Life is taxing and the world can seem like a scary place; it’s not a Disney movie, as they say. So, softening yourself may sound counterproductive or expendable – understandably so. But a hard as nails, stony-hearted demeanor is only helpful if it doesn’t impact your personal growth, others and your relationships negatively, and often it does.
A person can be resilient, persistent, consistent and tough while also still being soft and sensitive to other people’s feelings and their own. This notion that you can be kind and strong at the same time may come across as useless as a chocolate teapot because we may have been led to believe that success and survival conform to being vicious and villainous. But, is that even the truth?
If you’ve been looking for a guide on how to soften yourself, or want to know if you really need to, this guide may be helpful.
There are many things that can harden a person. Most of the reasons fall under two or three basic categories: you were told to be hard, you learned to be hard through your experiences, and/or gender or other cultural norms played a part. A combination of two or all of these things is also possible, if not likely.
Experiences that can harden a person can be things like bullying or other harassment, abuse, cheating or other betrayals, chronic invalidation of your needs and feelings, relationships/connections where your different attachment styles were neglected and other traumas or losses at any point in the lifespan. Cultural reasons can include “emotional stoicism, and if it’s praised, it can feel appropriate to adapt to such characteristics,” says Michal Goldmanexternal link, opens in a new tab, a relational trauma-informed psychotherapist. Situations that call for you to take care of others can also harden the shell if your caregiving relationships don’t allow for your own vulnerabilities.
Softness is an embodiment of respectfulness, friendliness and compassion, and ofopenness and vulnerability. When you don’t feel safe enough or are constantly evaluating people and situations to detect threats, being soft can be hard. Your experiences and how you and others have responded to them will inform how you behave with others or the way you present yourself in the world. “It is a response to relational trauma. You carry with yourself all your experiences of previous relationships that shape how safe you feel being soft with others,” says Evan Curryexternal link, opens in a new tab, trauma and anxiety informed psychotherapist.
Your nervous system, when going through emotional, physical and/or psychological traumas, develops defense mechanisms, which, over time, can become a way of surviving and getting through life. This is a result of unprocessed grief, prolonged, suppressed painful emotions and a misconception of seeing vulnerability, softness and kindness as a weakness, and can create emotional walls instead of healthy boundaries.
Culture often demands, and sometimes even forces, men to act or be strong, which can lead to repression of vulnerable feelings. Similarly, caretaking is often enforced on women and gender-nonconforming people at their own expense, causing them to ignore their needs or asking them to put up a strong front, which in turn can form a hard shell.
Recognizing if you’ve developed a hard shell means being honest with yourself. Seeing your own negative traits and the not-so-great parts of yourself can be daunting. Accepting that you need to change and/or make amends is the first step, which means discarding the denial in you that you don’t need to change.
To figure out if you could stand to soften up, you might ask yourself these questions:
- Do I feel anxious and uncomfortable being emotionally open in safe relationships or interactions?
- Do I think of vulnerability as a weakness or threat?
- Does everything seem to activate me? Do I feel like I take everything personally?
- Do I find myself closing off instantly or running away from connections when feelings become too real/strong or when there’s a disagreement or argument?
- Is it true that people in general, even people I consider important, find it hard to get to know me?
- Do I target other people’s faults as a way of distracting myself and others from my own insecurities and wrong actions?
- Do all of my relationships feel surface-level or follow a similar pattern?
- Do I avoid feeling visceral emotions or do I avoid taking actions if I feel that’s tearing my distorted safety net?
The patterns that can come with not being soft can affect relationships with your loved ones as honesty, intimacy and vulnerability take a backseat. “You can become emotionally unavailable, defensive, reactive or overly independent, unwilling to be in secure connections/relationships for fear of being hurt again,” says Liza Boubari, clinical hypnotherapist. With you feeling unsafe and the other person feeling unseen, together you still feel isolated. The consequence of this sets up emotional blockages, pain, frustration and anger, generating a never ending spiral of misunderstandings, disconnection, resentment, longing for deep bonds, ego trips and loneliness.
This is why softness is essential not just for your relationships and interactions with others, but also for you to thrive and to show up with tenderness for yourself. “Cultivating softness is not only healing, it’s essential. Softness allows us to access empathy, affection, emotional availability, maturity and presence. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system, calming the body and enabling authentic relational experiences,” says Sam Zand, holistic and trauma-informed psychiatrist.
Practicing softness isn’t about giving up your boundaries, abandoning your values or escaping accountability. It’s about understanding that meaningful connections and fruitful conversations are rewards worth the emotional risks. Being able to connect and relate with others is a prerequisite for well-being and happiness. It’s crucial to reframe what softness really means to embody it— it means being your stronger self by allowing others to see who you really are, by taking responsibility for your actions, words and behaviour, by voicing your boundaries, hurt and other feelings, by sustaining connections in a healthy way, by feeling genuinely empathetic and connected to others, and by aligning yourself to your truer version.
Be cognizant of those areas in your life and situations where you might have felt or feel your emotions run high or that you need to protect or defend yourself. Recognize what happens— how you behave, what you say and how you say it, how you react, what actions you take and how you feel in your body and where. Make an effort to find out if you understand a situation or someone’s behaviour or a conversation and the like for how it actually is. Clarify if needed.
Respectful and honest conversation is needed to practice softness. If you feel hurt by someone’s behaviour or if it spurs unwanted emotions, you can start by acknowledging how you feel, telling them why you feel that way and then have a thoughtful discussion with that person. If you’re the one who said or who’s done something that may have hurt another person, it’s vital to put your ego aside and apologize, keeping your language and tone tender. “I’m sorry if you got offended” isn’t an apology and it’s tender. If someone is sincerely sorry, and offers a genuine apology (which will sound a lot more like, “I’m sorry for what I did to hurt you”) and follows through with their words, accepting that apology is the way to go for sound relationships. Revenge seeking and hurting them back isn’t mature and doesn’t maintain peace.
You can also start by working with people in your life you feel the most or more safe with, taking smaller, positive risks by sharing something small or a feeling/emotion or something about yourself you’re comfortable with, and building on it over time.
Exercises like deep breathwork, or other ways of tuning into your body to notice where you might have stored traumatic emotions and releasing them; repeating affirmations like “it’s safe to open up,” or stream-of-consciousness journaling can all be helpful in practicing and growing softness. Therapies that can aid in nervous system regulation, and integrate and help process emotional experiences, such as cognitive behaviour therapy, dialectic behaviour therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing and somatic experiencing.
Softness and strength are not enemies or mutually exclusive: instead, they actually go hand-in-hand.
You don’t need to be hard to make things go your way, to be heard, to have the upper hand or to get wanted results. Being grounded in your authentic self is both more effective and better for you. Again, practicing softness benefits your relationships and connections, but it isn’t only for others. It’s also, perhaps most of all, for you. It evokes authenticity, it helps you breathe more, makes you feel better and transforms you into a more emotionally responsible and content person.