We can get confusing mixed messages when it comes to understanding vulnerability. Some people tell us that it’s vital to show our vulnerable side in our relationships, though for reasons that often seem less than clear to us. Whereas our typical response to vulnerability might more realistically be to run away as fast as we can. How can these opposing views make sense?
In this article we’re going to look at how we’ve historically been conditioned to view and deal with vulnerability, what our unconscious motivations might be, and the impact on our lives and relationships. We’ll end by reframing vulnerability in a way that might serve us more usefully.
The Illusion of Strength: Why We Learn to Hide Our Real Selves
From infancy onwards we receive unconscious messaging that we should aim to be strong and capable in the world, that this is the route to success and happiness. This in itself doesn’t seem an unreasonable strategy, right?
However, it turns out that this messaging is fundamentally flawed. This seemingly positive goal can make us work desperately hard to be seen as strong and invulnerable above all else. An additional consequence is that we unconsciously believe that being authentically ourselves is less important than the strong persona we present to the world – outer appearance over inner reality.
This develops into an ever-widening gap between the invulnerable version of us which strives to show no problems or flaws, and the real, inner us who lurks inside, feeling unwanted and unworthy. This is at the heart of our fear of being vulnerable – that this deeper part of us, which we have worked so hard to hide, will be seen and condemned. The illusion we try to create about being strong is not only a façade, at least in part, but it also fails to make us truly strong. Instead, it weakens us by making us scared of who we actually might be.
Wired to Protect: How Evolution Made Vulnerability Feel Dangerous
There is a further reason we avoid vulnerability. Humans have survived and evolved partly through successfully avoiding existential harm – a survival response which comes from a more primitive environment when humans were hunted by bigger and more dangerous predators. In this sense, vulnerability can be associated with feeling existentially threatened, producing a powerful desire to escape.
And being a hypersocial species, we have always been deeply fearful of rejection by our tribe or social group. In more primitive times, this could equate to death. In our times, the threat is really more of a conditioning pressure, though it can feel existential. These reasons combine to help explain why we are likely to have powerful instincts to get away from vulnerable feelings at any cost.
And yet, if we don’t examine and come to understand these feelings, the impact can be negative and significant.
The Hidden Cost of Invulnerability: Disconnection, Anxiety, and Loneliness
The cost of us walking around the world presenting a strong and invulnerable persona can profoundly affect how we experience ourselves and our relationships. As a significant part of us is potentially hidden, it prevents the people we are in relationships with getting a full picture of who we are. In fact, the deeper and truer parts of us, which we’ve rejected and kept inside, unseen and unheard, are surely the very parts that make us who we are, and are the very parts that others want to see and connect with.
This keeping ourselves locked away can therefore create distance and disconnection from others, with the negative consequences of us feeling misunderstood and even isolated, potentially leading to issues such as social anxiety, depression, and feeling disconnected from our own lives. As profoundly social beings we need connection with others, just as we need food to survive.
The disconnection goes further because being disconnected from our own experience means we can lack self-understanding and reject hearing or learning from our experience. This can leave us struggling to deal with life’s problems or knowing how to make ourselves happy.
Reframing Vulnerability: A Path to Connection, Courage, and Self-Knowledge
Contrary to striving for an illusory defence of strength, we can reframe vulnerability as the route to getting to know ourselves at a deeper and more authentic level. Through opening to our own inner and vulnerable experiences we are able to access more vital parts of ourselves. This enables developing strength in being who we really are, gives us access to self-knowledge, and enables deeper and more meaningful connections to ourselves and others.
However, bearing in mind that we’ve spent much of our lives avoiding vulnerability, we will inevitably come up against our own deep-rooted patterns of avoidance and conditioned messaging to turn back to familiar safety – even when we know that the old ways are not working. It is for this reason that psychotherapy aims to create the conditions where you feel able to connect with your own experience step-by-step and allow your vulnerable feelings to unfold. This process aims to help you engage and prosper from experiencing the deep value of your own vulnerability.
To return to the title of this article, perhaps the question isn’t: do you want to feel vulnerable? But instead: can you afford not to?
To enquire about psychotherapy sessions with Thad Hickman, please contact him here, or to view our full clinical team, please click here.
Thad is an experienced psychotherapeutic counsellor and a registered member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). He works long-term with individuals in our Lewes and Brighton and Hove practices.
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