What makes me feel vulnerable?
1. Getting blind-sided by something I didn't consider ahead of time (or someone changing me up).
2. Knowing I'm taking some risks and have no way to control a fall if luck is against me.
3. Getting trapped in a bad situation with potentially dire consequences and no escape route (or a horrendously destructive one).
People talk about being emotionally vulnerable. Honestly, I can put myself out there without much care in regards to people knowing stuff about me that others would find amazingly vulnerable. That really doesn't bother me -- I have this desire to BE known that overrides the vulnerability.
The risk there is more about being misunderstood and potentially rejected, thus losing a potential connection to explore, experience, and learn from.
I remember when I was 6 years old, a school bully would sit on me at recess and do different things to try and make me cry. He wasn't able to do it. There was some incident later with a person who was a friend. Anyway, I don't remember what he did, but it was something that hurt my feelings. That did make me cry. The bully finds out about it and redoubles his efforts - still to no avail. I can laugh about it now but that story seems to illustrate a point on how I've gone through life. I seem to harden myself to being harmed by others.
With me, I can't really "harden" myself in the sense I don't feel the hit. To me, that would be a lie, and part of who I am is distilling my life experience in order to learn from it and get a clear picture of life. To be alive.
Basically, inside, I can be horrendously vulnerable; but you just won't see it. I have the resilience to endure a lot of pain (physical and emotional) without flinching, because I know it can't kill me even if it scours me; and I can rationalize the best approach to a situation and how to act in a healthy fashion even if I'm sensitive to the pain of something; and so I just keep a placid, indifferent face on, steady as she goes, keep things stable and balanced, regardless of how bad the hit actually was. There have only been a few people in my life I'm willing to let see the raw emotion; I'll rationally describe it to lots of people, no problem, because it's still rationalized and I'm still in control of myself, but you won't get to taste what I'm tasting.
So basically I don't necessarily feel vulnerable by expressing my emotions in front of others, I feel vulnerable that they might misjudge my character by the emotions I'm expressing, and the relationship will go in a direction that it didn't have to. I guess that is a control issue as well.
I don't like being in a situation where I'm at someone else's whim or mercy. When I am impacted in a negative way due to such a situation, it seems to impact me much more than other bad things that might happen. It may have something to do with a dominating mother or that, at times, I felt picked on as a child. I'm not sure. The key point, I suppose, is that when someone else can make decisions which could negatively impact or influence me, it makes me feel vulnerable. An example of this would be the trepidation I can sometimes feel around a client or a boss because they have power over me. This makes me feel uncomfortable. I want to be free, independent and outside unfair or negative influences. I am overly sensitive or defensive to criticism from such people. Economic motivations have played a role in my life, I believe, because financial resources give you freedom from outside influence. There is also something related to emotional vulnerability - not being accepted by others for who I am. I'm sensitive to rejection. It is selective though. There are many people where I could care less what they think about me. There are others however where it does matter.
I wonder if that is typical of other INJs as well.
I relate to this. Any time when I'm not self-controlled to the fullest extent that I want to be - I feel vulnerable then.
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