Author Brené Brown humorously proclaims herself a professional “vulnerability avoider.” In the safety of her research, she spent 12 years studying everything there is to know about vulnerability and its relationship to shame. With the data collected, she was confronted with a choice: to dare greatly in the face of vulnerability, or to recoil in shame. This book provides practical insight into the nature of vulnerability and how it directly impacts the human experience.

Being vulnerable is not a trait reserved for a certain gender or the sentimental souls among us. Vulnerability is simply the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure inherent in life. We all face the same choice: engage with life on its own terms or run and hide. The title of this book was inspired by Theodore Roosevelt’s famous speech “Citizenship in a Republic.” In his speech, Roosevelt imagines the good life as an arena in which the man who enters must do so while, “daring greatly.” Vulnerability is when you put yourself out there, engaging with life in the arena rather than from the sidelines. Most often, we try to avoid being vulnerable because we are afraid. We fear vulnerability because we see it as weakness. The allure of building an invulnerable self is seductive, but it doesn’t exist in the human experience. We must be willing to engage with vulnerability, whether that be in a new relationship, through a difficult conversation, or amidst the inevitable challenges of parenting.

Vulnerability is often associated with dark emotions like fear, shame, and sadness. We avoid feelings that we associate with vulnerability because these “dark emotions” are precisely the ones that we don’t want to express, even when they profoundly impact the way we parent, love, and lead. Vulnerability is not the composite of dark emotions; it is the core of all feeling. To feel anything at all is to be vulnerable. If we choose to disengage from any emotion, whether it be dark or light, we exile our emotional lives and risk numbing the center of all feeling—including those feelings we all want, such as joy, love, and empathy.

The word vulnerable means “to wound” or “capable of being wounded,” whereas weakness is defined as “the inability to withstand attack or wounding.” From a purely linguistic perspective, one could make the argument that weakness stems from a lack of vulnerability, for if ignored, the risk of being hurt increases. If vulnerability is weakness, why does it look like strength in others? We’re inspired when people face failure and trials with raw honesty and openness, yet we shame ourselves when we feel weak amidst similar challenges. The crux of the struggle is that we want to see vulnerability in others but don’t want to be vulnerable ourselves. If we want our children or a loved one to be vulnerable with us, we must reject this double standard and enter the arena ourselves. 

The world doesn’t need another awkward moment of indiscriminate disclosure or celebrity information dumps. Vulnerability is associated with over-sharing, but true vulnerability is communicated within boundaries and is based on trust. Without trust, vulnerability is wasted on those who have not earned the right to hear you. We won’t always have a one hundred percent guarantee before we risk opening up with somebody, but there is no reason to bare our souls with everyone we meet.

Without boundaries, vulnerable communication can lead to disconnection and distrust. Just like any good thing, vulnerability can be mishandled. This happens when people use vulnerability to deal with their unmet emotional needs or simply to attract attention.

It doesn’t take much to be inspired by high and lofty thoughts like “daring greatly,” but we may feel emotionally conflicted. On the one hand, we desire to courageously make ourselves vulnerable, but on the other hand we feel inadequate to actually do it. It takes more than a spur of inspiration to be vulnerable because to do so challenges culture.

Our culture is saturated in fear. This fear creates a strong drive for self-protection. Before we even get out of bed in the morning, we’re plagued with thoughts about how we don’t have enough time, didn’t get enough done, didn’t say the right words, didn’t eat the right foods, etc. On an unconscious level, this scarcity mindset creates shame. Shame is distinct from guilt. We feel guilty when our actions were not enough; we feel ashamed when we believe that we are not enough. Thoughts of shame can take root quickly, and before we know it we feel ashamed at just existing because in some way or another, we’re never enough.

Scarcity doesn’t take hold of a culture overnight, but with the expansion of media-driven comparison and unreasonable expectations for what can be accomplished in a 24-hour day, there is deep shame. We’re not ashamed of our collective identity as Americans, but because enough individuals are struggling with the issue of worthiness, shame is silently shaping our culture. Understanding shame, vulnerability, and our emotional lives is not secondary to reforming the education system, meeting the needs of the homeless, or any other worthy endeavor. The shame we carry directly affects how we educate, advocate, and lead.

