Episode 61. Flawed and Fabulous: How to Build Real Intimacy Through Vulnerability (Part 1)
The Risk That Heals: How Vulnerability Can Transform Your Marriage
Vulnerability is often misunderstood. In the world of marriage, where we’re supposed to be strong, steady, and dependable, vulnerability can feel like weakness—or even a liability. But after years of studying couples and walking alongside them through conflict and reconnection, we’ve learned this: vulnerability isn’t weakness—it’s the gateway to deeper love.
In fact, vulnerability may be the very thing your marriage is missing.
When practiced intentionally, vulnerability has the power to shift a relationship from stuck, surface-level survival into something alive, vibrant, and deeply connected. In this post, we’ll explore what vulnerability in marriage really means, the obstacles that get in the way, and how you can start using it to transform your relationship.
What Is Vulnerability in Marriage?
Vulnerability in marriage means letting your guard down and letting your spouse see you—not just the polished, problem-solving version of you, but the real you. The one with fears, insecurities, longings, and needs.
It’s saying things like:
“I’m afraid I’m not enough for you.”
“I miss the way we used to be.”
“I don’t know how to fix this, but I don’t want to lose you.”
That kind of honesty is risky—but it’s also where real connection begins.
Two Types of Vulnerability
In our work with couples, we’ve seen two forms of vulnerability show up in relationships:
1. Intentional Vulnerability
This is the courageous kind—the choice to open up in order to deepen trust and closeness. It happens when there’s a foundation of emotional safety, and it says, “I trust you with the real me.”
2. Unintentional Vulnerability
This happens when emotional walls come down without consent—like during a betrayal, trauma, or major conflict. It often leaves us feeling raw, exposed, and ashamed. While it’s not chosen, how we respond to these moments can shape our healing.
Why Intentional Vulnerability Is a Superpower in Marriage
Being intentionally vulnerable isn’t about oversharing or demanding closeness. It’s about showing up honestly in your relationship, which leads to:
✅ Deeper emotional intimacy
✅ Greater empathy and trust
✅ Stronger communication and conflict repair
✅ More meaningful sex and affection
It’s not magic—but it is transformative.
What Gets in the Way?
Despite all these benefits, vulnerability is hard. Here are some of the most common barriers we’ve seen:
Fear of Judgment
“What if I tell you how I feel and you reject me?”
Many of us worry our deepest truths will be met with criticism. But more often, they invite empathy and connection.
Past Hurts
If you’ve been betrayed, dismissed, or misunderstood in the past, vulnerability feels dangerous. Healing requires time and often starts with smaller risks that rebuild trust.
Shame
As Brené Brown says, shame is the voice that tells us we’re unworthy of love. It whispers: “If they really knew you, they’d walk away.”
Shame shuts down vulnerability—and therefore shuts down connection.
5 Ways to Cultivate Vulnerability in Your Marriage
Ready to grow in this area? Here are five practical ways to begin:
1. Practice Courage
Say the thing you’re afraid to say—but in a kind, honest way. Vulnerability isn't about drama. It's about truth in love.
2. Show Empathy
When your partner opens up, resist the urge to fix. Instead, listen to understand. “That makes sense why you’d feel that way.” goes a long way.
3. Cultivate Compassion
Start with yourself. You’ll find it easier to offer your partner compassion when you’re not beating yourself up internally.
4. Foster Deeper Connection
Try sharing something you’ve never said aloud—even a small truth. These moments build safety over time.
5. Express Gratitude
When your spouse is vulnerable, say thank you. It helps reinforce that risk with reassurance: “I see you. I appreciate you trusting me.”
The “Shame Hangover”
Sometimes, even when vulnerability goes well, you’ll feel regret or anxiety afterward. This is what Brené Brown calls a shame hangover—that vulnerable “ugh, why did I say that?” feeling.
This doesn’t mean you did it wrong.
It means you’re stretching your emotional muscles—and that’s how growth happens.
