In relationships, being weak is the act of exhibiting somebody precisely who you might be and the way you are feeling with out disguise, bravado, or ego defenses, exposing your self to the opportunity of harm or rejection.
“Being vulnerable means we make a conscious decision not to hide ourselves,” explains licensed {couples} therapist Alicia Muñoz, LPC. “This is risky because we can’t control how others will respond to us. It means others see who we truly are, and if they aren’t able to take us in, or appreciate our complexity, and they judge or reject us, it hurts deeply.”
To assist perceive what vulnerability seems to be like in observe, Muñoz affords the instance of how infants deal with feelings:
“Being vulnerable with someone means risking being your true self. For babies, this is easy. They’re effortlessly themselves. They feel sad and they cry. They feel happy and they smile. They experience pain and they flinch, gasp, or whimper. They’re afraid and they seek soothing and comfort. Babies haven’t yet learned to hide themselves or what they feel. As our brains get more sophisticated, and we experience losses and disappointments, and develop a sense of ourselves as separate from others, we learn to present ourselves to the world the way we want to be perceived. We learn to hide ourselves. When we feel sad, we laugh. When we feel scared, we act indifferent. When we feel jealous, we tell people we’re happy for them.”
As Muñoz factors out, individuals start to battle with vulnerability as a result of they concern getting harm—usually within the type of different individuals’s rejection, judgment, or betrayal. We might start to placed on a courageous face, act detached, suppress feelings, or step into a task meant to guard ourselves from these dangers.
“The irony is, when we do this, we end up robbing ourselves of the intimacy, connection, community, and love of the people who have the bandwidth and capacity to take us in as we are,” she says.