Being vulnerable

We are always being told, that as people working with other people, a good way of earning trust is to be vulnerable. Yet, this is not quite as easy as it would seem.

Why is it so difficult?

I've mulled around on this topic for a while, exploring into our collective insecurities and trauma and why exactly these topics tie in with each other, seemingly being unrelated.

We are afraid. We spent ALL of our evolutionary history refining our survival instinct and skills. it's literally been in every single life form since the very beginning

Surviving, of course, is both procreation, and, well, not dying. We can not die by eating food and drinking water. We can also not die by being surprised by lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

The first part is kind of easy. catch inattentive animals, forage around the bushes for some Mcdonalds, and so on. Long term not-dying-of-starvation.

The second part is a little more tricky, though. Not-dying-by-stepping-on-a-poisonous-snake-ambush or not-dying-by-being-impaled-by-a-sabertooth-tiger-ambush requires some reaction skills.

This survival instinct that we have is SO strong that on average we will go through some dark things before the will to survival is overwritten. And yes, sorry, this is dark, but the fact of the matter is we live in an incredibly dark world. Humans are perpetrating the most horrendous crimes on each other, currently in Ukraine and and the middle east. And, quite frankly, looking back at the middle ages, or dark ages, or viking seafarers settling new places 1000 years ago, or the conflicts surrounding the Roman Empire (different to the Holy Roman Empire" and even as far back as 40,000 years ago.

In present-day Germany, a massacre took place some 7,000 years ago, when attackers apparently tortured their victims—in part by breaking their shin bones—prior to killing them. Similar Neolithic massacres have been uncovered elsewhere in Germany and Austria, as well as in Croatia and France. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Jericho, among the oldest cities in the world, built city walls around 8000 B.C., seemingly to keep out invaders.

We've been at this for a LOOOOONG time.

Now that the context is set, how does this impact us today?

Well, only the last 200ish years, or 6-7 generations, have we been benefited by technology. the world and our thinking pre-frontal cortexes made leaps into bringing various techologies out, but that is really only a recenty development.

Did you know, it only took us humans only 66 years to go from our first flight in 1903 by the Wright brothers, until we landed on the moon in 1969?

Anyway back to the topic at hand. All of this is simply to illustrate how DIFFICULT it can be to be vulnerable. To your traumatised amygdala, being vulnerable means opening yourself to the possibility of attack. Intentionally lying outside on the ground on your back while any large animal can suddenly pounce, and completely ruin your not-dying-by-being-eaten-by-a-large-animal plans. So much for the weekend.

Our amygdalas make it extrrrreeeeeeeemely difficult for us to override it. It's basically our brains' overprotective brain-dad, or the too-excited-club-bouncer-that-'s-looking-for-fight, or even our brains' insanely-jealous-ex-partner.

Our pre-fronal cortexes are our thinky brains. The nerd, the scientist, the artist, the engineer, the socialite, the learner, the teacher, the parent, sibling and any other non-violent part of our brain.

Our amygdalas are overprotective, and whenever they sense a threat, the're like STEP UP WHO WANTS TO THROW SOME HANDS!? and then pushes the normal thinking brain aside. It's a little more complex than that, but here's a quick excerpt:

TL;DR: Traumatic experiences screw up your memory of the events and keeps the memories separate for some reason. The takeaway is that essentially, while the pver-protective-crazy-ex part of our brain is active, allmeyes go there and the rest of the brain fades into the background.

Modulation of mPFC(medial prefrontal cortex) by subcortical structures

Because the mPFC must guide behavior on a moment-to-moment basis, it needs to receive a constant stream of information from subcortical structures and send out a coordinated response. The mPFC receives dense innervation from many subcortical structures, but we will focus here upon three crucial inputs: the hippocampus, amygdala, and thalamus. The canonical role of the hippocampus in threat circuitry is to encode context-specific information of a threat trace, as it is crucial for an organism to be able to distinguish threats as belonging to a particular context. The hippocampus itself appears to have a dorsal-ventral functional gradient, with the dorsal hippocampus encoding context more specifically, while the ventral hippocampus (vHPC) includes affective information as well [37].

The vHPC sends dense direct projections to the mPFC from CA1, but also bidirectional disynaptic indirect connections to the mPFC through the reuniens nucleus of the thalamus and the perirhinal cortex [38]. Lesion studies of the hippocampus suggest a critical role in context processing [39]. Reversible inactivation of the dorsal hippocampus, through either pharmacologic or chemogenetic means, interferes with context-specific information of a threat memory [40, 41]. Inhibition of double-projecting vHPC neurons to the mPFC and basolateral amygdala (BLA) interferes with contextual threat recall [42] and disconnection of the vHPC from the mPFC interferes with renewal of threat memories, a context-dependent process [43]. Activity-tagging coupled with optogenetic inhibition suggests that threat conditioning and extinction memories exist in separate populations of neurons within the hippocampus [44], and the hippocampus may influence mPFC activity through feed-forward inhibition mechanisms through parvalbumin interneurons [45]. In return, the mPFC appears to suppress expression of erroneous contexts in a “top-down” manner through a disynaptic pathway through the reuniens nucleus of the thalamus [46]. In addition, there may be more routes of information flow from the PFC to the hippocampus, including direct routes from the nearby anterior cingulate [47].

