Meme: Valuable Vulnerability
There’s an idea i’ve encountered in a couple essays and posts (not on LW) that being emotionally vulnerable is, counterintuitively, a desirable trait. I think this is usually defined as being in a state where what you observe is liable to create negative emotions in you (or in some definitions, a variety of emotions). I’ve heard several people recommend this meme but i’m still trying to wrap my head around it. Personally i usually aim for more manageable emotional states, and i rarely cultivate this kind of state. On the other hand, its popularity suggests, in my opinion, that it has at least some usefulness.
What do LWers think about this concept? What do you think is the main rationale for this idea, and do you think it is a good policy?
What do LWers think about this concept? What do you think is the main rationale for this idea, and do you think it is a good policy?
David Burns who’s one of the people who popularized CBT writes in The feeling good handbook (CBT workbook):
I think that he’s right that emotional vulerability is the key to creating personal connections.
He writes in When Panic Attacks: The New, Drug-Free Anxiety Therapy That Can Change Your Life-Broadway:
I think Burns is a good source for understanding the concept in more depths.
One possible reason is that it facilitates trust-building. Say you are stuck in a cell with another prisoner, and every day you have the chance to cooperate or defect on a small task (for example, sharing food equally vs trying to steal an unequal share). Later, you are asked to testify against each other and get a slightly reduced sentence in exchange for the other person having a drastically increased sentence. A history of the other person cooperating gives some evidence that they will cooperate in this new situation as well.
Another analogy to this would be the process of building credit. If you take out lots of loans and pay them back scrupulously, you build a history of credit worthiness. The banks are more willing to be vulnerable based on past behavior of not defaulting.
So like a policy of giving, emotionally? Ceding some control to and participating in the experience of a person near you? Which could be a bit like the Cooperate action.
Well, I followed a policy of strict emotional regulation, and it made me anhedonic for more than a decade. I’m actively working on feeling things, whereas previously, I would have described my emotional state almost entirely in terms of equanimity, although, since I didn’t know the word, I used an artful description of same. (In an emotional state, I would describe myself as balancing on top of a very narrow tower, where emotions were winds attempting to knock me down.)
Which is to say—in my experience, you don’t get to pick and choose which emotions you experience. If you start refusing some, you’ll discover they all fade away. This is initially extremely attractive, if you’re experiencing intense negative emotions, but in the long-term, I believe the term for the mental state this produces is “clinical depression”.
It’s better to learn to cope with your emotions than to attempt to refuse them.
Your experience is not universal. There are some people who get quite good at refusing negative emotions but still experiencing very strong positive emotions anyway. One advantage of religion, in fact, is that it can give people a set of beliefs (even if they are objectively false) which more easily allow them to do this.
What makes you think that certain religious people don’t have negative emotions?
I am speaking in approximate terms, just as OrphanWilde was. That does not mean never ever having a single negative emotion, just as I presume that he was not speaking of never having any emotions of any kind.
There is plenty of devotional literature which promotes refusing negative emotions and keeping the positive ones. And while I’m sure that it does not work for some people (as in OrphanWilde’s experience), it does work for others. One reason I know it works for some people is that it did work for me for many years, when I was still religious.
There’s also plenty of devotional literature about how to heal people by praying for them.
The terms are also not quite clear standard Christianity has Confession’s and I don’t think it’s considered proper that a person who confesses represses their emotions while doing so.
I was, indeed, speaking of not having any emotions of any kind. Or rather, not qualitatively experiencing them; I’d get angry, for example, but I’d notice I was angry because my hands would start clenching of their own accord, not because I’d experience anything resembling an “anger” qualia, or have my thoughts actually influenced by my emotions. To such an extent that, because I didn’t experience either lust or love or any of the variations on those two themes as an internal emotive force, I assumed for many years I was asexual.
Ok. Personally I wouldn’t consider that to be preventing emotions, but ignoring them. I think it is an undesirable thing precisely because you don’t notice the emotions, but have them anyway, and they have consequences. Since you aren’t paying attention, you can’t do anything about those consequences.
I was talking about actually not having the emotions at all, as physical realities, which of course is not something that can be done 100% of the time.
I thought Mark Manson explained it well:
Military bonding is an interesting comparison. Training in a professional military relies on shared suffering to build a strong bond between the members of a unit. If we model combat as an environment so extreme that vulnerability is inescapable, the function of vulnerability as a bonding trait makes sense.
It also occurs to me that we almost universally have more control over how we signal emotions than how we feel them. The norm would therefore be that we feel more emotions than we show; by being vulnerable and signaling our emotions, other people can empathize instinctively and may feel greater security as a result.
I think emotional vulnerability as it’s commonly intended means being emotionally open, not emotionally fragile. Open to mean that you’re not ashamed of what you feel, whatever that might be, and others have a honest reading about what you feel.
I think that the variety of emotions definition makes more sense. It’s about being open to possibilities, even if some of those possibilities are heartbreaking.
In other words, it is about taking emotional risks. I suppose it would be possible to go through life taking as few risks as possible....but such a life would be stunted in some ways. Risk-taking is not always valuable, but it is sometimes valuable.
Emotions usually have a use. Being emotionally “secure” means to choose your mental actions so to avoid possibility of negative emotions. If you allow yourself to be emotionally vulnerable you do not sensor your emotions and their usefullness away from you. That is you allow the state of the world to influence you and do not let your self identity to hijack your mental state.
I interpret this quite in reverse. I see being emotionally secure as being able to handle negative emotions and so you do NOT have to arrange your life to “avoid [the] possibility” which generally leads to a better and more interesting life.
Well I mean some mental strategies dare not risk the possibility of depression sadness etc. To that kind of mindset the “emotional cost” is very relevant. It it is associated with a fragile ego. But it does mean that in certain situations there is a clear option that is the emotionally least taxing even if it is not the most productive or most truthful option. Scapegoating your way out of harm usually leads into things like irresponcibiilty. But it is tempting and for many the default action if no corrective action is taken.
A lack of the ability to handle negative emotions isn’t what people mean when they speak about the values of vulnerability.
I’m not talking about the value of vulnerability, I’m talking about the meaning of “emotionally secure”.
“emotionally secure” is a vague term that can mean different things in different contexts. In this case I think Slider used it to mean the antonym of vulnerable.
Indeed I mean just the antonym whatever that ends up meaning.
You have to consider that people who do not enter vulnerable states will try to spin it as being the right thing to do. You can get things like the PATRIOT act throught if you refer to “domestic security” if people are terrorised by attacks. You could reasonably question whether it makes sense to forgo freedom to gain security. There is this quote of:
“People who would trade a little bit of freedom in exchange for security, will end up losing both and deserve neither”.
But this kind of logic did not end up prevailing. Its not like people admitted that they are too pussy to be the land of the free but interpreted as the circumstances forcing their hand.
I’m delighted by this perspective that the world and your self-identity are both external to your mental state.
You should look into Brene Brown’s stuff. Here’s a TED talk
From these comments i’m getting the impression that:
Being vulnerable here means some mix of being emotional, being compassionate, and being connected.
The idea is to be lightly vulnerable, or vulnerable within limits.
The name ‘vulnerability’ has the effect of emphasizing the paradox of desiring instability.