Dangerous Vulnerability

But Worth the Risk: Rebuilding from Broken & Beautifully Fragmented

I recently had the pleasure of being Held by

Lauren Barber

in her recent Heart Work Devotional group. Throughout the week Lauren oh so gently invited and guided us towards, as she so beautifully describes it, creating “deep conversation with your soul work”. Here are just a few of the many reflections that surfaced within that lovely week. I recognised that my lifelong sense of being fragmented, something I have always tried to reconcile, has prepared me to hold others in their brokenness.

Sutler in the Greek Style, Mascarade à la Grecque, Ennemond Alexandre Petitot (1727-1801) - I thought this was the perfect self-portrait placeholder for all my fragmented parts.

When Vulnerability Feels Dangerous

Vulnerability.

It’s never come easy to me, but it’s easy to understand why - that’s a story for another day.

Suffice to say for now, I grew up in an alcoholic household, and, as my Mom astutely observed during her recovery journey, you become very adept at acting when you grow up around alcoholism.

“Acting” was self-silencing, for me. Once ingrained, these self-silencing patterns are difficult to override.

Self-silencing softens the raw emotional reactivity in broken homes. Shutting down prevents outsiders seeing how broken you are, because broken people are shamed, rejected and exploited.

Vulnerability is, fundamentally, a willingness to be seen as you really are - but I have always felt so fundamentally fragmented - split into parts and phases that are closely guarded, seen or unseen, depending on who is observing - that the phrase “living a double-life” fails to hit the mark entirely.

“You learned to keep the peace by keeping parts of yourself hidden. But peace at the cost of truth is just quiet suffering. Real peace doesn’t require shrinking. It holds all of you without condition.”

Dr. Gabriel Barsawme

Vulnerability has always felt impossible because I’ve always been different - at home and outside - and because I’ve always been different, I’ve always felt shame, and this shame has left me feeling vulnerable, which means I must hoist up the emotional drawbridges and prepare the flaming arrows of my intellect … Oh the downward spiral of shame and vulnerability.

Avoiding vulnerability means avoiding parts of you that need to be heard. Resolution and reassembly of these parts of you that need to speak simply can’t occur when your environment tells you that vulnerability is dangerous.

“Thinking about vulnerability, thinking about being emotionally intimate, with another … it’s an opening. It’s an expansion. … Let someone in. So wherever that line is, wherever that border is, between safety and danger, I would just gently nudge up against that.”

Kate Bhakti. Cry Baby Somatics & girl bones Podcast

The Search - Three False Starts

Writing here so publicly about my history, my losses and my grief is a reclamation of these fragmented parts of myself, a vulnerable and tentative olive branch to the world.

I’m putting myself back together in plain sight, which is simultaneously terrifying and actually rather exhilarating. The exhilarating part is finding my path of service in life. For so long I felt like I was just trying and failing, trying and failing, trying and failing…

The Light is Sweet (1687), Jan Luyken

I studied pharmaceuticals because I valued health and wanted to do good. The problem was it was too exhausting, too stifling, too linear, and too limiting for a multi-faceted, fragmented woman like myself.

I studied astrology because I value meaning. Again, I wanted to do good and bring others the reassurance that there is truly a divine ordering principle orchestrating even our darkest hours for our greater purpose, should we choose to search for it. The problem was that instead of surrendering, I chased the false illusion of control such knowledge promises.

I studied film and media because I value the gifts of creative expression. I wanted bring my message into the world, but found a shy and starving artist within myself that needed tending first. The problem was that my “shadow artist” was fully intent on hiding behind others - or shall we say, “the industry” - as true creativity requires great vulnerability.

“Artists love other artists. Shadow artists are gravitating to their rightful tribe but cannot yet claim their birthright. Very often audacity, not talent, makes one person an artist and another a shadow artist - hiding in the shadows, afraid to step out and expose the dream to the light, fearful that it will disintegrate to the touch.”

Julie Cameron, The Artists’s Way (page 54)

An evident pattern emerges as I reflect in these phases of my life: every one of these paths was blocked by an inability to be vulnerable - with managers, clients, lecturers, and of course, friends and family. I couldn’t admit that the workload was too heavy, or the fear of unknown so great, or the prospect of dying without a creative legacy so very terrifying.

The Catalyst: Grief Cracks Everything Open

Then came grief, the grief that shattered me, cracked me open so wide I was forced to reassemble these fragments. On reflection, I realised I’d been curating knowledge based on assumptions about what others need.

Grief is a ubiquitous experience, yet so profoundly personal. In grief, we straddle the impossible space of wanting the special bonds we had to be recognized, but we also want to “grieve correctly” and to find resonance within our support network - to feel somewhat ordinary in the midst of the most abnormal circumstances one can find themselves within.

This tension - between being unique and being ordinary - is something that I’m quite familiar with.

Throughout my life, the tension between being seen and wanting to disappear with every step forward has felt like a balancing act with a piece of cheese-wire between my toes. I’ve sought to be seen in all the wrong places, in all the wrong ways.

