Daring Greatly when your Emotional Capacity is not so great

This post is part of a series of reflections inspired by the book ‘Daring Greatly‘, which I read back in March. I reviewed the book here and expanded further from a parenting point of view. As I was reading the book, I considered whether there were areas in my life where I shy away from being vulnerable and as a result the post below is more personal than anything I’ve written before.

You know that lovely woman, who always has a smile for everyone, who is gentle and whilst not necessarily a loud popular person is always there with an encouraging word and who seems to really like you and everyone else? I know someone like this and she is an amazing and inspiring woman. But yeah, that’s SO not me. I have never been one of those welcoming people who invite confidences.

For one thing I have to prepare myself to do small talk with people I don’t know. This applies to most social settings like church or toddler groups, or even parties where I don’t know everyone or I am only acquainted to a few people but we’re not really actually friends. When I say I have to come prepared, I mean that I have to intentionally talk to myself as I am getting ready or walking down the road and say: ‘today, you are going to talk to one or two people you don’t know. You are going to make yourself available and maybe even approach them and be friendly and ask who they are and why they’re here or whatever.’ Also, if I don’t do this, prep myself in that way before heading into a social situation, I will most likely just default to sitting quietly saving up my energy, hugging my drink and observing, or finding one person I know really well and only speaking to them, or focusing on my little kids so I don’t have to talk to anyone. The reason I do this is in part because my natural instinct is not to talk unless I know people well. Talking to strangers can be excruciating. My greatest fear is that they will not respond and I won’t know how to extricate myself from the conversation and it will just be awkward. I’ve been snubbed enough times as a teen from my school peer group to know that’s not an experience I care to repeat as an adult. But deep down, I know that’s not all there is to it.

The thing is, at the toddler group and at church, I often see people in need. People in difficulty, who are struggling to keep their face from showing that life is just too much or that they are in physical pain; people for whom life is not easy, and I don’t mean that they got a bit frazzled because the car wouldn’t start in the morning; I mean people whose loved ones have a life-threatening illness, abuse survivors whose latest relationship has turned violent yet again, people whose past won’t allow them to move forward. Compassion doesn’t come easily to me, and I think this whole ’emotional capacity’ thing is a huge part of the problem. Deep down, I want to engage and help out. I want to be able to put a hand on their shoulder, ask ‘how are you doing’ and then just be a listening ear and maybe offer a prayer or encouragement that is not trite or fake. Sometimes I will come out of a church service with my grizzly baby and sit in the café, and I’ll notice a lone figure on one of the sofas, here but not here, in need of comfort I wish came easier for me to provide. And most often, I shy away from engaging, from extending that hand. I tell myself I am too unprepared to engage with people because of xyz and I am too tired, and I miss an opportunity to just be there for someone. But I fear this is just one big excuse.

This whole ‘I can’t do small talk’ thing is only one side of the story. The real reason I don’t engage is because I’m afraid. I’m afraid of being used, like I’ve been used a number of times before when I’ve extended a hand and got my whole arm bitten off, in my friendships and in my personal relationships. I’m afraid that whatever baggage people are carrying will be too much for me, that I will not be able to walk away from that conversation without carrying their burden too. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I should be changed by meeting with a person in need. But mostly I am scared that I will be crushed under a burden too heavy for me too bear, under a burden I do not know how not to carry. It’s easy to say the words ‘you don’t have to take any of it on’, but it still happens even if you don’t mean to. And I don’t have the tools, I didn’t then and I don’t now. My emotional capacity is very small indeed. I can do friendships when there is a balance and we lean into each other in turn as life happens but we don’t need hand-holding all the time. That’s my comfort zone.

I know where it comes from, this small capacity, this disengagement and retreat from any person that might need more from me emotionally than I could ever get from them. It’s a series of big and small things that started in infancy. You don’t grow up in a house haunted by mental illness without learning about burdens. The burden of being expected to be ‘responsible’, the heavy, heavy burden and fear that comes with the realisation that your parent is not and never will be who you need them to be and that you’re the only thing you’ve got, the burden of not letting friends in because of what they might see in our house, of being a child who knows too much about adulthood, of unwittingly becoming the receptacle for someone else’s burden because ‘no one else can truly understands the reality of our daily life’.

The thing is, this habit of retreating and avoiding emotional engagement with people who might not be able to return support to me is now a hindrance rather than a protection. When I was growing up, it was the only thing I knew to do to not get hurt. It was a tactic to protect myself from rejection and burn-out and from being used. See a need, run away quick. It is probably a fairly normal response to what was going on in my life. As I am getting older however, I can see that it is my default setting for dealing with any emotional discomfort that comes my way, and it is stopping me from moving forward. It is the antithesis of vulnerability. If I want to grow as a person, I know I will have to take that risk and learn how to handle all the emotional baggage of other people without feeling overwhelmed or abused; I’m going to have to learn the tools to stop me from taking other people’s burdens to the extent that I am unable to cope so that I can give more. I do know it is a risk and I still need to take care of myself. In the last few years, I’ve finally learnt to structure my life to create capacity. I have learnt to be completely comfortable saying no to things; I have acknowledged that my need for a thinking and a resting place in my day-to-day is imperative to my well-being and I have taken steps to create a rhythm where I am not rushing anywhere. And on the whole, I am managing it, even with two kids under three.

