00:00
Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 284, "Why Vulnerability Matters." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living.
00:19
Alright, hello there, my friends, and welcome to the podcast today. Glad to have you here. I'm a few weeks out on these, but right now I am a week out from Thanksgiving and I just picked up my first daughter at the airport today. Super excited about that having my kids here. All four of them and my daughter-in-law will be here for Thanksgiving and I just I'm so excited to have them here. Look, it makes me all emotional. I just love them so much and they have taught me so much about how to love and how to be a better person and I just adore them. I'm so grateful that they're all making the effort to be here. My youngest daughter has actually moved in here with Sione and I to go to school out here in Indiana and my other son flies in tomorrow and my other son and daughter-in-law fly in the day before Thanksgiving. So we're just loving life here this week. It's gonna be an amazing week and I hope that your Thanksgiving was fabulous if you're in the United States and you've celebrated it.
01:26
And I hope that as we look forward to the upcoming holidays that a lot of this content is helping you show up better. Sometimes the holidays can be fraught with a lot of anxiety, a lot of unmet expectations that are always gonna wreak havoc in our lives. And that's why a lot of the work we do here is around like other people's agency: letting them show up as they are and as they want to, and letting go of these expectations because they really are damaging. So if you're really really struggling with this, sometimes this is the best time of year to step into coaching and to get some coaching done. So if you want to talk with me about some one-on-one coaching, how to keep things a little bit better in your life and how to show up, I can promise you that you can have holidays that are much more calm, much more loving and kind, than you have in the past if you find yourself starting to spin out of control.
02:24
All right, we're gonna jump in today. Our topic is why vulnerability matters. I'm gonna get a little bit personal here. I got divorced eight years ago after 24 years of marriage and I'm gonna share with you a little bit of that history. When my former husband and I met each other, we were both teaching at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah and we were attending school at Brigham Young University, BYU, when we were both 23 years old. So we had met and chatted with each other a few times and it wasn't anything special for either one of us, meaning that neither of us was really interested in knowing the other person really all that much better. And personally, I wasn't especially interested in getting married, at least anytime soon. I wasn't one of those girls who dreamed about her marriage day her whole life. And I honestly didn't think I would be getting married until I was about 30. So I wasn't on the prowl, although I will say that I did love dating and flirting. That kind of stuff was always fun for me. But I think intuitively I knew that I wasn't really ready for marriage, although I couldn't have told you why at the time. I had gone out with this other man three times and I really liked him. And then he came over and told me that he wouldn't be asking me out again because he felt like he just couldn't open up and talk with me. And I really didn't understand what that meant. And so I started to pray about it and ask Heavenly Father, "help me to figure this out. Like how can I be more open?" I didn't really know how. And I didn't, I don't know, I was just completely stymied by that idea.
03:59
And let me give you a little bit of background as well from my home of origin. I was raised in a loving and accepting home, but it was not an emotional home. We didn't really talk about things that mattered in life. We didn't share emotions or testimonies or talk about our feelings being hurt or anything like that. The only phrase that I really remember having to do with emotions was when I was young and I would be crying and being told that if I was going to cry, I would be given something to cry about. And I think that was a great phrase in the 70s, right, that our parents used to tell us. And I will tell you that it's not that my dad was mean when he said that, it's just the only thing he knew to say when someone cried. He didn't have that capacity to work through that either. He was actually a very loving person and he wasn't afraid to show or share emotion, but mostly at church is where I saw it, that when he would share feelings from the pulpit and he would cry sometimes. My mom was one of the most accepting people I knew and I will say that I saw her cry, and I'm not exaggerating on this, probably no more than five times in the course of my life. She was very even-tempered, she rarely got upset, and she never held a grudge that I know of. She was just a kind and loving person, very, very even-keel as far as emotions went. And my parents created a very safe and a loving space for us to grow up. I never doubted that I was being loved, but except for when I or one of my siblings would cry, emotions were not part of the experience. And I don't think that was so unusual for homes in the 70s and 80s when I was growing up.
