Vulnerability Is Not a Dirty Word

although it may make you feel like tossing out some F-bombs

May 11, 2022

Brene Brown in her new book The Atlas of the Heart describes a paradox: no human act of courage happens without vulnerability.

[Her TED talk has over 17 million views for a reason - if you haven’t yet, check it.]

Let me know if you have a story of someone acting courageously who had no vulnerability in moving forward ;)

I think the moving forward part is key - so if you “move forward” through this musing we’ll get to the part where the key unlocks a new level of the video game.

Why do we view vulnerability as “weak”? Or other synonyms, like “unsafe”, “defenseless”, “exposed”, and - clearly not a positive - “sucker”?

Do a gut check right now, what ‘feels’ come up when you read the word?

vulnerable

Do you smile involuntarily, with a warm flush in the middle of your chest, recalling the times you stepped into the unknown with abandon, and found strength in yourself previously unknown?

If you are like most on the planet right now, probably not.

Me neither. I’ve been laid bare by life’s not-so-whimsical erratic floggings, and also experienced firsthand the wonder and miraculous gifts resulting from moving forward with extreme “unsafety”, “defenseless”…and yet I still cringe a little when I think of the word vulnerable.

Almost instinctively shrink a little, harden up, waiting for the blow.

The Latin root for the word vulnerable means “wounding”, and yes, humans are hard-wired to avoid wounding. After the first few encounters with pain, we develop patterns of avoidance, and in the event there is no escape, we go for distraction or even dissociation - we literally somehow send our consciousness “somewhere else” - anywhere but our body where the wounding is happening real time.

Who would choose to be “unguarded” or “unprotected” in the face of oncoming trauma? Or something that looks or sounds like trauma experienced in our past? What are we, suckers?

What about the times we took a chance, professed our love or started a new business, and met rejection and failure? Felt shame after realizing the thing we did was not the thing to do - it hurt people.

I think that shame and fear are emotions most do not choose, and when they come knocking, we run into the bedroom, switch off the lights, and tune into Netflix with the earbud volume maxxed.

And still, shame and fear wait in the alley we pass on the way to work the next morning, reminding us that all emotions are part of the human experience, all emotions are part of the human experience, ALL EMOTIONS ARE PART OF THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE.

For most of my life I tried so hard to do everything “right” thinking I could avoid the yucky ones, believing I was flawed if I felt more than a wave of anger, or ounce of fear - how can I be a musician if I’m too scared to sing?

I thought maybe I could at least get enough self-control to schedule their appearance at convenient predictable times. Made those emotions wait in a big hefty sack I carried around for just the right time (looking for the cosmic trash can where I could dump them without having to actually touch the stuff again).

That did not work.

In over 20 years of practice in Emergency Medicine, including more than a decade of Integrative Medicine (read “holistic” including much woo), I saw most folks trying a variation of that strategy, and like me, underwater when the waves of emotion breached whatever bulkhead they constructed to stay “safe”.

Whether we liked it or not, the emotional tsunami left us vulnerable.

What took me much longer to see was that by taking detours to avoid unpleasant emotions, we limit the roads we travel. We carve out well-worn paths that include enough of the “good stuff” and plenty of signs that we will be safe.

But we miss the pop-up roadside joy vendors, the surprise creativity carnivals, the serendipitous connections that yield more feelings of love and belonging.

By working hard to be invulnerable, we narrow our own bandwidth and cut off the living we could do if only we had the courage…to be vulnerable.

Since there are other synonyms for vulnerable that are more “positive”, like “accessible”, “wide-open”, “ready”, I wonder if vulnerability has two faces.

Like a door - one side clearly marked HAZARD - it faces us with a wide buffer of shame and fear to keep us from getting close enough to see what is on the other side.

Moving through the discomfort of uncertainty, or risk of ridicule, requires different muscles than a Peloton develops. There’s something deep in our heart that gets stronger each time we choose to stay with tough stuff. Like anabolic steroids at the gym, we amp our workout results if we can approach ourselves with tenderness, finding compassion for our process. Curiosity, kindness, and a sense of humor help.

That’s a tall order when the weeds are high and we are without a map.

But maybe if we throw our hands up high in surrender, help will come. And maybe…we are that help.

What if we are cutting off parts of ourselves much more capable of whacking down the weeds and navigating the hell out of…hell? What if aspects of ourselves unimaginably great are waiting to be exposed?

What if the guard in front of the gate of vulnerability is us? A part we stationed there to protect and defend until we could thank him for a job well done and send him off to early retirement?

Then, open the door.

What if the experience of delight in our own growing whole-heartedness deepens each time we pass through another threshold previously barred by past wounds, and we eventually sense excitement when again we find ourselves vulnerable?

Whoa.

I tend to look at life patterns as fractals - macro and micro - inner work and outer world. Maybe it’s all the woo versus mainstream medicine, but it definitely brings more wholeness to my heart.

So expanding out from my navel-gazing, I see in our world the same threshold - so many never before faced fears, constant sources of shame and guilt in both actions and inactions. A lot of tough stuff.

Since early 2020, many of the structures of our shared reality have demonstrated a shakiness - how certain are you that the CDC recommendations are worth your fidelity? Are you 100% confident that mainstream news sources are unbiased? How about the will of the people in the U.S. being heard and carried out by our Federal government?

Not to push buttons on hot topics - any ideology makes a great bouncer for the quagmire of questions in the mind…but forces the bar brawl out into the world in front of us. (To me the cosmic joke is: inner or outer, the work is unavoidable.)

Like the micro trip above, the macro crossroads is either doubling down on “choosing the right side”, or willingness to wade through the truth of life’s constantly changing landscape.

Do you really think we would all be “safe” if we just knew the right information /misinformation/ disinformation? We’re so confused right now as a collective we can’t even figure out what hefty sack to shove our stuff into.

All the walls to keep us safe are crumbling out there…maybe it’s time to sit tenderly with our pain inside until we move through our grief, our longing, our anger, our confusion.

Then move forward. Stand up, brush off the dust, and walk through the rubble to find the door.

Leave the worn out patterns that worked to help us feel safe then, and exercise our hearts in a brave new world now.

Maybe like everything else in our post-COVID reality, we can’t rely on our past to predict our future.

Maybe it’s time to explore what it means to be vulnerable.

the bast

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