Jasmin Lee Cori, M.S. - Author, Mind, Body & Spirit

Learning to be vulnerable is a stretch for most people, but harder if you’ve experienced significant trauma. During traumatic events, we don’t know that we will survive and this gets associated with being unprotected, exposed in some way. This makes tolerating the vulnerability of daily life, relationships, and even inner growth difficult.

What actions are “too vulnerable” depend on our history. Things as simple as having your mouth open or your back to a door or your legs in an open position can bring anxiety if associated with past trauma. Publishing or posting something on the internet may feel exceedingly vulnerable as you have no control over where it is going. For some being visible feels dangerous.

Coming Out of Your Shell

We have all, on some level, learned to try to protect ourselves from vulnerability. A primary defense is armoring, where we build a hard shell around ourselves, like a turtle or a snail. Your shell is your protective structure. It consists of physical tension as well as other defenses, such as avoidance, isolation, internalized rules constructed to keep you safe, and trying to control what people can see in you.

The problem with the shell is that it separates you from your softer, more delicate essential nature and from more tender, intimate bonds with people.

Coming out of this shell can be a very long and difficult process. In addition to setting off all your alarms, any thinning of this shell defense can leave you feeling uncontained or out of control, both which may have happened in trauma.

We need to understand that we can be without our shell without being defenseless. In most cases we still have the instinctive defenses (fight and flight), we have verbal defenses (yell, scream, defend boundaries, or softer versions like telling people what we need), we have behavioral defenses (ways we use common sense and caution to mitigate danger, like locking your door or being discriminating about where you meet a potential date). It’s fine to have a shell to return to in emergencies, but not so great to live trapped in it.

Appropriate Risk and Appropriate Protection

If we’ve been hurt a lot, it is sometimes hard to recognize the positive side of vulnerability. Vulnerability allows you to become closer to your partners and friends. This is you outside the shell, available for contact. It may involve extending yourself in an uncharacteristic way, like being more affectionate or transparent. That takes trust that others are not out to hurt you, although in their clumsiness they may inadvertently step on your feelings.

With people who have proven themselves to be untrustworthy, it is wise to protect what is not yet “hardy” in you. Your emerging qualities need a safe place to develop, yet to grow hardy they also need calibrated exposure. It’s the same principle as putting out tender plants on a spring afternoon but taking them in before the temperature drops at night. 

If we avoid making ourselves vulnerable altogether, we won’t experience new learning, and we will be stuck in old default patterns. We need to see the feared consequences don’t always happen, and that requires taking a risk, peeking out beyond the shell.

The trick is to take risks that are the right size. If you take too big of a risk, you may short-circuit and dissociate. Increasing the risk level slowly, reassuring scared parts, getting support, and taking in successes are all part of equipping yourself to be vulnerable more often.

Be really compassionate in this. Your system does not quickly go on hair-trigger alert for no reason. It needs to learn you can keep yourself safe, even when you’re stretching beyond your earlier limits.

Please consider sharing this with those you love who are challenged with vulnerability and may have a trauma background.