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The “symptoms” are always the same. My heart starts to beat very fast. My mouth dries up. Often my body shakes with an involuntary tremor. I usually have the thought “This matter isn’t very important. Why don’t I just let it pass?” At the very last instant, I forget what it is that I want to say. But then, as if carried by a friendly, protective wave, I notice that I am very soon “on the other shore.” I have said what I wanted to say. I have told the truth. I have been awkward, embarrassed and vulnerable, but at least I remain in communication and in relationship with another human being.

I hate being vulnerable. I hate losing my composure, my security, my command of the situation. I don’t like opening myself to another person’s acceptance or rejection of my deeper inner self. I don’t like hearing from my inner voices of judgement calling me weak, foolish, unmanly or weird when I do open up, when I do choose to be vulnerable.

Yet I know that if I want close relationships in my lifetime, it requires that I be known to other human beings. If I want to experience intimacy, it requires that I be willing to be vulnerable. Over and over and over again. No vulnerability - no experience of intimacy. It’s that simple.

Simple, perhaps. But, for most of us, not easy.

I have spent over two decades as an individual and relationship therapist, and it is my professional experience that the conscious choice to be vulnerable is one of the most difficult things for any human being to do. We are extremely conflicted about it. On the one hand, I have yet to meet a couple who do not long to feel understood, accepted and supported by each other, to feel special and celebrated over by their partner. When, early on in our work, I ask both of them if they have any objections to being loved by their partner with all of his or her mind, heart, body and soul, few have indignantly replied : “No! I couldn’t stand to be loved that way!” Wanting to be loved and loving is, seemingly, an apple pie and motherhood type of issue.

However, as we begin to examine the issues , the grievances and the feelings which are currently blocking one heart from the other, it becomes gradually apparent to our two eager and apparently willing lovers that love requires vulnerability, and great love requires great vulnerability. What happens then? As my grandmother would sometimes say to me as a child: “Oy, such a fuss! Such a fuss!”