This psychology-based insight explains how well-intentioned responses can unintentionally shut vulnerability down.
2 Ways To Not Respond When Someone Shows Vulnerability
Learn which reactions often mishandle vulnerability and why they can make others shut down.
By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | Last Updated:
It takes more courage than you'd think be to tell another person something that has been weighing on you. Sometimes, it's a confession. Other times, it's a fear, a hurt or a long-suppressed truth. Sometimes, it's simply, "I need you to know this." Regardless of who's speaking to you — a child, a partner, a family member, a friend — the act of emotional disclosure is almost always a risk. Vulnerability exposes soft, unguarded parts of the self that we work hard, every day, to protect.
For this reason, what happens in the moments immediately after someone opens up matters far more than we usually realize. Research consistently shows that responses to vulnerability can determine whether people feel safe, accepted and willing to share again in the future. If handled well, these moments can bring two individuals closer together than ever before. But if handled poorly, they can close doors that may well never open again.
From a psychological perspective, there are many helpful things you can do when someone opens up. But there are also a few reliably harmful responses. Here are two of the most damaging, and why they matter more than you might think.
1. Use Their Vulnerability Against Them
When someone shares something clearly meaningful to them, then that revelation is no longer a mere exchange of information. Instead, it becomes a revelation of a perceived weakness: a fear of rejection, a shame-laden experience or an uncertainty about how they are seen.
(How you interpret someone else's vulnerability may depend on the voice you hear inside yourself. The Inner Voice Archetype Test can help you identify it.)
To then weaponize that disclosure — by mocking it, sharing it with others or throwing it back at them later in an argument — would be perhaps the unkindest thing you could do, regardless of whether or not it was your intention. This is because it will threaten the very core of their sense of safety in their relationship with you.
People disclose vulnerabilities most often when they are uncertain about a partner's acceptance. A seminal 2008 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology helps explain why these moments can be so precarious to navigate socially.
The researchers proposed and tested a model indicating that when individuals feel insecure in a relationship, they are more likely to express vulnerability as a way of seeking reassurance. However, doing so can also paradoxically increase their insecurity if the response they receive feels inauthentic or unsafe.
Across multiple studies, the participants who disclosed their vulnerabilities became preoccupied with how they were perceived afterward. They worried that their partner viewed them as weak or needy, which led them to doubt the genuineness of any reassurance that followed. These doubts then predicted feelings of rejection, which, in turn, fueled resentment and even more insecurity.
In simpler terms, these results suggest that vulnerability met with anything less than care will almost always result in even further self-consciousness.
Using someone's disclosure against them will only accelerate this process. But perhaps worst of all, it will confirm their worst fear: that revealing themselves to you was a mistake. As a result, this will fundamentally alter how they mentally represent their relationship with you. Their trust in you will wane, and they'll begin emotionally monitoring. Future disclosures will also most likely be withheld or delivered defensively.
Before reacting from a place of shock or disappointment, it's always worthwhile to pause to consider what it takes for someone to arrive at that moment of openness. Often, they have to rehearse the conversation internally, over and over. They have to weigh the costs against the benefits.
But, more importantly, they also will have had to live with the discomfort of their secret privately for some time first. In this sense, when you ridicule, betray, vilify or reject them for what they share with you, you are essentially responding to their courage by punishing them.
A more psychologically sound stance would be to be curious about their experience. Ask yourself:
- Why was this so hard for them to say aloud?
- What did it cost them to hold it in for so long?
- How do they feel now that they can't hold it in anymore?
You don't have to agree with their feelings that they're sharing, nor do you have to condone the actions that they're revealing, to recognize the vulnerability involved in telling them to you. Respecting that vulnerability is what will determine whether your relationship with them becomes a safe space or dysfunctional.
2. Don't Question Or Doubt Their Experience
People rarely intend to discount someone's emotional or lived experience. Often, it might even present disguised as reasonableness:
- "Are you sure it was that bad?"
- "I think you're overreacting."
- "That doesn't sound like something worth being upset about."
As mild, even rational, as these questions may seem on paper, psychologically, they're far from it.
If someone opens up to you about something, they're not actually asking you to evaluate whatever it is that they're saying; they don't need you to tell them whether their feelings are objectively justified, or whether the actions they took were necessary.
In reality, what they're actually doing is telling you how the experience registered in their world: their mind, their life, their nervous system. From this perspective, to cast doubt on their lived experience is equivalent to telling them that their reality isn't trustworthy or, worse, that it isn't real.
A 2022 experimental study published in Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation examined how validation versus invalidation affects emotional responses. The participants in the study listened to emotionally evocative scripts, and then they received either validating or invalidating feedback about their feelings.
As the researchers expected, validation was associated with reductions in negative emotional intensity, while invalidation reliably escalated distress. However, what was especially striking was that invalidation had broadly harmful effects regardless of participants' baseline levels of emotion dysregulation.
In other words, this means that doubting or dismissing someone's feelings is almost guaranteed to make things worse across the board; they felt even further shame and sadness. Validation, on the other hand, made it much easier for them to regulate the emotions they had shared.
Despite what some might think, questioning someone's emotional experience won't help make them "think more clearly." It will only leave them feeling ashamed and regretful of opening up in the first place. However, what's more important is that it will shut down the very conversation they clearly wanted you to participate in with good faith.
And because the disclosure was relationally risky from the start, the subsequent invalidation will only teach them to be more cautious about where — and with whom — they share in the future.
From a psychological standpoint, emotional disclosure is a bid for safety and acceptance. So, when you interrogate that disclosure, you convert the risk they took into regret. They'll likely stop talking, change the subject or minimize what they shared, despite how meaningful it really was to them. Worse, their trust in you as a safe confidant will weaken.
Believing someone doesn't mean you have to endorse every conclusion that they arrive at or every action that they take. All it asks of you is to accept that their feelings are real, even if your interpretation of events would differ. Your role in these scenarios isn't to cross-examine what they're saying; you just need to bear witness to it. That's why they came to you in the first place.
How safe does vulnerability actually feel in your relationships? Take this research-informed test to find out: Authenticity in Relationships Scale
How you interpret vulnerability often begins internally. Take this test to uncover the mental patterns shaping your emotional responses: Inner Voice Archetype Test