On the value of courage, vulnerability, and being brave in love
Episode 8
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE
Brene Brown: The Power of Vulnerability TED talk is a good place to start if you’re new to her work. She’s also written numerous books on vulnerability and speaks about vulnerability and courage regularly on her podcast, Unlocking Us.
On the history of ancient Rome and the masculine obsession with invulnerability, see Grace Jantzen’s book, Foundations of Violence: Death and the Displacement of Beauty.
Journey through Trauma: A Trail Guide to the 5 Phase Cycle of Healing Repeated Trauma by Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD
When the Greek hero Achilles is born, half-mortal, half-god, his mother, the immortal sea goddess Thetis learns of a prophecy that her infant Achilles will perish at a young age. In an effort to prevent this terrible fate, Thetis brings Achilles to the River Styx, whose waters are said to bestow invulnerability.
She submerges her infant son in the River Styx, but the water doesn’t touch his heel, where she’s holding onto him. This becomes the one place on Achilles’ body where he remains vulnerable, and where he’s fatally wounded by an arrow during the Trojan War
This myth highlights the truth that no matter what measure we, or a well-meaning parent, might take to protect us from getting hurt … in reality, there is an unbreakable connection between being human and being vulnerable.
If you’ve spent any time at all in the realm of personal growth and relationships over the last decade, you could have hardly escaped the message that vulnerability is an essential part of healthy relationships and a flourishing life. This is all thanks to one researcher’s tireless work to share her message about the need for vulnerability.
That researcher, of course, is Brené Brown, professor of social work at the University of Houston and author of numerous books on vulnerability, including Daring Greatly and The Gifts of Imperfection. Her TED talk, The Power of Vulnerability, currently has more than 61 million views. According to her research, there are three key elements to vulnerability. When we’re vulnerable with another person: 1) There’s a measure of uncertainty, 2) We feel like we’re taking a risk 3) @e also feel some degree of emotional exposure.
When we think of emotional exposure, we think of being nakedly ourselves. We’re not hiding our tenderness and sensitivity behind the armor of being unaffected by our experiences, by others around us, by those we’re closest to.
From our perspective, vulnerability is about allowing yourself to be affected by another person, which is why it can feel so risky. Dropping your armor, letting yourself be tender and sensitive with someone else, allowing yourself to be moved by them … these are all ways in which vulnerability is vital for any love relationship.
While Brené Brown has made a name for herself specifically in the area of vulnerability and relationships, other researchers have explored the role vulnerability has as part of our ability to deeply experience anything. Vulnerability, as it turns out, not only is intimately intertwined with our experience of love, but it also underlies our capacity to be affected and to be moved by art, by beauty … even by issues of social justice and equality. Vulnerability—in essence—is an inherent part of being fully alive and fully human.
So here’s the question we’re starting off with: If vulnerability is the capacity to be affected by another … to be penetrated by our experiences … to be moved by them, why is vulnerability so often associated with weakness? Why do we often think being vulnerable is synonymous with being weak?
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the word vulnerable as “open to attack or damage” and “capable of being physically or emotionally wounded.” Etymologically, the word vulnerable comes from the Latin word vulnus, meaning wound. By definition, then, being vulnerable means that we might be wounded … but that still doesn’t quite explain the idea that vulnerability is a form of weakness.
When Brené Brown says, “Vulnerability is not weakness; it's our greatest measure of courage” she’s actively trying to counter this notion that vulnerability is synonymous with weakness. But where does the whole idea that vulnerability is a sign of weakness come from?
Okay, so here’s where things get either weird or fascinating, depending on how riveted you are by the Western history of gender roles dating back to ancient Rome.
Because here’s a fact that you may not know, which has real implications for our difficulties being vulnerable with each other in relationships. As it turns out, in ancient Roman, all men at the top of the social pyramid were absolutely terrified of one thing: being penetrated.
