The Vulnerability Phenomenon
Perhaps it began with a TEDx talk that's been viewed 65 million times
The only people who don't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection. No one wants to talk about it, and the less you talk about it, the more you have it.
What underpinned this shame, this “I'm not good enough,”—which, we all know that feeling, “I'm not blank enough. I'm not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough”—the thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability.
This idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.
… The problem is—and I learned this from the research—that you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can't say, “here's the bad stuff.”
“Here's vulnerability, here's grief, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment. I don't want to feel these.”
“I'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin.”
Helen of Troy might have been the face that launched a thousand ships, but it was likely a 2010 TEDx talk (quoted above) by a social work researcher at the University of Houston that launched the vulnerability phenomenon.
That talk, titled “The Power of Vulnerability,” has racked up almost 65 million views online as of this moment, and it vaulted its speaker from the mundane halls of academia to social science stardom.
I’m referring, of course, to Brené Brown. And following the explosion of that particular TEDx talk, she’s written a handful of New York Times bestsellers, starred in a Netflix special, and according to her website, worked with organizations from Amazon to the Obama Foundation to the Central Intelligence Agency.
She’s somehow managed to deliver a message that resonates with the masses, from single parents living paycheck to paycheck to the .01 percenters.
It’s a message that resonates in some ways with me. There’s plenty in that original TEDx talk that’s thought-provoking and potentially useful. It seems reasonable that the type of interpersonal vulnerability that Brown talks about does facilitate human connection in certain circumstances, and as I’ve argued before, resilience is indeed a team sport. And we need resilience to weather the storms of life.
And yet—what do we really know about vulnerability and its relationship with resilience? What even are we talking about when we talk about vulnerability? Are there conditions or contexts that determine when and how vulnerability might be useful?
Vulnerability and the Zeitgeist
First, one thing seems rather likely: Vulnerability is en vogue.
Let’s look at the popularity of vulnerability as a trend within broader societal conversation. There are no perfect measures, but one way to look at this is to explore what people are searching for online, or more specifically, the changes in search prevalence of certain terms over time. Google Trends is one way to do this.
The graph below depicts two search terms: “vulnerability” and, just for fun, “brene brown.” I set the search parameters to go from June 1, 2007 (several years prior to Brown’s seminal TEDx talk) to April 24, 2024 (the date I happened to be working on this part of this article).
As one can see, the two trends appear to mirror roughly. People started searching the Internet for “brene brown” quite a bit after her TEDx talk, and that interest has continued to increase in general over time. The same appears to be the case for “vulnerability.”
Of course, searches for vulnerability could include all kinds of vulnerability—not just the interpersonal type that Brown discusses. That means that people’s searches for information about cybersecurity vulnerability or other matters outside the domain of my interest here are lumped into the data.
Still, even with this crude measure, interest in vulnerability appears to have increased over time. A similar pattern—with the same disclaimer that these are crude measures—appears to be the case with “resilience.”
Anecdotally, I hear quite a bit about these topics in my circles of academia, industry, and the military. They seem to be a part of the zeitgeist, and we could speculate as to why: turbulence in the business environment, geopolitical uncertainties, societal changes, and more. These items, perhaps, could be sources of ambiguity and uncertainty that increase our appetite for ways to alleviate our stress and build our mental strength. And that’s all reasonable, and in some ways, potentially healthy—assuming you’re acquiring knowledge and insights that actually help you.
The Foundation of the TEDx Talk Heard ‘Round the World
Spoiler alert: It’s one peer-reviewed journal article.
In my world of social science, we tend to eschew popular press books in favor of peer-reviewed journal articles when looking for evidence we can trust about various types of behavioral or cognitive or social phenomena. That’s not to say that all popular books have no solid grounding in evidence. Some certainly do. It’s also not to say that all peer-reviewed journal articles are worthwhile. Some certainly aren’t.
But in general, when I’m trying to figure out more about a topic in the domain of social science, I like to look at what’s out there in the scholarly world and use that as a basis for my understanding and conclusions.
That predilection led me to wonder: What research did Brené Brown use as her basis for her now-famous TEDx talk?
