Vulnerability and Trust: Overcoming The Heart’s Constriction

Underlying and driving our society are the values of independence, control and invulnerability that necessitate closing down the heart in order to compete in an achievement-oriented society. While we may still be living and physically present, many of us are leaving our partners emotional widows and widowers because we have killed something in ourselves. So many of us in our culture are “dying young," due mostly to our shut down, contracted or "broken" hearts. By avoiding any emotional pain, and by hiding it from others, we are diminishing our life force… and it is taking radical physical, psychological and spiritual surgery to save our lives.


The Marlboro Man
In spite of the statistics, men, more than women, are still particularly vulnerable to this dis-ease because of what our society expects of them. Trained to compete and win, a boy learns from a very early age “not to show weakness, do it right, and to get the job done." In adolescence, he learns that he must be responsible, take charge and not let a woman get the upper hand. For most adult men, achievement and performance is how they know who they are in the world. They measure themselves against one another in terms of how well and how much they achieve, and this pressure to compete stays with them until they retire, drop out or drop dead.

In fact, the whole of western culture is based on this view of the world. We conquer nature and even our own bodies with the hard approach to life. We use hard driving exercises to condition our body, just as we use bulldozers to clear our land and harsh chemicals to grow our food. Even the language we have for relationship and intimacy, inherited primarily from male thinkers and writers, resounds with the battle cry of competition. The word "surrender" has the frightening connotation of victor and vanquished, while "breaking down a woman's defenses" is a strategy used during the "battle of the sexes."

Yet, achievement is not the name of the game in loving relationships. In this arena men have a handicap and they know it. When it comes to emotional surrender, they are often in no-man's land, even when they are confident in their abilities and achievements. In countless frustrating experiences, they reach out to women or invest heavily in their love affairs, only to be disappointed or rejected. By the time they find a true beloved, they might fear their ability to win the perilous race of relationship; and so, they fall back on old escape routes, learned in childhood, even before they take the first turn around the track.

One man might shut a partner out emotionally by digging in his heels in stubborn resistance to his partner’s needs; another may become sullen, grouchy and non-communicative, claiming his prerogative of silence and pride; someone else may be a workaholic who is never available; the next may stay permanently free of commitment. Then there are those who use other’s feelings and bodies as pit stops to refuel themselves, slamming on the brakes whenever they’re faced with someone's love. Yet, on the relationship racetrack, all these strategies end in defeat.

If a man wants to win a woman's love, he has to learn to downshift, ease back and coast into the winner's circle! By realizing that what is most attractive and healing in a relationship is how emotionally available he is, that is, how much he is willing to open up, surrender his defenses and show his vulnerability, he may learn to entrust himself to another for safekeeping.

The Marlboro Woman
As women, we need to allow a man to take the wheel while we navigate him into those seductively sweet and mysterious places of vulnerability within himself. Yet, surrender is even more difficult for women today. Since we have entered the work force, we are not only taking over typically male-oriented positions, but are taking on the tough exteriors of our male counterparts in business. Many women, refusing to surrender their newfound power in the workplace, find it increasingly difficult to surrender in their personal relationships. Men, therefore, find it increasingly difficult to settle into relationships with women. The millions of us in therapy each year for our relationship failures and heartbreaks can attest to that.

Feeling more comfortable with the power approach, most women, at some time or another, use shame, contempt, anger, threats of abandonment or withdrawal of their love and sexuality to try to reach a man. When their men resist and stay locked in their emotional isolation, women take it personally. They can’t understand how difficult it is for a man to step out of his ego and into his vulnerability, even when he isn’t feeling emotionally battered by a woman. They may not know that a man cannot change without a woman’s forgiveness and trust.

For a man to become vulnerable means that he must break out of the emotional constriction that has scored big in business, competitive sports and war, but has lost him ground in matters of the heart. To open up to this extent is a powerful leap of faith that flies in the face of his basic training and some of his most painful memories. Surrendering to his feelings requires vulnerability; unfortunately,being vulnerable has usually meant weakness, shame and possible failure.

On a conscious and acknowledged level, when faced with vulnerability, a man fears losing his position and his power, opening himself to hurt, embarrassment and rejection. On an unconscious level, he fears the loss of his very identity. He may be thinking, "If I surrender to her wishes and demands now, she'll eat me alive!" Yet, in truth, unless he encounters the rare man-eater, for the most part, surrendering to a woman means finally finding himself and claiming his birthright--the ability to experience great love and pleasure in intimate union.

From my book entitled: A Woman's Guide to Opening a Man's Heart