This is my third post on developing the skills of intimate relationships as part of eating disorder recovery. This post is about the capacity to be vulnerable and deeply known by another person. By this I mean:
- Letting someone see you as you really are
- Sharing personal information and feelings
- Relying on another person; asking for and receiving help
- Letting another in on your efforts to stretch and grow
- Revealing secret dreams and hopes
- Sharing in mutually–satisfying sex with a partner
If just thinking about these ways of being vulnerable with another person makes you shiver, chances are your childhood experiences of being vulnerable were hurtful. Remember: your family—the people who knew you best at a time when you were at your most vulnerable—provided your first and most enduring model for what vulnerability in intimate relationships is like. If you were treated respectfully and made to feel worthwhile, you’ll expect that being vulnerable with someone you trust in the present will be a positive experience. If, on the other hand, your experiences with family involved being ridiculed, criticized, humiliated, devalued or ignored, this is what part of you, perhaps unconsciously, is likely to expect out of being close and vulnerable with someone now.
Negative childhood experiences of relationship vulnerability lead to shame and feelings of unsafety with others. Each of these feelings makes intimacy in present relationships feel too risky.
Shame
Shame is the feeling of having been exposed as utterly and completely unworthy. It includes the expectation of being humiliated and abandoned by others because of unworthiness. Shame always has to do with our relationships with others, others who can see, judge ridicule or exclude us. Eating disorder symptoms often represent an effort to manage shame. For example, shamed people might believe that being thin will protect them from being judged as unworthy by others. They hope thinness will substitute for missing self–worth, and keep others focused on what’s outside, not inside. People with such beliefs will go to extremes to achieve thinness. (Of course, the sad irony is that eating disorder symptoms, such as bingeing and purging, almost always result in making shame worse.)
Shame is one of the most toxic of human experiences. What can you do if shame makes being deeply known by an intimate other feel intolerable? First what you can’t do: You simply cannot fix shame with external achievements, whether that’s thinness, beauty, wealth, academic or professional accomplishment or a trophy partner. If you live with lots of shame, you’ll always fear that if people get to see what’s inside, you’ll be rejected or ridiculed.
Shame requires an inside cure. It involves acceptance of the most flawed parts of yourself and recognition that being flawed is part of the human condition. This shift in perspective actually results in feeling more connected to others, not less, as feared. It makes being intimately known seem not so risky after all. Easier said than done.
No one instantly stops hiding what’s inside to let it all hang out. Two ingredients seem essential for shame reduction:
- At least one other trustworthy human being—someone who can be relied on for acceptance and understanding. This could be a therapist or therapy group, spiritual leader, family member, friend or partner.
- A tiny step–by–tiny step approach which involves determining manageable stretches of your comfort zone, small–bite risks in letting yourself be known. Testing the waters in this way can allow you gradually to transform childhood learnings about how others will see and respond to you into a more accurate adult perspective.
What you’ll eventually discover is that mutual sharing of vulnerabilities promotes the deepest and most satisfying of intimate relationships. When you share vulnerability you are giving and receiving a priceless gift: acceptance and embrace of who you each really are.
To read more about coping with shame, check out “The Power of Shame” (posted September 17th, 2009).
Feeling Unsafe
When it comes to being vulnerable with others, feeling unsafe results from the expectation that if you rely on someone, you’ll be abandoned. The opposite of this fear is trust. Trusting can seem irrational if your early experiences have involved abandonment, rejection, neglect or abuse by those you relied on most.
The goal is to achieve confidence that you can be safe while being close and vulnerable with another person. This requires making some important distinctions between your childhood and the present, including:
- Unlearning old patterns You learned is that if you trust or rely on someone, you get let down or abandoned. Your grown–up brain probably knows it’s not actually cause and effect. But deep down it feels like it is.
- Discovering you know how to choose safe people or can learn to know The new idea is that you can recognize who is reliable and who is not. With this in–between approach, you take your time to get to know someone to learn if they are trustworthy. You aren’t stuck in the trust–no–one position on the one hand, nor do you jump in blindly, hoping for the best on the other.
- Discovering you can live through breaches of trust by people you are close to For a dependent child, an unreliable caregiver can be devastating. For an independent adult, untrustworthiness in others can be terribly disappointing, but it doesn’t have to rob you of all solid ground.
In my next post, “Developing the Skills of Intimate Relating in Eating Disorder Recovery, Part IV: Security“ (July 16, 2010), you can read about ways people work on achieving a greater sense of safety and security in their intimate relationships.
