Very often, when we face failure or setback, we heard our close ones telling us to be strong and tough. When a lady found out her husband had extra-marital affair, her female friends adviced her to stay strong and to separate with her husband. When a gentleman lost a promotion opportunity, his close friends suggested him to forget about it and be tough. However, these people frequently felt more confused and lost when they lost touch with their inner feelings towards their loss or challenge. When they denied their hurt and wounds, they became less grounded and started to live their life in a “zombie” mode. Opening up to our vulnerabilities is not easy to many of us as our culture tended to teach us to be more reserve in our emotions. Furthermore, getting in touch with the unknown world of our vulnerabilities is scary to some of us. It is because we might want to show others that we do not care and the failure or challenge did not break our heart. It is difficult for us to be honest to ourselves about caring something important to us in our lives, be it about a lover, a promotion, or a health issue.
To be open up to our vulnerabilities, we need to face our not-knowing. A client with health anxiety kept measuring his blood pressure twenty times a day in order to feel that he is certain about the condition of his health. His tendency to keep reassure himself in this ritual prevented him from facing the uncertainty. As a result, his health anxiety exacerbated without any increased certainty about his health. In fact, he is a person who preferred to have everything figured out by himself. He wanted to be confident in everything. He did not allow himself to have any vulnerability. For this client, his inner world would be disrupted if something in the outside world is out of his expectation. He would fall apart when he faced outcome of something he cared about out of his scope of knowledge. This lack of openness and fear of uncertainty are contributing to his lack of groundedness in the face of his health issues. On the contrary, if we acknowledge our ignorance and embrace our not-knowing and uncertainty, we become more grounded and stronger. When we know our limitations, we become more relaxed and open to more possibilities.
How can we face our vulnerabilites in our daily lives? We could try to pause and reflect whenever we are observing ourselves avoiding some situations or people. For example, we could ask ourselves, “Why do I avoid seeing this family members? What am I running away from seeing this person?” Another example could be, when we feel empty and lost, we could ask ourselves, “What issues in my current life I am avoiding to face? What if facing these issues is inevitable in my life?” When we try to pay attention to our inner world, our thoughts and feelings, we may be able to find out our fear of facing our vulnerabilites.
In fact, it is common humanity to have experience of disturbance in the face of inevitable failure and setback in our lives. With openness to our vulnerabilities, we learn to embrace our weaknesses and be frank to ourselves that we actually care about something that we lost. Paradoxically, our burden of being omnipotent lessen up and we become more grounded and confident in our daily lives.
