Embrace your Vulnerabilities

    Brené Brown talked about many very important and relatable topics in her Ted Talk, these topics all revolve around VULNERABILITY. What is vulnerability? As Brené said in her Ted Talk, vulnerability is what makes anyone imperfect, ironically all vulnerable characteristics that a person has made them the most perfect person ever. Without accepting your vulnerabilities, you will never be a complete person or as she explained it, “whole-hearted,” during her research, Brené talked to a couple of people who she believed were wholehearted and she realized that the only thing in common between them is that they all have the courage to talk about their vulnerabilities and not hide them, they have the courage to be imperfect. This gets her to her next point and that is self-love and compassion because without having compassion for ourselves, we cannot have compassion for others. People see their vulnerabilities as something they should be ashamed of and often try to hide them and not talk about them, because the more they do the more shameful they become of themselves. Finally, and most importantly, Brené talks about how vulnerability can lead us to a dangerous cycle which I completely agree with. People cannot choose which emotions they want to numb, it’s not selectable. When a person tries to numb negative feelings like vulnerability, fear, disappointment, and shame, they automatically numb the positive, happiness, joy, love, etc. Therefore, they end up living a miserable life and that makes them vulnerable again, and the cycle starts again. This is very true because a person is never complete unless they accept their mistakes or problems, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities, them not acknowledging and accepting their negatives they will never be fully happy in life.

    

    While watching this Ted Talk, I agreed with everything Brené said especially how she described vulnerability and having the courage to accept and acknowledge them. I also very much agreed with her when she was talking about how it is dangerous for parents to perfect their children. I believe this can be dangerous because they unintentionally don’t accept their kids’ imperfections and that causes a very unhealthy connection and relationships between them. In addition, for a person to be perfect, they have to be perfect in every factor possible, and that causes the parents to compare them with the best of the best at a specific thing, which also causes an unhealthy relationship between the parent and child. This might also cause hatred because of how unimpressed and unsatisfied the parents are with their own child and always looking at other people. This is very dangerous because the whole point of parents doing this is for the sake and love of their children, but is always misunderstood, created negative thoughts in the child’s mind, and causes bad blood in the family that is of course unwanted.

    

    For me, one of my most unwanted qualities and vulnerabilities is that sometimes I can react in a very aggressive and angry manner, however, it is not an anger management issue, you can call it an explosive reaction to specific actions. This has caused me many problems in almost everything in life, and I have been working on it during the past year trying to control my anger in all sorts of events. This has caused me trouble in my sport because I can have aggressive reactions that are against the rules of my sport. And most importantly between my friends. Having wrong responses to my friends has caused me to have many highly close friends that were very important people in my life. These reactions are not my true feelings towards that person, but an effect during the heat of the moment which still doesn’t justify me acting angrily to people who do not deserve that.