Three Ways to Deal With Feeling Vulnerable

When are you most likely to feel vulnerable? To feel scared of being revealed or anxious that others will see you as flawed?

Labelled early on as ‘too sensitive,’ I learned to hide my feelings out of fear that I would be further criticised. I buried them deep so that on the surface I was pleasant and easy to get along with. Underneath I was a roiling mess.

It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be liked. It more that I didn’t want to be seen. I was scared to be seen because I knew there was something wrong with me, I just didn’t know what.

Fast forward to one of my first sessions in therapy when my therapist asked, “Where’s your emotional life?” I had no clue what she meant. I went home and drew a picture of the dessert, a lone tumbleweed blowing across a vast emptiness. I had so successfully buried my feelings that my emotional range was probably a finger’s width apart.

Digging down to find my emotional life opened me wide-open. I felt stripped of my skin, and vulnerable beyond what felt tolerable.

Vulnerability is a funny emotion because it’s not about one thing: it’s about rejection, lack of reciprocity, attack, betrayal, or the loss of our autonomy. It’s about the shame of being found out as being something other than what you’ve presented. It’s about someone seeing…