Final Thoughts: From Stagnant to Scintillating
Vulnerability is not the easy path—but it’s the real one. It’s what moves a marriage from functional to deeply fulfilling. From “getting by” to truly being known, seen, and loved.
And here’s the truth: your spouse wants to know you—not the version of you that performs or protects, but the one that longs to connect.
So start small. Share one thing today that feels just a little risky.
Because real intimacy isn’t found in perfection—it’s born in brave, messy, honest moments.
As Brené Brown reminds us:
“Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity.”
And marriage, at its best, is where all of that can thrive.
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Welcome to Marriage iQ, the podcast for the intelligent spouse.[00:00:08 - 00:00:10]
I'm Dr. Heidi Hastings.[00:00:10 - 00:00:12]
And I'm Dr. Scott Hastings.[00:00:13 - 00:00:31]
We are two doctors, two researchers, two spouses, two lovers, and two incredibly different human beings coming together for one purpose. To transform the stinky parts of your marriage into scintillating ones using intelligence mixed with a little fun.[00:00:34 - 00:01:07]
Hello, friends near and far across the street and across the globe. We welcome you with open arms, open hearts, and open minds into our community of intelligent spouses who want to join with us to live, breathe, and fully experience life. If you're listening right now, you are a friend to the Hastings. Grab a friend or two and have them listen, too. We would love it if you could invite someone to listen, help us grow. Heidi, I want to ask you a question.[00:01:07 - 00:01:08]
Okay.[00:01:08 - 00:01:21]
How can a married man and woman who experience the world so differently possibly live a truly scintillating life together? We both interpret life differently.[00:01:21 - 00:01:21]
It's true.[00:01:22 - 00:02:11]
How can we, as married man and woman, live a truly scintillating life with this seemingly fundamental roadblock between our genders? From a perspective of a physician? As a doctor, I get to peer into the most intimate parts of human beings. Yes. I get to check prostates, cervixes, rectums, noses, ears. Oh, gross. That's so private, so personal. We don't want to expose ourselves. Right. But as a physician, I do that part of my job. And that kind of talks a little bit about opening up, being more vulnerable. Right. With each other.[00:02:11 - 00:02:12]
You have to be.[00:02:12 - 00:02:18]
Yeah. You have to be with your doctor. Let's talk about vulnerability in our relationship.[00:02:18 - 00:03:18]
Hmm? That's a good idea. To do that, we're going to be relying heavily upon material from the research and books by Brene Brown. For those five people who may not know Brene Brown, she is a shame and vulnerability researcher who also researches courage and joy and other amazing emotions that we feel looking at how they impact us as individuals and our relationships. So some of the books of hers that we're going to be looking at are Daring, Greatly Dare to lead, Gifts of Imperfection, which might be her most popular book and then her very first book. I thought it was just me, but it isn't. Making the journey from what Will people Think? To Am I Enough? So that's what we're going to use today to look at vulnerability in our marriage relationships.[00:03:19 - 00:03:20]
Excellent.[00:03:20 - 00:03:47]
So what is vulnerability from a marriage point of view? We can look at it as a state of either intentionally or unintentionally removing some of the personal walls or boundaries that we have set up around ourselves that impact who we are and this impacts who we are. And it also exposes us to risk of being injured or hurt. There's that possibility.[00:03:48 - 00:04:05]
But wait, Dr. Hastings, I've been burned before. I gotta learn how to be strong, not weak. I don't want to be stupid. I've got to defend myself, to protect myself, to create a safe space for myself.[00:04:05 - 00:04:47]
Yeah, I've told myself those same things and of course you do. It's human nature. We don't naturally want to be vulnerable. We want to protect ourselves physically and emotionally. Yeah, we may have been burned before. This might look like divorce, abuse, betrayal, or any other kind of loss. Why do we naturally gravitate as humans towards safety, security and perfectionism and protection? The stories that we tell ourselves about the potential pain that awaits us is so huge. We take very careful steps to avoid anything that might injure us.[00:04:48 - 00:05:11]
