Note: I’m writing this post somewhat on impulse, so it contains less research and more conjecture than usual. In particular, I make some pretty speculative claims about child developmental psychology around the middle section. It’s entirely possible that I’m completely wrong about a lot of this stuff, but right now this is how I’m squaring the circle of my own worldview. Let me know if I make any major mistakes!
Two of the posts in my Lessons from Coronavirus series are about vulnerability.
The first of these posts, titled Intellectual Vulnerability > Intellectual Modesty is inspired by the writings of Brené Brown and depicts vulnerability as something aspirational. A lot of us are insecure about our intelligence, I argue, and so we resort to bluster or cool silence as a way of masking that. It follows that by allowing ourselves to be intellectually vulnerable – showing our ignorance, letting ourselves be wrong – we can foster a healthier, less emotionally charged discourse.
The other post about vulnerability, How Vulnerability Matters, views it as something to be avoided or ameliorated. Particularly in the first half of the essay, vulnerability is treated as being roughly synonymous with social disadvantage. This accords with how the term is used in social policy circles, as in, “This policy is particularly harmful to more vulnerable populations.”
The tension between these two usages should be pretty obvious. A psychotherapist would balk at the idea of equating vulnerability with weakness, but a sociologist would insist that people have a right to the economic and social security that would make them less vulnerable. So what’s the deal? Is vulnerability good or bad?
Well let’s start by revisiting our understanding of what vulnerability is. In How Vulnerability Matters, the more analytical of my two posts, I break vulnerability down into two components: Exposure and insecurity. Exposure is the amount of big shocks you experience in your life, and insecurity is your missing capacity to withstand those shocks. The applicability of this idea to both social and psychological vulnerability should be pretty evident. To get a sense of it, imagine how different people would be impacted by the death of a parent. A child would be emotionally devastated and socially marginalized, whereas a fully grown adult might be basically ok.
In fact, the comparison between children and adults is an illuminating one. We tend to think about vulnerability in different ways when talking about children and adults. The vulnerability of children is often a kind of volatile fragility that they have to grow out of to become functioning adults. Adults themselves, however, search for vulnerability as a path to emotional truth – a path which therapists spend so much of their time trying to get us to walk down. Understanding the relationship between these two perspectives is key to resolving our love/hate relationship with vulnerability.
Consider, for example, what adult vulnerability looks like in practice: loving easily, taking risks, crying – all things that come much more easily to children. Personally, I think my own resistance to expressing vulnerability has come from a desire to act like a grown up. When you’re a kid, learning to regulate your emotions and live independently is an important part of growing up, so any step in the opposite direction feels like some kind of regression. The value of therapy for me, then, was in being given permission to take that step. The cliché of “getting in touch with your inner child” is not without its analytical foundations.
But that still leaves us with a contradiction. If the vulnerability of children is so similar to that of adults, why do we spend so much time trying to grow out of it as children, only to go to such great lengths to recover it as adults?
One intuitive answer is that we simply shouldn’t grow out of it. That our adult instinct to constantly control our emotions is a maladaptive product of evolution or social norms – maybe something that made sense in a different time, but not today. There’s probably some truth to this. In a rigid patriarchal society, the most important thing you can do is keep your head down and work. If you can do that, then it doesn’t matter what’s going on in your heart; and if the problems in your heart become problems in your life, so be it – society can get by just fine without you and your family. But society is more co-operative now. When the chain of branching social interactions gets more complex, it matters more when one of the links in that chain is on the verge of breaking. We have a lot more reason to take care of each other’s hearts now, and that means therapy and vulnerability and getting in touch with your inner child.
But I’m not fully convinced by this answer. To explain why, let me first explore one last contradiction, which is that if vulnerable behaviour is always in some sense childish, then so is the behaviour of those who desperately avoid vulnerability. Think of the way people act when they aren’t addressing their emotional problems: they’re moody, they’re defensive, they’re unreliable. In other words, they act like little children.
It’s nothing original to say that there is a sort of Jekyll and Hyde quality to children. Sometimes they’re cherubic bundles of delight, brightening the lives of all around them; other times they’re tyrannical solipsists, terrorizing whatever authority figures are tasked with helping them grow. I think both of these qualities are symptoms of children’s disregard for their own vulnerability. They take emotional risks that no rational person would take, and then they are shocked by the consequences. From, “Let me go play with that boy!” to, “That boy hurt me. He’s mean. I don’t want any more friends.”
In those wounded moments of defensiveness, children can avoid facing their vulnerability, but they’re not really making themselves less vulnerable. A child who is unwilling to take risks to make friends is a child who grows up to be a friendless adult, and adults without friends can find themselves very vulnerable indeed. So it’s not really the vulnerability of children that we need to hold onto, it’s the capacity that children sometimes have for moving beyond that vulnerability.
But even children could never find such courage in themselves without the right support systems in place. Children are too insecure and reckless to know how to budget risk, so they delegate that task to those around them – parents, teachers, friends, neighbours. In the right environment, with the right people by their side, sometimes holding them in check, sometimes nudging them out of their comfort zone, children can safely learn the hard way what risks are worth taking. By adulthood, this education in the school of hard knocks is every bit as important for your emotional security as academic education is for your social and financial security. It’s what teaches you that it’s ok to fail.
