Harriet Lerner teaches, to listen with the same passion with which we want to be heard.

The courage to be vulnerable is not about winning or losing, it’s about the courage to show up when you can’t predict or control the outcome.

Gottman’s work on marriages, he was able to predict an outcome of divorce with 90 percent accuracy based on responses to a series of questions. His team screened for what he called the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt, with contempt being the most damning in a romantic partnership.

Don’t grab hurtful comments and pull them close to you by rereading them and ruminating on them. Don’t play with them by rehearsing your badass comeback. And whatever you do, don’t pull hatefulness close to your heart.

Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.

Trust is the stacking and layering of small moments and reciprocal vulnerability over time. Trust and vulnerability grow together, and to betray one is to destroy both.

But vulnerability isn’t just the center of hard emotions, it’s the core of all emotions. To feel is to be vulnerable. Believing that vulnerability is weakness is believing that feeling is weakness. And,

the Stockdale Paradox was named after Admiral Jim Stockdale, who spent eight years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He was tortured more than twenty times during his imprisonment from 1965 to 1973. In addition to fighting to stay alive, he worked every day to help the other prisoners survive the physical and emotional torment. When he interviewed S

The definition of vulnerability as the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure