The Benefits of Vulnerability: Human Connection

Being vulnerable with yourself first and foremost is incredibly important as it allows you to understand more deeply your experiences and emotions. Once you start practicing vulnerability with yourself you may find that you have the confidence to start sharing more with other people - not anyone and everyone in your life, but the right person. The person who will support you and listen to you and hold space for you.

The funny thing is, when we open up to each other, we find out that we have even more in common than we realize. This has happened to me so many times in my life where I had the courage to be vulnerable and share something that I was going through with someone, and it created a closer bond between us than I expected. The gift of being vulnerable with others breeds connection, deeper relationships, and feelings of support for both you and the other person.

Every time I have taken the risk and been vulnerable, my support system has grown stronger and closer. Here are three stories from my life where being vulnerable has connected me closer to the people around me:

Childhood Trauma Unveiled

As I left my home for college and set off to California to start anew, I thought that I could simply leave the chaos behind me. But as I began to acclimate to my new life, I was still struggling to juggle everyday student life and my mental health. Looking back now, I can see that I was experiencing the beginning symptoms of PTSD. I had bouts of depression, social anxiety, and felt completely disconnected from people. I struggled to make friends. But I definitely lucked out my junior year and met a few ladies who I then lived with in my senior year on a whim and who went on to become my closest girlfriends. The network of support I needed so much.

One night, my roommate and I were laying in our beds just talking, as we often did. I don't remember exactly how this story came up, but I was sharing with her a very upsetting memory of mine from growing up. Even then, almost ten years later, it made me cry and brought up really intense feelings (now I recognize those feelings as triggers). My roommate listened and shared experiences from her own adverse childhood, telling me that what happened to me was not okay. That it was traumatic and abusive and wron​​g. That was news to me! Up until that time in my life, I had internalized this experience as my fault (which is often what children of abuse do).

Children who experience adverse conditions growing up often don't know what is normal because the abuse is so normalized. It's common for them to internalize it and carry around the responsibility of not being good enough, not being grateful enough, not being well-behaved enough. It weighs on you just as it had been weighing on me, making me feel like I was a horrible person who didn't deserve belonging.

Since that night, it has still taken me time to process and understand and heal that memory, but sharing it with my roommate was incredibly healing. It helped me to understand that it wasn't my fault, and when I shared that pain with my roommate and she held space for me, I not only believed that I belonged, I also felt it in our connection.

Secrets Don’t Make Friends

From the outside looking in, most people would have had no idea what was going on within my family as I was growing up. And that’s the way we wanted it. A conversation with a childhood  friend about 5 years ago confirmed that we did a pretty good job of keeping it all hush-hush. Her family did too. After years of growing up with each other - living in neighborhoods across the street from each other, sitting in classrooms together, playing at each other's houses - we were finding out for the first time that both of our home lives growing up were affected by mental illness.

I remember being a little bit afraid to ask her about her family, but I knew that the connection on the other side of that question was worth moving past that fear. Once I did open up and ask her, I could hardly believe the similarities in what we experienced growing up.

Growing up, loneliness was a prevalent feeling. I didn't think there was anyone out there who would understand, so it was almost painful to find out so much after the fact that I could have had a friend and support through those tough years. We shared lunches and homework, but never the secret that could have linked us together for support.

I learned a big lesson through this experience: When we keep things secret, when we don’t let others in to support us, we miss out on a lot of our shared struggles. You’d be surprised to find out that in a room full of strangers, you can find a multitude of shared struggles, if only you can open up to each other. 

Opening Up to the Possibilities

Last year I launched my blog, and one of the first blogs that I posted was about my childhood and about realizing that it was more than just dysfunctional family antics - it was trauma. Writing about my past was an incredibly triggering and intense experience for me, partly because my memory from growing up is so fragmented, but also because the pandemic was in its beginning stages at the time. I wrote it because I knew my story was powerful, and I knew that there was someone out there who needed to hear it in order to better understand their own past. 

Along with the blog, I sent out a newsletter entitled “What's the big Family Secret?”  and one of my friends on my email list turned out to be that person who needed to hear the story. We had known each other for 3 years and by then we had a tight yoga relationship. We exchanged yoga for design services (back when that was my career). Even when she moved to the Pacific Northwest, we still did yoga virtually on a regular basis, and in all those years we never once bridged the gap from surface-level friends to a real, deep connection.

Once again I found myself in a conversation with someone close to me and confronted with the fact that we had very similar experiences with dysfunctional family systems. When I opened up and was vulnerable about my past, my yogi friend recognized our shared connection and we were able to connect on a deeper level that we had been missing out on for years.

It's through these experiences that I know deeply how freeing and supportive it is to connect with others through vulnerable sharing.

Kindness is Not Enough

I’ve been seeing and hearing versions of this quote a lot lately: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” It’s a great quote (and I'm all for being kind!), but as I work through the Vulnerability Challenge, I’ve been thinking what if instead of just being kind we were vulnerable and open? It’s lovely to be kind, but just kindness doesn’t get you any closer to knowing what they are battling and possibly even finding out that their battle is quite similar to one of yours. We are missing out on the opportunities to connect more deeply with each other and not just practice kindness, but develop empathy and create a network of support as we continue forward in our fight together, in community.