“We all crave deep connection, yet we avoid the very thing that creates it: being seen.”

Dr. Gabriel Barsawme

This tension manifested in many ways for me - my “goth” phase in my early teens, the whole dark and stormy aesthetic was truly a painful silence that wished to be seen; when I went “off the rails” drinking and drugging, and how I still managed to push myself to my academic limits despite myself; how I craved to be seen as talented and musical, but froze up with fear every time it came to really performing; how I laboured quietly in a job I hated, just for sparse little sprinkles of validation from my managers.

In all of these instances, when it was all too much, I simply resorted to what I know best: shut down, self-silence, and do not give into “weakness”. As I have come to walk with grief and witness grief in others, I notice that this self-silencing has somehow become the default norm for many, contrary to every shred of evidence in grief literature on how real healing of grief happens.

Looking back on my twelve year old self, I see me attempting to wear my vulnerability in plain sight - because words failed me.

This protective type of self-silencing that is a byproduct of broken homes has unfortunately also become the byproduct of a broken society; a society obsessed with pathology, outdated medical models of grief, invisible or inadequate grieving rituals, and an absence of compassionate emotional vocabulary (you know those old tropes I’m thinking of, anything that starts with an “at least” has the empathetic resonance of a parking meter).

It turns out, and as I learned through experience, people need less than I thought but more than most can give: space in silence, space to be heard, space to weep, space to be seen, space to create, all with their grief.

So I’ve come to realise that I’m uniquely suited to navigating liminal environments because of my fragmentation, not despite it. I’m still tackling vulnerability, still seeking safety when I want to self-silence, still finding ways to bring my parts together, to be seen in fullness. To hold others in their most vulnerable, I must be able to do so for myself.

Recognition of My Vulnerophobia

Back in February,

Gabriel Barsawme, PhD

wrote a fantastic X thread on the topic of vulnerability in response to Brené Brown’s Braving the Wilderness. The lurch of my gut in response to every single point in the thread was indicative that I may have a vulnerability problem.

You overwork to prove your worth.

You self-sabotage the moment things feel “too good”.

You overthink every move.

You avoid risks unless you’re guaranteed success.

Dr. Gabriel Barsawme

All too often, I hide behind research to avoid discussing my own vulnerable thoughts. I can’t rest content with life as it is, in the snail lane suspended from all of those responsibilities I so desperately sought to escape, because that clearly means I’m not working hard enough. Uncertain of what the future holds, I must cover all my bases, from marketing mumbo-mojo to a minute-by-minute breakdown of every workshop I intend on facilitating, because if I don’t think hard enough I am doomed to fail.

Of course none of this is true, but such are the workings of the hypervigilant mind of a recovering vulnerophobic.

An avoidance of vulnerability affects so many dimensions of life - beyond the boundaries of our home, and our relationships, bleeding into our calling in life.

The problem with trying to evade vulnerability is that this resistance is what creates situations that will truly hurt you, leaving you even more “vulnerable” than before - in the sense that we typically understand vulnerability: fragile, weak, exposed, defenseless.

Paradoxically, by admitting our fears, and sharing our struggles, we create opportunities for more courage, creativity and connection.

Modern social media culture has affected how we relate to vulnerability too. There is a delicate, unspoken expectation of striking the balance between being “too raw” and “just right” when sharing our private lives in the public space.

Vulnerability in Our Current Age

Our relationship with vulnerability has become somewhat warped. It’s now normal to write confessionals for strangers that we conceal from our friends. We cultivate deep relationships with genuine and authentic influencers - because if they are willing to be vulnerable with me, then I can be vulnerable with them, right?

Vulnerability can be used to prey on the already vulnerable. A 2018 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that perceived vulnerability correlated directly with the qualities of likeability and trustworthiness - something that PROs, marketers and influencers have long been exploiting.

Grief and bereavement are the most profoundly vulnerable states we are likely to find ourselves in during the normal course of a life. In being called to work with the most vulnerable, I need an internal auditing process. I need to ensure that my words do not cause more harm than good, and that the vulnerability of others is not unwittingly exploited.

“So vulnerable are the recently bereaved, John Harvey has observed, that just one thwarted attempt to connect can shut down future efforts to confide.”

Hope Edelman, The Aftergrief (page 170)

So what then is true vulnerability? Safe vulnerability? Therapeutic vulnerability?

Carl Rogers described vulnerability as the fertile grounds for growth and change within his clients. For Rogers, feelings of vulnerability and anxiety signaled an incongruence between one’s self-image and their lived experience. The greater the gap between image and experience, the greater the sense of vulnerability and loss of identity.

This was before social media, so now consider that there may be one more psychosocial factor requiring congruence: one’s online image, in addition to one’s self-image, and one’s lived experience.

To achieve congruence, we have to allow ourselves to become vulnerable. If we are lucky, we will have the confidence, self-acceptance, circumstantial acceptance and emotionally resonant support networks in place for us to live our most congruent lives. However, this is unfortunately often the exception, not the norm.

