Vulnerability: Letting People Peel Back the Layers Makes You Stronger

 

Allowing other people to peel back your layers makes you a stronger person. We have a tendency to protect ourselves from everything outside. We want to believe we are right, we know what we’re doing, and we’re just. We often aren’t however, and may not know that until we’ve really asked ourselves hard questions about our actions past and present.

In Jordan B. Peterson’s book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, Peterson devotes an entire rule to the idea we need to dig into our pasts and understand them to move forward without making the same mistakes (Peterson, 2021). Peterson tells us we have to peel back the layers of our emotions from the past. We have to know what decisions we made and why we made them. We have to understand how we ended up in situations that led to traumatic experiences. Knowledge and understanding the past, frees us to make better futures for ourselves.

We suppress traumatic experiences. We want to walk away and simply forget experiences that hurt us. We want to forget people that cause(d) us pain. Unfortunately, we never will. Those experiences will always hold a place in our minds. Man has yet to discover a way to erase memories, to undo the pain caused by extreme circumstance. Until that way is found, we must deal with the ghosts of our past. We will experience triggers and act according to those triggers because they bring up a sense of extreme dread, fear, even panic.

What’s worse, is it doesn’t matter if we were the victim in our past or if we were the villain. Terrible experiences bring terrible consequences to our emotional and psychological health. These traumas shape our present and are impacting our futures. There’s a way to get through them however, and learn to build a better future for ourselves. There’s a way to prevent making the same mistakes.

Digging into our past and uncovering all the emotions associated with traumatic circumstance can free us from the past. Seeking understanding of our own emotions allows us to see the triggers before they occur, recognize them, and make better decisions. Through understanding our past, we can shape our future.

Good friends and loved ones can help us with our healing. People you are close with often ask personal questions. You will resist them at first, but learning to be vulnerable with those important people will make you a better person. Questions answered honestly, openly, and without fear of judgment will lead to more questions. Some of those questions, you may have never asked yourself. Getting someone else’s opinion about something you’re doing or something you experienced can help you discover knew ways of looking at terrible circumstances. They will never take those experiences from you, nobody can, but talking through it, with the intent to understand, can save you from a lifetime of bad decisions in the future.

Open up to the people that matter; the people that care about you. Tell the story and answer the questions. You will discover you haven’t dealt with it yet, or that you looked at it wrong the entire time. You will find opening up and being vulnerable makes you stronger. Allowing someone else to guide you through the layers of your life, because they have a genuine interest and concern, will make you a better person. You will avoid repeating the past because you understand it. You will learn. You will be a better person.

https://whateverhappenedtohonor.blogspot.com/2021/04/vulnerability-strength-not-weakness.html