Vulnerability is based on mutuality and requires boundaries and trust.  It is not over sharing, it is not purging, it is not indiscriminate disclosure, and it is not celebrity style social media information dumps.  Vulnerability is about sharing our feelings and our experiences with people who have earned the right to hear them.  Being vulnerable and open is mutual and an integral part of the trust building process.

We cannot always have guarantees in place before we risk sharing; however we don't bare our souls the first time we meet someone.  Vulnerability without boundaries leads to disconnection, distrust, and disengagement.  Vulnerability is not a secret sharing free for all.  Vulnerability goes hand in hand with trust.

Trust is built one step at a time.  When thinking about the investment and leap that people in relationships have to make before the building process ever begins. One of my favorite researchers on couples is John Gottman.  He is considered the country's foremost couples researcher.  And he writes...

"What I have found through research is that trust is build in very small moments, which I call "sliding door" moments, after the movie, Sliding Doors.  In any interaction, there is a possibility of connecting with your partner or turning away from your partner.

Let me give you an example of that from my own relationship.

One night, I really wanted to finish a mystery novel.  I thought I knew who the killer was, but I was anxious to find out.  At one point in the night, I put the novel on my bedside and walked into the bathroom.

As I passed the mirror, I saw my wife's face in the reflection, and she looked sad, brushing her hair.  There was a sliding door moment. 

I had a choice.  I could sneak out of the bathroom and think, I don't want to deal with her sadness tonight; I want to read my novel.  But instead, because I am a sensitive researcher of relationships, I decided to go into the bathroom.  I took the brush from her hair and asked, "What is the matter baby?"  And she told me why she was sad.

Now, at that moment, I was building trust; I was there for her.  I was connecting with her rather than choosing to think only about what I wanted.  There are the moments, we have discovered, that build trust.

One such moment is not that important, but if you are always choosing to turn away, then trust erodes in a relationship--very gradually, very slowly."



Brene Brown, Daring Greatly

Examining your criticisms of your partner turns out to be an excellent way to gather information about yourself. 

How can you increase your knowledge of your partner's inner world? 

The answer is:
through improved channels of communication.

Throughout the course of your relationship, your partner has given you thousands of hours of testimony about his or her thoughts and feelings and wishes, but only a fraction of this information ever registered.  In order to deepen your understanding of your partner's subjective reality, you need to train yourself to communicate more effectively.

To do this, it helps to know something about semantics: even though you and your partner speak the same language, each of you dwells in a different world of private meanings.  Growing up in different families with different life experiences has given you private meanings. 

As an example, let's look at the invitation, "Let's play tennis."  This are simple words and they might mean entirely two different things to each partner. 

In Family A, the full unspoken definition of this phrase is:
"Let's grab any old racket that happens to be lying around, walk to the local park, and lob the ball back and forth across the net until someone want to quit.  Rules are secondary; it's the exercise that counts." 

In Family B, however, "Let's play tennis" has quite a different meaning.  It means:
"Let's reserve an indoor court at the private club, get out our two hundred dollar rackets, and then play tough, competitive tennis until one player is clearly the winner."

Mark, raised in Family A is going to be taken aback by the aggressiveness and determination that his wife, Susan, raised in Family B, brings to the game.

In each marriage or partnership, clear communication, deep listening, validation and feedback are key to affirming the internal logic that each of you bring to the relationship.



Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love you Want.

Going through gridlock in your marriage is much like climbing a mountain, if you feel in control of yourself, rather than trying to control the terrain and weather, you can relax and enjoy the climb.  When you are tense and feeling out of control, the climb feels far more difficult. 

It helps to keep in mind that you never really master the mountain--you have to climb several mountains before you feel confident of yourself--but you cannot wait until you feel safe and secure before you venture out for your first climb.

A good guideline that seems to work well with those in therapy is to "hold onto yourself."  It can become a mantra to center and refocus whenever events or interactions threaten to swamp them, This mantra sums up the process of self mastery and self control.

Self mastery and self control is about learning about yourself, confronting yourself and shifting to self validated intimacy and taking care of yourself, self soothing. 

Learning to take care of yourself nudges your marriage forward as well as your personal development and fundamentally changes how you and your partner interact.

Passionate Marriage - Schnarch

We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known.  We cultivate love when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness, and affection.

Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them--we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.

Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows.  Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed, and rare.

As we think of shame and love the most pressing question is this: 

Are we practicing love?

Yes, most of us are really good at professing it--sometimes ten times a day. 
But are we walking the talk? 
Are we being our most vulnerable selves? 
Are we showing trust, kindness, affection, and respect to our partners? 

It's not the lack of professing that gets us in trouble in our relationships,
it's failing to practice love that leads to hurt.





Brene Brown, Ph.D. ~ Daring Greatly

We all grew up with limitations, challenges, fears, and insecurities.

 If we believe that any of these things are the truth and the only truth of who we are, we will stay trapped in our stories.

Those are the patterns that are deeply ingrained in our subconscious mind and watch hopelessly as they take over our actions and our choices. 

How do we access our own courage until we remember who we really are?  How do we realize what we really want?  How do we  know how to contribute to  our lives when we carry our old stories?

We can let go of our human drama.  We can give up the stories that have ruled our lives and shatter the self-image we created to affirm our story.  We can recognize and admit to the ways we have confirmed our story and colluded with our past.  When we distinguish and let go of the beliefs that have kept us bound to the past we can move onto a greater future that is calling to us. 

