So far, you know, today we've been talking about emotional intimacy. We've had an amazing conversation.

We've shared with you, you know, three pillars or components of emotional intimacy that we've already covered.

One is getting physically and psychologically healthy yourself. The second is building upon common values.

And the third is offering unconditional love, conditioned upon the mutual sharing of those values.

There's five more quickly that we want to share.

The fourth one is something that is, it's a concept that has been popularized recently by the amazing work of Dr. Brunei Brown,

a researcher and a professor at a Houston, Texas.

And she has probably two of the top 10 TED Talks ever given. And the very simple but yet profound and often very difficult concept that she has helped us come to understand better.

It's this idea of vulnerability as strength, vulnerability as the key to individual health and healing and relational health.

And it's very different from maybe how we were all raised because many of us as we've talked even today, it was about how we appear.

It was about appearing happy. It was about appearing successful. It was about not sharing, not talking about the tough stuff, not sharing our weaknesses, but instead hiding what's scary or hiding the things that we've used problematic.

Putting our best forward, compartmentalizing our lives, and then of course, an associate structure only talking about the things that we all agree upon, especially in a religious context.

And that may be great for public relations, that may be great for organizational health of some types of organizations.

But an avoidance of vulnerability is actually toxic or damaging to anyone who wants to develop true emotional intimacy either with a loved one or in a community.

And so the opposite of what we've all been doing is actually the way to emotional intimacy, which is to talk about the difficult things, let people see inside of us, talk about the things that we've been hiding and showing that true vulnerability.

What we've been conditioned to think is that people won't love us unless we are obeying and performing and are doing what they expect us to do.

And what turns out that when everybody's trying to appear perfect and everybody's trying to appear like they fit a role, we're not getting closer to each other.

And instead we're just all almost robotically acting when we're not really getting any closer to each other.

And the opposite dynamic is actually what brings people closer together.

And we've seen it here this weekend.

The minute that people start tearing up, the minute that they start sharing their weaknesses, start sharing their problems, start sharing where they're broken,

we feel emotionally connected to those people.

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