Navigating The Noise: Faith Meets Therapy Chapter 2 Embracing Vulnerability

You can love God and still be falling apart. If “vulnerability” makes your chest tighten, you’re not alone. A lot of us learned a church-friendly version of strength that’s really just isolation with a Bible verse taped on top. I’m Javier, and I’m inviting you into a real conversation where faith and mental health can sit in the same room without pretending.

We start with Scripture that many people overlook: Paul’s thorn in 2 Corinthians 12. God doesn’t promise to remove every struggle on command. Instead, He says His grace is sufficient and His power is made perfect in weakness. From there, we confront the hidden cost of performing faith, the kind that has you shaking hands and saying “I’m fine” while anxiety, grief, depression, doubt, or trauma is eating you alive. We also pull in research language around vulnerability and connection and put it next to what the Bible already models through David, Job, and Jesus.

Then we get practical. We talk about James 5:16 and why healing is often tied to safe confession and real community, not just private prayer. We name the biggest blockers like shame vs guilt, past betrayal, self-sufficiency, and not knowing how to open up. I give simple steps you can use today: name the specific thing, choose one safe person, start with one true sentence, and get support that matches the weight including therapy or counseling. I also speak directly to men who feel trapped by a version of masculinity that leaves no room for emotional honesty.

If you’re in crisis, I share immediate resources like 988 and other options because you should not sit in this alone. If this helped, subscribe, share it with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find a faith and mental health podcast that makes room for the hard parts.

Transcript

Welcome And Safety Disclaimer

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What is good everybody? Welcome back to the Pew and the Couch. I'm your host Javier. And if you're new here, this is the show where faith and mental health sit down in the same room and have a real conversation. Not a polished one, not a performed one, a real one. We talk about the stuff that most church services skip over because it is too messy, too complicated, or too honest for a Sunday morning setting. And if you have been here since episode 1, you already know what we are about. If this is your first time, welcome. Pull up a seat, you do not have to have it together to be here. Before we get into today's topic, I need to say something important, and I need you to hear it clearly. I'm not a therapist, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a licensed mental health professional of any kind. What I am is a man of faith who has walked through some hard things, studied the word, and paid attention to what actually helps people heal versus what just sounds good on a Sunday morning. Everything I share on this show comes from that place. It is not clinical advice, it is not a substitute for professional help. If you're in a dark place right now, please reach out to a licensed professional. We are going to talk about some real things on this show, but I want you to know exactly who you're talking to. You are talking to Javier, a fellow traveler, not an expert with a degree on the wall. Now with that said, let us get into it. Today we are in chapter two and the topic is vulnerability. And I already know some of you heard that word and felt something tighten up in your chest, because vulnerability has a reputation. It sounds like weakness, it sounds like exposure, it sounds like handing someone the exact thing they need to hurt you, and then hoping for the best. And a lot of us, especially those of us who grew up in church, were taught directly or indirectly that you handle your business and you keep it moving. You do not air your struggles, you do not let people see you sweat. You pray, you stand on the word, and you project faith even when you're falling apart inside. And I want to spend today dismantling that. Not because being strong is wrong, but because what a lot of us were taught about strength was actually just a really sophisticated system for staying isolated. And isolation is not strength. Isolation is where things die. So let us start with the biblical foundation. Because I think a lot of the resistance people have to vulnerability inside the church comes from a misreading of what scripture actually teaches about weakness and strength. People want to use faith language to justify emotional walls. They want to say, I take it to the Lord, I do not need to put my business in the street. And look, there is wisdom in being discerning about who you share with, but that is not the same thing as never sharing. That is not what the Bible is modeling for us. Go to 2 Corinthians chapter 12. Paul is writing to the church at Corinth, and he is doing something that most leaders today would be terrified to do from any platform. He is telling them about his thorn. He does not name it specifically, and theologians have argued about what it was for centuries, but what matters is not the label. What matters is that Paul, one of the greatest figures in the history of the church, has something in his life that will not go away, something painful, something he has prayed about specifically and repeatedly, and God has not removed it, and then he tells us what God said to him about it. My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Sit with that for a second because I think most of us read past it too fast. God is not saying, hold on, let me fix this, and then my power will show up. He is not saying, once you get past this struggle, then watch what I do. He is saying, My power is made perfect right here, right now, in the middle of the weakness. The weakness is not the problem, the