A popular trend has emerged over the last decade of slapping the label “narcissist” on anyone talking about worthiness or self-love. Ironically, the first targets of this finger-pointing are those individuals who have made their life’s work the expansion of shame-free and worthiness language. Believing you are enough is not egotistical and labeling people as such only exacerbates the problem by creating more self-protection and shame. The attitude of being enough can be thought of as wholeheartedness, of which two core tenets are intrinsic worthiness and vulnerability. It is only when you can accept being enough that will you be able to dare greatly in the face of the inevitable uncertainty, exposure, and emotional risks of life.

We run from vulnerability because we’re afraid of shame and how shame makes us feel. Shame is distinct from embarrassment, guilt, or humiliation. These terms refer to the painful emotional reactions to things we have done. Shame, however, is felt when our thinking shifts and we believe that we, our very essence, is now unworthy of being seen because of what we have done. If we hide from this painful feeling, we numb the center of all feeling.

Shame can also be defined as the fear of disconnection. The human condition, with its inevitable heights and depths, is no walk in the park, and it is almost unbearable without human connection. Shame dares us to do the impossible, to live in a state void of connection and love. But connection and love are the very things that make surviving worthwhile.

Just like darkness is defeated by exposure to light, voicing our shame quickly destroys it. The more aware we are of what shame is, the quicker we can identify it with language and free ourselves from its grip. If we have let shame fester, sharing our story with a trusted friend will expose it. We can also take a more proactive approach, and make it a habit to speak our shame in the moment and then replace it with the truth. The truth will always be that we are enough and that our imperfect actions are distinct from our identity. 

Expectations surrounding gender may be the greatest source of shame in our culture. For women, the primary shame trigger is being perceived as imperfect or not enough. Women feel they have to be everything to everyone. They feel it is expected that they remain calm, cool, and collected in the midst of chaos. Women feel voiceless to communicate their stress and failures in the various roles and responsibilities they hold. Shame does not have to exist in this space anymore, but until women learn to identify the shame and use language to demythologize it, it will fester and keep them from vulnerability and connection.

For men, the greatest shame trigger is being seen as emotionally weak or a failure at work. These triggers sound like outdated stereotypes, yet they persist. After Brown delivered a talk at TEDx Houston, she was approached by a man who, with tears in his eyes, told her how sick he was of women begging him to be emotionally vulnerable only to find his emotions unappealing once he brought them to the surface.  He said that the women in his life would rather see him die on the horse before they watched him fall off it. This story illustrates the great need that men have to be vulnerable. We need to create a safe place for the entire spectrum of emotions to be communicated. 

Vulnerability is bravely engaging with the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure inherent in life. Being vulnerable is being human. Shame is the fear of disconnection where the greatest human needs include connection, love, and belonging. If engagement is the key to vulnerability, then disengagement is the enemy of it. Disengagement is similar to the “flight” in a fight-or-flight response. 

For those who have experienced the dark side of religious or political dogmatism, they know how fitting an illustration it is for disengagement. In its true nature, spiritual connection is a product of love and belonging which are vulnerabilities. When spirituality is divorced from its very nature and replaced with compliance and consequences, a grave exploitation of vulnerability has taken place. People’s search for absolutes in religion is often birthed in vulnerability. There is an admittance of fear and an honest desperation for something or someone to tell us the truth of who we are. If religious leaders fail to model the true nature of spirituality, which includes wrestling with the unknown, they are merely leveraging vulnerability to meet their needs. Disengagement happens when any culture, whether a family, a school, or a corporation, is afraid to share their honest feelings.

Although disengagement has become socially acceptable, it is worth fighting against. You can only give what you have, so the first step is choosing to engage with your own inherent vulnerability. Take a good look at your humanness and choose to embrace yourself as worthy. Speak your shame out of existence and decide what kind of parent, person, and leader you are going to model for those in your sphere of influence.

Neutral news is hard to find. The Pour Over provides concise, politically neutral, and entertaining summaries of the world’s biggest news paired with reminders to stay focused on eternity, and delivers it straight to your inbox. It's free, too. Check it out.

These insights are just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of Daring Greatly here. And since we get a commission on every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.