A recipe for growth and healing
Supported Vulnerability is a foundational concept in RCT. It refers to the conditions that allow emotional risks within a relationship, trusting the other person to respond with empathy and acceptance. Supported vulnerability in therapy is an essential ingredient for healing.
In order to get at the walls that keep us separate, we have to feel safe. Supported Vulnerability creates safety. It’s part of the “corrective experience,” or healing relationship, that is at the core of RCT,
Foundational practices for Supported Vulnerability
- Careful, Active Listening: Supported vulnerability includes attentiveness, affirming responses, and questions guided by compassionate curiosity.
- Acceptance: Safety is experienced differently based on factors such as gender expression, race, socio-economic status, and varying abilities or disabilities. Supported vulnerability starts with accepting the speaker’s identity and expression without debate.
- Acknowledgement: Validating feelings of unsafety is crucial. Dismissing fear, even for reassurance, creates anxiety due to feeling misunderstood and unseen. To feel safe enough to be vulnerable, we must know our experience is accepted and valued.
- Responsive Pacing: Creating supported vulnerability requires time for quiet reflection. It is slower, following the speaker’s lead, allowing time for deep exploration without pushing for quick solutions or specific answers.
Cultural and Relational Awareness
- Cultural Awareness: M0st language around mental health centers a white, heteronormative, neurotypical, able-bodied, cis-gender perspective. Creating supported vulnerability requires us to be open to different ways of seeing wellness, connection, identity, and healing.
- Cultural Humility: It is impossible to create supported vulnerability if we don’t understand context. A Black person’s experience of safety in a public park can be dramatically different from a white person’s. A transgender or gender non-conforming person’s concerns about safely making new connections may include fears that haven’t crossed a cis-gender person’s mind. Cultural humility is the practice of continuously engaging in self-reflection and critique to understand and respect the unique experiences of others, particularly as it pertains to diverse cultural backgrounds and social identities.
- Power-With: Cultivating safety requires awareness of power held in the relationship, and a deliberate use of collaboration and care. This looks like reminding the speaker that you won’t push for more than they are ready to share, that they can stop or shift directions at anytime, or validating their struggle to be heard.
- Clear Communication: Understanding limits of confidentiality is essential for authentic vulnerability. Also, clear communication about availability outside the conversation helps create a safe container.
- Self-Disclosure: Sharing authentic emotional responses, including sadness, outrage, and joy, demonstrates a full receiving of what someone is sharing and makes room for more vulnerability.
- Mutuality: Directly related to self-disclosure, mutuality involves the understanding that you are both moving another person, and allowing yourself to be moved by them.
Supported Vulnerability in therapy is one way RCT honors the counseling and social work value of “starting where the client is.” It helps us co-create a place that is not just safe enough for self-disclosure, but one that is welcoming and encouraging of vulnerability; a place that can hold our uncertainty and fear while inviting exploration and healing.
