Meme: Valuable Vulnerability

David Burns who's one of the people who popularized CBT writes in The feeling good handbook (CBT workbook):

You can never be loved for your successes-only for your vulnerabilities. People may be attracted to you and may admire you if you are a great success. They may also resent and envy you. But they can never love you for your success.

I think that he's right that emotional vulerability is the key to creating personal connections.

He writes in When Panic Attacks: The New, Drug-Free Anxiety Therapy That Can Change Your Life-Broadway:

Self-Disclosure is based on the idea that your shame, and not your shyness, is the real enemy. Without the shame, shyness can actually be an asset because it can make you seem more vulnerable and attractive. But if you’re shy, you probably won’t believe that, because the shyness and shame are so tightly intertwined in your mind.

I think Burns is a good source for understanding the concept in more depths.

One possible reason is that it facilitates trust-building. Say you are stuck in a cell with another prisoner, and every day you have the chance to cooperate or defect on a small task (for example, sharing food equally vs trying to steal an unequal share). Later, you are asked to testify against each other and get a slightly reduced sentence in exchange for the other person having a drastically increased sentence. A history of the other person cooperating gives some evidence that they will cooperate in this new situation as well.

Another analogy to this would be the process of building credit. If you take out lots of loans and pay them back scrupulously, you build a history of credit worthiness. The banks are more willing to be vulnerable based on past behavior of not defaulting.

Well, I followed a policy of strict emotional regulation, and it made me anhedonic for more than a decade. I'm actively working on feeling things, whereas previously, I would have described my emotional state almost entirely in terms of equanimity, although, since I didn't know the word, I used an artful description of same. (In an emotional state, I would describe myself as balancing on top of a very narrow tower, where emotions were winds attempting to knock me down.)

Which is to say - in my experience, you don't get to pick and choose which emotions you experience. If you start refusing some, you'll discover they all fade away. This is initially extremely attractive, if you're experiencing intense negative emotions, but in the long-term, I believe the term for the mental state this produces is "clinical depression".

It's better to learn to cope with your emotions than to attempt to refuse them.

I thought Mark Manson explained it well:

I want you to think of vulnerability in a more broad way. Not just emotional vulnerability (although we’ll get to that), but physical vulnerability, social vulnerability.

For instance, making yourself vulnerable doesn’t just mean being willing to share your fears or insecurities. It can mean putting yourself in a position where you can be rejected, saying a joke that may not be funny, asserting an opinion that may offend others, joining a table of people you don’t know, telling a woman that you like her and want to date her. All of these things require you to stick your neck out on the line emotionally in some way. You’re making yourself vulnerable when you do them.

In this way, vulnerability represents a form of power, a deep and subtle form of power. A man who’s able to make himself vulnerable is saying to the world, “I don’t care what you think of me; this is who I am, and I refuse to be anyone else.” He’s saying he’s not needy and that he’s high status.

Most people think of a man who’s vulnerable as a man who cowers in the corner and begs others to accept him or not hurt him. This is not vulnerability, this is weakness and neediness.

Think of it this way, there are two men. One stands tall, looks straight ahead. Looks people in the eye when he speaks to them. Says what he thinks and is unconcerned with what others think of him. When he makes a mistake, he shrugs it off and maybe apologizes. When he sucks at something, he admits it. He’s unafraid to express his emotions, even if that means he gets rejected. He has no problem moving on to people who don’t reject him, but like him for who he is.

Now, the second man hunches over, eyes dart around and is unable to look someone in the eye without getting uncomfortable. He puts on a cool persona that is always aloof. He avoids saying things that may upset others, and sometimes even lies to avoid conflict. He’s always trying to impress people. When he makes a mistake, he tries to blame others or pretend like it didn’t happen. He hides his emotions and will smile and tell everyone he’s fine even when he’s not. He’s scared to death of rejection. And when he is rejected, it sends him reeling, angry, and desperate to find a way to win back the affection of the person who doesn’t like him.

Which one of these two men is more powerful? Which one is more vulnerable? Which one is more comfortable with himself? Which one do you think women would be more attracted to?

Going back to the evolutionary perspectives we discussed in Chapter 1, vulnerability makes perfect sense as an indicator to women of a male’s status and fitness. Let’s say there’s a tribe of 20 men, all hunter gatherers, all men with more or less equal possessions (or lack thereof).

Some of the men in the tribe are constantly reactive to what the other men tell them. They don’t admit faults. They change their behavior and what they say to win the approval of the other men. When something doesn’t go their way, they look to blame someone else. What would this say about their status in their tribe? If they’re basing all of their behavior on the approval of the other men and are constantly covering for their weaknesses, it says that they’re low status, not trustworthy, needy, and probably not going to be a dependable father.

Now imagine other men in the same tribe who are unfazed by the neediness or temper tantrums of the other men around them. They focus purely on their task at hand and don’t change their behavior based on what others think of them. When challenged, they stand up for themselves, but when wrong they also admit their fault, as they see no reason to hide their weakness. They have a sense of honor. They don’t react to any of the other men around them, rather, the other men react to him.

This behavior implies high status, a man who is dependable, comfortable in his strengths and weaknesses, a man who can be counted on and who is likely to rise through the ranks and provide for his family.

Military bonding is an interesting comparison. Training in a professional military relies on shared suffering to build a strong bond between the members of a unit. If we model combat as an environment so extreme that vulnerability is inescapable, the function of vulnerability as a bonding trait makes sense.

It also occurs to me that we almost universally have more control over how we signal emotions than how we feel them. The norm would therefore be that we feel more emotions than we show; by being vulnerable and signaling our emotions, other people can empathize instinctively and may feel greater security as a result.

What do you think is the main rationale for this idea, and do you think it is a good policy?

I think emotional vulnerability as it's commonly intended means being emotionally open, not emotionally fragile. Open to mean that you're not ashamed of what you feel, whatever that might be, and others have a honest reading about what you feel.

I think this is usually defined as being in a state where what you observe is liable to create negative emotions in you (or in some definitions, a variety of emotions).

I think that the variety of emotions definition makes more sense. It's about being open to possibilities, even if some of those possibilities are heartbreaking.

In other words, it is about taking emotional risks. I suppose it would be possible to go through life taking as few risks as possible....but such a life would be stunted in some ways. Risk-taking is not always valuable, but it is sometimes valuable.

Emotions usually have a use. Being emotionally "secure" means to choose your mental actions so to avoid possibility of negative emotions. If you allow yourself to be emotionally vulnerable you do not sensor your emotions and their usefullness away from you. That is you allow the state of the world to influence you and do not let your self identity to hijack your mental state.

You should look into Brene Brown's stuff. Here's a TED talk

From these comments i'm getting the impression that:

• Being vulnerable here means some mix of being emotional, being compassionate, and being connected.

• The idea is to be lightly vulnerable, or vulnerable within limits.

• The name 'vulnerability' has the effect of emphasizing the paradox of desiring instability.