what does it *mean* to be vulnerable in therapy?

There seem to be a lot of threads going on right now about attachment/trust/dependency/vulnerability related issues.

I'm the kind of person who won't shower with her sex partners and who responds to "Why are you crying" with "What?! I'm not crying!" So, I'm kind of confused. What does it even mean to be vulnerable with your therapist and be able to trust and depend on him/her in a healthy way?

How much is too much? I think there's such a fine line between allowing yourself to be open and vulnerable and feeling your emotions and completely losing it. But where is it?

"Completely losing it" is not a disaster in therapy. It can be a big step forward! So don't be afraid of that.

I think crying is very important and healthy.

I'd love to know the answer to this too! Funny I posted a sort of similar thread without seeing this one.

For me, being vulnerable is telling my T things that feel incredibly embarrassing and/or that I'm ashamed of. The things that I'd said that I'd never tell another person or that I don't even admit to myself. Trust and vulnerability have a dialectic relationship: you have to really trust your T to allow yourself to be vulnerable in front of him/her AND if you are vulnerable in front of him/her and he/she reacts supportively, then you trust him/her more. It's really hard getting this tough stuff out. At times I'd sit there for 10 minutes trying to say aloud 10 words. Other times, I'd write them on a piece of paper and hand it to T. But it does help you grow a lot...

Eastcoaster is exactly right - the more vulnerable you can be, the more you can trust your T and the more you trust your T, the more vulnerable you can be.

You don't have to start with the hardest things you have to talk about. Trust and vulnerability build over time - you can start with small things that don't feel as risky. As you experience your T's trustworthy responses to those things, you can gradually start to open up a bit more. It really does take time.

Personally, I've been amazed at how much more I trust my T than I did even 4 months ago. I expect that 6 months from now, I'll trust him in a way I can't even imagine today.

I also had trouble understanding vulnerability. At first, I thought that when I was in emotional pain, or felt fear of rejection, or felt embarrassed... that at that time I was "vulnerable."

What I've learned since, through experience, is that vulnerability is when you lay down your defenses and let yourself just "be" with your therapist and don't try to cover up the truth of your feelings with avoidance, anger, bravado, etc. I don't think I would have understood it if it had been explained to me. I began to understand it when my therapist succeeded at making me feel so incredibly safe... that I did not feel I *had* to avoid, or hide, or deflect, etc.

Does that make sense.. does it help?

That makes a lot of sense. I never would have thought about vulnerability in terms of letting my defences down consciously, rather than simply having them fail. Thanks!

Very well said!

When I get defensive or avoid a topic in t, I am not being vulnerable. As my t says I've pushed back. Looking back that is often when I've gone in with a plan to "share it all" or feel the need to show t how much something is hurting me - rather than just talking through it in the moment.

But really the sessions where I've been the most vulnerable, we've gotten to some very deep topics because I've just talked and answered t's questions completely honestly as I felt them at that moment. Those often turn out to be some of the best sessions. I don't think about how t might react. I just talk knowing that I am in a safe environment. There's no response planning on my part, meaning I am trusting t will not judge my response and trusting t leaves me vulnerable.

Personally, I don't think "loosing it" is ever a good thing. Therapy is only 1/168 of your week. You need to be able to leave at the end of your hour and go back into life.

I do think it's important to stretch your comfort zone from week to week. Take a chance and say something that you didn't want to say, but don't force emotions. Vulnerability can have a huge price tag, so it's important to be able to contain the excessive emotions it produces when needed. .

It is not so fine a line; it's a nice road, much better than hugging the ditches along the side; yeah, if you don't hug them well, you fall into them, like my husband driving narrow, winding, country roads and not wanting to be "in the middle" because he can't see around corners so he terrifies me, his partner in the passenger seat by barely missing the ditches at the side that would wreck the car -- I explained to him that avoiding a car that might/might not be around a corner would be a piece of cake over dealing with me if he puts us in a ditch! :-)

Being vulnerable is nothing more than stating how you are thinking and feeling and what you want instead of either lying to yourself, others, or both. If someone asks why you are crying, you either tell them why or you tell them it's none of their business/you do not wish to discuss it with them/now but you do not deny you are crying when you are crying.

Back to my husband's and my oncoming driver/ditch example, you make a choice to deal with your own fears/problems instead of putting them on to the other person (who has their own fears and problems). My husband is afraid of oncoming traffic, I'm afraid of being too close to ditches but it is my husband who is driving and in control so, in my world he should deal with his own fears rather than put them off onto me so I have to deal with mine.

If someone says, "why are you crying?" Replying, "I'm not!" tells them THEY have a perception problem and skews their senses, feelings, idea of who they are. Becoming vulnerable keeps things in the middle of the road, you learn to tell the truth about yourself and/or confirm other people's statements without compromising yourself because you know yourself and your fears and problems and have learned to work with them.

