Faint heart never won fair lady....

Summary - We need to come to terms with our shortcomings and be vulnerable in order to have successful relationships. We numb our fear with food, alcohol and a host of other things, and become numb to all feelings. This makes us depressed and unable to empathise with others. Ultimately,  we then lack the strength and passion that we need if we are to change things.

In June, I wrote a piece on shame, inspired by the work of social work researcher Brenė Brown. Shame was a small part of her research, which was about the power of vulnerability.

Her premise is that for all of us, men and women, boys and girls, our main focus is on connection, our ability to feel connected. That’s why we are here, on some level. Shame (“I’m not good enough”) is about the fear of disconnection.

In order to truly connect, to have real relationships that are authentic, then shame, judgement, and comparison have to be absent. And this means that in order to be really loved, we have to feel that we are worthy of love and belonging. We have to have the courage to be imperfect, and the compassion to be kind to ourselves. We have to be willing to let go of who we think we ought to be, in order to be who we truly are.

Vulnerability is a crucial part of being connected, of having intimate and loving relationships with the people who are important to us. In order to be intimate, we have to be seen. Not just the parts of us that we present to the public, but all of us. A good analogy is our sexual relationships. In order to have sex, we have to take our clothes off. We have to expose the saggy bits, the scarred bits, the wrinkly bits. All the parts that we don’t show to anyone else! It makes us feel vulnerable, to want to turn the lights off, or to keep our pyjamas on, but it’s a risk we have to take if we want sex. Relationships are the same. In order to be close to people, in order to love and be loved, we have to have the courage to be imperfect. It’s a fearful risk, because we risk rejection, we risk losing, and we risk disconnection. But in order to truly be connected, to be intimate, we have to make ourselves vulnerable. That’s the conundrum! We can only love and be loved if we are willing to have our hearts broken. We can only create and innovate if we accept that we may fail.

Someone has to be the first to dare to say “I love you”. Someone has to be the first to say “You are all that I want”. And we all need to take risks, to invest in something that may or may not succeed, in order create, in order to achieve, and in order to love. As Brown says, vulnerability is the birthplace of joy and creativity.

Because vulnerability is so painful, and such a risk, we numb it out. We do that with food, or alcohol, or computer games, or tv - whatever is our painkiller of choice. It’s a story most of us will recognise. Rather than expose our imperfections, and take a risk, we will numb ourselves out. That’s why I am looking at Brown’s work, in amongst trying to lose weight this year, it’s because I recognise that numbing. I know that if I am trying to do something that’s risky, that’s out of my comfort zone - writing a blog, being honest with my family about how I feel, acknowledging the personal losses of the past 6 months - then I rush to the kitchen and raid the food cupboards. How do I deal with driving to one end of the country to the other on my own, something I have to do regularly but feels like a big risk? Well, I eat my way through, from service station to service station, numbing my anxiety with wraps and coffee and sushi. Me and vulnerability, we don’t get on. That’s why my weight is not under control, because I numb my fear with food.

And that’s Brown’s point really. You can’t numb selectively. When you numb your feelings of vulnerability (“I’d like to write a book/make a sculpture/travel the world. But it’s too scary, and I might fail. I’ll eat this chocolate brownie instead”), then you numb all your feelings. You numb joy, gratitude, happiness, you numb love and compassion, and you numb the anger you feel that could help you change things. No wonder there are so many people on anti-depressants in our world, so many addicts, so many lonely people, and so much obesity.

The other consequence of the fear of the pain of vulnerability is that we armour ourselves. We protect ourselves from being hurt by shutting our hearts away, by not letting anyone near enough to hurt us. The armour does work, it means we can’t be hurt, but again the armour is not selective. Like numbing ourselves with food and drink, the armour protects us from everything, not just the pain of being hurt or of failing. It means we literally can’t bend, we can’t respond, we can’t feel the pain of others, and we can’t be proactive in righting wrongs or pursuing dreams.

To some extent, we wear armour because there is so much pain in the world. This is not just my pain and my fear of being hurt that I am protecting myself against. I am protecting myself from the pain of children dying from the lack of clean water in Africa, from the terror of the people of Syria, from all the sadness of the rescue dogs and cats that stay in kennels and get put down every year. The list is endless. But that armour stops me feeling the pain and the anger, and it is pain and anger that will change things. It’s pain and anger that drives people to protest, to fight, to innovate, to create solutions and to make our world a better place.

The other casualty of our armour is empathy.

Now here is a technical bit, because we need to understand the difference between empathy and sympathy. With sympathy, you feel for the other person. You might say “You poor thing”, or “What a shame” but there is distance between you and the object of your sympathy. You feel sorry for them, but you aren’t feeling the same as them. You aren’t vulnerable to their struggle, and in essence you are not connected to them. You are still armoured, and still numb.

With empathy, you feel with the other person. You don’t judge them, you look at the situation from their perspective, and you recognise their feelings. You are present, engaged, and vulnerable as they are vulnerable. The golden rule when attempting to be empathetic is not to try to make it better or to look on the bright side but to find an appropriate way to communicate, whether by touch or body language or words, your awareness and understanding of their feelings. Empathy is primarily about connection.

So, when we are “suited and booted” - armoured and numb - we don’t feel empathy. We don’t feel for others, in fact we don’t even feel for ourselves, and because of this we lack the tenacity and grit to make things happen. We become passive observers, searching for someone to blame so that we can discharge our anger and run away. For example, in this country we don’t make an issue about the money wasted on unproven vaccines in the NHS (see our recent posting on Facebook re the HPV vaccine) but we blame ‘health tourism’ for the financial crisis in our health service. We don’t look after our old folk but we complain about immigration - even though those very immigrants are doing the very jobs we don’t want to do in our care homes.

For me Brown’s research makes sense. In my next blog, I want to look at what we can do with our fear and our feelings of vulnerability, how we can use them to help us become happier and more fulfilled in our lives. Please feel free to talk to me about any of these issues, either in person, or by text, email, phone or Facebook.