Allowing Vulnerability
‘What you think you see in someone else’s eyes, an expression, and emotion, an action or intent, is merely a reflection of your own innermost desires, issues, intentions and actions. Therefore, examine what you are projecting to change or enhance what you are seeing’.
I have covered this topic before. However, for me, it seems to have come around again. (Round and round it goes where it stops nobody knows?) Our ability to receive can be a very challenging issue. In a very real way, how we perceive receiving anything in life is a huge topic, and many of us strangely feel vulnerable to receive. Allowing ourselves to receive opens our soft bellies and undersides and that which we usually seek to protect and leaves us feeling well in a word naked. I have learned in the past that to receive you have to make yourself vulnerable, yet many of us find this difficult to do.
I am exhausted as I write this. I am trying so hard to be nonchalant and oh so cool about my feelings. ‘Look at me, I’m so cool’ What I really want to say is ‘I love you, you mean a lot to me, among other things’ what comes out is inane. ‘I hope all is well….blah blah’ bull-dust meaning nothing really.
What I’m hoping to convey is ‘I’m thinking about you, I kind of hope you’re thinking about me too, it feels good to give and receive with you’. Yet none of these things I can bring myself to say.
Why? Because I’m terminally afraid of how these words will be received. In my coolness and I studied nonchalance, my message gets lost in translation. My body goes into shock at the thought of the reaction to these words. ‘What if it is a cold indifference?’ ‘What if that’s the last thing a person wants to hear?’ Not forgetting the biggest and ugliest of those fears ‘What if my love isn’t wanted?’ ‘What if my love isn’t good enough?’ ‘What if it means that now I have set up an expectation and created pressure?’ I’m often so damned apologetic for my feelings these seemingly bizarre thoughts actually do run through this crazy excuse I optimistically try to call my mind.
I do have to question what makes me believe that my love would be unwanted in the first place. I get so hooked on the fear that it isn’t I forget to stop and check for the source of this belief. I have loved many men in my life, I have loved many friends too, and family, of course, for that matter. With crystal clear 20/20 hindsight vision, I know that I had faced many endings and been able to be at peace and let go when the time came to say goodbye for whatever reason. What I battle with now are the beginnings. I’m not just talking about love and romantic relationships I’m talking about all nature of relationships. I’m so hooked on the possible ending, even knowing that I can cope with those that I’m too scared to begin.
Instead, I give my fears reign to override my natural logical and ordered thought into a jangle of ‘what ifs’. These what-ifs I know, are just the fear demons that rise from the swamps of the past and threaten to strangle me. There is no level-headed thought applied to this process.
In truth I am feeling a bit like I’ve been turned inside out and that my emotions are now on the outside and not the inside and I do feel exposed. Although I know on an intellectual level that this is not necessarily a bad thing. On an emotional level, it’s a whole different drink altogether. I often do a talk titled ‘the courage to be loved’. Hmm, and as I write this, I feel those trite clever words of mine mocking me from the past. I have once again had to consider how I think about my deservedness to receive in the world.
I understand now that the vulnerability I’ve always felt is the greatest strength a person can have. You can’t experience life without feeling life. What I’ve learned is that being vulnerable to somebody you love is not a weakness, its strength.”
Elisabeth Shue
I always believed that love was about giving. I never really thought about the fact that love is also about receiving. To receive we have to let go of our fear and cynicism that says, ‘now I have to give back, so what’s the price tag?’ We are so quick to throw the cloak of protection around ourselves, believing that because we have experienced pain in the past usually to do with some kind of rejection that we are now unworthy of receiving. When a hand is stretched out to us in the offering, we turn our backs on it, looking for the sinister and painful motivation behind it.
When life finally hands us a beautiful bouquet of flowers, we peer cautiously among the petals in expectation of a bee.
It is when we cut ourselves off from our ability to receive because of the fear of rejection that this becomes a crippling issue. The pain we cause by rejecting what someone’s offered to give often goes unnoticed, and I am not talking specifically about relationship love and giving. I am speaking of when you offer help when you offer kindness and encouragement, and that is also rejected. Sometimes the giving is in the smallest of things. A person’s language of love is sometimes not expressed in the words but the small but significant actions. When I was offered a gift recently, I found it incredibly difficult to receive yet I was so touched by the thought and the gift itself. I don’t think I properly expressed my thanks though or that it meant a lot to me.
“It’s so sad how we can go through life hating people, thinking that they are so different from us. It is only when we see them at their weakest point, seeing their vulnerability, and then we start to realise how similar we all actually are to one another.”
I am aware of where some of the belief that I need to have such a vice grip on my emotions came from or the habit of ‘dialling back’ the expression of how I feel.
As a survivor of narcissistic abuse, love bombing, withdrawal, betrayal, triangulation and then more love bombing, the never-ending cycle, I understand where my reticence comes from. The ability to trust when the real deal comes along, in whatever form, a relationship, a friendship, or even renewing a family bond is a trial for me. I have to re-learn to trust my own feelings, and not to question an ulterior motive in every single interaction with other people.
This often, I think, makes me appear diabolical. It works both ways too. Not only in my own desire to express my love, my pain, my anger, my joy, my dreams. I know that like a she-dragon I have shredded some who have tried to love me with the talons of ‘your love holds an expectation I can’t live up to’ and the sharp teeth of ‘back off, I don’t know how to give what you want’. Assuming always, that if someone loves me, then I have a price to pay for that, that now they ‘want’ something in return. Never considering that perhaps their intent is simply to love me.
I remember a man long ago who loved me very much. He also battled to say it and then blurted it out one day in a rush. Then oddly, he backed off into a sort of dumbfounded silence. This gave me a clue to my own somewhat erratic behaviour on this topic. He also went into the shredder for it, I’m ashamed to say.
This is tricky for most of us, to accept and receive without suspicion and without always having to have a reason why someone else would like to give.
It does occur to me though that trust must play a role. Not the trust in another, which also plays its part. However, it is in the ‘how much do I trust myself?’ kind of trust. Of course, linked intrinsically to this is self-confidence. I either have a feast or famine of self-confidence depending on the topic, the time of day and what moon is squaring off to my sun or something like that, what I had for breakfast, and what might or not happen in the next few minutes! In all seriousness, I don’t have the guru-like answers to this question. I’d love to but the further I go with this, the more entwined I get.
I believe though that perhaps having the answer is not as important as asking the question. I must start somewhere and trust that by examining my behaviour a little closer and more importantly what drives my sometimes strange and strangled thinking, will if not provide an answer at least bring a sense of peace and acceptance. Allowing me to move on and do things differently as I head into my future. This self-examination is instructive even if it does come with a certain amount of pain.
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