Ultimately, there’s no two ways about it, I will have to just jump in and invest into the messy lives of the people around me. I will probably still need to ‘talk myself into it’ as a daily intentional practice. But I get the sense that you need to stretch your emotional capacity like a balloon, with practice, a bit at a time, until you find yourself enlarged from within.

Daring Greatly – A book review

I can’t remember exactly how I decided to add Daring Greatly to my birthday books’ wish list. I first came across it when it was recommended on one of the blogs I follow. It sounded interesting but I wasn’t as excited about it as I was about reading Quiet or Bread & Wine. Maybe because it sounded a bit heavy; after all it is about the concept of vulnerability and was written by a ‘shame researcher’. A what researcher? There is such a thing? How very un-sexy and utterly depressing. But it was a bestseller and everyone was raving about it so I was intrigued.

Anyway, my birthday happened and there is was. And maybe because it was the book I was anticipating the least, I decided to read it first.

Oh. My. Word.

Wow.

Initially I wondered how it was that in a world where bestsellers include Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey (two books I am NOT going to link you to), a book on vulnerability could make such a big splash. And then, about oh, maybe 2 pages in, I knew exactly why. This book is insightful, profound, challenging and highly quotable. When I was thinking about which passage to highlight in this post, I wondered how I would manage to keep it concise when I could include entire pages from the book. In fact, I had barely started when I put this up on Twitter:

 

15 pages into Brene Brown’s ‘Daring Greatly’ & I’m getting neckache from nodding so frantically and I’ve been close to tears a couple times

— Pauline L (@Badgerwife) February 22, 2014

 

It’s only the flipping introduction!

— Pauline L (@Badgerwife) February 22, 2014

 

What It’s About

So this is a book on the subject of vulnerability. But what does it mean, and why is it important?

Ultimately, it is about learning to live wholeheartedly, embracing discomfort and being fully engaged in our relationships, work, home and parenting. The phrase ‘daring greatly’, as Brené Brown explains in the opening paragraph, comes straight from Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech known as “The Man in the Arena“.

She argues that “Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.”

This statement bears the weight of her research. She has interviewed a huge amount of people to draw her conclusions, and she presents the results with great clarity. She investigates our culture of ‘never enough’ and the myths that surround vulnerability, such as the idea that being vulnerable is a weakness, and she shows that true courage means risking the pain of rejection for the sake of connection. She also identifies the various ways with which we try to shield ourselves from shame and hurt (such as perfectionism and oversharing, to name but two) and how this ‘protection’ actually stops us from true healthy connections. This is no mere theory however, Brené Brown also offers strategies to learn how to drop the shield. In the final chapters, she connects her research outcomes to the real world specifically in the areas of work, education and parenting.

One Highlight From Many

One of the great gifts this book has given me is that of language. I was worried that the book would be heavy, dry and academic. I shouldn’t have feared. Anyone may pick it up and uncover deep truths about human nature, belonging, shame, connection and relationships, in accessible words that resonate long after you’ve finished reading them. For me personally, it gave language to things within me that I was aware of but which I could not have articulated in any meaningful way. Until now.

For one thing, it brings shame to the foreground and gives you words to throw at it when you feel like it’s getting at you, like shame resilience, self-love and courage, like knowing that you are enough.

One of the most interesting reactions I had to the book occurred when I was reading the chapter on Understanding and Combating Shame. Brené Brown was sharing her own internal struggles during the time that her TED Talk went viral (more on TED at the end of the post). As she was sharing her innermost fears about the criticism she knew she would get from certain corners of the internet, I as a reader experienced an immediate closeness to her and a rise in empathy for what she had gone through. I shared in her discomfort and most wanted in that moment to reach out through the page and tell her that I understood, and that I thought she had done an incredible job. I wanted to encourage her and tell her that she was not alone. It didn’t matter that I have never experienced the exact same circumstance or that I’ve never met her. It was our shared human experience of shame and discomfort and her honest disclosure that made her real to me.

This is what vulnerability does. It brings us closer, it makes us care about each other, it opens up relationships and makes communication easier. When we are vulnerable, we invite others in, put our differences aside and say ‘see, we are the same after all’. We experience connection.

Vulnerability is not weakness, and the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure we face every day are not optional. Our only choice is a question of engagement. Our willingness to own and engage with our vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our purpose; the level to which we protect ourselves from being vulnerable is a measure of our fear and disconnection.

In Conclusion

I was so inspired by this book that I plan to write a couple more posts on the subject. In the first I will focus on the chapter on parenting and I will close by reflecting on a couple of areas that bring up feelings of vulnerability within me, that reading the book challenged me about, and I hope my grappling with these issues inspires your own journey.

This is a book to read and re-read, so go buy it. But if you’re still not sure whether it is for you or whether it is worth spending money on, I would encourage you to check out the TED talk that started it all. If you’ve never heard of TED, go check out their website, you won’t regret it.