weakness is the location where the power lands. And then Paul responds in a way that should completely reframe how we think about this. He says, Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties, for when I am weak, then I am strong. Paul is not embarrassed, he is not trying to hide it. He is not saying, Pray for me privately, and let us not discuss this publicly, he is putting it in a letter that would be read aloud to the whole church. He is saying, This is my reality, this thorn is real, and I am not ashamed of it because I have learned something about where God actually operates. He operates in the places we are most honest about being broken. Now contrast that with what we actually do in most church environments. We come in carrying real weight, real anxiety, real grief, real relational pain, real financial pressure, real doubt, and we walk through the doors and the mass goes on. We shake the hands, we say the right things, we answer fine when someone asks how we are doing, even though fine is the last word that applies to what is actually going on inside us, and we sit through the service, we sing the songs, we say amen, and we drive home more exhausted than when we got there. Not because church was bad, but because performing is exhausting. And a lot of us have been performing for years. That is not what Paul was doing in 2 Corinthians, that is not what David was doing in the Psalms when he was crying out. How long, Lord, will you forget me forever? That is not what Job was doing when he sat in his grief and refused to pretend it was not real. The Bible is full of people who brought their actual condition before God and before community without dressing it up first, and the church somewhere along the way decided that was not okay anymore, that you need to clean it up before you bring it in. That struggling out loud is a sign of weak faith, that the right response to pain is to declare victory over it rather than to actually sit in it and let God and community meet you there. And that shift has cost us more than we realize. It has cost us connection, it has cost us healing, it has cost us the kind of community that the New Testament describes, where people actually bear one another's burdens, where confession leads to healing, where the body functions like a body and not like a collection of individuals, all pretending to be fine in the same room. So let us talk about what vulnerability actually is, because I think the word itself trips people up. When most people hear vulnerability, they picture someone falling apart in public, they picture tears and oversharing and emotional chaos, and they think, that is not me, I'm not doing that, but that is not what vulnerability is. Vulnerability is not the absence of composure, it is the presence of honesty, it is the decision to let what is real be seen by someone who has earned the right to see it. That is it. It is not dramatic, it is not weakness, it is actually one of the hardest and most courageous things a person can do. Dr. Brene Brown has spent decades researching this. She is not a theologian, but her findings track so closely with Scripture that I think God was just confirming through her work what he already said in the Word. She describes vulnerability as the birthplace of connection and the path to feeling truly worthy, and she says something that stopped me when I first read it. She says if it does not feel vulnerable, the sharing is probably not constructive. Think about what that means in the context of how we do church. The sharing that happens in most congregations does not feel vulnerable because it is not. It is safe sharing. It is testimony sharing where everything has already been resolved, and God already got the glory and it all worked out in the end. And those testimonies have their place. But they are not the same as someone sitting across from you and saying, I am in the middle of something right now, and I do not know how it ends, and I am scared. That kind of sharing feels vulnerable because it is, and that is the kind that actually creates connection. That is the kind that makes someone else in the room feel less alone. That is the kind that opens a door for real community to walk through. But we have been so trained to present the finished version of our stories that most of us do not even know how to share the unfinished ones anymore. We wait until we can say, and then God showed up and it all turned around before we open our mouths. And in the meantime, we are sitting in something heavy and completely alone because the culture we are in does not make room for the in-between. And here's what that costs us. Not just emotionally, spiritually, because the in-between is actually where most of the growth happens. The wrestling, the waiting, the not knowing, the showing up anyway. That is where faith gets built, and when we skip past it in our sharing, when we only let people see the highlight real, we rob them of the real picture of what walking with God actually looks like. We make it look easier than it is, and then people who are struggling think something is wrong with them because it does not look like that for them. James 5.16 says, Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The healing is tied to the confession, not just the private confession between you and God which matters, but the relational confession, the one that happens between you and another human being who can sit with you in it, pray with you over it, and remind you that you are not alone in it. God designed the healing to happen in relationship, that is not an accident, that is architecture. And yet so many of us are trying to heal in isolation, we are taking everything to God in private, which is good, but we are not letting any person in. Which means we are only using half the system God built for our recovery. We wonder why we are stuck. We