Self-esteem and confidence are two essential engines to face the challenges of daily life. However, there are times when we feel a lot of uncertainty in the face of threatening phenomena, since we do not know the best way to respond to them. This is known as vulnerability and, although in today's society being vulnerable is synonymous with weakness, sometimes it is necessary to value ourselves and accept our own emotions.
If you want to know more about this very interesting topic, in this Psychology-Online article, we tell you what is vulnerability and how to overcome it with very simple strategies that will help you recover your inner balance, as well as manage your uncertainties to improve your well-being.
Index
- What is emotional vulnerability in psychology
- Consequences of Emotional Vulnerability
- How to overcome emotional vulnerability
What is emotional vulnerability in psychology.
Emotional vulnerability in psychology is a state in which
Etymologically, the word vulnerability comes from the Latin "vulneration", which means the quality to be wounded. Therefore, it is a term associated with the susceptibility or fear of receiving emotional or physical injury. Likewise, this state depends on different factors such as the social environment, age and even individual beliefs and values.
It is usual for emotional vulnerability to cause a feeling of danger, alertness, incapacity and even shame, especially since society usually educates people so that they never show themselves vulnerable to the rest. However, this process can be essential to awaken resilience and cause favorable adaptations in people. It all depends on how you handle it. assertiveness.
Consequences of emotional vulnerability.
From a psychological point of view, emotional vulnerability provokes strong emotions and sensations like the following:
- Fear.
- Sadness.
- Gonna.
- Frustration.
- Dejection.
- Feeling of defeat.
- emotional insecurity.
- Inability to believe in one's own abilities.
- Negative thoughts that do not let you move forward.
The detail is that denying those feelings will not make the problem go away. On the contrary, one of the consequences of emotional vulnerability is that if you don't face your fear, you can never have true emotional independence.
As hard as it may seem, facing inconveniences and fears will serve to connect with positive thoughts, increase your self-esteem and overcome emotional vulnerability.
How to overcome emotional vulnerability.
If you are asked how vulnerability is worked on, the main thing is to reduce risk or threatening factors as much as possible. In addition, to overcome it you can apply the following strategies:
- start to know you better: will allow you to identify your insecurities and your best aptitudes.
- control the thought: an effective way to do it is by practicing mindfulness or some other relaxation method that helps keep you focused on positive, empowering thoughts.
- Calmly analyze situations: start by identifying what is the worst that can happen and imagine a feasible scenario of the situation and not one loaded with negativity and pessimism.
- Stop doing things to please others Y learn to say no without feeling guilty.
- show yourself as you are: Sometimes the fear of authenticity makes us vulnerable due to the fear or prejudice of other people. Begin to be truly authentic regardless of the consequences.
- make your own decisions: use the great advantage of free will to decide what is most convenient for your well-being.
- Don't be so harsh when judging yourself: Instead, try to find the reason why you feel the emotion and evaluate where you went wrong. Only then can you correct the errors so that they do not happen again.
- learn to be more tolerant with your actions, fears and weaknesses and prevent rigidity in your decisions and thoughts from ruling your life. In this article, we show you how to be more tolerant.
When it comes to overcoming emotional vulnerability, there is no need to feel ashamed, quite the opposite. To the show your true personality You will have the certainty that those around you value you for who you are and not for what you appear to be. Also, remember that situations do not affect you for what they are in themselves, but for the attitudes you have towards them and because, perhaps, you do not apply emotional intelligence in a crisis or conflict.
Also, keep in mind that the criticism you receive does not define your essence and that you can't like everyone either. That does not mean that you are worth less or that you do not have the capacity to achieve your goals. Therefore, when you learn to manage your vulnerabilities, you will realize that you are not guilty of feeling, but that you are a human being with emotions who deserves the best of this life.
This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
If you want to read more articles similar to What is emotional vulnerability and how to overcome it, we recommend that you enter our category of Emotions.
Bibliography
- Feito, L. (2007). Vulnerability. In Annals of the Navarra health system (Vol. 30, p. 07-22). Government of Navarre. Health Department. https://scielo.isciii.es/scielo.php? pid=S1137-66272007000600002&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en
- Kottow, M. (2011). Annotations on vulnerability. Redbioética/UNESCO Magazine, 2(4), 91-95. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo? code=3989587