05:47
So back to my BYU dates. When this guy told me that he didn't feel he could open up to me, I really wasn't quite sure what that meant. But I realized that something was missing in my understanding of relationships. So, when several months later my former spouse and I, who, if you recall, didn't know each other very well, we had the opportunity to chat for several hours. And during the course of that discussion, he and I both felt we should get married. Yep, we were one of those stories. I felt that God was telling me that he would help me learn how to open up, how to do this part of relationships that I didn't get. And I can't really tell you what his experience was there, but I felt like God was telling me to marry him. So, after not really knowing each other and never going on a date, we decided that night that we were supposed to be married. And I really did believe at the time that if I married a good person in the temple, that things would work out. And I had a lot of faith in the fact that I felt that God was telling me to marry this man. And my parents had had a marriage that was pretty compatible. And none of us kids ever saw them fight. We've talked about it and everybody's like, "no, I never saw them have a fight." Right? I'm sure that they had things to work out, but we didn't ever see that. So marriage just seemed to me like two people who loved each other and took care of each other and took care of the business of having a family and work together to raise kids and all that stuff. I really didn't think about it much more deeply than that. I would see my parents kiss and hug, but didn't really see or sense deep intimacy between them. Now, whether they had that or not, I don't know. But as a teenager and as a kid growing up in that home, I didn't ever really see that.
07:44
So after three months with my previous spouse, both of us, working full time and going to school part time and him being gone for five weeks for military training, we got married. So needless to say, it was pretty tough from the very beginning. We really didn't know each other at all and we were very different. My mother was a bit of a feminist and my father supported her in that and his parents were much more patriarchal in how their relationship worked. And my former spouse was just as uneducated about emotions as I was. So now we've got these two people getting married, both pretty headstrong, and we didn't have any idea how to create the emotional intimacy of a marriage. All I knew was that almost immediately I was very unhappy. I was very unfulfilled and I couldn't figure it out. I was a good person and he was as well. Look how painful it still is for me to look back on those days. We were both good people and yet we couldn't communicate. We couldn't understand each other. We couldn't see anything but what the other person was doing wrong. I probably cried more my first year of marriage than I had my whole life. And my husband was just as stymied about what to do about me crying as my dad had been. And probably as his dad had been. So there was a lot of ignoring of the fact that I was crying, a lot of annoyance that I was hurting. And I didn't I just knew that something was missing. I couldn't have even told you why I was crying. And he just like, "I don't even know what to do here," because we were we were both just clueless in this in this way. And as for being able to open up like my initial thing that said, "I think that this person can help me learn how to open up," I still didn't know what that meant. Everything I knew about marriage was just to be nice and to make sure that I was as low maintenance as possible. And also to make sure that I was giving him enough sex so that he didn't use pornography or go to another woman to get satisfied. Thank you 70s and 80s culture, right, like these crazy ideas that we had.
10:04
So are you starting to get an idea of how dysfunctional we were? Neither of us had any idea about emotional intimacy. I knew I needed to feel more connected. I was desperately hungry for that. But I didn't have any idea how to do that. He kept telling me it would happen the more sex we had. But that didn't seem to be working. In fact, it was having the opposite effect for me. I was feeling used and resentful for doing my duty and still not getting the friendship connection that I had hoped for. At this point that makes complete sense to me. All of this makes sense, why it was so dysfunctional. At the time I had no clue. And pretty much 24 years of that. We were both really unhappy, but neither of us could figure out what was missing. Now, not everything was bad. We could get on autopilot and be good roommates at times. We lived in Germany for five years and we both loved to travel so we did a lot of traveling. You know it wasn't horrible all the time, but there was always this undercurrent of things just being so wrong. And it would always circle back around to fights about how we felt so lonely and unfulfilled and how it was the other person's fault, how they weren't doing what they were supposed to do to make us happy.