We can be willing to give up any version of the self that limits us so that we can't become the strong, powerful, courageous person we were born to be in our lives. 

Life is filled with unlimited possibilities for who we can become.  How can we be our courageous self when we find our selves fearful or stuck in some area.  That is when we find ourselves frustrated, tired, bored, resigned, or unfilled.

It is with courage that we move forward dropping our backpacks of stories and memories down and leaving them to stay where they belong, in the past. 

Courage takes risk, and most specifically, the willingness to let go of that oxygen mask of the past we thought we needed.  To trust ourselves that there will be air to breath in
"the here and now." 

We risk the journey to a higher ground where there is freedom from the gravitational pull of our stories, the pull that comes from years of trying to prove that the stories we tell ourselves, the ones we've made up, are the truth, when they are not.

In order to make the best choices, we can make a fundamental and radical shift.  Rather than relating to courage as a resource that we tap into from time to time, we can allow courage to emerge and source our choices and infuse our lives.  The choice is ours to make. 

When we're standing in courage, we make powerful choices for ourselves.  We are no long standing on the shaky ground of a false self-image and tell a story from the past that requires that struggle.

  We tell ourselves the truth about whether our choices and if they make us feel weak, anxious, and insecure, or strong and powerful .

We ask ourselves, "Are our choices are coming from faith or are they coming from fear?"

Our power is internal, and courageous, we can become one who is unafraid of failure, setbacks or the disapproval of others.  Rather than continue to gather new pieces of evidence to support our old stories and to validate them, we begin to shift, convincing ourselves that
we are o.k. the way we are and that who we are today, is just right. 

Knowing ourselves, honoring who we are and our spirit, identifying what we want, what we believe in, and not chasing our cravings for love, approval and attention, then settling for emotional crumbs.
We can realize a self that is beautiful, empowered, scared, and  a holy self without apology, without explanation, without trepidation. 

Let the world see you and the magic of your dreams.  In that, you can discover happiness.



Debbie Ford, Courage

 

The common arsenal we perceive to protect our vulnerability seems to be a part of many people's personal armor.  Foreboding joy, or the dread that clamps down on momentary joyfulness; perfectionism, or believing that doing everything perfectly means you will never feel shame; and numbing, the embrace of whatever deadens the pain of discomfort and pain is perceived protection from our vulnerable self.

"In exploring joy, I realize it is one of the most difficult emotions to really feel.  Because we lose the ability or willingness to be vulnerable, joy becomes something we approach with deep foreboding.  This shift from our younger self's greeting of joy with unalloyed delight happens slowly and outside our awareness.  We don't seem to even know that it is happening or why..  We just know that we crave more joy in our lives, that we are joy starved." 

In a culture of deep scarcity, of never feeling safe, or enough, joy can feel like a setup.  "I wake up and feeling good, all is right with work, no major crises are happening, disaster must be lurking around the corner." 

Softening into joyful moments of our lives requires vulnerability.

"What was the most surprising and life changing moment for me was the nature of the reminder.  Vulnerability accompanies joy which is also an invitation to practice gratitude.  To acknowledge how truly grateful we are for the person, the beauty, the connection, or simply the moment before us.  Many describe joy as a spiritual way of engaging with the world that is connected to practicing gratitude."

Practicing gratitude is how we acknowledge that there is enough and that
we are enough. 

Joy comes to us in moments -- ordinary moments.  We miss risking out on joy when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary.   Being grateful for what I have is honoring what I have and also honoring what I have lost too. 

Softening into joy is uncomfortable.  Yes, it's vulnerable.  Every time we allow ourselves to lean into joy and give in to those moments, we build resilience and we cultivate hope.  The joy becomes part of who we are, and when bad things happen--and they do happen--we are stronger.

Brene Brown
Daring Greatly

After a quarrel, we know the moments when we find connection with our mate again: and the universe lights up.  These instances leap from the pages of novels, burn in our brains when we watch them in movies--or even in dusty research tapes--and, of course, entice us when they happen in our own precious relationships.  Everything comes together: suddenly all the blocks roll away, and there is an open, easy connection  But how did we get there?  If we don't know the path, how can we get there again?

A love relationship is never static; it ebbs and flows. 

If we want love to last, we have to grasp this face and get used to paying attention to and readjusting our level of emotional engagement.  Loving is a process that constantly moves from harmony to disharmony, from mutual attunement and responsiveness to mis-attunement and disconnection--and back again. 

But to really understand happens we have to zoom down into these interactions and atomize them.  Remember Seurat's painting: when we move in really close, we realize that the vast scenes are composed of thousands and thousands of little dots. 

Researchers are doing the same with love relationships.  By freeze-framing videos of romantic partners talking or arguing, and of babies playing with a parent, they are discovering how love, without our being aware, is shaped, for better or worse, in micro-moments and micro-moves of connection and disconnection.

What matters is if we can repair tiny moments of mis-attunement and come back into harmony, we can stay connected. 

Bonding is an eternal process of renewal.  Relationship stability depends not on healing hug rifs but on mending the constant small tears.

"What distinguishes master couples, the success in marriages", says John Gottman, relationship specialist, "is not the ability to avoid fights but the ability to repair routine disconnections."

As we take risks and confront our vulnerabilities, our trust grows--not just in our partners but also in ourselves.


Sue Johnson - Love Sense