Core Vulnerabilities in Love

Everyone has a core vulnerability—the emotional state we most dread and spend the most emotional energy avoiding. Common core vulnerabilities I see in my practice are fear (of harm, isolation, deprivation) and shame—dread of failure or inadequacy.

We rarely experience core vulnerabilities due to entrenched avoidance habits, such as blame (resentment, anger) and denial (distraction, substance use.) Habits of avoiding core vulnerabilities cast shadows on implicit judgments and overt behavior, particularly under stress. They undermine hope and diminish positive meaning.

Avoidance habits are salient in romantic relationships, where partners have different core vulnerabilities. One is more vulnerable to fear, while dread of failure plagues the other, for instance. Consequently, their avoidance habits have developed on different radar screens, making it difficult for them to sympathize with the vulnerabilities that underlie each other’s attitudes and behavior.

“Why do you think like that and do these things? I wouldn’t think or behave that way.”

A couple's reactions to each other over time form an unconscious fear-shame dynamic, wherein anxiety in one stimulates shame-avoidant behavior in the other, and vice versa. When the fear-shame dynamic is activated, facts and reason don’t matter.

How Shame Activates Fear

Stressed, shame-avoidant partners automatically trigger anxiety in their fear-avoidant partners. The following are common examples.

• Partner One comes home from work with a stressed or defeated emotional demeanor, which raises anxiety in Partner Two.
• Dread of failure as a provider typically manifests as criticism of spending, which stimulates the partner’s fear of deprivation.
• Dread of inadequacy can make sex seem performance-driven, less intimate, even less personal, stimulating fear of isolation in partners.
• In parenting, shame-avoidant partners demand discipline and achievement. This raises the anxiety of fear-avoidant partners who emphasize safety and nurturing their children’s physical and emotional needs.

How Fear Activates Shame

When fear-avoidant partners seem distressed or unhappy (for any reason), shame-avoidant partners can feel like failures. They try to avoid painful feelings with distraction, irritability, controlling behavior, or emotional shut-down, which appear rejecting, uncaring, or menacing to their partners.

Fear of deprivation can cause overspending, which stimulates the partner’s provider-dread.

Shame-avoidant drivers perceive their passenger partners’ involuntary fear responses (gasps or startles) as assaults on their charioteering. Their anger makes them drive more aggressively, which increases the fear of their partners.

Conflict in Committed Relationships

Regardless of the content of their disagreements, one partner’s fear-avoidant behavior (featuring hyper-vigilance, control, criticism) can stimulate the partner’s shame-avoidant behavior (featuring anger, irritability, stonewalling, emotional shut down), and vice versa.

Why It’s So Hard to Regulate

The fear-shame dynamic activates much faster than conscious attention, placing insight ever behind the curve. More importantly, avoiding fear and shame feels different from the way it looks. Avoiding fear feels self-protective but looks critical or controlling. Avoiding shame feels like justified defensiveness but looks rejecting, aggressive, or domineering.

How We Make It Worse

We intensify the fear-shame dynamic by focusing on facts in disregard of feelings. Regardless of whether one partner’s interpretation of facts is correct, focusing exclusively on them implies that the other partner’s feelings don’t matter, or worse, there’s something wrong with the partner for feeling that way.

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Why Modern Love Relationships Are So Hard

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The following are inherently devaluing and likely to have a gaslighting effect.

• Attempting to change feelings through argument rather than validation, especially when arguing to win or prove you’re right.
• Attempting to psychoanalyze or diagnose partners: "You’re like this because your parents ignored you as a child.” "You have this or that personality disorder.”

We make it much worse by using negative characterizations:

• “You’re too sensitive, needy, emotional, controlling, demanding, selfish.”
• “You’re too proud, aloof, afraid of intimacy, insensitive, dishonest, angry.”

The most common way to start and prolong the fear-shame dynamic is blaming.

• “It’s your fault.”
• “You’re doing this to me.”

Without blame, dynamics can’t last. With blame, they can’t end. When partners blame the fear-shame dynamic on each other, they encounter an inevitable standoff.

“If you loved me, you’d do this! (You wouldn’t make me anxious.)”

“If you loved me, you wouldn’t ask me to do this! (You wouldn’t make me feel inadequate.)”

In all the above, both partners feel bewildered or wronged, if not victimized. They lose hope in the throes of the negative meaning they give to each other’s behavior.

Antidote

Self-regulation of fear and shame is ideal, but that usually requires therapy. To control the fear-shame dynamic, partners must understand that the dynamic happens to both at the same time. They won’t need therapy if they learn to cooperate to deactivate it, without blaming it on each other. When they bring it into the open, it loses power.

“Hey, the fear-shame dynamic got activated. It’s happening to both of us. Together, we can turn it off. Our connection is more important!”

Prevention

To prevent the fear-shame dynamic, both partners must come out of their comfort zones. For example, shame-avoidant partners must connect when they feel like blaming or isolating. Fear-avoidant partners must give more space when they feel like criticizing or controlling.

Identify your deepest common values. The deeper value for both partners is to strengthen their relationship. The lesser value for each is meeting optimal personal preferences. It’s easier to negotiate different preferences when we start from shared values.

This is crucial: Share your core vulnerabilities, not your avoidance habits. Shared vulnerabilities bring partners together; avoidance habits drive them apart.