Quotes About Vulnerability

A sensitive plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light, and closed them beneath the kisses of night.

Falling in love with another man is like falling into a vast vat of yourself. For some men this is ultimately nourishing, for others . . . it is drowning.

Get out of your house in the middle of a rainstorm, get soaked in it, and then strip down—to nothing but a smile.

There may be a point in your life in which you are drowning so fast and fighting it so furiously that you don't have the strength left to call out for help. At that point don't expect one of your friends to jump into the water, if you've spent most of your life instructing them to mind their own business.

To extend oneself does not necessarily mean to have an erection.

You've lost sight of the fact that it is our weeniness that makes us human!

To see certain things, you have to be lying on your back with tears in your eyes and a scalding potato in your mouth. It's possible, I think, that you have to be hurt to see anything at all.

There was however, a group of 507 individuals who were permanent street dwellers [in Miami.] These 507 were not indigent, down-on-their-luck families. They were single people and every one of them was mentally ill.

We lock up the mentally ill because they terrify us. We are afraid of them and even more frightened of what they symbolize. We want to believe they did something that

As unsupported children, we have to dissociate because we are not able to effectively grieve.

The most expeditious way to get past an unpleasant emotional experience is to embrace it and to fully feel and express it.

When inward tenderness Finds the secret hurt, Pain itself will crack the rock And, Ah! Let the soul emerge. — Rumi

As much as I can forgive myself, that much can I forgive others. What I often forgive in others is an old pain of mine, released from the disgust of self-hate. It is an old vulnerability of mine that I now love and welcome like a bird with a broken wing. Shame and self-hate did not start with me, but with all my heart, I deign that they will stop with me. I will do unto myself as I would have others do unto me.

To the degree that our caretakers attack or abandon us for showing vulnerability, to that degree do we later avoid the authentic self-expression that is fundamental to intimacy. The outer critic forms to remind us that everyone else is surely as dangerous as our original caretakers. Subliminal memories of being scorned for seeking our parents' support then short-circuit our inclinations to share our troubles and ask for help.

Perfectionism also prevents us from letting in the love of others, no matter how abundant and genuine it is. When we are preoccupied with our deficiencies, we are often untouched by the nurturance others offer us. How tragic that so many of us are convinced we only deserve to be loved when we are happy or excelling.

Natural anger eventually arises when we really get how little and defenseless we were when our parents bullied us into hating ourselves.

She never learns that real intimacy grows out of sharing all of her experience.

A child who grows up with no reliable human source of love, support and protection typically falls into a great deal of social unease. He "naturally" becomes reluctant to seek support from anyone, and he is forced to adopt self-sufficiency as a survival strategy.

Extensive childhood abuse installs a powerful people-are-dangerous program.

They do this by shaming or intimidating you whenever you have a natural impulse to have sympathy for yourself, or stand up for yourself. The instinct to care for yourself and to protect yourself against unfairness is then forced to become dormant.

The most essential of these are the deaths of our self-compassion and our self-esteem, as well as our abilities to protect ourselves and fully express ourselves.

She could see that the outer critic typically triggered her into a very old feeling and belief that "People are so unreliable – they always let you down –they just can't be trusted!

While scaring us out of trusting others, the outer critic also pushes us to over-control them to make them safer. Over-controlling behaviors include shaming, excessive criticism, monologing [conversational control] and overall bossiness.

All my relationships had been developed under the guise of my people-pleasing, funny guy persona, and in my current state there was not a joke anywhere to be found.