To feel vulnerable is to feel, as did Eve and Adam after their fruit fest, naked and ashamed. For in the story of the world portrayed in the biblical narrative, shame is the tacit emotional payload that vulnerability carries. In our minds, to be vulnerable is to sense the potential for danger. But this danger is not perceived as being merely that of physical annihilation, limited to the functions of the brainstem and limbic circuitry. It is the even more consciously terrifying prospect of relational disintegration, which eventually leads to the prefrontal cortex telling us we are not enough
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