Why vulnerability leads to happiness
True vulnerability feels like deciding to hand a piece of your heart to someone you trust, with no guarantee of what they will do with it. When the person you open up to receives this part of your heart and delicately tucks it into their chest pocket for safekeeping, you build a safe bond with that person.
When that doesn’t happen, however, and instead the receiver tosses it away, you experience great pain. It is even worse when your brave gesture isn’t noticed and the risk you took isn’t appreciated. You feel dismissed or unseen.
As a result, you decide to stop sharing in order to protect your heart. This makes so much sense - why would you continue to do something that leads to such pain?
We are also flooded with messages from society that tell us to protect ourselves from being vulnerable in any way - physically, financially, or emotionally.
As relationship experts who provide couples therapy, individual counseling, and family therapy to countless clients every year, we know how joy-limiting it can be to live a life avoiding vulnerability. We see the barriers to connection as they form and know how hard it is to knock them back down.
So we want you to hear a different message from us. We wish to spread a much different message. We want you to know why vulnerability is important in relationships and love. We want to help you find the courage to continue to be vulnerable so you can build strong connections and experience the peace that comes with a true sense of belonging with the important ‘others’ in your life.
We are all wired from birth with a need for connection and a sense of belonging. The more rich our connections, the safer we feel to be courageous and thrive in life. When we don’t feel emotionally safe and question whether we matter, we are less likely to show our true, tender emotions such as sadness, loneliness, or fear. Instead, we can look angry or resentful. The latter perpetuates a cycle of negative emotional experiences that lead to more guardedness and less openness.
So the risks are real. You might get hurt. However, there isn’t a path to closeness and connection that avoids vulnerability. It happens to be the key ingredient of strong, safe relationships. We all have entirely unique life experiences however at the emotional core, we are the same. We all encounter heartache, joy, anger, elation, hurt, and what seems like a million other feelings. We un-do aloneness by sharing these parts of our lives. When we co-burden our pain and share in our joy with a chosen other, our mind relaxes and says ‘I am safe with you’ and connections build.
It’s not easy, though. We are socialized to see feeling vulnerable as weakness or inadequacy. It’s as though having feelings, and a desire to share them is a sign of poor emotional control, or excessive neediness.
As relationship therapists, we debunk this myth daily. We take time to help you really understand why it is not weak to feel emotions, or to internally feel a desire to share them or want to talk about them. It is natural. It is human.
The reality is, that it takes guts just to get through this life, and sharing that with someone else is rarely easy in the beginning. For many of us, our very first positive experience of feeling vulnerable happens in individual therapy or couples counseling. It is less risky to share yourself with someone who doesn’t play a role in your daily, private life.
When the experience is positive, the result is an undeniable desire to do more of it - with the people who matter most. Working through the discomfort and unfamiliarity of exploring emotions and understanding how to share them with someone else takes courage and strength. We all struggle to push past the messages we received as a child that said ‘get over it’, ‘there isn’t anything you can do about it so why talk about it?’, or ‘quit being so emotional’ and do something different.
As emotionally focused therapists, we will help you have a positive experience with vulnerability in relationships and love. We help you understand and embrace a new truth about feeling vulnerable.
During individual therapy or couples counseling, we often hear clients share that they resist opening up because they fear sharing so much could be shameful. Shame, too, is an emotion that serves a really good purpose - it keeps us safe from judgment and pain. It prevents us from sharing or reaching out to others and therefore protects us from rejection. There is also a cost to that shame. When we hide away our experiences, we close ourselves off to the profound freedom that comes from vulnerability. Shame thrives in the dark, secret places. Imagine shame as a physical object that has been placed in a petri dish. When the petri dish is hidden away, in a deep dark closet, it will grow. It will become so large and overwhelming that it overcomes the petri dish. However, when that shame petri dish is placed in the light, among humans, the shame stops growing. Sharing and opening up about your inner world is like taking the shameful Petri dish and placing it in direct sunlight. The sunlight takes away its negative power and creates more space for connection.
This is important. When you’re spending time and effort trying to distract others from your “stuff,” you’re naturally taking away some of your opportunities for joy, simply because we can’t selectively dull certain emotions. As Brene Brown has written when we dull pain, negativity, or sadness, we automatically dull joy, hope, and gratitude. This leads to feelings of loneliness and isolation.
This isn’t where we thrive as people. Finding our way to vulnerability in our relationships and love is the springboard to joy not just in those relationships, but in our life in general. The fullness of having joy and hope and gratitude and happiness in our lives can outweigh the fear of pain and hurt.
Freely feeling and sharing the tough stuff opens us up to the good in this life too. “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” (CS Lewis). Protecting your heart feels safer until you experience the joy and connection that come with taking the risk of opening up, sharing, and loving.
We know that feeling vulnerable is essential to a joyful existence. Embracing it can radically change your relationships and set you on a course for more joy and satisfaction than you ever thought possible.
Let us help you experience more joy through vulnerability in your life. We create space for you to explore the messages that tell you to ‘back away from vulnerability’ or ‘don’t need so much’. Exploring these messages leads to a deeper understanding of your own emotions and the value of the needs that come along with them. We help you take small steps towards vulnerability to ensure your experience is positive and meaningful. We celebrate the joy that results and then help you learn how to do this with your partner and other people who matter to you.
Whether we do this in individual therapy or in couples counseling, the journey is the same. Small steps towards big change.