A talk on choosing who to trust with your vulnerable moments. The speaker argues that selective sharing with the right people protects you from shame and keeps you emotionally safe.
I still believe, though, that not everybody is deserving of our vulnerability. So I talk about it. A dartboard, right? Like, I've got my dartboard friends. Like, so the people that are at the middle of the bullseye, they get to see me in my, like, darkest, deepest. They've earned that trust. And because I can be a little bit more externally referenced, they're the people that I'll take feedback from. And they're also okay if I'm like, some of that resonates, some of that doesn't, right? And then I've got people that are further out on the dartboard that actually don't know how to hold space for me when I'm feeling things or in something deeply. They're not actually safe space for me to be open and vulnerable. Right? Like, I almost get that recoil effect. So I've just learned, like, those people are not the people that I'm going to share with. I'm also not going to be the person that shares in front of a room of 500 people. That's never going to be me. That's never going to feel safe in my body. And that doesn't mean that I'm hiding. It means I'm making a choice to be vulnerable in spaces where I know I'm going to get the support that I need to be able to move through it. That's not going to drop me into a place of shame, because that's what happened to me right in that moment. I need to be strong. You are actually dropped into a place of feeling shameful about what you were feeling, and that's not okay. And there's a lot of people that don't know how to not, like, pull people into that shame trap.
