Practical Wisdom with Dr. Rick Hanson Accepting Your Vulnerabilities – Including from Early Childhood
Feb 18, 2026
A reflective talk about how bodily fragility and life’s precarity make vulnerability inevitable. It traces how infancy’s helplessness shapes compensatory habits like over-control and perfectionism. It explores welcoming vulnerability with compassion, sensing what underlies wounds, and engaging life honorably despite uncertainty.
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Everything Depends On Conditions
- Our bodies and lives arise from many dependent causes and conditions, making us inherently vulnerable.
- Recognizing dependent origination helps people face precarity without denial and see vulnerability as universal.
Admit And Meet Your Dependencies
- Acknowledge your dependencies honestly and identify realistic ways to get the social and material supplies you need.
- Face what your body needs (like exercise) and stop being dishonest about dependency.
The Primal Wound Shapes Lifelong Habits
- Birth leaves a universal primal wound of helplessness and vulnerability that shapes emotional patterns.
- Early dependency can create lifelong beliefs of unworthiness and compensatory strategies like over-control.
