Counselors like me can at times be conditioned that people avoid disclosure like the plague, but the truth is, in our modern social media age, many people are used to wearing their hearts on their sleeves.
It’s happened to just about every single one of us, I’m sure; you open up, and you share your essence and vulnerability with someone. You figure this is the moment, and this is the person. Then they prove to be anything other than safe, either in the way they respond to us or in what they do with the information we’ve given them.
In times like this we can’t rewind the clock, we can’t undo our vulnerability, and we can’t remove the memory of what we said and how we said it. And it comes back to bite us. We feel ashamed for what we should never feel ashamed about.
There are times after this that we close up, having been betrayed in the worst of ways, times that we regretted so much they caused us to trust the world a lot less, and these experiences caused us to become a bit more cynical as if there is nobody we could trust.
Being vulnerable is about the most courageous thing we could do, especially when we’ve endured the trauma of someone betraying our trust. We’ve endured the consequences, and we see the massive potential or actuality of harm and we feel the hurt.
One thing we can do is acknowledge for ourselves—no matter how ill-conceived our trust of the other person seemed to be—we had the right intent; we were courageous; we risked healing, recovery, reconciliation, restoration. We did the right thing with the wrong people or in the wrong situation or at the wrong time. We still had the right motive.
We may have gotten some of it wrong, but the instinct to heal was right.
The challenge is to find the right place, the right space, the right person; someone who will never let us down. There are such persons. Pray about it and God will lead you.
Being listened to, being understood, not being misinterpreted, finding our voice again. Take the risk of faith to hope in these again.
The easiest thing to do is to become cynical. But this type of attitude shuts the door of hope that there are good people around willing to hold space for you. Let’s understand cynicism as the fear that protects us from being hurt again.
Yet, cynicism may not permit us to risk trusting again and, therefore, the door of the hope of recovery may be jammed shut.
So we can see that trusting our vulnerability again takes even more courage.
“Be strong and courageous,” and prayers for a safe space, place, and person.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on Tribework
Featured Image by Christian Gabele from Pixabay
