Embrace Vulnerability

The saying, “Embrace Vulnerability,” seems to be everywhere lately, including on a birthday card I received from my cousin I visited last month in California. While there, we had many meaningful conversations about our own journeys in search of self-acceptance, joy, and authenticity.

Let me state clearly, I hate feeling vulnerable. My readers who have survived a traumatic, life-altering event have experienced vulnerability at its worse and have learned to “numb vulnerability.” That seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do in a moment when our very existence (literally or figuratively) is at risk.

However, here is the catch and the real quote for today from a talk given by Brené Brown, PhD, LMSW, at the 2010 TedX conference in Houston (video of full talk is at the bottom of this post):

The problem is that you cannot selectively numb vulnerability. . . .when we numb [vulnerability], we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness, and then we are miserable.

In her research, Dr. Brown has found that people

. . . who really [had] a sense of worthiness. . . .[had] a strong sense of love and belonging. . . . They fully embraced vulnerability [emphasis added]. They believed that what made them vulnerable, made them beautiful. .

I have come to believe that what holds us back from embracing fully our journey to a new normal after trauma is our difficulty in learning to embrace our own vulnerability. A defensive action taken when our lives, at least as we have known them, are threatened becomes a barrier to our ability to once again experience joy, gratitude, and happiness, and we indeed remain miserable.

Learning to feel vulnerable, let alone embracing that vulnerability, is very, very difficult today. Our reptilian brains have become convinced that feeling vulnerable is a threat to our existence. Thus, our work on our journey to a new normal must include reprogramming our brains so we can once again experience the full range of emotions that makes us human.

After nearly five years, I still have a long way to go on allowing myself to feel vulnerable again, but reflecting on the need to embrace vulnerability is helping me to understand the next steps in my journey. All the deep breathing and other stress reducing activities I do, all the avoidance behavior I continue to engage in, will not truly address what is holding me back until I can learn to be vulnerable. I want to say, “once again,” but in reality I have spent most of my life trying to numb my sense of vulnerability, so perhaps this has made my journey harder than it needed to be. Therefore, I join the chorus of those saying, “Embrace your vulnerability,” and will keep saying it until I truly am able to do so.

A Solid Core

Today’s quote is a poem, still wet with virtual ink, written by my sister today, as a gift for my 59th birthday. She beautifully captures the fact that, while we see the world differently, we have a bond built on the solid core of love.

The Golden Coin

Sister, you and I are two sides
of the same golden coin, always
looking at the world at a 180-degree
difference, yet we stand back to back,
supported by the same solid core.

by Denise Weaver Ross (c)2013
http://www.deniseweaverross.com/

The Best Is Just Beginning

“Childhood is a magic place of dreams…where everything is possible and the best is just beginning”
–Joan Walsh Anglund (Childhood is a Time of Innocence, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964)

January 3, 2013

Tomorrow, January 4th, I begin my 60th year on earth. We Americans call it being 59, but my dad always looked ahead. Growing up, I didn’t think too much about the new year. I thought all the fuss was about my birthday! To be honest, we usually did celebrate my birthday on New Year’s Day since everyone had the day off. Regardless, for me the new year has been more than a new calendar, but also a new year of my own life.

I have saved two of Joan Walsh Anglund’s little books of poems all these years. Her poetry may be considered trite by the literati, but her amusing little sketches have always made me feel warm and safe, childlike, full of wonder at how simple life really could be if we saw the world anew, through the eyes of the child within.

I stand at the threshold of my 60th year on earth, and once again feel I am in that magic place of dreams, believing everything is possible and, yes, that the best is yet to come.

Inner Peace?

 “Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace”
  —attributed to the Dalai Lama

Inner peace. I believe that is something we all seek; I know I have; only I do not think I knew that was what I was looking for.

About 20 years ago, I sorted through a box of mementos I saved from childhood: a plastic flute from Cave of the Mounds, post cards from our three-week road trip to California (gas was only 14 cents/gallon), and, among the rest of the detritus, my elementary school report cards. I threw out the plastic flute and other things with which I no longer had an emotional attachment; then sat down to read my report cards.

