that people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they’re worthy of love and belonging. That’s it!
„What keeps us out of connection is the fear that we’re not worthy of connection.“ – Brene Brown
These people have a sense of courage: They have the courage to be imperfect. They have the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others; because we can’t practice compassion with other people if we can’t treat ourselves kindly. And as a result of authenticity, they are willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they are. And these things are crucial for connection.
Those people embrace their vulnerability. They have the willingness to say „I love you“ first, the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees and the willingness to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out.
They think it’s necessary.
„Vulnerability is not only the core of shame, fear and struggle for worthiness, but it’s also the birthplace of joy, creativity, belonging and love.“ – Brene Brown
Why a lot of people struggle with showing vulnerable?
Now we know that dare to be vulnerable and sharing your vulnerability with others is crucial for building up and having connection with other people, why is it that a lot of people struggle with it?
In contrast to vulnerability, there is the need to be in control of the things around us. Fear makes us want to predict things, to control situations and relationships.
Sometimes we want to provoke certain results with people by behaving in certain ways, closing down to the person and to ourselves. And sometimes we behave in the way we think other people cold like, instead of showing or real feelings and or real self.
Often we want to make things that are uncertain certain. „I’m right, you’re wrong. Shut up.“ That’s it. Just certain. The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable we are, the more afraid we are. Then, there’s no real discourse, no conversation. Just blame. Blame is described as a way to discharge pain and discomfort. We perfect, but it doesn’t work.
We numb vulnerability – when we’re having to ask others for help, when we’re getting rejected, when asking someone out, waiting for someone to call back. And one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability.
But we can’t selectively numb emotions.
You can’t say, here’s vulnerability, shame, fear, and disappointment. I don’t want to feel all these. You can’t numb hard feelings without numbing other emotions. So when we numb hard feelings, we also numb joy, gratitude and happiness.
The way is to let ourselves be seen, to love even though there’s no guarantee, to practice gratitude in those moments where we’re wondering, „Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this?“. And the most important is to believe that we’re enough. Because when we work from a place that says, „I’m enough“ then we start listening, we’re kinder and gentler to the people around us, and to ourselves.
„I’m grateful because to feel vulnerable means I’m alive.“
Like many of us, I’ve had several relationships with other human beings in my life, and although they’ve been varied, my first romantic relationship set the foundation for all of them. Big heartbreak. I was a total mess at this time.
I began to cover my soul, layer by layer, like a lot of the people, do after a big heartbreak, big failures or losses in their personal life. In relationships with other people, there’s love, friendship, protection, but there could be also jealousy, competition, rejection and attack.
As we grow, a lot of things happen to us that make us want to hide the way we feel and how we are – especially when we scared to get rejected or not getting the response we want from other people. We do this as we grow up to fit into the family, to conform to the culture, the community, the gender and to people we love.
Non-Communication: A place for false Interpretation and assumptions
If you don’t communicate we can make up a lot in our minds about other people: We have assumptions about their behavior, what there said last time and spend all or energy in interpreting how the other person could mean certain things.
We only can make that many assumptions, interpretations, and prejudices in or heads, because we don’t ask the other person, how they could mean it. We don’t ask them to tell their reasons. We only make up stories in our minds. The other person had probably done the same thing. And then we wonder what keeps us separate.
Communication also means to make us emotionally naked to some point – even if it‘s hard. And it can be pretty hard to open p to someone. But if we manage to stay open, even when things are painful or difficult, e.g. when we have minor misunderstandings and bigger betrayals, there is potential to connect on a deeper level with this person. Dissolving conflicts can deepen the relationship on an even higher level, because it means we showing vulnerable to each other, getting to know each other better and often release pressure when saying things we always wanted to say.
If you fight against that pain, you just create more pain, and you block what wants to be renewed and healed. Pain is always asking to get healed. When difficult or painful things happen to me in my life, I remember me to open up to what’s scary and painful, instead of resisting it. Ask the pain what it’s come to deliver and something new wants to be born.
Sometimes we‘re hesitating to tell our truths, to reveal our wounds, to admit our wrongdoings. We‘re scared of doing so. Sometimes we even rejecting or attacking each other, instead of listening to each other, facing the pain we had caused each other, looking at stories and assumptions about each other and release them.
It means getting emotionally naked with another human being, putting aside pride and defensiveness, lifting the layers and sharing with each other our vulnerable selfs. It means saying things we‘d always needed to say, becoming braver about being authentic with others, saying or truths and searching and opening for the truth of others.
„How making us emotionally naked made us more ourselves by connecting with each other, and how by opening to the pain of our past, we’d finally been delivered to each other.“ – Elizabeth Lesser
You don’t have to wait for a escalated situations to clean up the relationships. We can be the first responder, the one to take the first step to be truthful to each other – with our family, friends, our partner, people we love, those who are important to us and those we care about.