In fact, we build walls around us and in doing so, we surround ourselves with these echo chambers, other people who agree with us on every point. This is why I think social media is so huge. It allows us to find our group of people who just want to support what we already believe.[00:05:11 - 00:05:16]
So are you saying then, God, that social media helps us be vulnerable?[00:05:18 - 00:05:29]
Well, it can. I think it can on both ends. But I think we need to be aware of the echo chambers that we create that only self serve our own ideas and opinions.[00:05:30 - 00:05:45]
Okay, so using social media with that in mind, just being aware that while it does sometimes give us an opportunity to be more vulnerable, it can also create problems. That what you're saying?[00:05:45 - 00:05:46]
Yes, indeed.[00:05:46 - 00:06:01]
Okay, so when we look at things that keep us from being vulnerable, here are a few things that we thought of when we were talking about this today. Sometimes we simply ignore whatever it is that feels vulnerable, that feels weak.[00:06:02 - 00:06:06]
That's what I like to do. Yeah, just ignore goes away, right?[00:06:07 - 00:07:07]
We compare ourselves to others and find that we are weak. And so we again probably ignore it. Or we use it to beat ourselves up. We criticize someone else in a way to help ourselves feel not less than or not enough. We ostracize ourselves from other people. We shut down, we keep secrets. We don't feel good enough. In the presence of other people that we have compared ourselves to, we often self silence, keep our mouths shut. And maybe the biggest and most destructive of all is we feel shame. Brene Brown calls this our armor and it's used to protect ourselves. Some of the things that she came up with that we use for armor are perfectionism, cynicism numbing out and controlling ourselves or other people to shield ourselves again from being vulnerable.[00:07:08 - 00:07:10]
But I can see that that armor.[00:07:10 - 00:07:21]
Also shuts us off from some really important things like joy, growth, and one of our four cornerstones, intimacy.[00:07:23 - 00:08:05]
Okay, so if vulnerability, Heidi, in marriage is absolutely necessary for scintillating life, as we're saying here, why do we have such a hard time doing it? Why is it so hard? Either consciously, subconsciously, we interpret vulnerability as always being a weakness, something negative. None of us want to be blindsided. I don't want to be blindsided. But if we live our lives, the play it safe life, or the no harm, no foul life, or the don't ask, don't tell life, or the sweep.[00:08:05 - 00:08:08]
It under the rug life, I use that one sometimes.[00:08:09 - 00:08:14]
We are missing out on a scintillating life together, my love.[00:08:14 - 00:08:15]
That's right.[00:08:16 - 00:08:50]
We are inviting you, our audience today, to take a chance on each other. Take a chance. Take a chance. Take a chance. Take a chance on me. If I, as your doctor, don't examine your poop, your pee, or your rectum because it's too emotionally uncomfortable for either one of us, then I may miss that nasty cancer that could have been caught and treated much earlier rather than later when it becomes life threatening.[00:08:50 - 00:08:56]
So are you saying being vulnerable is like exposing our poop, our pee, our rectum, and what was the other one you said?[00:08:56 - 00:08:59]
Oh, prostate cervix.[00:08:59 - 00:09:04]
That's seriously because of shame, right? We just talked about shame.[00:09:04 - 00:09:07]
Yeah, well, I'm using a medical metaphor.[00:09:08 - 00:09:32]
And I am using a marriage metaphor that are vulnerable parts of us, our weaknesses, things that we feel either disgusted by in ourselves or that we don't know how to explain, or we're embarrassed about, or we feel insufficient in those are the things that really hard. Well, other people see.[00:09:32 - 00:09:51]
And taking this medical metaphor a little further, we all have the all men have prostates, women have cervixes. Why should we be ashamed of these things? We all poop, for crying out loud. I know that's the last thing you would expect to hear on a marriage podcast today, folks, but there's a first for everything on this podcast.[00:09:51 - 00:10:35]