So far we've covered what is essentially PTSD. Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder. The "Disorder part" is important, because there is a run-up to that state.

For instance when you switch on the kettle, the water doesn't immediately jump to boiling, it has to go through every other temperature before boiling as well. If you drive from one place to another, there is time and distance to be covered. Thus it has been , and so will it ever be.

What gets a little less attention is the gap inbetween: zero-PTSD to full-PTSD.

There's also just PTSBNQADY (Post-Traumatic-Stress-But-Not-Quite-A-Disorder-Yet). The stress that we have to normal trauma, instead of severely dibilitating trauma.

You know, the trauma everyone has, your uncertainty of jumping over a fence because of that one time you faceplanted when doing it at age 12, the fact you won't get back on a motorcycle ever again after that crash. I used to ride offroad and was surprised by a slide i wasn't expecting around a turn i took everyday for months. After that incident it took me around a month to get over the involuntary fear of that corner and I could NOT bring myself to be instantly doing that again. Amygdala recognised a threat and as far as my brain was now concerened, I would suffer the worst of fates if i dared doing that again. I could literally not bring myself to it in the same way that you cannot bring yourself to cut your own finger off. Or willingly bite through your lip or tongue. i'm reminded of Leonid Rogozov, that guy that removed his own appendix. I dunno. I'd probably have died before getting my brain to cut into myself.

THAT is how difficult it is to be vulnerable (divided by the degree to which you have healed your truama) - that is to say, if you find it difficut to be vulnerable, it's OK, but you should probably look at your mental health a little closer. <3

Just to say that we understand.

Now we get to the actual "Mental Health" part.

Mental health. Mental illness.

What do we as society label or consider mental illness to be? Currently the general status of mental illness is to be "unclean", to be shunned, to be locked away in a mental instituation (don't worry, i hear the usa is taking mental asylum patients). It's all rather binary: either-or, all-or-nothing, us-vs-them. In reality it's more like normal diseases. Sure some people have mental-bubonic-plague, and other people have never had anything more than a mental-cold or mental-flu. How I envy those people. But! We still also get other severities, mental-broken-leg, or mental-covid19, or mental-strained-a-muscle, or mental-burnout etc. There are as many degrees of this as there are people.

As it stands, any illness impedes our ability to function, to some degree. Pulled a muscle? you can still go to work, you have have to accomodate it. Have a flu? Stay home for two weeks so you don't give it to the entire office. Broke your leg? Go for medical help and get accomodated while your leg heals. When your bone has healed, you need to go to a physiotherapist to help recover the old usage ability, but your leg will never be the same again. There's going to be that pain when the weather changes, that slight limp you now have and scars all over the leg. Despite that, we all make efforts to heal it, but in some cases we need the help of other people - can't exactly walk to the hospital with your broken leg.

Unfortunately, I keep seeing people walking around on mental-broken-legs with no support and of course the damage is only made worse, the longer you try to act normal and walk on the broken leg, either not understanding what is going wrong, or being prideful and refusing help, being hyper-independent, people-pleasing, self-deprecating, you name it. Any reason for us to appear normal, because being an outsider is more difficult than being part of the group.

Awareness matters here.

We humans are strange creatures bound by social constructs that we create ourselves and punish ourselves with. It doesn't make sense. That is, until you look through the mental-health-filter, take into account the maygdala's overprotectiveness, factor in that when the majority of us are born, are parents were still barely more than children themselves at ages around 20. They didn't know what they were doing, as did their parents, as did their parents. It's simply too early, no way can you learn about all these complexities that early in your life.

We all have an undiscovered responsibility in terms of society and civility, to help ourselves and others to mature more and faster. We've been preschool kids, we played, bullied or got bullied, feel out of trees, etc. Then we were in school, learning exactly zero of actual life skills that we need, and then we're thrust into the workforce. No one taught us how to use a calendar, let alone how to interact professionally or even how to be supportive of the people around us. We're just out here cobbling random life skills by skulking around r/ELI5, r/AITA, r/TIL, and tiktok videos of people discovering seriously cool lifehacks. It was a little more difficult in the times when the internet was still made of paper only.

Ok, Ok, I'll get to the point.

To be vulnerable means you need to go against your amygdala. The more you have healed your past trauma and can control your triggers and emotions, the more confidently vulnerable you can be.

Our amygdalas might be our fierce protector, but it's also dumb AF. The only purpose it has is to get out of danger NOW!! we'll worry about the rest later! Problem is, because it's dumb af, and is also not in the wilderness trying to not-die-by-being-eaten-by-tiger, the decisions it makes in civilised places such as your place of work or family, are usually reaaaaly shitty ones. The ones where you end up telling a lie, or be overly confident, but embarrasing yourself in the process, but for the life of you can't figure out what the hell made you do that. Then you realise what you did but now it's too late and you already look like an asshole and made a mistake but to your amygdala, being vulnerable is simply out of the question, you might as well be trying to take a knife and cut off your finger.

And this is where the fun starts where people get defensive, double down on stupid things they don't need to, but again, there's a knife, and there's a dearly beloved finger.

The takeaway here is that you can be vulnerable, but it can be in small doses to give yourself the confidence to do more.

Much like when i had that fear of leaning into that one corner, i took small steps and gradually won my context back. The important part is to take that fear and confront it in small doses until you can show your overprotective amygdala, that it's really ok, you can be vulnerable when you practice.