wonder why we keep cycling through the same thing. Part of the answer is that we were designed to carry this with other people, and we keep refusing to let anyone help us carry it. Now I want to address something that comes up every time this conversation happens in a church context. People say, but I tried that and it did not work. I opened up and it became gossip. I was vulnerable and it was used against me. I trusted someone in the church and they proved they could not be trusted, and I want to say, I hear that. That is real, that happens, and it is one of the most painful experiences a person can have, because it does not just hurt you, it makes you feel stupid for having tried, it makes vulnerability feel like a mistake. But here's what I want you to hold on to. One unsafe person is not a verdict on all people. One community that handled your openness badly is not proof that no community can handle it well. What it means is that you trusted someone who is not equipped or mature enough to hold what you gave them. That is a failure of that person, and that community, it is not a failure of vulnerability itself, and the answer is not to seal yourself off permanently. The answer is to become more discerning about who gets access to your depth. Not everyone deserves that, not everyone has earned it. Vulnerability is not the same as being indiscriminate with your story. It is about finding the right people and letting them in. And finding those people takes time. It takes observation. It takes watching how someone treats other people's stories before you hand them yours. It takes small tests before big ones. It takes paying attention to whether someone listens to understand or listens to respond. Whether they hold what you share in confidence or whether it shows up somewhere else later, those things tell you who is safe, and when you find someone who passes those tests consistently, that is a person worth opening up to. Let me talk about the barriers because knowing vulnerability is good and actually practicing it are two completely different things. And I think one of the reasons people stay stuck is that nobody names what is actually in the way. So I want to name them. I want to walk through the real things that keep people locked up, because if you can see the barrier clearly, you have a better shot at getting past it. The first barrier is shame, and I want to be precise about what shame is because a lot of people confuse it with guilt and they are not the same thing. Guilt says I did something bad, shame says I am bad, guilt is actually useful. Guilt points to a specific action and says that was wrong. Make it right, do better. Guilt can lead somewhere productive, but shame does not point to an action. Shame points to you as a person, shame says you're defective at the core, you are too much, you're not enough. You're the kind of person that people would leave if they really knew. And shame does not lead anywhere productive. Shame just makes you hide, and the hiding is the problem, because shame grows in the dark. It gets bigger and heavier the longer it stays in a place where nobody can see it. The moment it hits air, the moment you say it out loud to someone safe, something starts to shift. Not everything resolves immediately, but the power of it changes. It stops being this enormous shapeless thing that fills up every room you walk into, and it starts being a specific thing that can be looked at and dealt with. A lot of us are carrying shame about things that were done to us, not by us. We are carrying shame about our mental health, like it is a character flaw. We are carrying shame about our marriages, our parenting, our finances, our past, our bodies, our histories. And that shame keeps the walls up, because the fear is, if I let someone see this and they confirm it, if they look at the real me and walk away, I will not survive it. So we never test it, we just keep the walls up and call it self-protection, when really it is just slow suffocation. The second barrier is past hurt. When you have opened up and been betrayed, when you have been honest and had that honesty weaponized against you, your nervous system learns from that, it files it away as evidence that openness is dangerous. And the next time an opportunity for vulnerability comes up, everything in you pulls back. Not because you're weak, because you're human. That is how we are wired. We protect ourselves from things that have hurt us before, but that protection, when it goes unchecked, becomes a prison. Because the same walls that keep the pain out also keep the healing out. The same distance that protects you from being hurt again also protects you from being truly known. And being truly known is not optional if you want to actually heal. You cannot heal in a costume, you cannot grow behind a mask. At some point, the real you has to be in the room for the real work to happen. The third barrier is performative faith. This is one that is really specific to church culture. It is the idea that if you are really walking with God, you should not be struggling the way you are struggling, that your anxiety is a faith problem, that your depression is a spiritual deficiency, that if you just prayed more, believed harder, confessed the right things, you would not be in this place. And so, on top of the actual pain you are carrying, you are also carrying the weight of feeling like your pain means something is wrong with your relationship with God. That is a lie. It is a lie that has driven people out of the church, out of community, and in some cases out of their faith entirely. Because when you're already hurting and the community that is supposed to be a place of healing is instead making you feel like your hurt is evidence of spiritual failure. That is not a safe place to be honest. That is a place where you learn to perform your okayness even