How To Regulate Through Vulnerability WITHOUT Acting Out Or Acting In

Heidi Priebe explains how to stay regulated during vulnerable, uncertain periods without acting out (controlling reality) or acting in (suppressing true feelings), offering five practical strategies.

Key Takeaways

Vulnerability is a normal, challenging nervous-system state that cannot be eliminated, only navigated.
Acting out (controlling others or reality) and acting in (denying your feelings) both sacrifice reality contact and should be avoided.
Preparing practically, defining personal boundaries, and seeking supportive people help maintain regulation during uncertainty.
Allowing ambiguity to resolve on its own time respects other people's and reality's unfolding.

What the video covers

Vulnerability arises in uncertain periods such as waiting for job decisions, medical results, or a partner's answer to a hard conversation.
The nervous system regulates around predictability and certainty, so ambiguity is inherently challenging.
Acting out means trying to manipulate external reality (over-explaining, guilting, pressuring others) to escape uncertainty.
Acting in means manipulating inner experience by convincing oneself that something doesn't matter, losing touch with real desires.
Both responses cost contact with reality, so healthier strategies are needed to stay regulated while uncertainty persists.
Health ambiguity can feel safer than gathering information, and the speaker shares how finding a compassionate doctor helped her navigate that process.
One strategy is front-loading work or preparation to reduce the logistical load during uncertain periods.
Another is identifying personal boundaries (one's 'no') so the body knows what it will not tolerate, which reduces anxiety.
Coaching and self-reassurance help distinguish genuine concerns from spiraling self-shaming thoughts.
The sponsored segment promotes ZocDoc as a tool for finding and booking doctors with patient reviews.

Chapters

What are the two main unhealthy ways people respond to vulnerability?

The speaker identifies acting out, which means trying to manipulate external reality to get certainty, and acting in, which means convincing oneself that something doesn't matter. Both lead to losing touch with reality and with one's true feelings.

Why does the speaker say the nervous system struggles with vulnerability?

She explains that the nervous system regulates around predictability and certainty, so periods when important outcomes are undecided or unknown are naturally destabilizing. This is normal human functioning rather than a personal failing.

What practical strategies does the video suggest for staying regulated?

The video recommends preparing logistically in advance, such as front-loading work, defining personal boundaries or a clear 'no,' seeking supportive people who understand your situation, and practicing self-compassion instead of self-shaming. These help maintain regulation while allowing reality to unfold.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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Hey guys, I'm Heidi Prib. Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here. Today on this channel, we're going to be talking about vulnerability and how to navigate vulnerability without either self-abandoning or trying to control reality too heavily. So, this

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can be something like we apply for a job or we interview for something or we pitch something that we really, really care about and want to see work out well. And now we're in this in between state where maybe we're not going to

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hear back for a week or so about whether we get the job or the investment or whatever it is. We might feel vulnerable when we are waiting for medical test results or of course that kind of classic situation that comes to mind for

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most of us let's say we tell someone how we feel and then they tell us they need time to think about that right or we can even go kind of smaller and less clear.

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So sometimes vulnerability is more a feeling of something is off, but I can't quite put my finger on it yet. But something inside of my nervous system is struggling to regulate in the way that it normally does. Maybe because someone

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that we are close to has been acting kind of different or a little bit evasive lately, but we're not really sure if something's wrong or if we're making it up in our head. Or maybe some aspect of our lives just isn't working

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the way that it used to. So, we're feeling less happy in our career than we used to, or our friend group is not feeling as happy and coherent as it used to, but we're kind of waiting to see is

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this going to course correct by itself over time, or do I need to intervene here? And where is the right place and when is the right time to intervene if so? So, vulnerability very often puts us in this state where we are struggling to

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know how to regulate. And this is really important because yes, vulnerability can be a really beautiful move that helps clarify things in life that need clarifying, but it's also a state that's really challenging for our nervous systems and that we definitely don't

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want to be in all of the time. Essentially, the nervous system regulates around predictability and certainty. And life of course includes a lot of unpredictability and a lot of uncertainty. But when we find ourselves in those places where the things that

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really matter to us are uncertain or not decided upon yet, it can be really challenging to figure out how to stay consistently regulated. And so a lot of us deal with this in one of two ways. So we either act out or we act in when we

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act out because we're feeling vulnerable. Basically, what we're doing is trying to manipulate our external reality so that we don't have to either encounter an unwanted answer like maybe this person really doesn't want a relationship with me or maybe things

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with my career or my friend group really are moving in a direction that's going to be painful for me. So, we start frantically trying to change the external conditions that we're inside of in order to avoid staying present with

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that inner experience that is so uncomfortable of not knowing. And I want to be clear that this does not mean that we never want to try to change our external conditions. Right?