That's right. Well, let's break vulnerability down even further for you. So in our discussions, we've come up with a couple of different kinds of vulnerability. First is intentional vulnerability, and second is unintentional vulnerability. With intentional vulnerability, it's the conscious willingness to remove at least a small part of our protective emotional boundaries and purposefully take risks in order to gain connection with Our partner, with our spouse, and to find meaning in our relationship and in our life doing so. Being vulnerable, taking those risks is a sign of emotional intelligence.[00:10:36 - 00:10:39]
Yes, intentional vulnerability. Good.[00:10:39 - 00:10:59]
Intentional vulnerability usually requires us to have a foundation and a history of feeling safe, fundamentally, and also secure within our marriage in order to lay it out there, to say some of the things that are deep within our souls, deep within our heart, we have to have some level of feeling.[00:11:00 - 00:11:33]
I like that. This makes me think of skydiving. Now, I've never been skydiving, but this is a great metaphor. With skydiving, you want to make sure that your plane's going to work properly. The pilot knows what he's doing, or she. The weather's nice before you even think about jumping intentionally on purpose out of an airplane thousands of feet off the ground. So this is. This is a. A great example of intentional vulnerability.[00:11:33 - 00:12:07]
All right. Another example of intentional vulnerability. I belong to a group of women where we discuss and share ideas and experiences and how that leads to our growth, how that leads to our understanding of life. And so sometimes I feel comfortable to share some things that are very deep about my own weaknesses in order to show that I'm human and that I'm learning and that some of the things I'm going through are really, really hard.[00:12:08 - 00:12:21]
And I choose to be intentionally vulnerable with you. When I discussed with you my identity affirmations list, that is very highly vulnerable.[00:12:21 - 00:12:28]
Yeah, you're talking about the things that are most important to your identity deep inside you. That's good.[00:12:28 - 00:12:55]
So let's discuss now unintentional vulnerability and how that differs from intentional vulnerability. We talked a little bit about this, actually, Heidi, in episode five with the intimacy episode. And so we're talking about it a little bit in more detail now. So unintentional vulnerability is the removal of our protective emotional boundaries without our consent by someone else.[00:12:55 - 00:12:58]
It's somebody else making that somebody else.[00:12:58 - 00:13:32]
Is violating our boundaries. So we feel extremely violated. We feel injured, victimized. This is what we consciously or subconsciously want to avoid. At all costs. We want to try to protect ourselves emotionally because when we're made vulnerable unintentionally, we feel attacked, ridiculed, exposed. And it's worse when it comes from someone you love and are married to.[00:13:32 - 00:13:58]
So maybe for you, it would be when. So for all of you who don't know Scott's a classical piano composer. You can look him up on Spotify on A Window to the Soul is the name of his album from 1996. I'm sorry. And I used to all the time ask you in front of people to play the piano on the fly.[00:13:59 - 00:14:01]
Yes. That is unintentional vulnerability.[00:14:01 - 00:14:08]
Even though you were a great classical piano composer, doing it on the fly was very, very uncomfortable for you.[00:14:08 - 00:14:10]
Yes. Yep.[00:14:10 - 00:14:16]
And so that caused a crack in your protection of yourself.[00:14:16 - 00:14:17]
I did not like it. Yeah.[00:14:17 - 00:14:19]
Yeah. I'm sorry.[00:14:20 - 00:14:22]
It's okay. It is totally fine.[00:14:23 - 00:15:00]
So let's talk about shame, which is a powerful force that's tied to unintentional vulnerability. Brene Brown, like I said, is a shame researcher. That was the first part of her research that led to some of these other areas, like vulnerability. But she says that shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that I'm flawed and therefore I'm unworthy of your acceptance and belonging. And I know what that feels like. I feel same quite often. Do you ever feel shame?[00:15:00 - 00:15:01]
I do.[00:15:02 - 00:15:13]
All right. Well, shame is a result of thinking that our vulnerability is a weakness that can't ever be changed. It often stems from unintentional vulnerability like we talked about.[00:15:14 - 00:15:27]
