Vulnerability: Showing Our True Selves

We spend a lot of our lives protecting ourselves from being hurt by others. Protecting yourself emotionally keeps others from seeing your truest self. When we show vulnerability, we can forge strong relationships with others.

Hiding Our Vulnerability

As adults, why do we work so hard to hide our vulnerability? Often, it is because pain from our past. Being the target of teasing and bullying as a child can cause us to hide our true selves. Sometimes, we protect ourselves emotionally because of emotional neglect or abuse at home as a child. Going through heartbreak from a romantic relationship can lead to shutting others out. Anytime that we deal with emotional pain, it can lead to shutting others out emotionally.

Risks And Opportunities

Opening up to others gets harder the longer that you’ve shut others out. But the only way that we can have a real relationship with value is to show vulnerability.

Being open to others can be risky and anxiety inducing. We fear being rejected when we are genuine with others. As long as we hide our true selves, rejection doesn’t sting as bad because we haven’t shown our true hearts to someone. When we expose our hearts to someone, rejection is the worst because the other person has rejected who we are at our core.

However, when we open up our true selves to someone that accepts us as we are at our core, it is the most satisfying feeling that we can experience. When someone accepts the true you, then you feel safe confiding in them, creating an even stronger bond between you.

Fulfillment In Relationships

When we show vulnerability to others that are accepting of our true selves, a remarkable thing happens; the people that we share ourselves with become more willing to share their true selves. When we share our genuine, authentic selves with each other, we form relationships that can be extremely long lasting and fulfilling. Without sharing our vulnerability, our lives can end up being a very lonely existance.

Housekeeping: In cleaning up unused WordPress plugins, I found that I’d never converted About Me: A Profile on Wayne Cochran and Poems: Songs From the Raven’s Nest to Block formatting, so that has been remedied, while also allowing me to delete a now unused plugin. I’ve also completed revisions to Songs That Make Me Cry – Top Ten.

Teaser: Come back next time, when we’ll be talking about influences from the past.