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Sometimes it really is the time to go, hey, I'm not happy for reasons that I can point at and that I could fix and it's time for me to get cohered around my health or my job or whatever it is

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and get myself back on track. But there are also times where some aspect of what matters to us is kind of out of our hands. And so what we might be tempted to do when we feel vulnerable is try to

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get reality to give us whatever form of certainty we're wanting regardless of what's actually true so that we can regulate again. Right? So again this might mean overexlaining ourselves to someone who is feeling ambivalent and needs time and space to sort out their

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feelings for themselves. Right? But we try to bypass that in between part where it feels so uncomfortable by trying to guilt or shame them or blame them and point fingers at them for not knowing what they want when in reality sometimes

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people just don't know what they want and they need some time to figure it out. So we try to kind of rob reality of the right to experience an ambiguous state where things are unclear or undefined because we are so

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uncomfortable with how it feels inside of our nervous systems for that to be true.

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Or the other way we might deal with vulnerability is we act in. So we essentially go through the process of trying to convince ourselves that actually this thing doesn't really matter to me, right? I don't care if I

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don't get that job. I'm above it anyways or I don't care if this person doesn't like me back. I'm going to reject them first so that I don't have to feel the pain of waiting around for them to

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decide. Right? So we start manipulating our inner experience and losing touch with what we actually want and care about in order to avoid that vulnerable feeling. And neither of these solutions are good fit solutions. The reason being is that both of them require us losing

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contact with reality. In the first situation, we're trying to get reality to kind of act the way that we want it to act regardless of what is actually true. And in the second case, we're trying to get ourselves to feel

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something that is not necessarily the truth about what we're feeling so that we can avoid once again sitting with the discomfort of wanting something and not having it. And so what we're going to talk about next is what some healthy

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strategies are for navigating states of vulnerability. Because again, vulnerability is really challenging for everybody. We all naturally regulate around things like our plans for the future and our ideas about who we are and who we're in close relationship to

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and what expectations we have for ourselves and other people in our lives. These are very very very normal parts of human functioning. And when any of them are up in the air, it's normal for our nervous system to struggle with that.

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But there are also things that we can do to help ourselves regulate through those ambiguous periods that feel really challenging for our nervous systems without doing those acting out or acting in behaviors. So we can create some space for reality to keep unfolding

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authentically without losing all access to self-regulation in the interm. So we're going to go into five strategies for that. Now, one of the times that we can often feel the most vulnerable is when we don't know what's going on with

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our health. And sometimes staying in that ambiguity zone can actually feel a lot safer than intentionally gathering information, especially if we're afraid of what we might find out. So, there was one point where I noticed this physical change that I couldn't explain. And it

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was one of those things where it was scary enough that I knew I needed to go get it checked out by a doctor. But I'd also had experiences in the past where I'd gone to doctors and ended up feeling

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really dismissed and still not really having the information I needed about what was going on by the time that I left. So I knew that what I needed was to see someone who would both take me seriously and be able to help me

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navigate the process compassionately. Which is where the sponsor of today's video, Zachdoc, comes in really handy.

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[music] All right, back to those strategies for navigating vulnerability. Step number one in this process is to thank the part of yourself that is absolutely wigging out right now. So, or a lot of us, especially if we have a lot of those

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self-shaming patterns online, we might immediately as soon as we notice ourselves starting to feel vulnerable and wanting of reassurance, go into this pattern of going, "What's wrong with me?

