Quotes About Vulnerability

When the rush is there, you're not acting like yourself. You're nervous and insecure. There's no critical thinking and you make idiotic choices: I just want to rip his clothes off and breathe his air and so what if he's clinically depressed!

What makes therapy challenging is that it requires people to see themselves in ways they normally choose not to.

Sitting-with-you-in-your-pain is one of the rare experiences that people get in the protected space of a therapy room, but it's very hard to give or get outside of it—even for Jen,

Instead, you release them in layers, moving closer and closer to the tender core: your sadness

the upside of being a therapist's child is that nothing gets shoved under the rug; the downside

The more you welcome your vulnerability," Wendell had said, "the less afraid you'll feel.

and I'm not sure if it's all of your annoying questions or the sadistic silences you put me through—but I feel like you get me, you know? And I don't want your head to get too big or anything, but I thought, you have a more complete picture of my total humanity than anyone else in my life.

How easy it is, I thought, to break someone's heart, even when you take great care not to.

Loss of trust is harder to repair.

For many people, going into the depths of their thoughts and feelings is like going into a dark alley—they don't want to go there alone. People come to therapy to have somebody to go there with, and people watch John's show for a similar reason: it makes them feel less alone, allows them to see a version of themselves muddling through life

more real in his life is allowing him to let others be more real too.

Now I keep in mind that none of us can love and be loved without the possibility of loss but that there's a difference between knowledge and terror.

but the stages of change are such that you don't drop all of your defenses at the same time. Instead, you release them in layers, moving closer and closer to the tender core: your sadness, your shame.

but I figured that this comment was just one of John's defenses against getting close to anybody or acknowledging his need for another human being.

anger serves another function—it pushes people away and keeps them from getting close enough to see you.

But I assure him that he's not breaking down; he's breaking open.

You didn't fall in love with me before our first date, when I told you I had a six-year-old," I say. "You knew what to do then, didn't you?" More suffocating silence. As you've probably guessed, this conversation goes nowhere.

Is Boyfriend unhappy with something in the relationship that he's afraid to tell me about? I ask him calmly, my voice softer now, because I'm mindful of the fact that Very Angry People aren't Very Approachable.

her first conversation with Matt, one that lasted until dawn and still hasn't ended.

It's not that people want to get hurt again. It's that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this "repetition compulsion." Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar—but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.

What makes therapy challenging is that it requires people to see themselves in ways they normally choose not to. A therapist will hold up the mirror in the most compassionate way possible, but it's up to the patient to take a good look at that reflection

The therapy room seemed to be one of the only places left where two people sit in a room together for an uninterrupted fifty minutes. Despite its veil of professionalism, this weekly I-thou ritual is often one of the most human encounters that people experience.

doorknob disclosures.

John points to his tears. "See?" he says. "My fucking humanity." "It's magnificent," I say.