I keep coming back to this distinction in my work: openness is not the same as vulnerability. They often get conflated, but they feel completely different in the body, and the difference between them matters—especially in therapy.

Openness feels like an outward gesture. It lives in the chest, expands, speaks. It’s a way of saying, this is my life, this is what I’ve been through. There’s something clarifying about it—expressive, coherent, even energising at times. It can feel like agency. Vulnerability, by contrast, doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t necessarily speak. It’s felt more than seen, and when it is seen, it can be hard to name. It often arrives as silence, or the breaking down of a story mid-telling. It can feel like a contraction rather than an expansion—more stomach or throat than chest. It’s what rises when openness falters, or can’t quite land.

In therapy, it’s common to encounter someone who is incredibly open. They can speak clearly about their history, their struggles, their emotional landscape. And that openness matters—it shows a willingness to engage, a kind of readiness. But it isn’t always the same as being vulnerable. Carl Rogers, in person-centred therapy, would call this kind of openness congruence—the ability to be transparent and real in the therapeutic relationship. But even Rogers understood that real change happens when we touch something deeper than words: when we’re met at the edge of what we can’t yet say.

Some of the most vulnerable moments in therapy happen when the story breaks down. When someone pauses, repeats themselves, loses the thread. When something can’t quite be said. Vulnerability often doesn’t arrive in language. It shows up as a shift in the body, a silence in the room, a feeling that’s difficult to place but easy to sense. In trauma-informed work and somatic psychotherapy, this is often described as the body speaking before the mind catches up. What can look like resistance or fragmentation is sometimes the most authentic expression a nervous system can offer.

In my own experience of therapy as a client, I’ve often found that the worse I’m feeling—anxious, low, unsure—the more open I become. I get clearer, more articulate. I explain myself. I tell a coherent story. And from the outside, it looks like vulnerability. But inside, it often doesn’t feel like that. It feels like control. Like staying one step ahead of the feeling. There’s a strange safety in it. Openness, for me, has sometimes been a way of protecting the very thing I most need help with. Not because I’m trying to hide it, but because I don’t quite know what it is. I can describe the shape of my life, the way I move through the world, the reasons why I feel the way I do—but what I can’t always do is sit quietly in the place that story emerges from.

In psychodynamic therapy, this might be seen as a defence—intellectualising or rationalising, not to deceive, but to survive. In Internal Family Systems, it would likely be a ‘manager’ part: the one who keeps things moving, who can make meaning out of difficulty. That part has often served me well. But the first time I ever felt something shift in therapy—really shift—was when a therapist listened beyond the story. They waited. They noticed the pause, the slight catch in my voice, the feeling in the room. And they didn’t interpret it. They didn’t ask a follow-up question. They simply said: “There’s something there. I’m not going to push it. But I feel it.”

That was the moment I knew something more important than insight had happened. A part of me had been named without being exposed. That was vulnerability—not the words, but what showed itself when the words ran out. And because it was met, and not poked at or analysed, something in me softened. Something opened, for real.

This is why I believe that vulnerability—when well-held—is the key to healing. Not openness. Openness shows we’re aware, that we’re trying, that we’re involved in the process of living. It matters. But it’s only the beginning. Vulnerability is what waits behind it. And it doesn’t want the spotlight. It wants safety. It wants steadiness. It wants to be seen in a space that’s been earned. As Brené Brown writes, not everyone gets access to our vulnerability—people have to earn the right to hear our story. And that’s not a rejection of connection. It’s a boundary rooted in self-trust.

I’ve learned this both as a therapist and as a client. Vulnerability isn’t something we offer to just anyone—it’s something that surfaces in the presence of trust. Not performance, not exposure, but trust. In somatic and trauma-informed frameworks, that trust is physical as much as emotional. The nervous system must feel the room is safe before it lets go of its protections. That letting go—the moment where the words fall away and something unnameable is felt—isn’t dramatic. It’s often small. Quiet. But unmistakable.

This isn’t an argument against openness. It’s not a rejection of the value in speaking or being seen. But I’ve come to recognise that some of the most transformative moments in therapy begin after the story ends. When the openness settles and something quieter begins to stir. When words drop away and what’s left is a feeling neither of us can quite name yet. That’s the place I try to meet people in. And I know it, because I’ve been met there, too.

In therapy, I’ve learned to listen for what’s not being said. To notice when someone stops mid-sentence, or loses their thread. That’s often where vulnerability lives—not in the moment of confident disclosure, but in the tremble just underneath. Maybe the real task isn’t to help people be open, but to honour the places where their openness ends. That’s where the work begins.