Vulnerability is scary, but failure to be open guarantees loss of love

By David McElroy · May 20, 2013

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about emotional vulnerability. I wrote about this subject about 15 months ago after I discovered social work researcher Brené Brown. I found her TED talk on the subject terribly compelling.

As I’ve continued to think and read about this, I keep uncovering new things to understand about myself — sometimes things I’m not so happy to discover. I knew that the dysfunctional home in which I grew up left all of us feeling shame and fear, but I seem to keep uncovering new layers of the effects it’s had on the ways I’ve lived my life so far.

Over the weekend, I had an epiphany of sorts when I realized the role that shame and lack of vulnerability played when I lost someone important to me about four years ago. I think I’d sort of already known, but it somehow came together in a very clear way that dropped a load of bricks on my head. Or heart. I’m not sure which.

I didn’t realize this for a long time, but I don’t like to take emotional risks, because I’m afraid of being hurt. If you happened to see the piece I wrote for Mother’s Day last week, you might understand why I have a long-term fear of losing women I love. I’ve understand that piece of the puzzle for years, but I don’t think I’d been clear on the fact that I set myself up to lose someone I wanted badly by not being vulnerable — by pulling back when trusting more was the healthy and loving thing to do.

So here’s what I realized.

When we make ourselves vulnerable to someone we love, we’re risking being hurt badly. The more we love someone, the more power we give to the person, so the common unconscious tendency is to hold back parts of ourselves. If we’re vulnerable with a loved one, that person might hurt us deeply. But if we’re not vulnerable, we’re dooming ourselves to losing the love we want, because love won’t flourish where things are hidden. So being emotionally vulnerable with someone is tremendously risky, but not being vulnerable is a guarantee of losing love — and of emotional isolation and unhappiness which are far worse.

Some of us are really good at building walls and fences — and some of us are good at choosing partners who are going to have just as much trouble being vulnerable as we do. (If you’re scared of being vulnerable, isn’t it a great unconscious defense to choose someone who isn’t going to insist on you opening up, because that person is busy with his or her own issues?)

People sometimes even try to justify the walls they put up. I’m sure you’ve heard variations of the common line of pseudo-wisdom that says, “Sometimes we put up walls not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to knock them down.”

If you’re putting up walls and fences, it’s your job to bring them down. Nobody else can do it for you. As long as the walls and fences — and various other defenses — are up, you’re going to find excuses to keep someone else out. And you’re going to blame it on the other person. There’s always something wrong with her. (Or with him.)

As long as you’re scared and have your walls up to keep others out, your heart is going to be left suffocating inside those cold and lonely walls. Allowing yourself to take a chance on someone is scary. Trusting enough to give up control can be terrifying for some of us. But the alternative to taking a chance is even worse. I have personal experience with that.

I won’t make that mistake again.

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Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

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The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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