In the Ted Talk “The power of vulnerability,” Brené Brown reminisces the time when she was a young researcher, a doctoral student in her first year, she had a research professor who said to them, "Here's the thing, if you cannot measure it, it does not exist."
She wanted to understand messy topics. She wanted to hack into these things that she knew were important and lay the code out for everyone to see. So, she started with researching connection because it's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. Connection is the ability to feel connected.
When she started her work, she met a crossroads. When she asked people about love, they talked about heartbreak. When she asked people about belonging, they talked about their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. And when she asked people about connection, they talked about disconnection.
So, six weeks into this research, she ran into this unnamed thing that absolutely unravelled connection in a way that she didn't understand or had never seen. And so, she pulled back out of the research and figured out what this is. And it turned out to be shame.
Shame is the fear of disconnection. It happens when we think there is something about us that, if other people knew or saw, we won't be worthy of connection?
Shame is universal; we all have it. The only people who don't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection. No one wants to talk about it, and the less you talk about it, the more you have it. What underpinned this shame, this "I'm not good enough." The thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability, i.e., we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen to feel connection.
So, she decided to deconstruct shame and understand how vulnerability works. Her one year turned into six years. She kind of understood, what shame is, how it works.
She wrote a book and published a theory, but something was not okay.
So, she divided the people she interviewed into
- people who really have a sense of worthiness -- have a strong sense of love and belonging
- and folks who struggle for it and were always wondering if they're good enough.
There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believed they're worthy of love and belonging. They believed they're worthy.
The hard part is that what keeps us out of connection is our fear that we're not worthy of connection. And this was something that, personally and professionally, she felt like I needed to understand better.
So, she took all of the interviews where she saw worthiness and tried to see things these people had in common. And the thing was "whole-heartedness." Those were whole-hearted people, living from this deep sense of worthiness. So, she started looking at the data and conducted a very intensive data analysis.
What they had in common was a sense of courage. Courage comes from the Latin word "cor," meaning "heart" -- and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.
And so, these folks had the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly. And the last was they had connection, as a result of authenticity. They were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were. The other thing that they had in common was:
-They fully embraced vulnerability. They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they really talk about it being excruciating. They just talked about it being necessary. They talked about the willingness to say, "I love you" first ... the willingness to do something where there were no guarantees. They're willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out.
So, she had to go through this conflict between her pledged loyalty to control and measuring as a researcher and her research findings.
After spending a year with her therapist to unravel this conflict, she understood that we numb vulnerability. She sent out a question on Twitter and on Facebook saying, "How would you define vulnerability? What makes you feel vulnerable?"
And within an hour and a half, she had 150 responses. She realized we live in a vulnerable world. And one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability. The problem is that you cannot selectively numb emotion.
You can't say, here's the bad stuff. Here's vulnerability, here's grief, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment. I don't want to feel these. You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. So, when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then, we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable.
And it becomes this dangerous cycle.
But why and how we numb.
We engage in addiction. The other thing we do is we make everything that's uncertain certain. For example, religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. "I'm right, you're wrong. Shut up." That's it. Just certain.
The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable we are,
To come out of this vicious circle, we need to tell our children "You know what? You're imperfect, and you're wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging."
Therefore, she suggests that we should let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen ... to love with our whole hearts, even though there's no guarantee. We should practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror when we're wondering, "Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this?" just to be able to stop and, instead of catastrophizing what might happen, to say, "I'm just so grateful because to feel this vulnerably means I'm alive."
Thus, we need to believe that we're enough. Because when we work from a place, that says, "I'm enough" ...then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves.