If you were a child with ADHD and entered kindergarten in 1959, you will know that there was nothing peaceful about my grades in “Department” (usually a “D” or an “F”) nor about the comments made by my second grade teacher. I simply could not sit still nor be quiet. Life was so full of interesting things to think about, and if I thought about it, I talked about it. My father thought everything I said was fascinating! Not so my second-grade teacher.  At a parent-teacher conference, she told my parents, “You’ll enjoy Debbie, someday.” As my mother tells it, she grabbed  my 6′ 4″ father by the belt and pulled him back when he jumped up, leaned over the desk, and yelled at the teacher, telling her that he enjoyed me very much right now, and if she didn’t, she should quit teaching.

At age eight, the behavior of this teacher definitely messed with my ability to be at peace with myself. It was probably the beginning of my anxiously searching the faces of peers and authority figures to be sure I hadn’t offended them, said something I should not have said, or upset them for simply being the hyperactive, annoying child everyone but my family seemed to believe I was. I struggled hard to find this thing called “inner peace” and kept struggling right up until last year. (I should note here that I am very, very lucky to have had a family that has always loved and supported me and know that many people have not been as fortunate.)

Today’s quote assumes one already has inner peace. There would be no inner peace for me as long as I was anxiously searching the faces of others to be sure I was not giving offense. Inner peace for me has come from accepting myself for who I am, no matter what labels others pin on me. The less I worry about how others reactions to me, the less I react to them. The less I react to other people’s behavior, the quieter I become. The quieter I have become, the more I have found myself surrounded by people who accept me for who I am.

I therefore proffer the following paraphrase of this quote, “There can be no inner peace as long as one cares about the behavior of others more than one cares about oneself.”

Where Do I Put My Energy?

“Miracles start to happen when you give as much energy to your dreams as you do to your fears.” –Richard Wilkins* 

There are so many things we can fear in life, and those fears are often based on real events; events we have experienced personally or collectively. However, our rational fears are constantly inflamed to the point of irrationality by the endless reporting of tragic events in the media to the exclusion of all else. I was heartened that the immediate reaction after the shooting in Newtown was to focus on the heroes of that tragedy. Parents were encouraged to shield their children from the endless reporting on this event in order to keep them from becoming irrationally afraid. Then, this tragic event was pushed aside as the media began fanning the fears of our falling back into a recession due to the “fiscal cliff” and as a nation, we have continued to put more and more energy into our fears.

While the media tries to highlight the positive things happening in the world, the fact that millions of viewers cannot stop themselves from their virtual “onlooker slow down” keeps fanning the flames of our fears.  A woman I worked with would become absolutely paralyzed with fear whenever something tragic happened, whether it be the death of Princess Diana, the subway bombings in London, or the capsized cruise ship in the Mediterranean. She allowed these events to affect her choices in life, vowing to never ride a subway again or never go on a cruise.

In the quote above, Wilkins does not ask us to put away our fears. He does not ask us to ignore the events that induce these fears. Rather, he asks us to put an equal amount of energy into our dreams. My decision to stop looking back on tragic events of my past is inspired by this quote and by the mentorship of several important people in my life.

I had always scoffed at the idea of putting together a “dream board.” I did not have time to sit down like a kindergarten with pictures and glue. I had to put all my energy into preventing falling off my own personal fiscal cliff, or so I thought.

However, the Universe has kept pushing me in the direction of focusing on my dreams, on “following my bliss,” in trusting in God’s willingness to bless me. All I have to do is put as much energy into my dreams as I have put into the drive to prevent things I fear from happening. I have begun creating that dream board; I have begun listening to the still, quiet voice within me; I have tuned out the negative media clamor, and I am seeing the signs of miracles starting to happen in my life.

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*Wilkins, Richard. When God Asks: A Chance to Change. Nashville, TM: Thomas Nelson Pubishers, 2001.