Vulnerability vs. Openness

One of these things is not like the other.

Vulnerability (according to fan fave Brené Brown) is a state that interweaves risk and emotional exposure. 

To be vulnerable is to enter into an interaction without self-protection while being true to one’s self: doing or saying the honest thing, the real thing, the thing that expresses our heart’s longing, without any knowledge of how this will land. 

The neurobiology of teenagers—who I am lucky enough to work with in my job as a group facilitator—pushes them toward vulnerability. Sometimes the people and systems around them can’t handle their truth of their big feelings, fears, and dreams. They get pushback. They get rejected. Maybe they get hurt in some worse way, or repeatedly.

Ideally, they also have people in their lives who care for them unconditionally. Who know how to support them, to be there for them in both celebration and turmoil, as they flail around trying to fulfill the vast potential they hold to become fully realized adults. This is what enables them to keep risking and expressing and becoming who they truly are.

Our teen group today is focusing on the theme of vulnerability.

One teen says, “I consider myself a pretty open person. But I’m realizing that openness and vulnerability aren’t the same.”

Yes, I think. Openness can be a way of ingratiating or submitting ourselves to others. Like a dog preemptively rolling onto its back when another dog approaches, to demonstrate that they are harmless and uninterested in defense or attack.

I remember my own teen self, spilling my guts about stuff that felt juicy in an effort to ingratiate myself. To make myself interesting and unthreatening. 

Look how much of a f***up I am! And how self-aware I am about this f***ed-up-ness! Hey, you don’t need to be afraid of me! You might even want to take care of me! I would totally dig that! Let’s gooooooo!

That isn’t vulnerability. It’s a defense. A strategy. 

Behind this was a desire to be invulnerable. To control how other people saw and responded to me. To drum up preemptive empathy that might keep them around even if (God forbid) I said or did something that invoked their ire. 

I didn’t know any better. 

At some point in my early life I must have learned that speaking or living my actual truth was not safe. I adopted this “openness” strategy instead. 

Decades later I’m still unwinding my nervous system enough to relax into true vulnerability: the willingness to have hard conversations or embark upon risky projects or adventures without knowing how things might turn out. 

This teen is already figuring this out. God bless them.

Their authenticity and bravery inspires me even before they drop this wise gem on the rest of the group. 

“If I show up really vulnerable,” they go on, “people might not be able to handle it, and they might go away. But maybe if I was more vulnerable with my friends I would get better friends.” 

Right, my inner teen sighs, longing to time-travel back to my own adolescence so I can have this teen as my friend.  

Early life challenges gear our systems toward self-protection: the opposite of vulnerability. 

The challenges I faced in my own early life were not big ones compared to those others have faced. I was a relatively privileged kid, white, upper middle class.

What I lacked was emotional safety. 

I wasn’t able to be honest with adults in my world about how I was feeling, what I wanted, what I was afraid of or mad or sad about, or who I was becoming or wanting to become, and have them accept these things as real.

When I tried, I got reactions from the important adults in my world that turned me away from myself and toward what I thought they wanted from me.

This is not unique to me. Obviously. Many people born in my generation were brought up in families that seemed to Have It All, but where emotional intelligence and flexibility around identity were still a few decades away from approaching the zeitgeist. This is, I believe, what interferes with the ability of many of my contemporaries to get to vulnerability. We defended our tender sproutling true selves by rebelling/acting out or becoming inveterate people pleasers. We turned our big feelings in on ourselves and got depressed or anxious.

And just from this, look how my system braced against vulnerability. 

Look how I lived and chose for so long based on what I thought others wanted or expected from me: for so long, indeed, that I am just now beginning to be able to discern my own desires in the clamoring mayhem of what I imagine to be the desires of others about how I should look, act, choose, speak, behave.  

(And yes, I recognize 100% that NO ONE REALLY GIVES ENOUGH OF A CRAP ABOUT WHAT I DO OR HOW I LOOK for this to be even a minor deciding influence on me.) 

And then, I imagine having come into the world under different circumstances, where not only my emotional safety was compromised, but where I was not physically safe. As so many folks are and do. How much more vigilantly I would have come to protect myself.

I think of the folks I’ve felt frustrated by because they don’t seem able to go there, to be real, to be vulnerable.

Therapy clients who defend against dipping into their actual truth. Teens who refuse to speak more than a word or two or speak audibly in groups (no matter how many times I bark, “Please speak up! I am old! I do not hear well!”) or to move their bodies around when we play games. 

Why don’t they just lean in and give it a chance??? I think. Don’t they know that this is a Safe Space? 

We can say it is, but maybe their systems can’t trust that they are. 

The only way to prove that vulnerability is safe is to let folks show up however they do, and to accept and love and appreciate their simple presence.

To trust that they are giving as much as they can. 

I am lucky to be surrounded every day by people who love and support me without condition. I’m working on doing this for myself. And it is a slow, slow process. Our nervous systems prioritize safety over everything else, and unclenching takes time.

Sometimes vulnerability is about being quiet and saying nothing. This is where I find myself now, often, as I work to open myself up, to relax enough to be who I truly am and know/state what I truly want.

Who in your world frustrates you with a seeming inability to be vulnerable with you?

Does your heart change around this when you consider how slow their unclenching may need to be?

How is it for you?

Do you want to be able to access vulnerability more easily? Where? With whom?

What are you doing to get there?