You're Not Being Vulnerable

"I feel like you're not being authentic with me. I want you to be vulnerable."

That sounds like a beautiful bid for connection, but it's actually a protective layer of the speaker's own vulnerable truth.

Vulnerability uses first person pronouns.

This statement prevents intimacy through tacit accusation, creating a problem-solving dynamic.

This is a false expression, an externalized expression. It seems like it's a sharing of emotions and vulnerability, but again, it is actually an accusation and externalization.

Here's the truth, the vulnerable truth, the truth that has only first-person pronouns.

"I'm having trouble feeling our connection, I have fear and doubt in my heart. I desire intimacy and connection."

Everything else is thoughts about why you feel that way, designed and presented for the other to reverse-engineer to hunt out how you feel, and, worst of all, to fix it.

Fixing a problem is very different from joining in desire.

That one's a gamechanger.