So, for example, when I had you come to a meeting at our office and evidently I threw you under the bus during a staff meeting, kind of.[00:15:27 - 00:15:29]
Criticized me in front of the stuff.[00:15:29 - 00:15:43]
I criticized you. And so you felt shame from that not being good enough. The story you told yourself is you weren't good enough and I didn't have your support, and then you never came back.[00:15:44 - 00:15:44]
Right.[00:15:44 - 00:15:46]
You haven't been back to another one.[00:15:47 - 00:15:59]
Because that makes me vulnerable again to potential criticism. And that's not the most healthy way to handle that. I will say, like, and I'm very.[00:15:59 - 00:16:02]
Sorry for criticizing you. I. I do. Very sorry about that.[00:16:02 - 00:16:20]
Well, it's okay. Me cutting myself off because of that is, again, just another way of showing that I'm not willing to be vulnerable in that way. It's an explanation, but it's not the most healthy, emotionally intelligent way to handle something. Right.[00:16:21 - 00:16:50]
And yeah, that's true. That is correct. I think that we can learn both ways. An example from my life I felt shame from this was some years ago. It's not now. Feeling that I'm not good enough to provide for my family. I'm not able to earn enough money to support my family. I am fundamentally flawed.[00:16:51 - 00:17:00]
Instead of realizing this is just something that we're going through because of circumstances beyond our control.[00:17:01 - 00:17:11]
Right. I mean, it gets. It cuts to my identity. Right. As a father and a husband. It's ingrained in my DNA to provide for my family.[00:17:11 - 00:17:21]
So here's a question then. Would telling yourself that story be less emotionally intelligent as well, or does that one not have anything to do with.[00:17:21 - 00:17:39]
Emotional intelligence, that it is not emotionally intelligent? Shame is not ever a fun thing to do or to experience fundamentally not emotionally intelligent. So. Okay, it's time for me to giddy up and learn how to. To overcome the shame.[00:17:39 - 00:17:48]
Okay. Well, there's another kind of shame that I wanted to talk about for a second that I experience quite often, and that's called shame hangover.[00:17:48 - 00:17:48]
Ah.[00:17:48 - 00:18:11]
And this is when we have been intentionally vulnerable. But in doing so, it. It's met with unexpected or hurtful responses resulting in our own flawed thinking that we are now a bad person or that we shared way too much or what we're going through is too much for other people to handle.[00:18:11 - 00:18:11]
Yeah.[00:18:11 - 00:18:12]
Do you ever feel that?[00:18:12 - 00:18:39]
Yes. Although not nearly as much now. I don't tend to really care very much about what other people think of me now. I. I do enough to the point to stay out of trouble. But ultimately I've learned that being vulnerable is a huge asset to me. It's far better to overshare and have.[00:18:39 - 00:18:41]
People think you're weird and have people.[00:18:41 - 00:18:57]
Think I'm weird or just messed up. I've learned this. This is way better. Because I guarantee you, next time they see me and the dust has settled, they're going to look at me as someone who's more authentic and genuine. And that is. That's big.[00:18:57 - 00:19:29]
And vulnerability, according to Brene Brown, creates connection. And sometimes when we are very vulnerable about talking about our weaknesses or about things that are really more private to us, it can create connection with somebody going through the same thing or somebody just feeling compassion for us. But I do want to go back to the shame hangover for just a minute. Just a little example here about that. So I talked about the group of women that I go to and am able to share things that are deeply.[00:19:29 - 00:19:31]
Personal to me intentionally.[00:19:31 - 00:19:43]
Intentionally. But when there's not support there or somebody saying, I like that or building on it or, you know, nodding their heads or whatever, and there's just complete silence.[00:19:43 - 00:19:44]
Silence.[00:19:44 - 00:19:52]
I don't know why this happens to me, but I just feel shame. Like, oh, my gosh, maybe that was out of the bounds of what's appropriate to share.[00:19:52 - 00:19:54]
I share too much. Yep. I'm a bad person.[00:19:55 - 00:20:35]