They were obsessed with it! They considered it to be the most shameful thing that could happen to them to the extent that, for elite Roman soldiers, it was considered to be far preferable to stab yourself with your own sword, to end your own life, rather than allow anyone else to stab you in battle. This is only one small example of the many ways in which this phobia of penetratration occupied the minds of upper class Roman men.
When we’re talking about Ancient Rome, this is still early days of Western patriarchy. But their sense of what it means to be a man was defined so rigidly and so forcefully that it still reverberates in society today. And one of the biggest associations with masculinity was this notion of impenetrability.
That’s what it meant to be a man—to be impenetrable, to be absolutely invulnerable to the world outside yourself, like a fortress. And this requirement to be impenetrable extended beyond the physical self: it included the emotional self, which is why it was also considered shameful for men to be emotionally vulnerable, or to have an emotional attachment in a relationship with an intimate other…including one’s spouse or lover.
The fact that invulnerable masculinity coded emotional intimacy as shameful suggests that this kind of closeness was a very real threat to the cultural requirement of being cold, calculating, and distant.
Fast forward a few thousand years and we’ve lost the overt association between shame and being penetrated, thankfully. That said, when we widen our perspective a bit, we can still see the clear connection between emotional vulnerability and the experience of fear, shame, and anxiety.
One change is that this is true not just for men and boys. It is a factor that now informs everyone, no matter where they fit on a gender spectrum. We all, to some extent, have imbibed the noxious air of patriarchy and the masculine value system of being independent and emotionally unaffected by others.
This shows why the process of re-evaluating the experience of vulnerability and recognizing it as an essential component of being human, as well as an essential part of love and flourishing, is so critical today. Far from being proof of weakness, embracing vulnerability is part of a cultural recovery from the toxic masculinity that got its footing back in ancient Rome. Vulnerability is vital for true strength.
There’s another reason why we struggle with allowing ourselves to be vulnerable in relationships. It has to do with our belief that the best way to stay safe is to keep things predictable and within our control. This means that when things are unpredictable or out of our control, we feel like something threatening or dangerous is happening.
Again, according to Brené Brown’s definition, vulnerability involves feeling emotionally exposed as well as there being a measure of uncertainty and risk. Making the choice to be vulnerable, thus means that we have to actively choose to let go of our ability to control things in the way we could control things if we stayed inside our lonely fortress of invulnerability.
Being vulnerable asks us to step outside the fortress, where we’re suddenly emotionally exposed. Allowing for unpredictability—not knowing what’s going to happen and certainly not being in control—feels risky. Most of us have a low tolerance for this kind of risk in our interpersonal relationships.
At the same time, of course, our best and most rewarding experiences in intimate relationships absolutely and 100% require exactly this step. The most exquisite moments of loving connection you’ve experienced were times when you were outside the lonely fortress—falling in love, reaching out in care, celebrating in joy are all moments that seize us, transporting us from where we feel alone and reuniting us with a sense of connectedness.
So now that we’ve talked a little about why it can feel scary or risky or wrong to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, let’s explore the things we do in our relationships in order to avoid feeling vulnerable. …despite the fact that, at some level, we know that vulnerability is vital for relational health.
The first thing we do to avoid vulnerability is perhaps the most obvious. We don’t allow ourselves to get too close to another person emotionally. We hold them at arm’s length, outside the fortress, where they can’t get close enough to really hurt us.
I (Angela) remember working with someone years ago who was struggling with intimacy in her relationship. She’d gotten feedback from her partner that she always had her walls up. As we were exploring ways to start letting down those walls and begin sharing some things about herself with her partner, her immediate response was, “why would I give him all this ammunition about me?”
It was such a telling response that she associated sharing about herself and her inner world with giving her partner ammunition that he could use to hurt her later, because we’d actually spent the last six months or so figuring out how she could put her mother on an information diet: her mother did, in fact, take what she knew about her daughter’s life and turn it against her in the form of criticism, judgment, and character attacks. This was why she was having such a hard time letting down her walls with her partner. She had this working model of relationships from childhood that stated: don’t give anyone information that they could use to hurt you later.