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I'm so pathetic. Why can't I just be fine with not knowing?" Well, probably because you are a human being with a nervous system that is functioning properly. Okay? Our nervous systems are designed to keep us safe and also figure

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out what it's going to be wise for us to cohhere our energy and our attention around. And so your nervous system wanting some sort of resolution to a state of vulnerability is totally natural and in fact a sign that it's

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operating healthfully. And so what we don't want to do right off the bat is create this inner war between the part of ourselves that wishes we weren't feeling the way we are and the part of ourselves that is feeling that way. We

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can actually get into a deep friendship with that part of ourselves. Right? So we can go, yeah, because I am a normal human being, it's uncomfortable for me to be in a vulnerable state. And these kind of acting out or acting in

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behaviors are my systems natural response to trying to resolve that state. But if I think that it's actually important to let reality take its course and not foreclose on reality by either trying to manipulate it or convince myself it doesn't matter, there are

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other things that I can do to help myself navigate through this period where I am just going to be feeling a little bit vulnerable and unsure of how to regulate myself. Okay. So, just acknowledging that the discomfort of

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vulnerability is totally normal and in fact an adaptive response is the first step in this process. The second step is figuring out how we're going to steady ourselves as much as we're able to through the vulnerability process. So

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one thing we can do and I feel like this is kind of the classic approach and then we'll get into some more creative ones but it's the classic approach because it often works so I want to call it out is

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figure out how we are going to cope with things not going our way. Okay. So, for a lot of us, we have this beautiful vision of how we want our lives to go, right? I want this person to love me

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back. I want to work at this job or have this opportunity or whatever it is, but we haven't put a lot of thought into what is going to happen if that doesn't work out. And this is generally adaptive, right? It's not a bad thing to

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focus our attention on what we're hoping will happen. But sometimes it can be a useful thing to do if we find ourselves feeling highly distressed because we have no plan B for if plan A doesn't work out. So just sitting down with

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ourselves and getting an embodied sense of how would I keep myself okay if this thing that I so don't want to be true is what turns out to be true can go a much longer way than we might expect it to.

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But it requires us to do it in a kind of authentic way, right? We can't have resistance the whole time. So, we can't go, "Well, I guess I would just do this plan B and it would be terrible. We have

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to actually allow ourselves to relax into the idea that we might not get this thing. Reality might not pattern out in the way that we're hoping. And we don't have to gaslight ourselves and pretend that that would be wonderful and good

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and we would be super happy about it. In reality, what would probably happen is that we would grieve it and we would feel the loss of it and feel the weight of losing it. But then there would also

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be something on the other side, right? There would be new opportunities that would come up as a result of not getting the first thing or maybe there are really beautiful connections that we would make with people through that

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grief process and through welcoming it in. Right? There would be something on the other side of not getting this thing that would eventually help us return to a state of regulation because we would find a new equilibrium.

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Asking ourselves if the worst did happen, who would I call? How could I show up to that situation to make sure that I am able to care for myself through it? and making a concrete plan for it often feels a lot better than

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sitting with that anxiety of this has to work out because there's no other plan.

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And if we do want to air on the side of kind of gamifying this for ourselves, one strategy I have used is basically assigning myself a booby prize for if I don't get the thing that I want. So when

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I was approximately 19 or 20, I think there was something that I was going for academically that I really hoped was going to work out for me. But there was a period of months where I was waiting to hear back about this thing. And in

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the meantime, I was like, okay, I don't know whether I should be getting excited or whether I should be kind of mitigating my expectations here. And what I decided is that I'm going to create a win-win situation for myself

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intentionally. So, if I get this academic opportunity that I'm hoping for, I'm going to organize my life around that, and it's going to look one particular way. But if I don't get it, I'm going to take the time that I would

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have devoted to it, work like three part-time jobs all summer, and then take myself on a trip to New Zealand. And at that point in my life, I had done almost no traveling. And my dream was to go to

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New Zealand. And so after making that decision for myself, as the months wore on, I started to realize I don't even know which outcome I'm hoping for more here because I've created a set of conditions for myself where there's

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going to be something in the future that I'm excited about regardless of this outcome.

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Okay? And this is something that we can do for ourselves because every single thing that happens to us in life comes with some sort of negative trade-off, right? No matter how good, meeting the love of our lives means that there are

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also going to be forms of independence that we sacrifice if we get into a committed relationship. Getting our dream job necessarily means there are other opportunities professionally that we're not going to have the time to pursue. And so leaning into that and

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going, if the worst happens, how am I nonetheless going to find the opportunity within it is kind of just mentally speedrunning the grief process for ourselves. Because this is how grief always works. We let go of something, the energy that we had kind of spiraling

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around it dissipates and then our attention and our energy is free to go find other things to explore and get excited about and curious about. And the more we can really believe that on an embodied level, the easier it feels to

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start navigating through those periods of time where the outcomes are uncertain. Now, this leads us to another strategy we're going to talk about, which is making what I call a vulnerability regulation strategy. So, deciding concretely what we are going to do to

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help ourselves stay regulated inside of periods where we are feeling a little bit out of control about some aspects of our lives that really matter to us.