Right. And especially if I'm doing public speaking. Like, I did a speech to women on pornography used by a spouse. That was from my research. And afterwards there was a dinner and no one came up and spoke to me, and I was like, shoot, I either did a terrible job, I'm not a good person, or I shared too much. When I step back and think about it, it's probably that a lot of the women were experiencing that in their own marriages, and they thought it was just safer to not talk to me, because if they talked to me, somebody would know that they were experiencing that.[00:20:35 - 00:20:38]
Sweep it under that rug, honey. Let it go.[00:20:38 - 00:20:40]
Right. Do you have any examples?[00:20:40 - 00:21:29]
Well, for me, and we shared this before in another episode, sharing deep philosophical thoughts. I. I tend to think a lot. I am a thinker from the day we met. And I love philosophy. I love it. I love that perspective. And so when I have this big aha moment, this insight moment, I want to just share it with you, but it is very vulnerable. And sometimes they get shot down, or I feel like they are anyway. And that is some pretty deep shame hangover. That's an intention being me being intentionally vulnerable and then not having that reciprocated in a way from you. Especially coming from you. Yeah, I don't care what anyone else thinks, but I really care what you think.[00:21:29 - 00:22:54]
And we've talked about this enough that it's cause for me to say, huh, I wonder what's going on with me. Why do I do this? Because I love you dearly and I love your ideas and I love to talk to you, and so I'm going to be vulnerable and just say, I've been going to a therapist the last few weeks to try to uncover what this is about. And for you, there may be times in your life also that you just need some help uncovering some things internally that I do this, and I don't like this about myself, and I can't understand why. And it's been amazing to see kind of what the root of some of this has been. That there were things that happened decades ago that I would put up a shield, kind of one of those boundaries that we're talking about, to protect myself from a weakness. And in doing so, that impacts you negatively. Like, my brain is telling myself I have to do this to survive. And in reality, what I'm doing is not being intimate with you, keeping that space and distance by not being open to what you're saying. So I'm really working on that now. I think just in a few sessions, it's been very helpful to pull down some of those walls that I've built up.[00:22:54 - 00:23:02]
You shared some of the. Those deep, deepest parts of those therapy sessions with me, and I, I. That's a very sacred moment for me.[00:23:02 - 00:23:04]
Yeah, I was very vulnerable also.[00:23:04 - 00:23:04]
Very vulnerable.[00:23:04 - 00:23:05]
Things you didn't know about.[00:23:06 - 00:23:16]
All right, everyone, let's bring this all together. Vulnerability, shame. By using a scene from the fabulously popular movie Wicked.[00:23:18 - 00:23:19]
Now, love that movie.[00:23:19 - 00:23:22]
If you've seen the movie or the play, then you're going to know what I'm talking about.[00:23:22 - 00:23:27]
Right. And we just watched recently the Disney version. That's so great.[00:23:27 - 00:23:57]
Very good. Elphaba is the unpopular green girl. Glinda, or Galinda, however you want to say it, is the pretty, skinny, popular girl who everyone likes and wants to be like. So this popular girl, Glinda, asked Elphaba to the dance kind of as a joke. It was a joke.[00:23:57 - 00:24:00]
Yeah. And she had her wear her.[00:24:01 - 00:24:01]
Which hat.[00:24:01 - 00:24:05]
The ugly hat that her grandmother or mother had made for her.[00:24:05 - 00:24:06]
As a joke. Yep.[00:24:06 - 00:24:07]
To look stupid.[00:24:08 - 00:24:11]
To intentionally embarrass her.[00:24:11 - 00:24:12]
Yeah. That was sad.[00:24:14 - 00:25:04]
Well, in the meantime, Elphaba pulled some strings and told the head teacher that she needs to let Galinda in this special class that she couldn't get in on her own right before the dance. And so now Galinda feels this weight because she got something. Elphaba did something for her that she couldn't do on her own. So the moment arrives. All these people wanting to be popular. And all of a sudden, Alphabet comes in fashionably late, green as ever, pointy hat. And you can just sense the immediate secondary, secondhand shame. Embarrassment. Shame. What is she gonna do by the.[00:25:04 - 00:25:07]
Entire group of people there at the dance?[00:25:07 - 00:25:18]
Well, and you gotta back up a little bit. Elphaba. This is stepping out of her comfort zone. So she became intentionally vulnerable by going to the dance.[00:25:19 - 00:25:19]