But there is only so much help that any given support system can provide. We live in an uncertain world, and there is simply no way to give children room to grow while also protecting them from all of the worst possible outcomes. Even if we lived in a world designed to help children flourish, things could still go wrong. And we do not live in a world designed to help children flourish. There are no good statistics on the number of children who have experienced abuse in Ireland. 8.1% of children live in consistent poverty. Over 2,000 are homeless.
And as with all education, learning to face vulnerability is that much harder when you have to leave it until adulthood. Those who don’t get the chance to be children when they’re children need to work a lot harder and get a lot more support as adults. That’s why I had go to therapy. Not so that I could be more vulnerable, but so that I could reckon with how vulnerable I already was.
This also resolves another paradox of vulnerability discourse: that it takes strength to be vulnerable. For a long time, this sounded like a trite platitude to me. Like how grown ups call you brave when you get injured as a kid. You’re not actually doing anything, you’re just sitting there in pain. What kind of bravery or courage is that? I certainly didn’t feel particularly courageous when I was letting it all out to a near-stranger in a well-lit office on a Wednesday afternoon. If anything, it felt kind of weak and pathetic, sitting there letting my emotions run loose like a child.
But it’s all about where you’re coming from. Remember that avoiding facing vulnerability is also a childish behaviour – one that my therapist had to train me out of. The point was not to stay vulnerable, but to turn vulnerability from something that I avoided into something that I could move beyond. Really, this talk of letting ourselves “be vulnerable” is a failure of the English language. Spanish speakers draw a distinction between “estar”, which is temporary, as in, “To be awake,” and “ser”, which is permanent, as in, “To be or not to be.” When we talk about letting ourselves “be vulnerable”, we’re using “be” in the “estar” sense of the word – experiencing the state of vulnerability without being defined by it.
This is important because therapy is only ever the first step on a much longer journey. Once I acknowledged my vulnerability, I was still left with the arduous task of actually making my life better. That has meant finally doing all of the things that make me feel vulnerable, including, it should be said, writing this blog. I’m still new to all of this, and I will probably never get to the point where I feel totally secure in myself, but I finally feel like I understand what people mean when they say it takes courage to be vulnerable. Turning to face vulnerability for the first time is courageous in much the same way that taking the first step in a marathon is courageous. It is both the least taxing step of the journey and also the most daunting.
This is the courage that I was really referring to in my piece about intellectual vulnerability. Anyone who spends their time among the masses of the internet will be familiar with the less endearing side of intellectual childishness. Learning to accept a new perspective is a vulnerable position to be in. Much easier is to stay out of the fray altogether, or turn every exchange into a conflict, resorting to snark or name calling if necessary. But the best among us have no trouble engaging in the public discourse as open participants. They oppose, propose, listen, and revise with a grace and dignity which is instantly recognizable to any honest observer. These are the people who have faced up to their vulnerability in the past. They suffered the mortification of being exposed as a dilletante, or a naïf, or simply an ignoramus, and, having realized that the experience did not kill them, gained the emotional security to try again another day. Vulnerability is the crucible in which the metal of our courage is forged.
Post-Post-Script: What does any of this have to do with coronavirus?
In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein argues that the course of modern history has been fundamentally shaped by our response to large macrosocial shocks. Wars, revolutions, natural disasters, and debt spirals all represent critical junctures for the societies they impact. For the most part, the shock and disorientation of these moments simply provides cover for the powerful and well insulated to impose their utopian agenda on these newly-vulnerable societies. Sometimes, though, the shock can act as a wake up call, calling into question the inevitability of the status quo by demonstrating how easily it can be interrupted. In such moments, the democratic movements which have made modern society what it is can flourish and take shape.
If there has been a running thread throughout these posts, it is the idea that this pandemic represents just such a shock to society, and that what that shock means for history will depend on our response to it today. The paths ahead are clear because we’ve seen them before.
One path is familiar to us as the austerity of post-recession era. Chastened by our collective shock, we could retreat inwards, cutting off social spending and turning our backs on the most vulnerable. This retrenchment may be tinged by the moral language of sustainability and “consolidation”, but we must remain vigilant of the difference between caution and cowardice.
The other path is modelled for us by the postwar era in the west, or the asambleas barriales of Argentina. Blinking in the wake of our collective struggle, we may be freshly attuned to the possibility of renewal. For the last few weekends, Dublin city has pulsed with a spirit of festive communality, often standing in jarring contrast to the state’s haphazard and draconian response to these gatherings. After a year where we have never been so dependent on both each other and a responsive, compassionate state, last weekend’s images of police wielding their batons against peaceful social gatherings may yet become a powerful reminder of the possibility and necessity of social solidarity.
This is a vulnerable moment. The last year has hit some harder than others, but we are all faced with the question of where to go next. As we consider the treacherous terrain that lies before us, we would do well to also consider our ourselves. Are we secure in our capacity to withstand the shocks to come? Have we really been facing up to the reality of our own vulnerability? What will it take to get us where we need to be? No two people will have the same answers to these questions, and I expect we’ll still be asking them for years to come, but in the meantime there is one thing that I have been convinced of: as we embark on our search for answers, our greatest resource will be our own courage.
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