How Building Safety Within Ourselves Leads to Experiencing Vulnerability With Others
For many years I have struggled with emotional vulnerability. I find it hard to believe that there are people out there with the curiosity, space, and intention to get to know all levels of who I am, even though I carry this desire for closeness towards all the people in my life.
This was a major hindrance to the intimacy of my relationships until recently. What has helped evaporated this ambivalence toward letting people in, you may ask?
I realized that I had to be a safe place for myself first before I could experience safety within other people.
Let me explain.
It’s easy to believe based on the narratives we see in rom-coms and social media that it takes one significant, emotionally intelligent, caring person to crack us open, and this is how we learn to love ourselves. Now, I’m absolutely not ridiculing this idea, as for many of us this may be true. A vital part of any intimate relationship is about encouraging each other to embrace all parts of ourselves.
But for those of us with a history of being disappointed after sharing deeper parts of us, or who may have abandonment wounds that make us fearful about bringing our guard down, trusting others with our stories is not so simple. There can be a lot of shame surrounding past traumatic experiences, past mistakes that we’ve made, and possibly past versions of ourselves that we’ve been, which can be hard to surmount when we are probed to be vulnerable. This shame can be compounded if we have ever sought out validation from others about those experiences, without it being received in the ways that we hoped it would.
If you can relate any of your feelings to the previous paragraph, I see you. I need you to know that you can release any guilt or remorse that you may hold around how you may once have sought love and acknowledgment from others. The desire to be seen is one of the most human yearnings to have, and it is possible to build lasting trust and safety within others despite our past. It’s about amending what that looks like within ourselves first before we try to build it with other people.
Building safety within ourselves means learning to meet all versions of ourselves with acceptance, love, and compassion. It means reconciling with our regrets and forgiving ourselves for what we may have done with what we had then. It means reflecting on those past versions of ourselves and our past ways of walking through life and using that insight to learn about the things that the deeper parts of us desire.
From here, the next step is neither putting your life on a billboard nor being okay with everything that has happened to you. This inner journey is simply about learning to love all parts of yourself before you rely on someone else to claim them as worthy.
Before we can look to someone else to love us, we need to first learn how we want to be loved, and that starts from within.
Before we can stand in the truth of who we are, we have to read our own stories to remember how we got to where we are and where we go from here.
Before we can look to anyone to meet our needs, we need to know that we can hold ourselves up in the event in the event that they cannot.
This process isn’t about learning to never rely on anyone again. I’m not saying that developing this kind of self-inquiry will make you immune to pain nor take away your fear of vulnerability completely. Sharing pieces of your story will always take courage, and it’s important to remember that that depth of knowledge is not a right that you need to afford to everyone.
What I am trying to say is, that when you can accept yourself before relying on someone else to accept you so you can then love yourself, your vulnerability will not feel like a threat to your being. It will be a gift that you are offering another person to engage in deeper connection with them, and an opportunity for them to help you see yourself in ways that you may not yet have seen yourself.
