Quotes About Vulnerability

Vulnerability opens us up to being shamed. To someone with BPD, controlling others is a way to ensure that no one can ever shame them. In practice, however, people with BPD often attempt to control others by putting them in no-win situations, creating chaos, or accusing others of trying to control them.

When the person with BPD felt threatened, they consciously or unconsciously protected themselves from painful feelings in ways that pushed these buttons.

Those who must control everything fear being vulnerable. Why? Because to be vulnerable opens up one to be shamed. Control is a way to insure that no one can ever shame us again. It involves controlling our own thoughts, expressions, feelings, and actions. And it involves attempting to control other people's thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.

Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.

How does Forrest Gump have sex? What could be more of a revelation about a character than watching them have sex? That says a lot about them, how they touch another person in bed.

Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Our judgements judge us; and nothing reveals us [or] exposes our weaknesses more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.

Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish.

Stress vindt zijn oorsprong in een bedreigende situatie, met als extreme variant een omgeving waartegenover we volledig weerloos zijn en een waarin we zelf actief kunnen ingrijpen.

If writers had a little more guts, maybe they wouldn't be writers.

She wanted Mark to come back and to smell him and feel him and she wanted to tell him that they still beg for it from her, they still want her and what do you think about that Mark? I'm yours and I'm the slut of all sluts. She wanted to say, Markie you haven't taken it away from me I still have it. I still have what it takes. She thought, I could show you my insides, I could turn myself inside out for you, me, me, who everybody wants, me, who can swallow the whole world.

I imagine there's a timid animal inside me...When it's afraid, I feel it tremble. It can't hear. It only knows the fear it feels. It doesn't have memory or an idea of the future. It lives in the present—the right now—and I try to remember it is only a part of myself, a small frightened thing I can pity. When I'm able to do that, something happens. The animal grows less afraid.

Everybody's intrigued by someone comfortable in their own skin because most of us aren't.

it struck me how comfortable I felt with him, as if we were old friends or had already done this many times over, him handing me pages with his heart on his sleeve - he couldn't pretend this work didn't mean everything to him - me reading his words, quietly amazed by what he could do.

I wasn't raised to acknowledge my own feelings, let alone stick up for myself like that.

Anything and anyone could disappear on you, and you could disappear, too, if you didn't have people around who really knew you. Who were there solidly, meeting you exactly where you stood when life grew stormy and terrifying. Who could find you when you were lost and couldn't find yourself, not even in the mirror.

i liked feeling strong and was uncomfortable knowing that had vanished whne he left. was my happiness so completely tied to him now that i could only feel like myself when he was near? i had no idea.

Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human, Eden used to say. I didn't know what she meant then. My heart had been broken lots of times, and I was supposed to say thank you? Now, all these years later, I'm at least starting to see that she was really talking about the whole journey. That it's impossible to be alive and not get hurt sometimes, not if you're doing it right.

Getting married had been all his idea, but he hadn't told her how very afraid of it he was. He seemed to need to force his way through it anyway, as he did with everything that scared him terribly. He was afraid of marriage and he was afraid of being alone, too.

Is it nice? It's hard to care about people. You end up fretting all the time and feeling helpless, hoping they'll live forever. Only no one does.

Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human.

I didn't quite know what to say. Kitty was one of the most poised and self-confident women I'd ever known, and here she was knocked off her feet and set spinning.