I have learned (to a certain extent) to allow things to be out of my control; I can allow other people to drive me in a car, for example. I can drive a car myself (where I can't control what other people are going to do) and trust that most people will follow the traffic laws. That's what is needed in human interactions; we trust that most people are not out to get us and we go our way and let other people know what way that is so they don't accidentally hit us. We obey certain social laws (don't ask personal questions like "why are you crying?" unless we are therapists or very good friends/relatives of the person or they look destitute and alone and we would like someone to ask us that question if we looked like we feel they look), etc. But, given our backgrounds, that can take some learning how to do.

Yeah! and I think that with me, at first it wasn't necessarily deliberate.. it was just that I had so thoroughly *tested* my therapist (also not necessarily deliberate) and felt so absolutely safe, that my defenses were not prompted to be raised or something. And these accidental stumblings into vulnerability were rich and intimate experiences.. where my openness was treated with so much care. So it became easier and easier to just *be* vulnerable. When I realized what was happening and talked about it, my therapist taught me how to judge "out there" whether it was safe to be vulnerable.

And in therapy, she always told me that she was totally okay with me not trusting her. She let me be however I needed to be, defenses and all, for as long as I needed to. Somehow I think that served to accelerate the development of my being able to trust her.

How do you know if your T is OK with you letting your defences down and being vulnerable??

Letting defenses down and being vulnerable is something the person doing it wants to do for themselves, it doesn't have anything to do with the other person's wants. It is a way of being, like not letting your defenses down or not being vulnerable. You don't ask permission, it feels good/healthy to you. When bad guys are around, you defend; when good guys are around you lower your defenses and party :-)

Perna explained it well. I didn't realize that I had laid down my defenses until I'd been doing it, and felt the therapeutic relationship dynamic markedly changing. My normal anxiety - with respect to the relationship - vanished. I felt emotionally secure. I didn't fear rejection. I experienced myself as accepted and understood.

Probably the biggest impetus for my learning this stuff was during the period of time where I pushed my therapist a lot - testing her tolerance. Sometimes I said hurtful things... even things that I later found out felt to her like I was challenging her competence. She never reacted defensively to me. Never. With compassion, she demonstrated interest in understanding whatever it was I was challenging. This went on for a long time, and ultimately it affected the way I related in therapy, with her. I internalized that way of being. I've successfully taken it outside too.

That's how all that worked for me, anyway.

OK, I guess I'm just not able to understand how this works. Thanks - I'm getting a lot to think about (including whether or not to stay in therapy...)

Can you elaborate, Apteryx? Tell me where it starts breaking down for you, and I'll see if I can help make sense of it. I know I had a real tough time really understanding what it meant to be vulnerable.

Thanks, Crescent. I'm having trouble phrasing my thoughts tonight. I'll make another attempt tomorrow.

hey Apt, I don't know what's going on with you, but I hope you are not taking away from this discussion that you are failing at therapy in some way by not being vulnerable enough.

One thing I'm getting from all the responses is that trust is a development that has to happen organically, and that I can't accelerate things by trying to force myself.

I agree, Athena. It's really important to understand that a client's ability to be vulnerable is directly related to the therapist's ability to create an unbreakable sense of safety - emotional safety - for the client. The therapist has the first responsibility. A client cannot overcome a therapist's inability to create a sense of safety.

I think T is about understanding our defences and having some control over them. So from that I assume T's do want us to do this. I guess we have to get to know our defences first - have no idea what mine are yet.

Just thought of another thing my T said - the more we start to trust T, the more difficult it may feel for us. When we don't trust at all, we don't give anything away and it all stays safely tucked up - so no risk there. When we start to trust we let things out and then the stakes become higher in the consequences of that trust being breached - so when it starts to feel more scary can be when we start to take those risks in trusting more. I think this may be connected therefore to vulnerability.

I agree. It is the therapist's job to win the patient's trust. If she doesn't, the failure is hers.

I'm not sure if I do totally agree. I think trust is very fragile and can be easily broken and we need to feel safe. However I think we need to take a few risks ourselves - we can be told, know logically that a ladder is safe to climb, but it is ultimately us who has to put our foot on the rungs of the ladder. Also is it realistic to think that trust is ever completely unbreakable? Is it our response to breaches in trust and our ability to make ourselves feel safe and OK, that which is most important?

This is connected to what I was trying to ask yesterday. Whether it is OK to talk about trust or not clearly depends on the T and on the kind of therapy they offer. But I've also been thinking that it might or might not be OK to talk about the kind of thing that requires trust - if that makes sense. I mean, if I want help with my elevator phobia I may not need to trust my T completely to the point where I talk about my CSA (these are fictitious examples since I haven't suffered CSA and don't have a problem with elevators), and the T probably would be a bit impatient if I were to start going into that kind of thing with her.

Should I just trust that it's OK to talk about anything, lower defences and be vulnerable to the point where I might show emotion? What if I say too much and it isn't OK (or, God forbid, if I start crying)? I would really like to think that it would be OK, but I just don't know how to find out...

I don't mean to monopolise this thread - my situation isn't really relevant here, but the general questions might be interesting to more people than me.

I wonder how it not being OK would look?

And of course there is one sure way of finding out.... (says Soup bravely, being terrified of her own emotions, what if I cry and T tries to comfort me !)