09 Jun Vulnerability- The Birthplace of Happiness?
via PsychCentral by Claire Dorotik-Nana
“No one ever gets through this life without heartache, without turmoil, and if you believe and have faith and you can get knocked down and get back up again and you believe in perseverance as a great human quality, you find your way.” The words of Diana Nyad, the first person to successfully swim the channel from Florida to Cuba, ring true.[i]
Yet so many of us try to minimize, avoid completely, and when everything else fails, deny that we have been knocked down. We try to turn away from the struggle to avoid the inevitable: everybody gets knocked down.
Why should we? Because what we are all trying to avoid is that one thing that no one wants to admit.
Vulnerability.
But there is no avoiding it. Setbacks, losses, and adversity simply make us vulnerable—incredibly so.
Tthere are many reasons for this. The nature of the setback is one. If we perceive that our life, or the life of another, could have been lost, we also recognize how close we are, at all times, to losing a life.
If we have experienced stress, trauma, or hardship early on, we may be familiar with the feeling of powerlessness and the vulnerability that goes with it. This will make us more likely to feel that way again. For many people, it is these early wounds that set forth a pattern of vulnerability that is not so easily unraveled.
Multiple stresses or setbacks also compound the feeling of vulnerability. When hardship and distress cannot be compartmentalized in one area of our lives, but instead bleed out across many domains of life, we are more likely to feel vulnerable.
Certainly, the closer to home the setback is, the more it hurts. Failures and losses that are a few degrees separated from us, and are not so closely tied to who we are, are much easier to take. This is why a grandchild misbehaving is not as unsettling as a child misbehaving. This is also why things we are personally responsible for generate much greater feelings of shame and vulnerability when they don’t go our way—because there is no one else to help shoulder the blame.
But setbacks don’t have to be so severe to make us feel vulnerable…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE