There has been some good discussion about vulnerability, and I want to extend that to how our response to vulnerability is different if we’ve had trauma in our background.
Brené Brown defines vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. I am going to add to that the feeling or state of being unprotected, without your guard up.
We see that vulnerability is both a condition and a feeling when we consider that we can be in a (physically or emotionally) vulnerable/unprotected situation without the feelings that generally accompany vulnerability. Other inner resources can come up that leave us feeling more confident, perhaps even indestructible on a deeper level. (On the physical level no one is indestructible.) Or our defenses can numb us or put blinders on so we are blithely unaware of risk. In other words, we can be in unprotected situations that involve some risk and exposure without feeling vulnerable.
The flip side is we can feel vulnerable even when risk and danger are minimal. Vulnerability happens as we come out of our shell, which I’ll talk more about below. I find it noteworthy that my most intense feelings of vulnerability often happen when I am doing deep inner work alone, crawling out of my armor or loosening my self-boundaries. Just the state of openness can feel intensely vulnerable.
Vulnerability and Trauma
An example of normal vulnerability on the physical level is being in an open area during an electrical storm or playing a sport where you could get hurt. On an emotional level, you feel vulnerable when there is risk of embarrassment or rejection, as when you initiate closeness and may be rebuffed.
In trauma the exposure is to massive harm. On the physical level it often involves imminent danger with no way to escape or protect yourself. On the emotional level, trauma involves the sense that your sanity or survival are at risk.
To the traumatized psyche, vulnerability is associated not just with social discomfort–it feels like life or death. Even though the context may be something as simple as letting another see your feelings or your dependency, it feels out-of-proportion dangerous.
Because traumatic events impress our nervous systems more than non-traumatic events, they “load” our response to situations the quick-comparison center of the brain sees as similar.
Vulnerability for trauma survivors in complicated by additional feelings and behaviors that have, by association, become coupled with vulnerability. Some of these include hypervigilance, helplessness, and the overwhelm that usually occurs in traumatic situations.
Things as simple as having your mouth open or your back to a door or your legs in a more relaxed, open position, can bring vulnerability if associated with past trauma. Publishing or posting something on the internet may feel exceedingly vulnerable as you have no control over where it is going. For some of my clients being visible feels dangerous.
This makes tolerating the vulnerability of daily life, relationships, and even inner growth especially difficult.
Coming Out of Your Shell
We have all, on some level, learned to try to protect ourselves from vulnerability. A primary defense is psychological armoring, where we build a hard shell around ourselves, like a turtle or a snail.
Indeed, there are situations where you need this shell: when violent things are happening around you or when other ways of protecting yourself have not yet developed or are disarmed.
The shell is the structure you developed to protect yourself. It consists of physical tension as well as other defenses, such as avoidance, isolation, internalized rules and prohibitions constructed to keep you safe, and trying to control what people can see in you.
The problem with the shell is that it separates you from your softer, more delicate essential nature and from more tender, intimate bonds with people.
Coming out of this shell can be a very long and difficult process. In addition to setting off all your alarms, any thinning of this shell defense can leave you feeling uncontained or out of control.
Trauma survivors quite understandably associate not being in control with being hurt, and learning to relax this control brings up feelings of vulnerability.
Uncontained is also a little dicey. If you have a trauma history, not having something protective around you, being “uncontained,” may also remind you of the dispersal you may have felt during episodes of dissociation.
Yet uncontained is not always dangerous. One of the most enjoyable examples is when we are silly and can’t stop laughing. We can be without a hard separating boundary and not float off in space if we know how to keep anchored in the body and the present moment.
We need to understand that we can be without the shell without being defenseless. In most cases we still have the instinctive defenses (fight and flight), we have verbal defenses (yell, scream, defend boundaries, or softer versions like telling people what we need), we have behavioral defenses (ways we use common sense and caution to mitigate danger, like locking your door at night or being discriminating about where you meet a potential date).
A Wise Bit of Protection
It is hard for those who have had many deeply damaging experiences to realize that there is also a vulnerability that is chosen. This is the vulnerability that allows you to become closer to your partners and friends. This is you outside the shell, available for contact. It may involve extending yourself in an uncharacteristic way, like being more affectionate or transparent.
Emotional vulnerability is letting yourself be seen and known. That takes trust that others are not out to hurt you, although in their clumsiness they may inadvertently step on your feelings.
With people who have proven themselves to be untrustworthy, it is wise to protect what is not yet “hardy” in you. Your emerging qualities, for example, need a safe place to develop. The more you allow these qualities to be seen and get a positive response, the more resilient they become. You get used to operating with them and they become integrated into you.
We need to learn that vulnerability is not automatically dangerous, although in those most impressionable traumatic experiences it was extremely dangerous. This is not only a conscious head-type realization, but needs to ripple through our entire being, including our body, implicit memory, and unconscious.
If we avoid making ourselves vulnerable, we never experience new learning, so are stuck in our old defaults. We need to see the feared consequences don’t always happen, and that requires risk.
If you’ve experienced a lot of trauma in your life, most likely you need to be “gentled” into vulnerability, one step at a time, not thrust into situations where you have no control. This means setting small goals, getting support (internal, external, or both), and taking in your successes. You may need to reassure the scared parts inside.
If you have a history of dissociation and you take too big of a risk, you will likely short-circuit and reinforce the defense of dissociation rather than desensitize your system to being vulnerable. So slow is good.
Be really compassionate. Your system is not on hair-trigger alert for no reason. But it needs to be reset, and that will involve vulnerability.
Learning to be vulnerable is a crucial step in healing from trauma.
Please consider sharing this with those you love who are challenged with vulnerability and may have a trauma background.
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