Yeah.[00:25:20 - 00:25:55]
Now she's standing in front of everybody. They're all staring at her. The music stopped. This is now probably feeling unintentionally vulnerable. If somebody makes fun of her, but we notice nobody makes fun of her. They look at her like they're going to make fun of her. Elphabo's dancing these strange new moves. Galinda studied her, trying to figure out what are these new moves? And what do I do?[00:25:55 - 00:25:56]
Yeah.[00:25:57 - 00:26:30]
And so she could have laughed and pointed at her and created a. A huge sense of shame in Elphaba. Or not. But I would imagine it would create a sense of shame because of the unintentional vulnerability that was created. But instead she started copying her. And the crowd, of course, followed Glinda because she's cute and skinny and popular. And popular.[00:26:30 - 00:26:31]
Popular.[00:26:32 - 00:26:59]
And so this is a great. A great moment in the movie that shows us such deep vulnerability in the lives and how to move through that in a way that is successful is something that creates growth and connection and meaning. Galinda could have embarrassed her, made fun of her, but she didn't.[00:27:00 - 00:27:00]
Yeah.[00:27:00 - 00:27:04]
And in that moment, that created a deep friendship.[00:27:04 - 00:28:06]
So, Scott, I want to take that same scene in Wicked with Elphaba and Glinda and apply that to the five things that Brene Brown says can help us be more vulnerable. And the first one is courage. Take one emotional risk together. Not only was Elphaba courageous by standing there in the middle of everyone and dancing, but it maybe even took more courage for Galinda to step into the circle with her, to be vulnerable, to copy her strange moves when she was used to being the leader. The second thing is empathy. Get down in the hole with the person who's feeling broken, who's feeling loss, who's feeling secondhand shame, who's feeling like they're not enough. Get down there with them, listen without.[00:28:06 - 00:28:10]
Fixing, and don't be afraid to talk.[00:28:10 - 00:28:11]
Yeah.[00:28:11 - 00:28:15]
You may not say the right things. That's okay. Keep showing up.[00:28:15 - 00:28:18]
Yeah. Let them know you're not alone.[00:28:18 - 00:28:26]
I rarely say the right things, but if somebody knows I'm going to keep showing up for them, they're going to start giving me grace.[00:28:26 - 00:30:13]
Yes, they will. Much better to say something and have it be wrong and keep showing up than to say nothing at all. The third thing Brene Brown says is very important is compassion. First of all, we have to have compassion for ourselves in order to be vulnerable. We can't be constantly telling ourselves that we're not good enough. I am a master at that, and I'm really trying to overcome it now. But we have to show compassion for ourselves, and then we have to show compassion for our partner when they're being vulnerable. Just like when you share your ideas and I was shutting them down. That's not compassion. It's not empathy. I'm not getting there with you. Trying to understand. The fourth thing is connection, and that is sharing one thing that I've never shared with anybody before. Sharing those things that are deep inside of me, which I did when I talked about my therapy session. I told you about some of those things that I think helped Scott to understand some of my past a little bit better. And he wasn't judgmental about it. He was kind and loving about it. And interestingly, when we are vulnerable in that way and we share with our spouse something really deep and important to us personally, it creates more connection, more intimacy. Between us. And lastly, gratitude. If we think of the things that we're grateful for about each other or we thank our spouse for any small act of courage they took, that's enough to promote further vulnerability, which then leads to greater connection.[00:30:13 - 00:30:30]
This ends part one of our episode on vulnerability. There was so much we had to talk about. We're splitting this up. We hope that you've enjoyed it so far. And make sure you listen to the second half where we tie everything together, come up with some solutions, and that.[00:30:30 - 00:30:45]
Will release on Friday. This coming Friday. We're not going to wait a whole other week for you to catch the rest of this episode. Everybody, we're so glad that you joined us today. We'll catch you next time on another exciting episode of Marriage IQ.