11:27
Okay, so that's a lot of background and hopefully not too much information, but I share that because I think there are so many marriages that have a lot of similarities to what I just shared. I mean, obviously the details are going to be different, but I think that there's a lot of this disconnect in young people getting married. Especially from our generation who just didn't know about emotional intimacy. I don't think I ever really associated the lack of connection with vulnerability and being open. In fact, I don't think during those 24 years of marriage that I ever connected the word "vulnerability" with marriage at all. I'm not really sure what happened with the idea of being open that kind of pushed me into thinking that marrying him was the right decision. And I'm not saying that wasn't the right decision. But I will just say that it never felt safe to be open with him. It seemed that when I would try to share things, it would end up being a painful experience for me. So I stopped trying in the first few years of marriage. And I would say he probably did too because it probably wasn't safe for him because he wasn't meeting my expectations, right?
12:45
So after my divorce, a trusted friend suggested that I check out Brené Brown and so I did and the first thing I did was check out a five-hour presentation that she had given called "The Power of Vulnerability," and I started listening to it in my car. This was about nine months after my divorce and up until then I had been pretty much in blame mode. I could see all the things my previous spouse had done wrong and really wasn't seeing anything that I had contributed to the dysfunction. It just wasn't even on my radar. I couldn't see it. My life was about to change. I started listening to "The Power of Vulnerability" while driving around in my van, as moms do a lot, and I was floored. Brené was sharing concepts about vulnerability and relationships that I had never heard before, and it was like water after being in the desert for weeks surviving on very little. It was feeding my soul like nothing ever had before.
13:54
So here's a taste of some of the things that she says that were connecting with my soul and were feeding me. I'm just going to read a whole bunch of quotes right here. "Staying vulnerable is a risk we have to take if we want to experience connection." "Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen." "You cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviors." "We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions." "Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they are never weaknesses." "Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, the longing, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path." "Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It's about the choice to show up and be real, the choice to be honest, the choice to let our true selves be seen." "To love someone fiercely, to believe in someone with your whole heart, to celebrate a fleeting moment in time, to engage fully in a life that doesn't come with guarantees, these are risks that involve vulnerability and often pain. But I'm learning that recognizing and leaning into the discomfort of vulnerability teaches us how to live with joy, gratitude, and grace." "Owning our story can be hard, but not as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky, but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy, the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light."
16:07
Okay, that's just a small spattering of the concepts that I was being exposed to for the first time in my life, and it was blowing me away. I ended up listening to that CD set three times before I finally had to turn it back into the library because my rentals of it were out. And then I bought my own CD set of it and listened to it four more times in the next few years. I was finally learning what it meant to be vulnerable, to be open, and the impact that that has on our relationships. And I was starting to realize for the first time and understand what was so dysfunctional in my previous marriage, why we struggled so much, why there was so much pain. I also started learning about boundaries for the first time and how important it is for us to have a clear sense of self and to have a voice and to set clear boundaries. I had spent a lot of years not having a voice because I felt that having one would cause problems and fights and I didn't need more of those in my life, for sure. And besides, as a woman, I felt it was my job to create a heaven on earth in my home and being quiet was part of that for me. Being compliant, being easy-peasy, even if it didn't feel like me, felt like my responsibility because when I spoke up, it created a fight. So it is crazy to me how much societal conditioning we received, both in and out of religious culture, that is actually very detrimental to creating equal partnerships in marriage. And this is part of what I'm seeking to do here on the podcast is help us step away from that conditioning that we receive, those ideas about how we should be as women, that actually destroy our relationships. And I thank God every day that I finally started learning about concepts like vulnerability.