harder. Paul had a thorn, God did not remove it, that was not a faith problem. Jesus in the garden asked if there was another way. That was not a faith problem, David wrote psalms that sound like a man on the edge. That was not a faith problem. Struggle is not the opposite of faith. Struggle is often the context in which faith becomes real, and the sooner we get that in our bones, the sooner we can stop performing and start actually healing. The fourth barrier is pride, not arrogance. The kind that shows up as self-sufficiency, the I will handle this myself mentality, the I do not want to be a burden, the what will they think of me if they know? The I'm supposed to be the strong one in this family, this ministry, this friendship. So I cannot let people see me struggle. That kind of pride feels noble, it feels like responsibility, but what it actually does is keep you alone in something you were never designed to carry alone. Galatians 6.2 says, carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. That verse does not work if nobody is willing to have a burden. It does not work if everyone is performing strength and nobody is being honest about weight, somebody has to go first. Somebody has to put the thing down and say, I need help with this. And that requires swallowing a kind of pride that the church has accidentally baptized and called maturity. The fifth barrier is not knowing how. A lot of people genuinely do not know how to be vulnerable, they were raised in environments where emotions were not safe to express, where you learned early that showing how you felt led to punishment or ridicule or being dismissed, and so you built systems to manage it. You intellectualized, you minimized, you deflected with humor, you stayed busy, you performed competence, and those systems worked well enough to get you through. But now you're an adult sitting in pain, and you literally do not have the skill set to open up because nobody ever modeled it for you, and you never got to practice it in a safe environment. If that is you, that is not a character flaw, that is a gap in your formation. And gaps in formation can be filled, that is what therapy is for. That is what honest community is for, that is what this show is for. You're not broken because you do not know how to do this yet. You just have not had the right environment to learn it in, and that can change. So, what does embracing vulnerability actually look like in practice? Because we can talk theology and psychology all day, and people can nod along and feel inspired for about 48 hours and then go right back to the same patterns. I want to give you something you can actually work with starting today. The first thing is to name the thing. Not, I'm going through a hard season, not things have been tough lately. What is the actual specific thing? What is the weight you're carrying right now that nobody in your life knows the full truth about? Get quiet enough to identify it, write it down if you need to. Say it out loud in your car where nobody can hear you if that is where you have to start. But name it, because you cannot deal with a thing you will not acknowledge. You cannot bring something to God or to another person that you have not even been willing to face yourself. The second thing is to identify one safe person, not a crowd, one person. Someone who has shown you over time through their actual behavior that they can hold weight without breaking. Someone who does not gossip, someone who does not minimize what you're going through by immediately jumping into fix-it mode, someone who can sit in uncomfortable silence with you without needing to rush past it. Someone who has proven that what you tell them stays with them, you probably already know who that person is. The name is already coming to you right now. And the question is whether you're willing to make a move toward them with something real. It does not have to be everything at once. Start with one true thing. One thing that is actually going on that you have not said out loud to anyone. Test the room, see how they respond. Pay attention to whether you feel safer or less safe after, and then go from there. Vulnerability builds in layers. You do not have to hand someone your deepest wound the first time you decide to open up. You just have to take a step that is more honest than you have been. The third thing is to get support that matches the depth of what you're carrying. If what you're dealing with is beyond what a friend or pastor can help you process, get a therapist, get a counselor, find someone trained to help you work through it. Do not let anyone inside the church or outside of it make you feel like that is a betrayal of your faith. It is not. It is wisdom. God put people in the world with specific training and tools to help human beings work through specific kinds of pain. The same way you would go to a doctor if your body was broken, you go to a counselor or therapist when your inner world needs that level of care. Dr. John Townsend talks about how a supportive environment gives people the encouragement and accountability they need to actually navigate hard things and grow through them. Get the support that matches the depth of what you're carrying. Do not try to handle a 10 with a two. The fourth thing is to start creating safety for other people. When you choose to be honest in a room where everyone is pretending something happens, the air changes. Someone else exhales. Someone else thinks, okay, if they can say that, then maybe I can say my thing. You become the permission someone else needed. You do not have to be fully healed to do this. You just have to be willing to go first, to be the one who stops performing long enough to say something true, and watch what that does to the room. This is how healthy church culture actually gets built. Not from the top down through programs and