God, I love this talk. Just watched it again and it made me cry like a baby (again).
So hard to embrace vulnerability when you grew up hiding vulnerability from people who either disallowed it or preyed upon it.
I find the opposite really hard too! Sometimes (quite a lot), I swing the other way and make myself too vulnerable, too soon with people who have the same emotional limitations and aversion to intimacy as my parents.
These cycles of alternately stuffing/numbing and over-sharing seem to set me up to be experience the same heartache and traumas over and over again. Wish I could say it's only been in the personal realm, but I've done exactly the same thing in my career. I suppose it's repetition compulsion?--puking up all this emotional baggage all over people is a kind of twisted defense mechanism, subconsciously designed to repel intimacy by the very means intimacy is created. Maybe it's counter phobic? Feeling the hard feelings so deeply and incessantly, hoping I'll eventually become numb to them. Trying to make myself so "vulnerable" to personal criticism that I become invulnerable... which is of course, not real vulnerability at all, according to Brene, fueled as it is by deep feelings of unworthiness.
Anyway, total rant... But this really strikes a chord with me. Feel like I'm only beginning to find some balance. Only beginning to live in the gray zone, between the "black"-zone of stoicism and the "white"-zone of being totally translucent and giving people too-much personal information. (I've obviously failed the latter in this post!)