This example highlights an important feature of learning to be vulnerable with another person: that safety does matter. We would never encourage you to be indiscriminately vulnerable with others. It’s important to make sure that the other person is trustworthy, that they’re someone who will take what you share with them and treat it sensitively.
If you’ve been hurt in the past, if you’ve been vulnerable with another person that betrayed your trust, in childhood relationships, in friendships, or in past romantic relationships: know that it can be scary to allow another person to get close to you.
What so many people experience, after being hurt in past relationships, is a very keen awareness that the closer you get to someone, the more a betrayal can hurt. Of course, the alternative is staying in the lonely fortress, where nobody is able to get close. Everyone, including an intimate partner, is kept at arm’s length. The alternative results in never getting to experience the pleasure of true connection.
Another related way that we avoid being vulnerable with others is to be entirely self-sufficient. We make sure we never need anything from anyone else. Becoming entirely self-reliant means that we don’t take the risk of depending on another person. Despite our Western cultural value of independence and self-sufficiency, which is reflected in our American myth of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, humans are actually an interdependent species.
Nobody is ever entirely self-sufficient. We all rely on each other, in small ways and in big ways, every day.
But relying on another person doesn’t come with any guarantees that they’ll actually be there when we need them, which is why being mutually interdependent in a relationship is a form of allowing yourself to be vulnerable.
This can feel especially scary to those of us who learned early in life, in childhood, that we couldn’t depend on anyone else to be there for us. For children who weren’t properly supported and nurtured during childhood, the message we internalized was “I can’t depend on anyone else.” The children who heard this loud and clear, and took it to heart, carry it unwittingly into their adult relationships. It’s still really hard to trust that someone will be there if you ask for help or support, even when you have supportive friends or partners.
In her book, Journey through Trauma, trauma therapist Gretchen Schmelzer writes that part of her work with traumatized clients is helping them develop the ability to lean on her as a supportive person. She finds that one of the most challenging points in trauma treatment comes when her clients start to have the impulse to lean on her and to trust her to support them. This is often a point when clients can get so scared about taking that leap of faith and trusting her that they might stop coming to therapy altogether.
We see something very, very similar happen in intimate relationships between partners, when one or both partners have a history of past trauma, especially relational trauma from childhood.
It’s not just therapy clients who can have difficulty learning how to lean on their therapist. In intimate relationships, it can feel very scary to learn how to truly lean on a partner for support. This is especially true when your only experience in life has been that you can’t trust that anyone else will be there to support you. From our perspective, this is one of the most vulnerable things a person with past trauma can do in a relationship. It requires great courage to learn how to lean on the other person, taking the risk of asking for help and support.
Another way that we avoid being vulnerable in relationships is by hiding our true self. This occurs when we don’t allow ourselves to be seen, when we don’t share from the heart about what really matters to us, or what we’re thinking or feeling. The more tender our hearts, the more tender our feelings, the more sensitive we can be in the experience of sharing our authentic selves with another person.
When it comes to sharing things that are sensitive, we might fear being misunderstood, or being judged or criticized. We will be acutely aware of how risky being vulnerable feels.
Being vulnerable is all about openness and trusting the person who’s on the other end. …And trust, ultimately, is always a leap of faith in relationships. We have no guarantees of any kind when it comes to relationships.
Certainly we can—and do—build trust in relationships, but the reason we say there are no guarantees is because even well-meaning, loving partners and friends sometimes drop the ball. They let us down. They say the wrong thing … or they’re not present … or whatever you’re talking about triggers their own issues, and they react in a judgmental or critical way.
It happens, which is why part of being in a healthy relationship requires knowing how to repair these kinds of ruptures in the fabric of the relationship. Fortunately, the movement of rupture and repair that comes as a result of choosing vulnerability in intimate relationships ends up making the relationship stronger, closer, and more satisfying.
