5 Signs You're 'Overdoing' Vulnerability (And How To Stop)

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There's no reality in which the friendzone rejection doesn't sting. It does tend to sting less if you shoot your shot in a confident straightforward manner though. Vulnerability without reciprocity is masochism.

Once again you know just what I need to learn next.

I feel really overwhelmed, like I have to be hyper vigilint about so many things or that everything means something and to watch where I’m stepping. So it is best not to be vulnerable if youre attached to an outcome or wanting a specific response?

You're amazing

I am curious about your comments about parent child secure relationships. The parents don't disclosure to the child. So if we didn't have secure parenting would we need as adults a period of one way disclosure like parent child? Or as an adult do we look for 1-1 disclosures only? I have been in what I hoped was a healing relationship which modelled parent child and the person wasn't vulnerable with me. They kept telling me I wasn't being vulnerable and when I acted against their advice they said I didn't trust them and ended the relationship. This video helps me see more clearly the dynamics and more about vulnerability. I may need to ponder more to get clearer to my question.

Most of your videos resonate with me on a deep level, but this one didn't. I take that as a good thing, a sign that I haven't over-corrected when it comes to vulnerability.

I have been overdoing vulnerability and paying the price. Being an open book can really hurt you

Thank you, this is excellent advice. I'm happy to notice that it's another area where I'm managing some increased integrity. It's hard and lonely, but the long-term result is more respect for, and trust in, myself. And, the right kind of people seem to be sticking around. But this information helps me reinforce improving habits, so thank you.

This video is very much the way it is for me right now, and has been for a few months I think. It’s becoming unbearable at the moment with over sharing with another person. I’m very thankful I’ve found you and this video 🌟🤗🌟🤗

so basically if you want relationships dont be autistic and dont have adhd.

Thank you Heidi this s so valuable!! I wish there was MORE content in the mainstream to add to the Brenee Brown story. Such a big piece here that’s missing from it

Thanks for the advice on how to understand our attempts at vulnerability. I succeeded in being vulnerable at a support meeting and got shut down. Your talk just let me know that it's OK to see that experience as a learning one and move on. The people pleaser in me enjoys the thought that I don't always have to stand on vulnerability in relationships, however close they may seem.

I'm going to watch out for the grizzly bears!

In a PRACTICAL (simplistic)
WAY …I call it 🕯
QUESTION I ASK
MYSELF ..is this
PERSON ?????
1. READY
2. WILLING
an so important
3. ABLE or CAPABLE
in the MOMENT 🕊🕯🕊

It’s f-Ed up I was overly vulnerable and at the end of the day he told me I wasn’t vulnerable with him. I put myself on the line, he didn’t do the same until later on in the relationship. It’s tough. I loved him so much. But I started to close off to protect myself because I felt too raw in sharing. Anything I said my friend would know or viceversa. It felt like nothing was mine not my stories or process, victories or failures even if it came from a place of worry or care from them. But I closed off too much to the point I wouldn’t share, I guess that’s where everything went south.

Thanks, Heidi.

Wow, guilty as charged! This hits the nail of the head for me. In general, I find myself in relationships; romantic and friendships that are not reciprocal. Then I end up feeling resentful. But this video is a reminder that I need to work on discernment.

Thank you so much for teaching how to navigate these emotional waters . My life got improved listening to your important words. I am much more ready for the next day thanks to you! The fight for self-containment is real!

Epic education !!!😮🎉🎉🎉

Thank you so much.
I used to think that being able to show vulnerability somehow made me a secure and healthy person.
I needed to hear this talk and get a reality check about how this, too, could be used the wrong way.
It feels like a slap in the face to wake me up from the weirdest nightmare.

Absolutely amazing. Wow wow wow

This is very helpful information. Thank you Heidi! 🤓

Hello Ms Heidi 🎉
Exceptional ..work
on achieving shared
HEALTHY HUMAN
VULNERABLY
I call it MAKING
self extremely
GULLIBLE to
HARM & HURT 🥶
Have listen to this
Podcast several
times 👍✅👍
You put the awareness
info into practice words
and examples 🧐🫶🏻🧐
I am a fem senior ..always
on the INNER journey
of developing HEALTHY
intimate genuine inter
dependence since middle
age ..and self DISCOVERY to
LOVE & SERVE un conditionally
have NOT FULLY
MASTER IT …it is a LIFE
TIME inner WORK 🕯️
Thank YOU ..I will cont
to LISTEN and forever
HONOR my HUMAN
DIGNITY and NEEDS in
a HEALTHY, REWARDING
genuine vulnerable ways
Again EXCEPTION WORK

Why would someone form the habit of overdoing vulnerability?