18:09
Vulnerability is described as "capable of being physically or emotionally wounded, open to attack or damage." So that's what the dictionary has to say about it. So no wonder we spent years and years not wanting to be vulnerable. Nobody in their right mind will intentionally open themselves up to being physically or emotionally wounded or open to attack. Or would they? I think for so many of us the "wounded and open to attack" definition is all we knew about being vulnerable, that we just knew that we could be really hurt. And yet Brené Brown was teaching me that in order to have the emotional connection I wanted, vulnerability was a vital ingredient. And like I said before, I had never considered the concept of vulnerability in the context of marriage or relationships. I did not understand the importance of being open with my ideas, my fears, my struggles. And to be honest, in my previous marriage, it wasn't safe for either one of us to go there because the other person would use it to attack later on. Or we would just be dismissed and that was just as painful. This was our worst fear in our marriage. And yet Brené Brown teaches that vulnerability is a necessity and the necessary ingredient in creating intimacy.
19:34
And here is what I've come to understand why. When someone can show up with vulnerability and the other person can make it a safe space for that vulnerability, it creates the understanding that this person can be trusted. It creates a safe space. So if you follow John Gottman's work on marriage at all, you will know that trust is foundational to having a healthy relationship. Marriages without trust do not last, or if they do, they don't last in a meaningful way. Meaning, it won't be an intimate, loving place to be. It would be just like roommates coming and going. So when I show up sharing something that could put me in some sketchy light, and my partner gets all judge-y about my thoughts, my feelings, my behaviors, that does not create a safe space. And then I don't trust that in the future I can share something vulnerable and that they will love and accept me. And so I start holding back from sharing something personal the next time. And then we've started a pattern of thinking and behavior. I hold back sharing out of fear of being rejected and then the emotional distance widens. And then I'm even more fearful of being vulnerable. And it's a completely natural protective pattern for our brain to take that is harming our marriages.
20:56
And this is where we have to start learning and seeing things that we haven't seen before. And here's where vulnerability is so important for both sides of the conversation. When I enter into the relationship circle and put something really vulnerable on the table, maybe sharing some judge-y thoughts I had about someone or how I held back on being loving to someone, my partner can choose to be vulnerable in return by looking at it and accepting me for being human and having pretty normal human struggles. His vulnerability will have him respond with compassion, with empathy, with kindness. It's vulnerable for him because it can be hard to see the weaknesses of your spouse and not feel fear that those behaviors or thoughts will infiltrate your own life or your relationship. Because what if he gets emotionally or physically wounded from similar behaviors that she says toward you? So, when my partner responds with compassion, empathy, and kindness, I can feel it is safe to allow him to see my struggles, my fears, my pains, to know me. And this creates trust, or even greater trust, which strengthens the foundation of our relationships.
22:15
So what would cause me to want to show up with vulnerability in the first place? Why would I want to share with my spouse that I had been super judge-y about someone during the day or that I am struggling to be kind to someone? Why would I want to share with them how I am weak, how I am struggling to be Christlike, how I am falling short of who I want to be? It's because the emotional intimacy we create in our relationships is found in the knowing and being known. Meaning, when my spouse knows my weaknesses and failings and loves me all the more for it, we create safety and trust and intimacy. And when my spouse can share his weaknesses and failings and I love him all the more for it, we create safety and trust and intimacy. This space of showing up vulnerable is vital to our relationships. When any of us first met our spouse and started dating, it only progressed when someone was vulnerable. Someone had to be the first person to express interest by approaching and talking to the other, by asking the other person out on a date, by at some point reaching over and holding a hand or asking for a kiss, by saying "I love you" for the first time, by becoming committed in a relationship. Somebody had to be vulnerable. All of these things required a lot of vulnerability and that let the other person know that you were making a bid for deeper intimacy. And again, if the other person responded positively, we increased the intimacy and we felt safe in the relationship and it progressed.

23:56
Often what happens after several years of marriage is that we lose our focus and one or both of us stop responding to vulnerability bids with kindness and acceptance. Okay, our spouse might come and share something vulnerable with us and we might ignore that they've shared something or we might get super annoyed that they have bothered us with such information or that they're not the kind of person that we expected them to be or that they interrupted something that we were doing. We may get judge-y or even angry, and so we respond with being dismissive or expressing annoyance and disappointment rather than with empathy and compassion, and that response can create shame. And shame will generally shut us down. We have made a bid for intimacy and the other person rejected it. That is always painful and our primitive brain hates pain and so this is how we start the cycle of turning away, of shutting down intimacy, of destroying our relationships. It can happen almost imperceptibly at first, but it is painful and it is so harmful. If we're not paying attention to our vulnerability and our spouse's vulnerability, we can let these small moments of connection pass by us and it's destructive not only for the missed opportunity to see them and know them more deeply, to create deeper intimacy, but it also because of the trust and the safety that gets eroded.
