Vulnerability

If you haven't seen TED Talks, you should check them out. There's a lot of amazing stuff in there. After watching Dr. Brown's TED Talk on vulnerability in June of 2010, it stuck with me. There was clearly something deeply profound about what she was saying, but 20 minutes wasn't enough time to unpack everything she said. After spending some time mulling it, I thought I'd write a summary of what I got out of it.

She talks about how she wanted to better understand human connection – that thing that gives purpose and meaning to our lives. Connection is at the center of the human condition. In her experience, that ability to feel connected is “neurobiologically how we’re wired.” When she asked people about being connected, what she got was stories about being disconnected.

Once she began looking at this need to connect, “Very quickly, absolutely unraveled connection in a way that I didn't understand or had never seen. And it turned out to be shame.” Fundamentally, shame is a fear of disconnection. That whatever is shameful will result in being rejected, or disconnected from others. Shame creates a sense that we are unworthy of connection – “I’m not good enough. . . . I'm not _____ enough. I'm not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough.”

Following this realization, she looked more deeply into the other side of that coin -- those people that have “a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging.” Fundamentally, she wanted to look into these people that have a deep sense of worthiness. “I took all of the interviews where I saw worthiness, where I saw people living that way, and just looked at those.” She found that the words that echoed throughout those interviews described the concept of being “whole-hearted”. These whole-hearted people had compassion and kindness for themselves, which is required to have compassion and genuine kindness for others. This revealed an authenticity – a willingness to let go of who they thought they should be, and embrace who they were. It turns out that this is a requirement for connection.

In addition to this sense of authenticity, she discovered another fundamental requirement of this sort of connection – vulnerability. Her subjects didn’t discuss vulnerability in terms of comfort or discomfort as she heard in the shame interviews, but as a necessity. They were willing to invest in relationships that had no guarantees – they were willing to take risks in order to connect.

This realization was personally overwhelming for her, and she found that she struggled deeply with vulnerability. She describes this realization as a “breakdown." So she dove into the research once again, trying to understand our struggle with vulnerability. What she found was that vulnerability is a negative emotion. Through this research, she realized that we as a society tend to numb these emotions. She says, “I think there's evidence -- and it's not the only reason this evidence exists, but I think it's a huge cause --we are the most in-debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history. The problem is -- and I learned this from the research -- that you cannot selectively numb emotion.” I found it interesting that she also connected this to what we see today in religion and politics. “Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. I'm right, you're wrong. Shut up. That's it. Just certain. The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable we are, the more afraid we are. This is what politics looks like today. There's no discourse anymore. There's no conversation. There's just blame. You know how blame is described in the research? A way to discharge pain and discomfort.”

What is the result? How do we put these realizations into practice? I drew two conclusions from her talk. One is that the reward of genuine human connection is worth the risk of being vulnerable. The other, “…which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we're enough. Because when we work from a place I believe that says, ‘I'm enough,’ then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves." It's worth giving some serious consideration, both personally and professionally.