initiatives, from the ground up through individual people deciding that they are done pretending, and watching that decision create space for other people to do the same. One honest conversation, one true thing said in a room, where false things were the norm, that is how it starts, and it spreads. Now I want to say something directly to the men listening, because this conversation hits different from men in the church. We have been handed a version of masculinity that has almost no room for emotional honesty. Be strong, provide, protect, handle it. And then that gets layered on top of the church version, which says, be the spiritual leader, be the pillar, be the one your family looks to, and the result is men who are carrying enormous amounts of pain and have literally nowhere to put it because every environment they are in is asking them to perform strength. That is why men are struggling in silence. That is why men are dealing with depression and anxiety that nobody knows about. That is why marriages are falling apart, because one or both people never learned how to say what is actually going on inside them. The inability to be vulnerable is not a strength, it is a slow leak, and eventually it empties you out. You're allowed to not be okay, you're allowed to need help, you're allowed to need help, you're allowed to say I'm carrying something and I cannot carry it alone anymore. That does not make you less of a man, it does not make you less of a leader. It makes you someone who is willing to do the real work instead of just performing the idea of having it together. And that is actually what strength looks like. There is a verse I keep coming back to when I think about all of this, Romans 8.38 and 39. I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. I want you to hear that not as a theological statement to memorize, but as the actual foundation that makes vulnerability possible. Because the reason most of us cannot be vulnerable is because at some level we believe that if people really see us, if they really know what is going on inside us, they will leave, they will judge us, they will decide we are too much or not enough. And that fear is rooted in a deeper fear, which is that our worthiness is conditional, that we have to maintain a certain presentation to remain lovable. But Romans 8 cuts straight through that. It says there is one relationship where your worthiness is not conditional. There is one place where the real you, the whole you, the unfinished you, the struggling you, is fully seen and fully loved without condition, and that is with God. He already sees everything. He already knows every thought you have sanitized before bringing it to him, he already knows every version of yourself you have tried to hide, and he has not moved, he has not left, he has not decided you are too much. He is still there, right in the middle of it. And when that becomes your foundation, when you stop trying to manage God's opinion of you, and you actually receive the reality that his love for you is not contingent on your performance, something shifts. The fear of being seen starts to lose its grip, because you start to understand that the worst-case scenario is not as catastrophic as you thought. Even if someone sees the real you and walks away, you are not undone. Because the one whose opinion actually determines your worth already knows everything and already chose you. That is what makes vulnerability sustainable. Not just the courage to open up once, but the ongoing willingness to be known, which requires a security that does not come from how people respond to you. It comes from knowing who you are before you open your mouth to anyone. A lot of people try to build vulnerability on the wrong foundation. They try to be more open, but they are doing it from a place of needing the response to go well in order to feel okay. And so when someone responds badly, when someone mishandles what they shared, it confirms every fear they had and they shut down harder than before. The problem is not that they tried to be vulnerable. The problem is that they were building on sand. They were using other people's responses as the measure of their worth, and that is a foundation that will always fail you eventually because people are imperfect and they will sometimes let you down even when they are trying not to. Build it on the rock first. Get anchored in who God says you are. Get rooted in the reality that you are fully known and fully loved by the one who made you, and then from that place start taking the risk of being known by people, because now when it goes well, it is a gift, and when it goes badly, it is painful, but it does not destroy you. You can absorb the disappointment and keep going because your foundation did not move. Now I want to talk about what this looks like inside the church, specifically because I think the church has a real opportunity here that it is largely missing. We are living in a moment where the mental health conversation is louder than it has ever been. People are talking about anxiety, depression, trauma, therapy, boundaries, all of it, in mainstream culture in a way that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago, and people are hungry for spaces where they can bring those conversations without being judged or dismissed or handed a Bible verse and sent on their way. The church should be that space. The church of all places should be the safest place on earth to be honest. About your inner life. We have a theology of grace. We have a theology of redemption. We have a God who specializes in meeting people exactly where they are. We should be leading this conversation, not lagging behind it. We should be the place people run to when they need to be real, not the place they hide from because they do not feel safe enough to take the mask off. And building that kind of culture