25:30
Okay, so if you are in this type of relationship and I know that many of you are, or you have been in the past in a previous relationship, or maybe you're trying to dig yourself out of it. How do you change it? How do we reverse the cycle of destroying trust and safety and start returning to a place that feels safe? Brené Brown talks about how people have to earn the right to our vulnerability, meaning we don't just go throwing our vulnerability around to everybody we meet. And that absolutely makes sense, right? It's important for us to be aware of when and where it's appropriate to be vulnerable. And yet, if you're seeking to create a stronger relationship with a spouse, sometimes they haven't earned that right. They have been dismissive of our bids in the past to connect through vulnerability and it doesn't feel safe. So herein lies the struggle. This is the conundrum. We need to be vulnerable to increase intimacy, and yet we feel that if we are vulnerable, that we will be attacked or dismissed, and that's painful and our primitive brain is screaming for us not to do that. So how do we bring these two things to the table? How do we honor the fear that we're not going to be accepted but also step in with vulnerability?
26:51
So here's the space where I have landed with that. It is a risk to create a better relationship because we have to put our bloody, vulnerable hearts out there. But without risk, it will never get better. Someone has to be willing to go first. When we can get to the point that we are okay being vulnerable because we have our own backs, then we can start the process of stepping into it. Having our own back here means that we know that even if our spouse dismisses us or even mocks us or attacks us, that it will not break us. We know we have been the person we want to be in showing up vulnerable. We know that we have shown up how we want to for the relationship. This isn't saying that a dismissive or attacking response won't hurt, but it is saying that I know I'm strong enough to work through it, that it won't beat me, that even if this other person is less than kind, that I will be more than kind to myself. I know that I'm strong enough to be the one willing to take the risk, and that's an amazing place to be. And then I also know that if they show up dismissive or attacking, that I can also start a conversation around their response using the "own your own" sentence structure that we talk about on here. I don't have to get mad or defensive or attack back. I can share my thoughts and my feelings about their response, and this also takes vulnerability to use the "own your own." But here's the deal, my friends.
28:38
No amazing relationship will ever exist without copious amounts of vulnerability. And it has to start with somebody. Why not let it start with you? Someone who has been doing the difficult work of seeing yourself more clearly and learning tools to help you communicate better and to have your own back. And here's another piece. If you continue to show up with vulnerability and owning your own and your spouse continues to show up dismissive and attacking, that's good data. Data that lets you know where your spouse currently is in regards to your relationship. Now, I'm not saying that they won't change. But if you show up vulnerable and then let your spouse know, "when I told you about my struggle and you said, 'come on, you're blowing it out of proportion,' I felt hurt because I was thinking that what I was experiencing didn't matter to you." Then you are opening up a piece of your heart and you're making a bid for intimacy. You're being vulnerable even in sharing the owning your own piece that we did there. Most of the people we are married to don't want to hurt us, but it takes vulnerability to let them know when they have and to do it from a place where we are not attacking and blaming and accusing.When we can learn to step into the vulnerability, of not only putting our fears and insecurities on the table for our spouse to see, but also to have an honest, "own your own" conversation when they show up in a way that is hurtful, then we are showing up as an equal partner. And only when we show up as equals do we have a chance to really create what we want in our relationships. And yes, showing up as an equal requires these types of vulnerability if we want it the chance at creating deeper intimacy.
