The route to reconnection isn’t just “go on a date night.” It takes something much gutsier: vulnerability

“W

hen we’re vulnerable, we create connection. When we’re not, there’s disconnection,” says relationship coach and educator Julie Lurie. A tachlis person by nature, she doesn’t trifle with long-winded introductions when teaching couples how to create emotional intimacy in marriage.

“The word ‘vulnerability’ is often misunderstood,” observes Julie, who runs a private coaching practice out of Chicago, Illinois and is the cofounder, along with her husband, Rabbi Yitzchak Lurie, of the Connections Marriage Institute. The Institute, endorsed by Rav Shumel Fuerst shlita and  the late Harav Gedlaya Schwartz, offers international teleconference marriage seminars, premarital education, and training programs for coaches and kallah teachers.

When Julie trains relationship coaches, she asks them to define vulnerability. Their responses are often similar to the dictionary’s definition: (noun) putting yourself in the face of danger, exposing yourself to risk both physically and emotionally.

“Yet that’s not accurate,” says Julie. “What I learned from vulnerability researcher and author Brené Brown is that vulnerability isn’t a state of being. It’s a verb — an action. It’s the practice of showing up and allowing yourself to be seen. To expose your heart, to admit and talk about your feelings.”

And that calls for genuine courage. Because to connect emotionally with your husband and be real with him, you must be emotionally honest with yourself and tuned into your emotional needs.

“The process of getting to know ourselves initially feels uncomfortable,” Julie says. “What if we don’t like what we see? What if our husband won’t like what he sees? What if we meet this needy person we don’t want to identify with? I tell my clients to expect a vulnerability hangover when they start working on this.”

Julie had one client who had to dim the living room lights before she could share vulnerable feelings with her husband. Another woman, who didn’t realize how attached she was to her iPhone, described to Julie the painfully vulnerable experience of simply being alone in a room with her husband without the security of her phone.

It doesn’t surprise Julie when she sees this. “Hashem designed us in a way that we’re hardwired for connection, specifically through our soulmate. So when we’re disconnected with our spouse, we feel a painful emptiness at our core, which we desperately try to fill. That’s when we go for the quick fixes, like our phones and social media. I see so much numbing with women who are having a hard time connecting in their marriages.”

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a world-renowned psychiatrist and best-selling author of The Body Keeps the Score, speaks about our deep human need for connection. “In his training course, Dr. van der Kolk opened up his first class by talking about what decades of researching trauma data taught him: The source of all misery and torture is a feeling of disconnection — from ourselves and from other people.

“By the same token,” Julie continues, “Dr. van der Kolk teaches that the source of the purest, most unrefined joy is a feeling of connection with ourselves and others. You’ll notice there’s an order: We can’t taste real connection with others until we first connect with ourselves. This means raising the volume of our inner voice and accepting ourselves and our needs. Once we’ve done that, we’re ready for stage two: sharing what we’re feeling and what we need emotionally from others.”