How many conversations are there in your life, that never happened, because you or someone else was not willing or able to be vulnerable?
How many loves and experiences have been lost out of that very same fear?
How many situations have your senses informed you were opportunities that your trauma shut down for you with the speed of Bruce Lee’s reflex’s?
How much of that fear, that fear of being vulnerable, has anything positive to offer you?
When someone wants to work on vulnerability with me, what follows in this post is my approach, advice and heartfelt deep hope:
Vulnerability (intimacy) is something that lives in the emotional spectrum between love and fear.
So I am asking you now, as if you were in front of me:
How has fear impacted your life? Do you have regrets? What are you doing about it?
Meaning…
How can your past regrets inform you about how you will need to respond differently when the opportunity comes up again, because it will come up again.
What can you learn to do now so that when you have an opportunity to act on something, you finally do it with the intent to move through the discomfort?
These are all questions I ask patients in therapy when they tell me they want to be happy and connect with someone authentically.
When we talk about how vulnerability is either possible for people or it isn’t (currently), it seems to work in a cycle.
We disclose only things to those we trust and since we do not trust many people including our own judgment, we remain silent and vulnerability starts to feel increasingly more dangerous as we build the negative fantasy around what it means for us to be vulnerable.
This is a problem though isn’t it? Something is missing when being vulnerable is missing.
Something deeply fulfilling is missing.
Because if you never let yourself be vulnerable then you will never connect at the deepest levels to your experience here and you can feel that loss without ever having had the feeling of having it somehow.
So what can you do?
The simple but difficult answer is, you re-process WHY you are afraid in the first place, which you will find has shaped your current behavior with connection a long time ago. The good new is you can change your feelings on intimacy but/and you must be willing to revisit the wound that exists currently because there-within is the fix to the problem.
The process is literally: Feel, deal, and heal the wounds that dictate your current process for love.
Love and the first feelings of the absence of love (pain) are recorded in our memories as children and revisiting pain and having closure with it all happening to us before it was in our control is the only way you can free yourself up to truly love without a full metal jacket protecting your heart at all “costs”.
Costs.
Costs always come up in therapy as defense mechanisms (functional excuses) for not engaging in intimacy because the trauma from the past takes over. It sounds like “I know it would be great BUT…” whatever the “but” is, consider that the “cost”.
Real costs are different than “costs”.
The only Real costs are the experiences we pay for and haven’t learned anything from in order to do better for ourselves. Anything else is always an investment waiting on you to cash in.
If you are like me you have enough lessons that have shown you that you can go through things and it not break you.
Why don’t you break? Resilience.
Resilience is the perfect support system for maintaining.
Resilience can also be used with becoming vulnerable because it shows up for you when you need positive reinforcement for the act of being vulnerable.
Vulnerability is a strength because it shows both yourself and others that you can handle any outcome because authenticity is non-negotiable for secure people, making resilience a quality all vulnerable people have.
The secret is, only the secure people in this world are vulnerable and they are not vulnerable because they are secure, they got to a space of security BECAUSE they were willing to be vulnerable.
At some point you decide you are resilient enough to be vulnerable and survive any outcome that results because it’s the only way to act authentically and experience intimacy.
How to start on this journey:
#1. Get your mind right. Literally
You have to say to yourself in the mirror out loud:
“You are a product of your past, you are not defined by it, you have learned and suffered and survived. The love I should have and deserve to have, was not always shown to me as a child or as a young adult in the way I needed it. Despite that, I can depend on me and I can depend on others. I can see others as reasons AND not blame them. Being fearless with love will be my reality because I am worthy of being loved for my authentic self.”
You say this out loud because you need to hear it. You need to say it. You need to see yourself say it. You need to listen to it and embrace it.
Then…
You GO.
Go try the things that you were to scared to try while you were so worried about rejection. You have resilience to endure the outcome.
You SAY
Say the things that make your heart beat go crazy because think about what is happening by keeping that energy trapped inside you out of fear. You have the resilience to endure the outcome.
You FEEL
Open yourself up to being ok no matter what happens because you are an evolved version of you who can handle having to adjust. Resilience, remember?
You let INTIMACY happen
(instead of stopping it with your anger/staged fights/traumatic pre-programmed responses)
Intimacy is something that requires your vulnerability and the reward is the freedom to be exactly who you are because that is how you will feel when you connect with people who are also willing to be their most vulnerable selves.
The path is known. We actually know as humans how to fix our pre-programming and heal ourselves. The question is, are you willing. Are you willing to do what needs to be done to see, feel and experience the other side?
CDM Think Tank LLC 