Quotes About Vulnerability

It is painful to imagine what would have happened if I had been the sort to have shouted at Rob to shut up and get back to bed. He probably would have done just that, feeling abandoned in a dangerous world. But he would not have slept. His intuitive mind would have elaborated on the experience for hours, including probably deciding he was somehow to blame. With sensitive children, physical blows or traumas aren't required to make them afraid of the dark.

Or, when we feel most insecure, we act flamboyantly or make crazy jokes to ensure that everyone's attention is on us.

HSPs usually respond to change with resistance. Or we try to throw ourselves into it, but we still suffer from it. We just don't "do" change well, even good changes. That

It is not surprising that many sensitive adolescents meet the crisis by destroying their budding self so they will not have to watch it fail to bloom "right.

Sooner or later everyone encounters stressful life experiences, but HSPs react more to such stimulation. If you see this reaction as part of some basic flaw, you intensify the stress already present in any life crisis.

HSPs with a troubled childhood are more at risk of becoming depressed, anxious, and shy than those with a similar childhood who are not highly sensitive. But HSPs with good-enough childhoods were no more at risk than others. Another study the same year by Miriam Liss and others found the same result, mainly for depression.

I know that sometimes people fake on each other out of genuine motives to hold onto the object of their tenderest feelings. They see themselves as so inadequate that they feel forced to wear a mask in order to continuously impress the other. I do not want to "hold" you, I want you to "stay" out of your own need for me.

I did not know that I had all these feelings inside me. They have never been aroused before. Now they cascade down upon my head and threaten to beat me down to the ground, into the dust.

It takes time and deeds, and this involves trust, it involves making ourselves vulnerable to each other…to become sitting ducks for each other----and if one of the ducks is shamming, then the sincere duck will pay in pain---but the deceitful duck, I feel, will be the loser.

A relationship] takes time and deeds, and this involves trust, it involves making ourselves naked, to become sitting ducks for each other.

It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

The weaker partner in a marriage is the one who loves the most.

I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.

There are moments when we resort to senseless formulations and advance absurd claims to hide straightforward feelings.

We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.

Finally, I spoke of the necessity of recounting frankly every human experience, including, I said emphatically, what seems unsayable and what we do not speak of even to ourselves.

We don't know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.

You can be hurt only if you love someone. But I don't love anyone.

Good feelings are fragile, with me love doesn't last. Love for a man doesn't last, not even love for a child, it soon gets a hole in it. You look in the hole and you see the nebula of good intentions mixed up with the nebula of bad.

I feel ugly, like I'm a bad person, and yet I'd like to be loved.

For the first time, I left Naples, left Campania. I discovered that I was afraid of everything: afraid of taking the wrong train, afraid of having to pee and not knowing where to do it, afraid that it would be night and I wouldn't be able to orient myself in an unfamiliar city, afraid of being robbed. I put all my money in my bra, as my mother did, and spent hours in a state of wary anxiety that coexisted seamlessly with a growing sense of liberation.

That even if we're constantly tempted to lower our guard -- out of love, or weariness, or sympathy, or kindness-- we women shouldn't do it. We can lose from one moment to the next everything that we have achieved.

My breasts are small," I said in a whisper, but immediately despised myself because it sounded as if I were making excuses, excuse me if I can't offer you big tits, I hope you enjoy yourself anyway, idiot that I was, if he liked little tits, good; if not, the worse for him, it was all free, a stroke of luck had fallen to this shit, the best birthday present he could hope for, at his age.