Being vulnerable in this way of sharing from your heart and letting another person have a window into your deepest, inner self can feel the scariest if you have a past history of relationships which have been very critical or judgmental, when you’ve experienced being rejected or criticized for being who you are.
We talked about this in episode 6 on authenticity, and what makes it difficult to be authentic in relationships. The difficulty really comes from the fact that it’s vulnerable to be yourself.
Going back to the metaphor of keeping yourself within the lonely fortress as a form of protection, being authentic means letting down those walls, letting the other person see the real you. And the kind of nakedness that authenticity requires of us is in some ways the ultimate experience of vulnerability … to just allow yourself to be seen for who you are, without having the ability to control how the other person responds to you.
That’s the uncertainty, that’s the risk and the feeling of emotional exposure that go along with vulnerability. Moving into this raw place is what makes love possible, with no guarantee that the other will respond.
Given all of the ways vulnerability can feel risky, you might be asking yourself: why on earth would I want to do that? The importance of becoming vulnerable that makes it worth the risk is illuminated if you consider this question from a different angle: what do we sacrifice in relationships when we attempt to remain invulnerable?
In some ways it’s much more obvious what the risks are when it comes to being vulnerable, while the risks of not being vulnerable are perhaps not so obvious at first.
But, the answer to the question, what do we sacrifice when we attempt to remain invulnerable in relationships is: We sacrifice intimacy. We sacrifice closeness. We sacrifice connection. And ultimately, we sacrifice the experience of love in all its fullness.
Because vulnerability is an essential aspect of having an emotionally healthy, bonded relationship with another person, that’s what we sacrifice when we’re not willing to be vulnerable. When we close ourselves off, when we armor ourselves in an attempt to stay safe in relationships, we risk becoming insensitive and numb to the pleasures of an unguarded relationship.
Being invincible is what Achilles’ mother tried to provide for him when she dunked him in the waters of the River Styx. Fittingly, the river that in Greek mythology serves as the boundary between life and death. The lonely tower provides a similar boundary point. Although you’re not dead, you’re disconnected from the source of vitality and thus miss out on many of the pleasures of being fully alive.
The allure of being invincible is that we’re safe. Nothing and no one can hurt us. For Achilles, his near invincibility made him the most feared warrior in the Trojan War. But his near invincibility in battle never made him invulnerable. It failed to keep him safe. Achilles was deeply attached to his beloved companion Patroclus, whose death in battle led Achilles to become unhinged by grief.
Here’s what we might take from this Greek tragedy. It’s that strive as we might to become invulnerable, incapable of being penetrated by our experiences, immune to being affected by another person, we will never fully succeed in these attempts.
The best we might achieve is to shield ourselves from experiencing the richness of feeling the entire spectrum of emotions that come along with being attached to another person, the exquisite depths of love. The price of trying to save ourselves from suffering is depriving ourselves of what makes life worth living.
It is a risk to be open and vulnerable with another person. But it’s also a risk not to be vulnerable.
The alternative to being open with another person is being closed. And when we close ourselves off in an intimate relationship in an attempt to shield ourselves from potential hurt, from the potential wounding that’s inherently involved in being vulnerable, the problem is that we can’t be selectively closed off. Eventually, choosing to stay in a relationship while staying in the lonely fortress results in a slow estrangement from your partner.
Closing ourselves off, holding the other person at arm’s length, often feels like the safer choice in the short term. It even could seem like the wiser choice, especially if we’re acutely aware of the dangers of love because we’ve been hurt before. But this attempt at staying safe ends up resulting in isolation and disconnection.
We think we’re protecting ourselves from being hurt or rejected, but, in our attempt, we’re also closing ourselves off from love and connection. And since relationships cannot thrive without openness and vulnerability, when we refuse to be vulnerable, we close off the very flow of energy that would sustain love over time.
we’ve found that this disconnection goes deeper than our relationships with other people. It also causes a sense of isolation from the world around you.
