Welcome to the show!

In this episode, I’m bringing back our guest from the previous episode since we ran out of time and had some unfinished business.

If you haven’t heard it yet, feel free to check out Sandra’s last episode all about cheating and infidelity – CNM Episode 41: What To Do About Cheating & Infidelity.

Sandra Lax is a therapist based in Toronto, as well as a certified facilitator of Brené Brown’s program, The Daring Way. Today, she’s bringing us some surprising research on vulnerability, trust, and shame.

Here’s the interview!

Interview with Sandra Lax on Vulnerability, Trust, and Shame

Brian: Welcome back to the show, Sandra. It’s so nice to have you back.

Sandra: It’s great to be back. Thanks, Brian.

Brian: Absolutely. We’re picking up where we left off. We had some topics come up last time that we didn’t get a chance to delve into in a lot of detail, so I thought it would be a great idea to  give its own episode because these are important and somewhat popular topics. There’s some recent research and studies that have been done that I think could be useful to people. We’re talking about trust, shame, vulnerability, and some fringe topics related to those.

Question: The first thing I want to ask is how did you get into working with things like vulnerability?

Sandra: I grew up believing that vulnerability was the antidote to life like above all else, do not show yourself. I grew up with a lot of image management going on in my household and we, above all, didn’t share what’s happening inside and outside the house. I found myself, probably in my 20s, in a relationship with a man that I just fell head over heels with. We were hot and heavy for the first little while and then he sort of disappeared, and I didn’t know why. We connected back maybe a month later and I said, “Tell me what happened.” He said, “You’re just too vulnerable.” It felt like a truck hit me. It was the thing that I was told not to be and right in my face, this thing that I was practicing being more in my skin and sharing it, did not pan out well – at least I thought at that time.

Fast forward, a few years later, there was a woman who was doing a talk on the power of vulnerability. Her name was Brené Brown. Everything about what she said resonated with the way that I wanted to live. I studied, researched, and learned everything I possibly could about her and I ended up signing up to get trained by her. Because something in me knew that being vulnerable was the only way that I really wanted to live life and the messages that I got early on were not the ones that were going to bring me the most fulsome experience of life on this planet. I call myself a vulnerability warrior now, but I certainly wasn’t that way growing up and not even in my young adulthood. That’s what brought me here.

Brian: Thanks for sharing that. I want to really dig in to the topic here because I think that a lot of us want to be able to be vulnerable. And it goes different for men versus women. I know as a man, you’re really told not to be vulnerable because; it’s a sign of weakness. But I feel like that leads to getting closed off in life, and not really living life to its fullest.

Let’s unpack this a little bit and talk about shame and trust as well.

Question: I think that most people have a fairly common impression and realistic view of what vulnerability means, but are there any myths that you’d like to dispel about vulnerability before we get started?

Sandra: Yeah. In her research, Brené came up with four vulnerability myths. Before we go into that for a moment, I’ll just say that vulnerability has become a real pop culture word. But if we just take and simplify it, it simply means being real, being ourselves, and living in our skin. A word that was really popular a few years ago was being authentic. For me, vulnerability is transparency.

There are four myths about this transparency (or being real or authentic) that can get in the way for us. The first one is what you said – which is what a lot of men carry – vulnerability is weakness. Actually, what showed up in Brené’s research was the exact opposite; vulnerability is really the measure of courage. The paradox that she talks about is that we’re drawn to seeing vulnerability in other people when we think about someone getting up to do a talk, a presentation, or something creative. We look at it as strength in them. ‘Wow, look at them being able to stand in front of many people and share this.’ When we’re in the exact situation, we don’t want anyone to know that we’re feeling scared, nervous, or overwhelmed. Vulnerability looks like courage in you and weakness in me; that’s the first myth.

The second myth is that we think that we can opt out of it, like when that man said, “You’re just too vulnerable,” I declared that I would never be vulnerable in a relationship again. That was really hard because to be alive is to be vulnerable. In fact, Brené defines vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. We have to face those things every day. If we suit up and close that up, we basically won’t have any real relationships and then we’ll experience loneliness and wonder why we’re lonely if we’ve created that for ourselves. We really can’t avoid being vulnerable because it’s really how we’re built, we’re wired for connection.

The third myth that Brené talks about is vulnerability is oversharing. In her TED talk, she says that it’s not live-tweeting your bikini wax. I think in today’s world, we’re really exposed to people thinking that what they’re doing is vulnerability, when in fact what they’re doing is oversharing. Brené would say, “We can’t hot-wire a connection.” What we’re doing when we’re oversharing is either trying to hot-wire a connection or garner attention. Vulnerability is really about trust, intimacy, and connection, done in organic way that happens in stages.

The last myth that she talks about is, “I can go it alone,” which is just never true. We cannot do vulnerability in isolation, but we romanticize the idea that we can do it that way. The actual point of vulnerability is connection. Those are the four myths based in her research of what we equate with vulnerability.

Brian: Right. While you were discussing the second myth, I was really thinking about how I notice people sort of vacillate back and forth between overly rigid and overly loose boundaries, where people say, “Oh, no. I’m going to build a wall around myself so no one can hurt me again.” If it doesn’t work, they feel very lonely, then they open up and go too far to the other side. I see that happen from time to time.

Thanks for sharing about vulnerability. Let’s move on to the topic of shame so we can all get on an even-keel about that.

Question: What exactly does shame mean and not mean to you?

Sandra: Shame is that full-contact experience. It’s a full-contact emotion that tells us that we don’t belong, that there’s something in us that doesn’t fit within the context of where we are. Brené would say there are three things about shame that we need to know. Number one is it’s universal; everyone has it. The only people who don’t have shame basically are sociopaths – a little bit of shame, okay; being a sociopath, not so great.

The second thing is shame is a driver for disconnection. You see it a lot in mental health issues. People who isolate believe that they’re not worthy and they isolate more, whether that’s with mental health issues, addiction, or simply being a human on this planet. I think of times where I really have to, even at this point, talk myself up because I tend to be an introvert. So, when I go to a party, I really have to tell myself that I belong there, that I’ll be able to engage in conversation, and things like that.

We see people who give talks, do public events, or seem to have an easier time socializing and we think that they don’t have shame, that they just come at it easy. But in fact, that is not true. It’s not what I see in practice and it’s not what I see when I speak with my friends. But we all experience some sort of disconnection and really have to remind ourselves that we are worthy of love and belonging.

Brian: It’s funny, I often say that my wife has no shame. She loves being in front of people and does comedy improv every single weekend at a theater. She has an unusually low amount of self-consciousness. She’ll get up, perform in front of people, make mistakes, and doesn’t seem to care – it’s amazing. When we go to a party, she’s the same way. I’m more of an introvert like you, so I do have to psych myself up. It’s kind of funny to me that you say that because I do the same thing. If I’m feeling a little insecure, I might even go into the restroom during the party and say, “Alright, let’s get it together.”

Sandra: I do the same thing, exactly.

Brian: My wife and I are both open with each other, but she just doesn’t understand that. It’s a completely foreign thing to her. It just makes me laugh, different people, different ways; introverts have similar characteristics, extroverts have similar characteristics. It’s funny how we don’t necessarily understand the other one that well. It’s just a quick observation.

Sandra: Yeah. And thinking about your wife an