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paired with a kind of meta awareness of how often we're needing to turn to these strategies because again it's just not going to be that good for our nervous systems to live in a state of kind of constant vulnerability. And if we find

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that we are living in that state, what we might want to look at are some of the decisions we're making upstream that are causing us to be in a state where we don't have a lot of control over how our

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lives are going. But we'll get into the strategy piece of this first. So I actually really recently went through a period of my own life where there was a lot of vulnerability inside of the system that was my life. So there were

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specific decisions about my work life and my home life, so where I was going to live that were actually genuinely out of my hands. And I knew that there was going to be a particular period of time where I would feel the biggest impact of

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the stress around this. So there was going to be a 2 to 3 month period where I was waiting to hear on the outcome of some of the determining factors of these things. And I noticed in my nervous

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system as that period of time started approaching I was getting more and more anxious. And so I asked myself the question knowing that I'm going to be going into this period of vulnerability, how can I make it as comfortable for

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myself as possible? So, it's going to be really uncomfortable if I'm expecting myself to be able to keep up with the regular demands of my work while I'm in this state of flux where I have a whole bunch

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of kind of tricky logistical things that I'm navigating at the same time. So, what I decided to do was take a couple of months to get as ahead of myself as possible in terms of work so that I took

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something off of my plate for that future version of myself that was probably going to be struggling to regulate as easily as I was able to regulate in the leading up period. But we can also do this on a very small

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scale, right? So, we can have kind of back pocket strategies that we just pull up if and when we need to use them. So, okay, if I am waiting to hear back on something and it's going to take 2 to 3

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hours, is there any particular form of grace I can extend myself within that 3-hour period that's going to allow it to feel more comfortable? So, what feels good to me even inside of a state of vulnerability and how can I resource

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myself with more and more of that so that I stop feeling as afraid of that vulnerability state itself.

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Right? So that might mean going and sitting with a friend during that 3-hour period and just having someone to co-regulate with and to spend time with and to have another nervous system to sync up with if we are feeling

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vulnerability and going through a challenging day. It might mean giving ourselves a break from having to focus on the work that we normally focus on because maybe it's really hard for us to cohhere our attention in a really

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focused way when we're feeling vulnerable. This one is very very true for me personally. If I'm in a state where I'm feeling disregulated or vulnerable, but I need to get work done, I try to do the kind of very

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straightforward and logical tasks as opposed to trying to be creative or trying to force myself to do something that comes most naturally when I'm really regulated. Right? So, being aware of which tradeoffs we can make to set ourselves up for the easiest possible

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experience of going through a vulnerable state. And once again, what we want to stay aware of here is how often is this happening? If I feel vulnerable every single day and so it's chronically hard to focus and chronically hard to

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self-regulate, this is where we might want to start looking at, am I practicing more vulnerability than maybe what is healthy for me? and do I in fact need to make some changes that help me to feel more in control of my life so

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that my capacity to stay regulated is more in my own hands. But just naming that we're feeling vulnerable and that we need to find a way to care for ourselves through it in an ongoing way can actually go a really really long way

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in helping us understand how we ought to be setting up our lives. Fourth strategy for navigating vulnerability is getting clear on what our nos and our boundaries are. There was a point in time where I was preparing to go to an event that I

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was feeling a whole bunch of anxiety about in my system and I kind of surfaced in working with the coach that I was working with at the time that a lot of where that anxiety was coming from was that there was someone I'd had

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a past relationship with who I felt really demeaned in connection with and I was very nervous that I might encounter either this person or other people who were close to this person at this event.

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And so my system was going, okay, I don't know how to prepare for this event, right? Because I don't know if I'm preparing for an event where I'm going to feel calm and collected and competent or an event where I'm going to

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feel kind of triggered and panicked or where maybe I'm going to be spoken to in a way that I'm really uncomfortable with. And the coach asked me, "Well, let's find your no. Let's find what you are definitely not going to allow to

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happen no matter what." And so we talked it through and I ended up coming to the conclusion that what feels really good in my nervous system is deciding on the boundary if this person either showed up at the event and tried to speak to me or

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if someone came and spoke to me at the event on this other person's behalf in a way that I felt demeaned by, I was going to leave the event. I was not even going to try to get into a conversation about

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why I deserved respect or why I did not deserve to be spoken to like that. I was simply going to end the conversation and remove myself.

