A couple years ago I participated in a local gender dialog event. It was co-hosted by two reputable, longstanding organizations, one that helps women find empowerment and one that helps teach boys to be men. It was well-attended and loosely facilitated. After tepid introductions and a few ice-breaker exercises, the room was divided in half, and men and women were seated on opposing sides of the room. The facilitators then proceeded to moderate a discussion, whereby one person would ask a question of the group on the other side of the room, and multiple people were picked to answer it.
Listening to the men, I realized they kept asking the same question over and over in different forms:
If I am vulnerable, will you take care of my feelings?
This struck me as incredibly unhealthy, and also one possible root for why women feel they have to play small to avoid the backlash of a man’s bruised ego.
Vulnerability as Currency
Being vulnerable doesn’t win you the prize of being taken care of. Ever. If you are being vulnerable so that you will be taken care of, you have a covert contract with that person, and that will likely lead to resentment faster than it will lead to connection. More on that later.
Back to the question, which, if we turn it into a statement – I will be vulnerable if you will take care of me – becomes a conditional statement. And this is where we get to the heart of why that question is toxic, and how that question delivers the message of entitlement and misogyny that men are born with. Conditioning.
“Wait!” you say, “The question seems relatively harmless, what are you talking about?!?”
Right? I mean, we enter into intimate partnerships so that we can create security, an environment of unconditional love and acceptance, and, at our best, a place where we can grow as human beings. Why wouldn’t we ask our partners to be careful with our feelings? Why wouldn’t we ask for an environment of safety? What is bad about saying “Please be kind?” The answer is, asking for a condition under which you are willing to be vulnerable delivers a complex message that very few are equipped to handle.
I will be vulnerable, if you will take care of my feelings equals:
- I am not capable of handling my own feelings, and can only be vulnerable if someone else validates my safety.
- I am making you responsible for my future ability to be vulnerable. Depending on how you handle my feelings, I will choose to shut down my emotions from here on out, or I will use you as the model for all of my future shares.
- I am broken, less than, unworthy, etc, and need your validation to feel whole, equal, worthy etc.
Another aspect of this is asking our partner to take care of us regardless of how we show up. If I ask you to take care of my feelings when I am vulnerable, part of that question is will you take care of my feelings no matter how I show up in my vulnerability. This message becomes “I am going to express my feelings in whatever manner I choose, and it’s your job to approve of that expression no matter how it feels to you.”
Vulnerability as a Practice
It’s my opinion that we are mostly amateurs when it comes to the verbal expression of our internal landscape. Emotions, feelings, sensations, these are all foreign territory when it comes to verbalizing what’s inside. It’s normal then, when we first decide that expression is a better choice than holding it all in, just getting words out of your mouth is an accomplishment. And it usually comes out with all of the backed up blame, anger, resentment and fear that we’ve been using to keep it all down. That’s natural. What we forget is that it’s OUR blame, anger, resentment and fear. It doesn’t belong to the person we are expressing it to, nor is it their responsibility to approve of us in that expression.
This is why therapists, life coaches, support groups, 12 step groups, and transformational programs exist. These are the spaces that exist for you to practice being vulnerable. You can practice saying what hurts even though your first tries will be laden with that anger and resentment. The person you are expressing to is trained to hear you without taking it personally. There’s a particular kind of intimacy between you that creates a space for expression without causing the listener harm.
However, when men are in an intimate partnership, our conditioning tells us that our partner is supposed to be our one and everything (aka our mother). We then feel entitled to practice being vulnerable with our partner. Our anger, resentment, fear, doubt, and blame all come out, usually about 90% of our communication, with the tender thing we mean to express buried somewhere in the rest. Naturally, our partners react to our entitlement, our expression, our dumping, and then because they are not playing out the role we have assigned to them, we get triggered and the whole situation devolves from there.
Conditioning, Family Systems, and Relationship Templates
We are living out the relationship templates we formed as children. Before we could talk, we believed the universe revolved around us, that everything happened because of us, and that when something bad happened, because it was our fault the most likely consequence was annihilation. Because of those beliefs, we developed survival mechanisms for our family relationships. When there was conflict, because we believed we would be annihilated, we learned how to navigate those relationships to survive them. Those survival mechanisms became our templates for relating. Summarizing greatly: Our mother becomes our template for women, our father for men, our siblings for friendships and our extended family for acquaintances and other relationships of varying intimacy levels. This complex set of rules for navigating each other is known as a family system. It was our family’s system of relating to each other that we learned to survive, and practiced that system (successfully if you’re reading this) until we moved out of our family home.
Relating to an intimate partner based on a template we developed to survive our family system growing up is simultaneously The Norm, AND a terrible idea. All of those templates were formed in us when we felt powerless, when we felt the world revolved around us, and when we believed we would die if we didn’t navigate the relationship with the Powerful Person through pleasing, manipulation and deceit. As adults we are not powerless, we know our place in the world, we know we won’t die if we don’t get what we want, and we are capable of asking for what we want without pleasing, manipulating or deceiving.
But how many of us show up in the world as powerful, autonomous, self-actualized beings who take 100% responsibility for our choices, actions and lives?
Imago and Hope
When we have not yet done the work of deconstruction those templates, and constructed new, healthy ones to put in their place, we relate to our partners using a lot of covert contracts. We have a lot of unexpressed expectations built on what we expect our model for women (our mother) to provide for us. We operate in our conditioning, get triggered a lot, and live in a near constant state of cognitive dissonance. “I want to fully know and love the woman I’m in a relationship with, yet I spend a large portion of our interactions acting like an angry, spiteful child.” It’s confusing, and painful, and because we are conditioned to react to confusion and pain by withdrawing, shutting down, and otherwise stifling our emotions, it can be extremely difficult to change this pattern.
And. There is a lot of opportunity available to us in our relationships. They provide a litmus test of our emotional development like none other. Harville Hendrix wrote about the Imago back in 1988 in Getting the Love You Want. It’s the idea that we unconsciously seek out a relationship with a person who exhibits traits that most trigger our core wound. And that we can use that relationship to discover the work we need to do to heal that wound. He said that while we may date many different types, we always PARTNER with our emotional equals. That no matter how fervently we may actively search for a partner that is nothing like our parents, we unconsciously seek out an Imago partner so that we may see more clearly the parts of us we must heal to show up as our whole selves in the world.
There’s hope for us yet. If we can choose to see our triggers as information to use for healing, if we can stop punishing our partners for not taking care of us, if we can begin to do the hard work of deconstructing our family system templates, we can have the freedom, joy and fulfillment that comes from being in a healthy, well-adjusted, adult relationship.