From the best of what I can tell (please correct me if I’m wrong and you know better), it’s this single peer-reviewed article:
Brown, Brené. “Shame resilience theory: A grounded theory study on women and shame.” Families in Society 87, no. 1 (2006): 43-52. Link
There might be a great deal of new original research that Brown uses in her subsequent books. I simply don’t know, as I haven’t read them. Again, my bias is to look at what’s been vetted by others in the scholarly community first.
I don’t intend for this piece to be a takedown of Brené Brown. Her ideas do have merit in my estimation, and although she hasn’t published many peer-reviewed articles (I spotted two on her CV, which you can download on her University of Houston webpage), she has published a handful of editor-reviewed book chapters that are likely scholarly in nature.
I’m also not trying to “yuck” anyone’s “yum”—if Brown’s ideas have helped you, great!
Please don’t stage a protest on my lawn.
At the same time, it’s important to look at these ideas critically if we’re going to consider using them in our own lives or recommending them to others. So let’s turn our attention there, starting where it really seemed to ignite, a few years before the TEDx talk heard ‘round the world.
Shame Resilience Theory: The Original Idea
Brown’s 2006 article that appeared in the journal Families in Society reports findings from a qualitative study using interviews of 215 women. Aside from mentioning that she attempted to draw a diverse sample of women, the article doesn’t say how these women were chosen for the study. The point of the research was to explore how these women experience shame and then to try to figure out some of the ways in which they developed “shame resilience.”
Methodologically speaking, 215 interviews is quite a large sample size for a qualitative study. Analyzing interview transcripts (or in this study, field notes) is a massive undertaking, and one problem that often occurs is that the person studying those notes or transcripts can draw their own conclusions that aren’t actually connected with the data. One way to mitigate this issues is to involve others in the analytic process, which Brown does in this study.
Brown reports that the interviews centered on three primary questions:
“How would you describe shame?”
“How do you think shame impacts women?” and
“How do you think women overcome shame and the impact you just described?”
From her analysis, Brown developed what she calls “shame resilience theory.” This first involved defining shame as “an intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging.”
Shame certainly sounds awful. Figuring out ways to deal with it seems like a worthwhile endeavor.
Brown notes that shame involves how evaluate ourselves, how we are connected with (or isolated from) others, and cultural expectations about success or failure. The article outlines a number of other facets regarding the experience of shame (e.g., feeling trapped, powerless, and isolated), how this all fits into one’s context, and what triggers the feelings of shame.
Relevant to my interest here in vulnerability and resilience, Brown suggests that her findings reveal a juxtaposition between shame and empathy, such that if shame is at one end of the “shame resilience” continuum, then empathy—along with connection, power, and freedom—are at the other end. She then makes the argument that vulnerability, and more specifically, acknowledging one’s vulnerability, can become a source of strength.
In an attempt to simplify these ideas, we could think about it this way: If you’re feeling shame about some issue, it’s can be due to something negative that happened to you, something you did, or something you did not do that makes you feel unworthy. It’s something that you likely don’t want to disclose to others. And yet, Brown argues, that shame can result in massively negative emotions and poor well-being, and if we continue to bottle it up inside and refuse to acknowledge its presence, things can get worse.
Brown suggests that vulnerability in the form of self-disclosure to others can help in these contexts specifically by building connections with others who have had similar experiences. At the risk of oversimplification, going through bad stuff is awful, but going through it with the perception of being alone is even worse. Having trusted, understanding relationships in which a person can disclose what’s really going on, and then “speaking shame”—figuring out how to identify and express shame—can help build resilience.
This is all interesting and potentially useful.
Brown’s study on shame resilience theory helps illustrate potential ways in which acknowledging one’s own personal vulnerability, considering one’s context or social influences, building connections with others, and talking about these issues with understanding others can together help one navigate some aspects of adversity and its aftermath.
It also makes me wonder about a number of things—none of which were addressed in the famous TEDx talk—including:
The sample was 100 percent women. Might that have influenced the findings?
How generalizable are these findings, meaning, how widely might these findings apply to people overall? Might aspects about the person or the situation matter?
How might one further validate this model using quantitative measures? Has anyone done that yet?
Might there be limits to the value of personal disclosure or “speaking shame” as it pertains to one’s resilience in the face of adversity?
Those questions, among others, are a bit too much to address here, but in my next piece on this topic, I’ll dig deeper into the social science of vulnerability—beyond Brené Brown.