[working definitions] vulnerability

[kaberett]

I've been noticing, working my way through Brené Brown's books, that many of the ways in which she defines or exemplifies vulnerability are just... not intuitive to me. They don't stick; they're an active effort to think my way through every single time I try to engage with the concepts involved. "To be vulnerable is to be capable of being hurt; to be weak is to be unable to withstand injury" is a definition she suggests that sort of works for me on an abstract level -- I at least don't have to work to remember it -- but I don't experience any emotional resonance with it.

Here's an alternative I've been turning over: vulnerability is offering people more complete data so as to enable them to better model me.

On the one hand, I can sort of see that it might sound more impersonal, more abstracted, than the explanation proposed in the previous paragraph -- and on the other it's one that I am viscerally attuned to, to the point that typing it out leaves me hyper-aware of my belly and my throat, of my physical softness, of my -- yes -- vulnerability made manifest. ("The delicacy of my skin" might need to feature in a poem, hmm.)

It seems to be a succinct and internally intuitive way for me to encode the thought-shape of hope-and-fear inherent in letting people see me by showing them how to hurt me (by telling them how I work), with its mirror terror that even if I try I won't be understood.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

yeah I'm not resonating with the better-model thing at all but damn could her comparison be improved

like if someone sticks a knife in one's back, neither one's weakness nor one's strength has anything to do with why one is bleeding

[kaberett]

I do want to clarify some that I was providing a very brief summary of something she genuinely has written Entire Books trying to explain; to sketch a slightly more expanded version, this is something she says very clearly in the context of trying to draw clear distinctions between "vulnerability" and "weakness" for the sake of an audience that's assuming vulnerability = weakness, and weakness = bad.

(Examples she gives of vulnerability that don't really work for me include "giving comprehensive and thoughtful apologies" in the way that I... kinda default to, these days. It hadn't occurred to me that saying "hey, I screwed up, here's my best understanding of how & what I'll try to do differently next time" could be considered "vulnerable" because these days a lot of it is just... automatic. I have drilled it enough that I don't have the anxiety about Losing Face If I Say I Was Wrong any more, so it's not... scary.)

[alexseanchai]

ohh gotcha

I will probably have more thoughts when not Splitting Headache?