Well said..wow!❤

Serious question … how the heck did you heal everything you share on your videos … im shook

i just became so vulnerable that my dog licked my toes and bit my jugular. Next vid on how to fix and heal jugular?

Coming and watching this video as an avoidant learning how to be vulnerable 😂

Great video. This was exactly the insight I was looking for.

I watched almost all ur videos. Thanks a lot

Hmm... How do you do this when you desperately need help though? A failed therapy has caused these issues for me. I used to be careful with expectations but I'd hope therapy would help me get better not worse? Or that doctors know how to treat and find my health issues?

I love your videos, but the outro music always seems so... incongruent? with the content of your videos. I always expect something calming and cheerful - like the outro music that The Book Leo channel typically uses.

wow! you are so good with this stuff! and people often praise me for my insights. I have absolutely struggled to get boundaries to work, and the problem I find myself faced with is that this seems to be an optimization problem, and not a set of tradeoffs between one thing vs some others. When I was younger, I ended up internalizing my moms paranoia, and having to be on guard with her, but still getting emotionally sucker punched when I let my guard down also didn't help.... her heart was in the right place, but she had some strange ideas even if she came by them honestly.

It's strange, because I've been given coaching by therapists on setting boundaries, I've watched a bunch of videos by various people who are supposed to be "experts," and done some reading as well. Most of what you find out there is to the effect that what you are supposed to do is clearly and calmly explain your needs or desires, how the person's actions are affecting you, what values that impinges on, sometimes how it might impinge on similar values they might hold, followed by clear actionable consequences (not threats) you will impose if the boundary continues to be violated.... but I can tell you that never works, and when it would work, the boundary never needs to be expressed because the other person is already reasonable and attuned and the issue is resolved long before it even becomes a conflict. One of my frustrations with therapy is it seems like there are all kinds of people giving advice on situations they have never had to deal with themselves, and the explanation as to why they don't have this issue in their lives ends up being a misatrubution that borders on confabulation.

So far, the two most helpful explanations I've come across as to what might be going wrong have been a video interview on why communicating boundaries to narcissists doesn't work (they will just use your needs and vulnerabilities as control points against you), and a behaviorist book on developmental psychology (can't remember the name right now). The idea is that to stop some problematic behavior in a child involves extinction learning, and this will involve an extinction burst while they test the boundary to see if you are serious, and things might get a bit worse before they get better.

but now I wonder how this could ever work, and it pisses me off that such damaging advice is commonly given to people who are already in harms way, such as say, an abusive relationship. What the standard advice amounts to is "make yourself vulnerable, and hope the other person decides to do the right thing." If you are not dealing with a "nice" person, I can promise you that even the "threat" of consequences will make things worse, and I put "threat" in quotes because no matter how reassonable the consequence might be, and no matter how calmly you communicate it, this is how it will be received.

I do take a long time to get over things, and I know I do set myself up for it.... but I don't really know what else to do. A long time ago, I realized that having boundaries that are too rigid just alienates the nice people, and when there is no one around, then you are wide open to the real predators who you are all too willing to invite in because of the isolation and alienation you already feel. You even feel connection and affinity with them.... not realizing that if you are both isolated, it is for entirely different reasons, but its complicated because as I have just finished describing, you weren't exactly pleasant to be around either because its like your heart and mind are in sepsis, and you're bleeding out into the world.

I realized that this kind of paranoia wasn't protecting me, and that I was making things doubly worse because I was carrying the spectre of my mom around with me. So I said, screw that noise, and basically stopped doing anything to purposefully keep the bad people out. That actually worked better, and I saw it being for two reasons. Whenever you try to keep something out.... the very same tension also means you are keeping something else in, because "keeping out" just means keeping other things separate from what is already "in". In my case, that meant holding onto exactly the person I should be running from, and because I had deprived myself of any means I could have known that this person was not my "friend." Funny how that works. If you have the wrong boundaries, you end up inadvertantly concentrating what you want to avoid. But, other than that, we are social creatures, and the stats from evolutionary game theory tell us that that most people actually are reasonable (this is why open source software and Wikipedia are as reliable as they are), so by random assortment you actually might expect to avoid most of the people you need to.... The problem I've come to see with this is that the population is not randomly distributed, and if you have trauma then you will end up being a magnet for those who are either hurt, or harmful, and the hell of it is, you don't even know which one of those you are until you start healing. Even though I have been hurt and I have anger, I can't completely blame these people because I'm not exactly cloaked in white myself. Just like my mom, I have said things that were quite cutting, and while I think I've gotten a lot better, I know that a lot of people still find my intensity hard to deal with. Mostly, that just means writeups like this, as I rave.... or rant.

