Quotes About Vulnerability

Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions.

I've told her about the many relationships I've seen implode simply because one person was terrified of being abandoned and so did everything in his or her power to push the other person away. She is starting to see that what makes self-sabotage so tricky is that it attempts to solve one problem (alleviate abandonment anxiety) by creating another (making her partner want to leave).

He glances toward his cell, which is vibrating again, but I don't follow his gaze. I stay with him, trying to hold on so he won't get pulled away whenever an unwanted feeling appears and go numb. People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn't the absence of feelings; it's a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.

Mas do que temos tanto medo? Não é como se fossemos espiar naqueles cantos escuros, acender a luz e descobrir um bando de baratas. Os vagalumes também adoram a escuridão. Existe beleza nesses lugares. Mas é preciso olhar ali dentro para vê-la.

It's easy to conflate the intimate experience of romance or sex with the intimate experience of having somebody pay undivided attention to the details of your life, accept you fully, support you without competing agendas, and know you so deeply.

Will you see my vulnerabilities, my lies, my shame? Will you see the human in my being?

Tem a expressão intensa, mas gentil, uma combinação de ancião sábio com bichinho de pelúcia, e vem com uma mensagem: Nesta sala, vou te ver e você tentará se esconder, mas mesmo assim te verei, e tudo bem que seja assim.

She wasn't willing to look at what she was doing that made it difficult for people to give her what she wanted.

Is there anything that makes us feel more vulnerable than asking someone, Do you like me?

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. —James Baldwin 1 Idiots Chart note, John: Patient reports feeling "stressed out" and states that he is having difficulty sleeping and getting along

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, who is a therapist.

It's impossible to grow without first becoming vulnerable.

impossible to grow without first becoming vulnerable.

The inability to say no is largely about approval-seeking—people imagine that if they say no, they won't be loved by others. The inability to say yes, however—to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program—is more about lack of trust in oneself. Will I mess this up? Will this turn out badly? Isn't it safer to stay where I am?

I was three inches taller but he could smell my fear.

If something upset her, she usually talked about it or cried and then got on the road to getting over it or changing it. … Kate had a tendency to bury her hurts deep inside and when they tried to rear their ugly heads, she effectively pushed them right back down. Kate gave the appearance of handling upsets well, when in actuality she did not handle them at all.

Dear Lord, had he seen her cheetah-print panties?

Love just plain hurts sometimes, but we can't let that stop us from loving. Love is the only thing in the world that really matters.

Any of us that have been around for any length of time have had our hearts broken. That's life. That's all it is. Loving, getting hurt, but daring to love again, even though you know you're probably going to get hurt again. That's the triumph of the human spirit. The infinite capacity to love.

Honesty is not only a gift to other people--it's a gift to yourself.

I used to think love could save anything, but it can't if the vessel's cracked.

A tear fell from her son's eye and splashed on Olive's cheek, which shamed away her vanity, making her want to concentrate on bigger issues. Fletcher, I love you! It was hard for me to show it—I had to make a living for us, didn't I?—but honestly, Fletcher, you were a prince among sons. A prince! How did a gentleman like you come from a cad like your father?

It's said (truly) that most women forget the pain of childbirth; I think that we all forget the pain of being a child at school for the first time, the sheer ineptitude, as though you'll never learn to mark out your own space. It's double shaming - shaming to REMEMBER as well, to fee so sorry for your scabby little self back there in small people's purgatory.

Whenever I hear someone boast of having conquered a mountain by climbing it or a wild river by paddling it, I am struck by the foolishness of this attitude. It seems to me a pitiful bravado in the face of a great and powerful mystery, like whistling in the dark to give oneself courage. Worse, it arrogantly pits the ego against the matrix of being, conveying the harmful illusion that one creature can dominate the creation of which it is a part and on which it depends for its very life.