Feeling Afraid of the World? 6 Signs of Vulnerability Schema

Vulnerability can be complicated.

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This article is one part of the Schemas: An Introduction series of 18 posts, covering each of the 18 schemas outlined originally by Jeffrey Young. You can check out this post for more background on the definition of schemas, which I call the” DNA” of your personality.

With years of COVID-19, economic precarity, ongoing structural violence, and climate change, it’s no wonder we aren’t quite sure what to make of just existing and whether it feels safe out there. To manage daily life in 2022, you need to manage feelings of vulnerability and to do some reality checking.

Understanding Vulnerability Schema

Do you feel like you’re always worried about protecting yourself from risks and feel drained as a result? You may find these experiences affecting personal relationships: You are unable to do some of the daily life activities your friends and loved ones expect of you, which causes pressure and tension. You feel vulnerable, and other people just don’t get it, don’t see it, don’t try, or just get angry at you for it. This isn’t fair and shouldn’t feel like your fault. But what is to be done?

If you lived through difficult, precarious times in your childhood, you may have been left with a tendency to feel vulnerable as an adult in ways that aren’t accurate and to underestimate your real ability to cope. That is the effect of vulnerability schema: Triggered feelings of vulnerability may be more about your past than what’s happening now. It’s important to know the difference so you can appropriately address current challenges.

You may find yourself avoiding certain everyday activities, such as speaking in meetings, commuting, social events, or even exercising. Your mind drifts toward some kind of terrible outcome, and you focus on how you are hurt in this possible (however remote) turn of events. The plane could crash, the building could fall down. COVID-19 is keeping you down, even if you take good precautions. The future feels scary.

You may have a sense that these are worst-case scenario outcomes, and unlikely, but you can’t stop thinking about the harm to you that could happen. You’ve always lived with this kind of caution and worry. You may even have been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder.

You may also be reading this thinking of someone you care about, who you believe is more capable than they think they are, who you hope doesn’t need to live with exaggerated fears every day.

6 Signs of Vulnerability Schema

Schema therapy suggests people usually develop the vulnerability schema in childhood, as a result of long-term experiences of vulnerability such as illness; life precarity due to poverty, disasters, or structural violence; or having a parent with vulnerability schema. These experiences leave a keen imprint that the world is dangerous and life is fragile—to such a degree that you feel you have to be careful at all times.

As always with schemas, they are a powerful imprint in our psyche of a childhood experience, which remains with us into adulthood. Once we become adults, if we try to live adult life through the lens of a schema, we see the world with the same limitations as a child has. It’s like part of our brain hasn’t learned that we’re more capable because we’ve grown up.

To be clear, some of the risk we faced as children may still be with us as adults, so this is not to say that there aren’t real problems outside your door. But if you do believe you have vulnerability schema, it will help you more accurately gauge what you’re facing now.

In these six signs, try to think about whether you went through an experience in childhood that is the source of current worries:

1. Spending time every day projecting possible negative outcomes in daily life situations leading to increased overall anxiety and avoidance (as a child not having an adult to help contain your worries).
2. Tension and stress in personal relationships, as friends and loved ones feel burdened by your worries (a child needing to rely on others, but feeling isolated).
3. You devote a lot of thought and worry to physical symptoms that you worry may be illnesses (serious or long-lasting childhood illness or illness of a loved one).
4. You avoid exposure to risk in public settings such as work meetings and performing in front of others, where you may be humiliated or slip up (bullying or public humiliation in childhood).
5. You may be overly worried about losing money, falling into poverty, or facing catastrophic financial outcomes (growing up in poverty).
6. Every potential outcome in your life feels that it will likely become the worst-case scenario (growing up with anxious, catastrophizing parents).

Child Development Essential Reads

Helping Young Children Navigate Election Anxiety

Why Toddlers Treat Rich People Better Than Poor People

We all know that vulnerability has stigma attached to it; we commonly and mistakenly equate it with weakness and even shame. But feeling vulnerability also means connecting with your real needs and touching an authentic sense of who you are. And, yet, there are times when vulnerability becomes confusing, leaving you asking yourself, “What makes me vulnerable, and what are my real strengths and abilities?”

3 Steps for Overcoming Feelings of Vulnerability

Try these steps:

1. Using the six signs listed above, identify which intense vulnerabilities you feel today are actually rooted in childhood. Remind yourself that now, as an adult, you can take care of yourself. List the ways you can provide for yourself.
2. When your vulnerability schema is triggered, you can get trapped focusing on feeling helpless. Stop yourself, and ask yourself (saying the words out loud works best), “What are my strengths, and how can I solve this?” (This may seem obvious, but it really works.)
3. Practice. Remember, you developed this schema over a period of time growing up, and it will take some time to change. Honor your feelings of vulnerability as part of your history, and your psyche’s way of taking care of you.