Vulnerability Is Dangerous and Unwelcome

That's what I believed for most of my life.

Not in those words. 
No one ever said it to me directly.
But it was the rule I inadvertently lived by.

Don't show what you're feeling. 
If something hurts, handle it on your own and keep a calm face.

That's what I thought it meant to be strong, for so long.

They show us all the goodness and love we have, and they expose all the darkness too.

I'm a good person.

But what my marriage taught me is that I was emotionally immature in ways I couldn't see at the time. 

I found it almost impossible to talk about the things I was afraid of.

The things that might expose me as weak.
The things that might show I wasn't as strong as I looked.
The things that might reveal the confidence was a facade, and underneath it I was fragile.

When someone I loved would ask me something that needed a real answer.

Not "how was your day", but the deep questions. 

The ones that went straight to a sensitive place, or to what was actually happening between us. 

The ones where answering honestly meant letting her see something I'd hidden from everyone, including myself. 

I would freeze. I'd shut down. Go quiet.

I'd end up avoiding it, or disappearing somewhere inside my own head, because I couldn't process what I felt in real time.

I remember it like it was yesterday. 
It was debilitating. The fear, the embarrassment.

Worse, I'd feel attacked.

Nobody was attacking me, but my body braced like it was under threat, and defending myself felt like survival.

And then I'd need time. Days, sometimes, to work out what I'd actually felt in that moment.

By the time I had the words, the moment was long gone.

The cultural cliche didn't help.
I grew up in the eighties in rural England. 

In a family where expressing feelings didn't feel allowed.

When I cried, the answer was stop. Grow up.
Any emotional expression was weak, or too much.

No one around me modeled what it looked like to feel a hard thing, have a mature conversation about it, and let it be okay.

So I never learned it.

You can't copy what you've never seen, but you can copy what you have. 

My son's mum wanted to talk about what we were going through, and I found it hard to meet her there sometimes.

She felt dismissed. Unimportant. Resentful. And I understand why. 

I couldn't listen the way she needed.
I couldn't support her. I couldn't serve her.

Emotionally I was holding myself together with both hands, and there was nothing left over to give.

The urge to protect myself was primal.

The irony being that my armor wasn't keeping anything dangerous out. If I let it go, I thought I'd fall apart.

So it kept me locked in— all the feeling and fear and softness in a place even I refused to reach.

I used to resent her for not understanding me. But I never really let her understand me. I told her everything, and then not really. There were things I just couldn't say.

This was one of the hardest parts of our relationship, for both of us.
And it's a big part of why we broke up.

I'm a far better communicator now. I'm connected to what I feel, and most of the time I can process it in the moment.

Not always. I've regressed more than once. 

Crying is still hard for me, and even when I want to, I catch myself resisting it.

But, Here's what I understand now that I couldn't then.

Relationships show you exactly where you are. 

Our breakup was complicated, the way most are, with plenty of things that belonged to both of us. But this pattern was mine to own. This freezing, this inability to share when it mattered, was something I brought to it. 

The feedback was painful, but it was accurate.

And at some point I had to stop defending against it and actually take it in.

So I did the work.

I learned to recognize the fear when it showed up, and the embarrassment right behind it. I became more comfortable sitting with both.

I worked on accepting myself, on letting the fear loosen its grip, on trusting that I could feel something hard and not come apart. I taught myself how to stay and listen to someone else even when my own emotions wanted me to run away or shut down

I'm still learning. 

But I'm no longer the man who freezes when it matters most.
I can be there now. For the people I love, and for myself.

This isn't a switch you flip. It's something you come back to, again and again. For me it's been less a set of steps and more a path I keep re-walking.

Notice the fear. Not the surface version. The real one underneath. For me it was almost always some version of if they see this, I'll be less of a man. Name yours.

Question whether it's true. That belief came from somewhere. It was handed to you. Ask whether it still holds up, or whether you've just never put it down.

Let yourself feel it before you show anyone. You don't have to perform vulnerability for an audience. Start by letting yourself feel the thing, privately, without rushing to fix it or explain it away.

Trust yourself to stay in the room. The fear says you'll fall apart if the armor comes off. You won't. That's something you learn by doing, not by deciding.

Find the people who can hold it too. Not everyone can. Some will take what you share and make it smaller, or make it about them. The ones who can sit with it without flinching are the ones worth opening up to. Becoming one of those people for someone else is part of it.

I didn't become a joyful co-parent overnight — and if you're in the middle of this, you probably won't either.

I share my journey to connect with others working through the same confusing transformation.

It might be exactly what they need to hear.

Thank you,
Justin | The Joyful CoParent

PS: I aim to respond in 48hrs, I do read everything, but please be patient with me :)