Once isolated, you may mistakenly feel like you do not matter, or that your existence is somehow not as fully enmeshed in the tapestry of life and love that connects us all. When you seek to be invulnerable with others, it’s common to also feel disconnected from yourself. This is one reason why loneliness has been named as a major social problem: we shut ourselves into the lonely fortress and forget that there’s anything outside that could make it worthwhile to open the door again.
And this brings us to the value of courage in relationships. The word courage is rooted in both the Latin and French words for heart. Courage comes from the heart. It’s our ability to be brave in response to something scary or threatening.
Vulnerability is an act of courage … it’s the brave act of keeping our heart open when it would feel safer to close up. We began this episode by talking about the ancient Roman value of keeping oneself invulnerable as the ultimate show of strength. What’s interesting is that in some non-Western cultures, strength is understood, correctly in our opinion, as the ability to remain open. Strength reveals itself in allowing yourself to be affected by another person while also maintaining a core sense of yourself at the same time.
Being affected by another person while also being authentically yourself is at the heart of being vulnerable in a relationship. it’s a way of sharing your inner experience with someone else while also allowing yourself to be affected by their inner experience.
This invitation to a shared experience of your inner world is what’s suggested by the word intimate, which initially meant to “make known” or reveal what would not be obvious at a glance.
It isn’t possible to love without also accepting the possibility of hurt or loss. This is true when we embrace the idea of loving vulnerably, with our heart wide open. And it’s also true when we try to protect ourselves by shielding our heart and holding the other at arm’s length.
Keeping ourselves at a distance from love doesn’t protect us from the pain of loss … it only adds another layer of pain when loss occurs, because we have to mourn not only the end of the relationship but the lost opportunity to truly love while we had the chance.
It takes courage to allow yourself to be affected by another, because this happens in ways that you can’t control, you can’t predict, and you can’t manage. Letting go of control, you open your heart to another and believe in your ability to respond to whatever happens.
Courage is surrender to the experience of love. Courage is the willingness to allow yourself to be moved and changed by the experience of loving and being loved.
All love is ultimately a leap of faith. It’s surrendering control and trusting in your resilience and in your ability to survive potential loss.
When I (Angela) was a young mother, I remember reading somewhere that having a child is like allowing your heart to walk around in another’s body. That felt so true to me at the time that it’s stuck with me for two decades now. And in the years since I first came across this idea, I’ve realized that’s not just true for mothers and their children. It’s true for all of us who love another person.
When we love another person, we’re making the choice to have a wandering heart … a heart that’s connected to the hearts of all those others whom we love.
This, ultimately, is what enables us to survive and grow through vulnerability and openness. By allowing your heart to beat in other bodies, and by hosting the hearts of those who love you, you expand your sense of what it means to be yourself. It means your sense of self no longer is confined to the boundary of your body. Instead, who you are is intimately intertwined and involved with all of your relationships. You nurture and are nourished, you care and feel supported, you love and you are loved. You’re woven into the heart of the world, open to being a vital artery in the lives of others.
What’s your relationship archetype?
about angela Amias & Daniel Boscaljon
We’re the creators of the Five Relationship Archetypes and the hosts of the Alchemy of Connection. It’s been known for a long time that painful childhood experiences, including trauma, affect adults at many levels, from physical and mental health to emotional well-being to relationships. While the impact of early trauma on adult relationships is frequently noted by trauma experts, there’s been very little in terms of practical, useful advice or programs that adults with childhood trauma can use to improve their own relationships.
Our programs are designed to fill that gap—to help you understand how your own past experiences influence your relationship with yourself and your relationships with others.
Healthy relationships are an essential part of living a good life and yet, many of us (perhaps even most of us) have core wounds from childhood experiences that affect our ability to have the kinds of intimate relationships in adulthood that we long to have.