Is it surprising then that we are seeing upwards of 200% search volume increases for somatic and expressive art therapies - therapies that do not require vulnerable words but a congruence between body and mind?

Grief, being cracked open, creates the conditions within which we can find congruence between our values and our walk with life - like a cracked window that allows the light in, but risks being broken by a misplaced sleight of hand.

I noticed during Lauren’s Heart Work Devotional, as we were invited to consider our core values, that many of these values overlap with the “Missing Elements of Grief” identified by Hope Edelman in The Aftergrief: Compassion, Grace, Gratitude, Hope, Humility, Meaning and Wisdom.

These are the qualities that, while already rooted within me, grief quietly invited to unfurl above ground.

Urformen der Kunst (1928), Karl Blossfeldt

The Rebuild - Creating Space for Others Within

Another thing that comes with emotional upheavals and trauma in youth is that you forget how to feel your body, and by extension, your intuition, your calling.

Part of Lauren’s Heart Work Devotional was to engage with your calling in a deeply sensual way, “a sensory exploration”: visual anchors, sounds, scents, textures, and tastes.

I was brought back to all those “dead ends” in life, as I had wrongly come to call them...

I remembered the many late nights getting documents over the deadline. How the stimulating aroma of my coffee was savoured in the pauses of phone calls with panicked colleagues, and how I calmly, steadily managed to proceed and bring them with me.

I remembered the squeak of my black markers on way too many whiteboards, and the thrill of leading people with me, holding space for their creative solutions to problems - solutions they were too afraid, too vulnerable, to volunteer with management, but I knew I could sacrifice myself being seen and hold that space of acceptance for them to flourish.

I remembered gazing into my birthcharts, marvelling at the mandala of a given life unfolding before me, through their joy and their pain. Those moments of shared vulnerability in readings, fumbling our way through shadows and symbols until something struck the room and we both knew that the charts were speaking through this union.

These memories aren’t glamourous - deadlines, white boards, little circles with symbols scribbled all over them - but they remind me that vulnerability, like grief, needs a willing vessel to find its shape. It also reminds me that I’ve created spaces for people to be vulnerable with me before - without overthinking it, without having imposter syndrome, without marketing it, without capitalising on it, countless times, as natural as it is to breathe.

Moving into grief work, the sensory anchors are simple, but they are beautiful because they are simple - the margins of life lived in all of its emotional fullness: the comforting mug of strongly tannined tea (because you were so deep in conversation you left the teabag in too long); the weight of a witnessing hand on your shoulder; the sound of long letters in a silent room; the tearing of paper or the crinkling of tissues; that moment when you hear yourself laughing through your tears though you swore you would never live to laugh again.

We tend to think of vulnerability within close relationships, like when we open up to our partner about our traumas that very first time, or when we realise we need to apologise to our child, these are moments of vulnerability - but we are moving into the AI age where vulnerability, authenticity and compassion will become irreplaceable “commodities” (though my soul wrenches to call them such).

We are entering unprecedented times. We may indeed be liberated by technology, but we may also find ourselves being called to tend the spaces of incongruence such technologies have created.

In a sea of social media voices, it’s easy to feel as though we are voiceless. In the tides of creator economies, we may forget how to create for the sake of healing. In the age of faceless AI content, we may forget what true vulnerability feels like.

Goodbye for Now, I’m Off To Write My Book

Dr. Barsawme highlighted the joys that come with openness and a willingness toward vulnerability:

Confessing your love

Taking a leap of faith in your career

Opening up about something painful

…

Cozying up with you here on Substack feels like all three at once.

…

I’m currently collecting ideas, concepts, case studies, and more, for a book I am writing about creating through grief. At some point in my own walk with grief, I realised that my creative practices were very much a “rebuilding” process - I was sifting through the rubble of my former life and repurposing some pieces, but having to fabricate completely new and complementary elements for the way forward.

The outline for the book erected itself before my very eyes… two days before going into labour with my beautiful second born six month old.

This book will be the blueprint for my offerings going forward. I can see it with such clarity and certainty. I can’t complete the work quickly enough, because of course, the work of Mothering is far more important, but that creative tension between Mothering and Creating - between being hidden and being seen - is palpable.

I’ve come to realise pushing against the tides of Motherhood is doing myself a great disservice, as my best ideas have been found within the margins of Motherhood. So I will be writing here about this beautifully slow process of getting the book together.

Healing happens in community, so as I write about this process, I hope to create meaningful dialogue around grief, death and creative healing practices - if any of this resonates I would love to hear your thoughts, stories, reflections and personal rebuilding stories.

To my Bluequentials & our Creative Grief Club,

Your presence here means so much to me on our walk with creativity and grief. Every time you read, comment, or share these words, you validate that creative grieving is a possibility for us all. Your support allows me to continue researching, writing, and creating resources that honour our losses while nurturing our resilience.

If it resonates, consider a small donation to the Coffee Donations using the button below - it keeps the words flowing while I’m nap-trapped with my little one, and my emotional support dog (Blue!) walked on the daily!

Thank you for believing in this work.

Sarah-Liz & Blue