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And this felt to me in my cognitive mind like a very extreme reaction. I had all of these thoughts come up like, well, I paid so much money for the event and what I should actually do is try to get

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the guest list ahead of time so I know who's coming or try to make sure that there's someone there who can keep this person or people close to them away from me in case something bad happens. But actually all my system needed to know

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was I care about my own dignity and my own sense of selfrespect enough to choose to remove myself from a situation even a situation that I have paid quite a bit of money to be able to attend if

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it feels like my dignity is in the balance and if that ends up being the case I will choose my dignity over this investment that I have made. I will be on my own team through this well understanding that I might be the only

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person who understands why I'm making the decisions I'm making. And as soon as I found that very clear and very definitive boundary inside of my system which my body knew I would stick to, the anxiety disappeared.

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Right? Sometimes what we need to identify is not just what we want to happen but what we are definitely not okay with allowing to happen and how we will boundary set in a way that is within our control. Right? When we get

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crystal clear on those boundaries, what often happens is our nervous system can relax into self-rust.

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Selfrust through vulnerability is the most beautiful thing that we can have. Right? And it's woven through all of this that belief that I trust myself to make the best of a situation where I have to grieve something I really wanted

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and go on in a different way. That I have the selfrust to believe that I can navigate through periods of discomfort or periods of my fate being in someone else's hands without losing all access to regulation. I can find ways to

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resource myself inside of that, believing that I have the selfrust to set really hard, sometimes very expensive boundaries and actually follow through on them. All of these are ways that we resource ourselves through states of vulnerability. And then last

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but not least, the final strategy we're going to talk about today for navigating vulnerability healthfully is finding a way to keep in touch with what we want and what our desires are regardless of whether or not the situation that we're

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in is able to fulfill them for us. Okay? So, this is about not doing that acting in behavior where we go, okay, it was so uncomfortable to want something and to not get it. And so what I'm going to

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convince myself is that actually I don't want that thing. This is a huge disservice to our future selves.

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Okay? Because the fact that we desire something is really really important signal about how we can be planning our future. And so even if our wants are not actualized, even if that job does not want us, even if that person does not

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want us, even if our lives start moving in a totally different direction than what we were hoping they would move in, can we stay connected to I wanted this even though I didn't get it, and that want matters to me? Once I find a way to

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lick my wounds, go through that grief and that letting go process, how am I going to make sure that I keep connected to the desire that exists beneath it?

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Maybe this relationship didn't work out, but I still really want a healthy and happy relationship. And maybe I really want my future partner to have a lot of the traits that this partner who I wish it had worked out with had. Right? It's

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important to stay in touch with what was beautiful about our existing desires. Or maybe my career is not heading in the direction that I wanted it to. But what did I love about the potential for it to head in the direction that I did want it

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to? What was exciting about that to me? What was I hoping reality would kind of come and play and interact with me inside of? That desire is a really important signal about where we want to take things on the other side of grief.

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And so finding a way to basically hold in one hand, I really want this. I feel really aligned with this and hope it works out for me. And in the other hand, this person or this situation does not

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have to be the thing that fulfills it. I hope it is right. But if it's not, I am not going to drop this hand just because this one did. I'm going to keep this handheld high and I'm going to look for

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something else eventually that is going to help me fulfill that same desire. Losing the opportunity to self-actualize in a particular circumstance or in a particular way that we wanted that is a really sad thing but it is nowhere

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nowhere close to as sad as losing the capacity to self-actualize. Period. because we are too embarrassed to stand behind what we want when we don't get the particular expression of it. Right?

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Being able to hold on to that desire is where our power lives. All right, we are going to start wrapping this video up for today. But as always, I am super curious of what you guys are thinking about, any questions you might have,

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anything that came up for you as you've gone through this video. And if there are ways that you have or strategies that you employ to help you stay regulated through periods where you're feeling vulnerable, I would so so so so

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love to read about them in the comments section below. Again, I learned so much from you guys and the way that I see you showing up for yourselves and each other. So, please share anything that might feel relevant. As always, I love

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you guys. I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other, and I will see you back here again really soon.

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[music]

Topics:vulnerabilitynervous system regulationemotional regulationuncertaintyacting outacting inself-abandonmentboundariesself-compassionHeidi Priebe

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