What blocks people from being vulnerable with others?

Much ink has been spilled on two classes of answers to this question:

1. Not everyone is in fact safe to be vulnerable around. Not even well-intentioned people are always safe to be vulnerable around; being-safe-to-be-vulnerable-around is a skill which not everyone is automatically good at.
2. Many people have been vulnerable in the past, got burned for it, and so developed emotional blocks against vulnerability. “Trauma”.

There are a lot of people for whom these answers provide the right frame for their problems. This post is not for those people.

I want to focus on a different frame: there are importantly different kinds of things which people are hesitant to expose to others. Some of those things just require finding the right person and being vulnerable with them; these are the “easy cases”, in this frame. But other things pose fundamental difficulties, even when everybody involved has the safe-to-be-vulnerable-around skillset and isn’t particularly traumatized.

Let's start with an easy example: sex stuff. Fetishes, sluttiness, that sort of thing. Revealing one's sexual tastes involves being emotionally vulnerable. Moreso the more taboo one's tastes are, with pedophilia on one end of the spectrum [...]

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First published:

November 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fKoZmewSEwpfHj5Rg/easy-vs-hard-emotional-vulnerability

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.