30:36
Now, will there be people out there that you will show up vulnerable for and they don't show up at all? Absolutely there will. But when we have our own backs and love our reasons for showing up vulnerable, then even if they are dismissive or insensitive or mean, we can be proud of our courage and vulnerability and who we are choosing to be in the relationship. We will have our own back. Now, this isn't always easy. And if you have years of shying away from vulnerability in your relationship, it can be incredibly scary. But change will not happen without risk. Even if you have a pretty great relationship but would love something deeper and more intimate, ask yourself if there are ways you could step into more vulnerability with your spouse. How can you be more open and transparent about your fears and insecurities and weaknesses and failures? When I look back at my previous 24-year marriage, I see a severe lack of vulnerability for both of us because neither one of us was accepting of the other person's flaws, weaknesses, and humanity and this created a very safe environment with very little trust.
31:52
In my current marriage with Sione, we work really hard to not only be vulnerable and honest in how we show up, but also to create a really safe space for the trust being honest and vulnerable with us and it is making all the difference in the intimacy we are creating. We have more intimacy after 20 months of marriage, 24 months of knowing each other, than I had after 24
years in my previous marriage. This, my friends, is why vulnerability matters. It is the only way to create that relationship that we crave. It's the only way. And I'm so grateful for Brunet Brown's work that got me started on this path of figuring this out. And I'm so grateful to be able to share part of my journey with you. And I just pray, literally I pray, that this helps you in the ways that you need help, that it helps you see things, even if it's just one little small nugget, a podcast, where you can see and understand the complexities of this better. That's why I do this work. And I'm just so grateful to be able to share these concepts with you. And I'm grateful for you for showing up. I love growing up so much. And this is why. Because it's creating for me the opportunity to have relationships with my spouse and with my children. And with other people in my life that just was not even available to me before.
33:44
Okay. If you would like to chat with me about a one-on-one coaching opportunity, December's a great time to do it. You can go to tanyahale.com. You can go to the "free consultation" tab at the top. Click on that and you can sign up on my calendar for a time that works for you that we can chat about coaching. And also, if you're not getting my "weekend win," go to the contact me page or any of my podcast pages. Scroll down and there's a place where you can sign up to get my weekend win in your inbox every week. Also, I just am working on getting transcripts made for my podcasts. So we're starting at my most current and working our way back. It's going to take a while to do that. But if there is one or two of these that you're like, "I would like to go back and revisit that and be able to read it," that will be available as soon as we can get them up. We're working on that right now.
34:41
Also, I'm toying around with the idea of just having a discussion group around emotional and physical intimacy. I know that a lot of you love this content, you love talking about this kind of stuff, but you don't really have people in your life to talk about it with, to process things. I know that when I started doing this work, a lot of my friends had zero interest in this, and I have some really, really great friends who have never listened to one of my podcasts and have zero interest in this kind of content, and I have had to find other people in my life to have these great discussions with, and some of you don't have that. And I thought it would be kind of great to get together a group. We could meet early on Saturday mornings, and just meet, I don't know, I'm just playing around with the idea. Maybe for four, five, six months, every Saturday, I mean, obviously none of us could come there every Saturday, but we could work on that, and just talk about what we're experiencing and share ideas and share information and open up ideas about this. That sounds fascinating to me. If that's something that would be fascinating to you and you would like to be a part of, go to my website as well and just send me a note and let me know, "hey, I would love this idea." If I have enough people who are interested, I'm going to follow up with it and I think I'm going to do it because it just sounds great to me. It sounds like a lot of fun to help you create connections of people that you can have great discussions with and new friendships and just to hash out a lot of the stuff that a lot of us struggle with within the area of emotional and physical intimacy in our relationships. So let me know if that's of interest to you. Go to tanyahale.com and go to the "contact me" button and you can send me a note. It'll go straight to my inbox.

36:27
Okay, my friends, that's gonna do it. Loved the things I shared with you today and I think I was pretty vulnerable today in sharing some of some of the things that I've been through and I hope that it was helpful information for you to see things more clearly in your own relationships. Okay, have a great, great week. I'll see you next time. Bye.
36:53
Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.