I had thought I was practicing radical openness, but once again, you have helped me to see that I've actually been practicing reckless vulnerability. And just think; until today I had thought the solution was to do that even more! I recognized a while ago that what I had been doing was trauma bonding, which I think has its place in our journey because it can act as a springboard.... the problem is that it is either entirely rooted in the past, or worse, carries trauma forward into the present by reenacting it. Mine was what I consider to be the healthier "past rooted" kind.... but that was cutting me off from secure connections because I didn't know how to be vulnerable in the present.... because I didn't actually know what I felt until the moment was past.

Another problem I've had is not that I end up expecting something worse to happen than actually does.... but that I have failed to anticipate the worse thing that actually does happen, and to be fair to me, that's because everyone commonly describes these scenarios the other way around. As a case in point, the scenario described in this video where one might confess having romantic feelings for someone, but they are not reciprocated.... for me, it is still a dream that it could even go that well. For me, that is usually the quickest way to lose a valued friend, and that has always happened when I least expected it because it happens after I've been given all kinds of reassurances that of course we will still be friends.... but the only time it was ever true was when it turned out the person actually was interested in me. To be fair to other people, I've only actually done this a handful of times in my life.... because its terrifying for me, and it generally takes several years to a decade for me to get over it. I wonder how much of that was actually limerence now. I mean, I thought I knew each of them quite well, and I really enjoyed spending time with them or conversing with them in any form... but obviously I didn't know them that well if I could be this blindsided. The one that I'm having a hard time getting over right now might actually be a form of limerence in reverse. I actually did have an intimate relationship with this person, even though I did not have any expectation that my feelings would be reciprocated. I only told her because she was a good friend, and if I care about someone, I don't want to be harboring feelings in secret, whether they are good or bad. But, I discovered one night that the person I was in love with was actually her own limerent image, and I'm not sure if I should say what I actually mean by that. I was assured that "she is her own person," and at the time that was enough for me.... I guess in my own way I'm also trying to be my own person, and maybe fantasies can become real. I already have the best possible proof of that.

It almost feels illegal that this video is free! You've been helping me so much with your amazing content since I first found your channel a few months ago, but THIS video is THE VIDEO for me. Such a clear and kind mirror into my inner experience. You are the fairy godmother I always wished for as a little girl. 🧚‍♂💖

I think secure vulnerability is more of an emotion than an action. I think it’s based on feeling open and connected to oneself and from there others may perceive us as vulnerable but we’ll be rooted in ourselves and there’s less focus on the other person

This is gold

Brene Brown is a fraud. Vulnerability is not good by any definition except in Au currant psycho-babble. It's like something that middle class women talk about at luncheon.

Fantastic job, Heidi! I'm constantly learning about my own behavior and others in a way no one else has explained on these topics like you do in your videos. Thank you!

learned something very useful again. Thanks!

This channel changed my life❤️

Thanks! really important topic!

Thank you so much for breaking down exactly what happens during vulnerability, this is precious!!!

I've been doing this. I've been calling it "radical openness" So far, I've not been hurt by it. Yes, I have had hurtful experiences, but not connected to deliberate vulnerability. I'm a trauma survivor. On dating apps, or in dealing with people that I think may become more than a customer/client, or water cooler buddy, I will bring this up fairly early. From my perspective, I want them to know I have baggage, and some personality quirks early on before either of us are invested in actually turning it into a deeper friendship.

Most of the big problems in my life have been due to people not telling me things I needed to know. From people assume I knew how to pick up body language cues. to read between the lines. RO has been a game changer for me. When in the slightest doubt, I ask. I invite questions. I'm pretty candid about nearly everything.

And it works.

I didn't attach well to my parents. Insecure disordered attachment is my default style. But it's been shifting from Anxious Preocupied, to dismissive avoidant. In AP, any rejection hurt a lot. But as DA they aren't really people yet. I've become self secure enough, that I don't depend on total strangers. I can dismiss hurtful comments fairly easily. Hurtful comments from people I know well and have some form of bond with still hurt.

This is an awesome set of guidelines and explanations for what happens in situations with imbalance. Thank you. I learned a lot!