Quotes About Vulnerability

I felt the ninety-eight-year old house lift slightly off the pilings it was built upon. God-awful scary.

American Psychological Association, the girlie-girl culture's emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness can increase girls' vulnerability to the pitfalls that most concern parents: depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, risky sexual behavior.

As mentioned earlier, the primary way to create and sustain excitement in a sexual relationship is through honesty. It provides a sense of newness and surprise that can't be matched by any of the standard gimmicks for improving a couple's sex life. NOT

Another rationalization is that if the spouse never suspects the affair, then no damage is done. This belief ignores the fact that the distance and isolation created by the deception of an affair cause a great deal of damage to the relationship. People become strangers who don't really know each other. This makes a couple vulnerable to all kinds of problems and pressures that can eventually lead to divorce or a deadened relationship.

Things would have turned out differently if he'd been wearing shoes. A shoeless man is a defenseless man. A shoeless man can't be held responsible for his actions.

The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.

When things are shaky and nothing is working, we might realize that we are on the verge of something. We might realize that this is a very vulnerable and tender place, and that tenderness can go either way. We can shut down and feel resentful or we can touch in on that throbbing quality. (9)

The only reason we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else's eyes.

Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.

I used to have a sign pinned up on my wall that read: Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us...It was all about letting go of everything.

A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us.

She had the look of a woman whose bra had just been snapped open.

When we were young, we said the hell with it and used our breasts as shields. But the tears fall so easy when they take away love.

She felt as if she'd always been holding a part of herself back, saving it, and she had a terrible fear she would end up saving it forever. That she would die with whole parts of herself unused.

She'd just spent the last hours engaged in endless small talk. Now, when it mattered so much, she seemed to have no words to say, or even breath to speak them with. All her life she'd always had such trouble with words: finding them and losing them, hoarding them and wasting them.

When you see through a defense mechanism, you don't stop at the intimidating behavior but go right on into the underlying misperception about life and through that to the path back to harmony. When you see through people's fear-based actions, motives, and secrets, you're really aiming for their sweet vulnerability, inner beauty, and magnificence—and you find their soul.

Children were vulnerable—helpless hostages to fate, their emotions so tender that a parent could with the smallest sentence, the briefest gesture, accidentally scar them. He did not want the burden of carrying that responsibility.

I'm sorry, Roger, but that doesn't make me feel any better. Worse if anything. All that, knowing that, and he didn't tell me, kept it to himself. He must have been so frightened, so wretched. I can't have been much of a wife.

Ludovic, you don't understand. It makes me feel far far worse. That he couldn't tell me about it, share all this with me.

Every human being on earth. It's difficult to understand. That people can hurt each other. When they have been so small and helpless. Every single rapist and football bully and suicide bomber and pedophile has been so small and depended. Of milk and love.

Det hade jag emot Människosonen. Man ville ju inte säga det rakt ut, men man kunde inte riktigt lita på honom. Han hade liksom för många att ta hand om. Man hade hela tiden en känsla av att när det var som värst, då var det någon annan som kanske hade det värre. Och då blev man ju efterlämnad.

Then she turns to me. 'Tell me. How are you really?' she says, as if there were two versions of my life, and now she is not on the verge of tears at all, but sharp-voiced as an interrogator.