requires leaders who are willing to model it. It requires pastors and elders and ministry leaders who are willing to say from the front, I struggle too. Not in a way that is inappropriate or that burdens the congregation with things they cannot help, but in a way that normalizes the human experience of walking with God, that says, faith does not mean you have it all together. Faith means you keep walking even when you do not. And that kind of modeling from the front changes what is possible in the room. Think about what it does to a congregation when the person behind the pulpit says, I went through a season of depression and I did not know if I was going to make it through. Think about what it does to the person in the third row who has been sitting in that same darkness alone for two years, convinced that something is spiritually wrong with them, convinced that they are the only one, convinced that if anyone knew they would be seen as weak or faithless. That one moment of honesty from a leader can crack something open in that person, that no program or initiative ever could, because they just saw someone they respect tell the truth. And if that person can tell the truth, maybe they can too. That is the power of modeled vulnerability. It gives people permission. And permission is what most people are waiting for. They are not waiting for a better small group structure. They are not waiting for a new series on mental health. They are waiting for someone to go first, someone to show them that it is actually okay to be real here, that the community will not collapse if someone admits they are not okay, that grace is actually real and not just a word on the wall. Dr. Larry Crab has written about how genuine healing happens within the context of real relationships, not in isolation, not just in private prayer, in actual ongoing relationships with people who know you, show up for you, and stay when things get hard. The church is uniquely positioned to provide that, but only if it is willing to prioritize depth over appearance, only if it is willing to let things get a little uncomfortable, because real community is sometimes uncomfortable. People are messy, healing is not linear, and a church that can only handle people when they are doing well is not actually functioning as the body of Christ. It is just a gathering of people performing wellness at each other. And one more thing before I let you go. I want to speak directly to the person who found this show because they are in crisis right now. Not just a hard season, a real crisis. The kind where you do not know if you're going to be okay. The kind where the darkness is loud and the hope feels very far away. I want you to hear this clearly. You are not alone. What you are feeling is real, and it does not mean you are broken beyond repair. It does not mean God has abandoned you. It does not mean your story is over. It means you're a human and you're in pain, and you need support right now. That goes beyond what a podcast can give you. If you do not know where to start, I got you. For immediate crisis support, call or text 988. That is the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, free and confidential. If texting is easier, text home to 741741 to reach the crisis text line. Same thing, available anytime, no judgment. If you're a veteran, call 988 and press 1 or text 838255 to reach the veterans crisis line, built specifically for you. If you're dealing with addiction on top of everything else, call SAMHSA at 1-800-662-4357. Free, confidential, 24 hours, they will connect you with real options in your area. For ongoing support where you know you need someone to talk to regularly, go to psychology today.com and search for a therapist by location, insurance, and specialty, including faith-based counseling. If you want someone who integrates faith into their practice specifically, check out the American Association of Christian Counselors at AAC.net. If cost is the barrier, Openpath Collective at Openpathcollective.org offers sessions between$30 and$80 for people who qualify. That is real therapy at a price real people can actually access. For families and couples navigating mental health together, NAMI has a helpline at 1-800-950-6264 and resources at NAMI.org. And if you're outside the United States, the International Association for Suicide Prevention maintains a directory of crisis centers around the world at IASP.info. Your country is on that list. Help is available to you too. Please reach out to someone today, a trusted person in your life, a pastor or counselor. One of these resources, if that is what the moment calls for. Do not sit in this alone. You were never meant to sit in this alone. And whatever brought you to this episode today, I do not think it was an accident. I think something was steering you toward a reminder that you matter, that your life matters, and that there are people ready to help you carry what you are carrying right now. Let them help you. That is not weakness, that is the bravest thing you can do today. You were not designed to carry this alone. You were designed for community, you were designed for connection, you were designed for a faith that is honest enough to include the hard parts, and that faith is available to you, that community is available to you, but you have to be willing to reach for it. That is chapter 2. Embracing vulnerability. Thank you for being here and for doing the hard thing of just letting these words in. If this episode hits something in you, share it with someone who needs it. Leave a review, tell somebody about the show, and grab the companion book, Navigating the Noise at the Compass Collective NYC. Everything is there. We will be back next time for chapter 3. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other. And remember, you do not have to be okay to be loved. See you next episode.