66 - Understanding a Woman's Heart: Gentleness, Availability, Vulnerability
How We are Created
We are created as emotional and spiritual creatures; we are created to do one thing in this life—live fully. But we cannot live fully unless we do so in relationship with ourselves, others, and God.
* That statement means that we must bring our hearts to daily relational life and involve ourselves emotionally and spiritually with others.
Many of us have not learned or have refused to allow ourselves to be vulnerable with how we are created. We tend to “run” from how we are created as feeling, needing, desiring, longing, and hoping people.
Surrender is Good
To live fully we have to admit that we are powerless over how we are created. We do not need to run from ourselves; instead, we need to surrender to how God made us.
Surrender actually means to “render over,” as in give something back.
The goodness of surrender is that it returns us to how we are created. It also returns us to needing others and God, who created us to find fulfillment in relationship.
Surrender paradoxically allows us to reclaim our “anger” for life as we face that we are desiring, longing, hoping, wishing, wanting, yearning, hungering and thirsting people. Read my book, The Voice of the Heart and listen to Episodes #19 - Episode #20.
For a woman, to surrender is to know that she hungers to belong and matter through experiencing herself as secure.
For a man, to surrender is to know that he hungers to belong and matter through experiencing himself as appreciated.
Being Chosen
A woman’s security requires that she experience herself as chosen, as discussed in Episode 65.
She is not chosen on the basis of her appearance only, but on the content of her heart and character. She is chosen for “her.” She is chosen for how God made her. If a woman experiences herself as truly chosen by a man she desires to be with, she will have a strong tendency to appreciate the man who has chosen her.
Security leads a woman to be Appreciative.
Men Must Be Man Enough to Create Security
If a woman experiences the relationship as a secure place to bring her vulnerabilities, joys, desires, needs, and struggles, she will experience “heart security;” she will have the experience of being chosen consistently reinforced.
Three essential characteristics that display a man’s capability to create a safe place are:
Gentleness
Availability
Vulnerability
These characteristics do not diminish a man’s need to protect his relationship (or his family) with a sense of “territorial” awareness.
These characteristics are more about what happens in the home. For example, the outside of the house is often made of brick or stone, that is, protective material; but inside the home are “soft” and “comfortable” places to live life without threat of danger.
Thriving requires external protection and internal security. Internal security is created through the essential capability of a man to develop into all he is created to become.
Gentleness: Gentleness means that the man is strong enough to be “leaned on.”
He is able to tolerate the struggles and needs of someone needing him.
He has inner-resources of strength that come from God and other men that allow him to develop patience and tenderness—the ability to receive another’s pain or struggles without being reactive.
Available: Availability means that the man can relate to others emotional and spiritual struggles, because he is good at knowing his own struggles and humanity (healthy shame).
He is “response-able.” This is where we get the true meaning of responsible.
Availability means that he knows and is able to respond to his own feelings and needs (empathy) in a mature way. This ability makes him a secure person to come to because the woman or children know that they will experience “relation-able,” “response-able” care (compassion).
Vulnerable: Vulnerability means that the man can tolerate the hurt that love will inevitably bring to every human being, without developing the defensive position of resentment, bitterness, or self-pity. In vulnerability, the man can know that love hurts, but the pain of love doesn’t mean that love is over. If we can hurt, we can heal. If we deny hurt, we can become “infected” with bitterness. Vulnerability allows a person to display hoping and needing. The person also has the courage to not be harmed. Harm occurs when the openness of vulnerability is treated with lies, deceit, sarcasm, and other forms of contempt by the other person.
“Man Enough” to Love a Woman
A man must have humility in order to become a man who creates security. A man needs the help of other men to learn the courage of both the external toughness of manhood and the internal caring of manhood. He needs to be able to present great strength so that others around him know that their hearts are safe with him.
Men need mentoring, support, and teaching of other courageous men to develop and grow gentleness, availability, and vulnerability. They need to be secure enough with other men to be in need of each other’s experience, strength, and hope.
Women cannot give security to men.
Other men and God create security for men.
Women appreciate a man who is secure.
The tragedy is that most men are insecure in the presence of other men:
They are more competitive than cooperative.
They are more comparative than confessional.
Therefore, a man often attempts to get a woman to do for him what only men and God can do for him.
A man who is gentle, available, and vulnerable creates and atmosphere or an environment in which others are free to thrive.
This kind of man creates an environment where others don’t have to use energy to be vigilant and cautious. They can use their energies to be themselves and express their hearts, rather than guard themselves and hide their hearts.
Secure women appreciate secure men 🡪 who appreciate secure women 🡪 who appreciate secure men.
That is the way it works. We feed each other’s strength by attending to the heart of how we are uniquely created to belong and matter.
Dr. Chip Dodd
Voice of the Heart Center