I've Never Shared This With Anyone Else

I don’t know of anything that will help us find emotional health faster than being vulnerable with safe people. 

     Donald Miller

 We can feel the pressures roll off their shoulders and melt from their hearts.  Anytime someone says to us …

 I’ve never shared this with anyone else before

 … long-hidden secrets are revealed and long-held feelings are set free. 

 There’s a sense of freedom when they say that.  A sense of relief that a burden they’ve been carrying is lifted.   Especially when it’s shared in safety and in trust.   That healing can begin to come now that light has been shed on a corner of darkness within. 

 We’re certainly not saying that people need to expose their every experience or thought or fear to everyone they meet.  If you see what’s often revealed on the walls of Facebook or through the tweets on Twitter, you may agree that too much public exposure is just too much.  But we do believe that it is very important to our own emotional, mental, spiritual and physical well-being to have safe people in our lives.  Someone, at least, with whom we can share from the depths of our souls, to be vulnerable knowing that it’s okay.

 For both of us our first published essays were stories about our own vulnerability.  My (Michael’s) essay – Fear – shared how frightened I was that my wife’s cancer would return, leaving me to care for our son and his severe disabilities alone.  The story detailed one way in which I reacted all too humanly to the prospect of great loss and great responsibility that overwhelmed me.  My (Tom’s) essay – Uncovered – shared how I despaired at not having a job and living in my sister-in-law’s attic with my wife and two small children.  In my story I revealed how unworthy I felt during that time, that I was not measuring up as a husband and father to those I deeply loved. 

 We wrote these stories to help others, especially men, who were also living with fear and feelings of unworthiness to know that they were not alone.  We wrote to share that the anxiety and absence of self-esteem could ultimately be overcome.  

 But we never could have written what would eventually become very public stories without first being able to share them with our wives and with each other.  With the people we trusted most to allow us to express the vulnerable places in our hearts.  Without judgment.  Without criticism.  Without rejection.  Without worry that we would be loved any less for it.

We all need that, as Donald Miller writes.  We all need those safe people who allow us to fully human, fully open, fully who we are.   There is nothing healthier than having those people in our lives and being able to open our souls to them.

 They can begin to help free us from the burdens that weigh us down and the pain that chips away our peace and our joy.

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash