Trust, vulnerability, & trauma
We all know the ways to deeper emotional intimacy requires that we allow ourselves to be both trusting and vulnerable. Investing in emotional intimacy asks us to take a leap of faith, the give someone information about ourselves that the other could use against us. It invites us to be tender, with ourselves and the other.
It also asks us to step outside our own comfort zone, to put down our self-protective behaviors that prevent intimacy and instead learn new ways of being that invite connection. Not an easy task when our brains have been wired to distrust, to remain isolated and disconnected (from ourselves and others) to stay safe. Not a simple task when learned at too early an age that love equals abuse or neglect (or often both), that expressing our thoughts or emotions is met with harm and or ridicule.
Not an easy nor simple task at all. In addition to rewiring our brains, we also need to learn our own discernment and self-trust. Not everyone actually is safe-enough to know our inner thoughts and emotions. Not everyone has the capacity to hold what we may want to give them. Not everyone is capable of seeing us as we are.
Wanting to be seen and heard, to be understood, is a very natural human condition. The issue crops up when we try to insist that we be seen, heard, and understood by people who are unable to do so. This is where our own discernment and self-trust needs to come in - to know the difference between if our reluctance to share a part of ourselves with another is because they actually are unable to receive it or because of our own conditioning from childhood.
Learning to trust ourselves, invites us to self-reflect, to come into the present moment, to be in our body, to connect to all our younger, wounded, protective parts and integrate them. It is a slow process. It can be a painful practice. And ultimately it is in fact a practice, and something we have the opportunity to fine tune for the rest of our lives.
What I’m learning about trust and vulnerability, is that humans are complex. A person may be safe-enough one day and not safe at all the next. We may be highly attuned with our mind, body, and soul one moment, and completely disconnected the next. We are both predictable and chaotic and suprising. We are complicated, contradictory, and contain multitudes.
So if humans are so complex and ultimately can be untrustworthy, what is the point of being vulnerable, knowing we will likely be hurt in the end?
What I’m finding for myself,
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