Self Disclosure Quotes

Sometimes it seems safer to hold it all in, where the only person who can judge is yourself.

To share your weakness is to make yourself vulnerable; to make yourself vulnerable is to show your strength.

It takes strength and courage to admit the truth.

It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.

It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;—it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.

If suffering like hers had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an individual's pain gained meaning was through its communication to others.

A new, self-employed architect scientist is the one in all the world who may accelerate realization of a high-standard survival for all, as now completely practical within the scope of available technology.

The self-commissioned architect is the obviously exclusive potential - for as at present used, or designed, the world's resources are serving only forty-four per cent of humanity.

Confess your own sins, not someone else's

They are also comfortable with self-disclosure, which is a building block in creating close personal relationships. To people with high self-esteem, rejection is part of life, not a reflection on their self-worth.

That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion that I draw is that the only quality which all human being without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes.

Open marriage thus can be defined as a relationship in which the partners are committed to their own and to each other's growth. It is an honest and open relationship of intimacy and self-disclosure based on the equal freedom and identity of both partners.

Research in self-disclosure supports my own experience that the personal openness of the guru facilitates and invites the increased openness of the pilgrim. (24)

The non-disclosure of emotional pain can be deeply traumatic. It leads to depression. In such situations of vulnerability, one must choose to speak to a person you trust. Someone who could care for you and heal you.

By the time we grow up we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe. But we pay a price. After years of turning people away, of protecting our inner self, of cultivating it by living in a different world, of furnishing this world with our fantasies and dreams—lo and behold we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else. We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority—it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are—only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional break-through only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself. We emit huge globs of love to our parents and spouses, and the glob slithers away in exchange of words that are somehow beside the point of what we are trying to say. People seem to keep bumping up against each other with their exteriors and falling away from each other. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer is the modern master of this aspect of the human tragedy. Take even the sexual act—the most intimate merger given to organisms. For most people, even for their entire lives, it is simply a joining of exteriors. The insides melt only in the moment of orgasm, but even this is brief, and a melting is not a communication. It is a physical overcoming of separateness, not a symbolic revelation and justification of one’s interior. many people pursue sex precisely because it is a mystique of the overcoming of the separateness of the inner world, and they go from one partner to another because they can never quite achieve “it." So the endless interrogations: “What are you thinking about right now—me? Do you feel what I feel? Do you love me?

As you get comfortable revealing who you are, you help others stop fearing and concealing the magical feelings of who they are.

The things she said seemed to have very little relation to the last thing she had said a minute before. She was the sort of person, Tommy thought, who might know a great deal more than she chose to reveal.

For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives,81 indeed possesses an unequaled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failings, and transgressions. Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others.

Young children begin very early to internalize information that either encourages or discourages self-disclosure. Cues are intuitively understood. Most of what we feel is unexamined and articulated. Cultural norms are unwittingly absorbed. We learn when to speak and when to stay silent. - Pam MacRae (Ch. 2)

Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary. Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history. Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people. At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies” (New York Times 11/25/95). Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

Humanness depends on being faithfully heard. And being faithfully heard depends on risky speech of self-disclosure uttered in freedom before a faithful listener.

In Christ and by Christ, God effects complete self-disclosure, although He shows Himself not to reason but to faith and love. Faith is an organ of knowledge, and love an organ of experience.

Men’s concern with status differentials has implications for their intimacy with friends. Because an element of competition always exists between them, men are wary about self-disclosure to other men.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD LISTENER? 1. Not interrupting. 2. Showing that you empathize: not criticizing, arguing, or patronizing. 3. Establishing a physical sense of closeness without invading personal space. 4. Observing body language and letting yours show you are not distracted but attentive. 5. Offering your own self-disclosures, but not too many, or too soon. 6. Understanding the context of the other person’s life. 7. Listening from all four levels: body, mind, heart, and soul.

The “Word of God” is not simply the Christian Bible but exists in a threefold form: “The Word” incarnate (Jesus Followers’ King), the word prophesied and proclaimed (Prophets), and the word in scripture (Bible). All three are the self-disclosure of God, The One & Only ...in three, distinct & unique Persons, Father, Son, & Holy Spirit.

Storytelling is a form of self-disclosure.

three ways to improve your team’s motive-based trust in you: self-disclosure, demonstrating fairness, and acting with integrity.

I remain convinced that a therapist’s judicious self-disclosure facilitates the course of therapy. Love’s

Self-disclosure is almost like sex... It isn't easy to bare your soul

There is a marvelous ambiguity to the ego: on the one hand it is an ordinary part of the world, one of many things that inhabit it. It occupies space, endures through time, has physical and psychic features, and interacts causally with other things in the world: if it falls, it falls like any other body; if it is pushed, it topples over like any other thing; if treated with chemicals, it reacts like any living organism; if light rays hit its visual organs, it reacts electronically, chemically, and psychologically. 'I' am a material, organic, and psychological thing. If we were to take the self simply as one of the things in the world, we would be treating it as what can be called the empirical ego. On the other hand, this very same self can also be played off against the world: it is the center of disclosure to whom the world and everything in it manifest themselves. It is the agent of truth, the one responsible for judgments and verifications, the perceptual and cognitive 'owner' of the world. When considered in this manner, it is no longer simply a part of the world; it is what is called the transcendental ego. The empirical and transcendental egos are not two entities; they are one and the same being, but considered in two ways.

Although men and women agree that sharing activities and self-disclosure are important, women’s idea of an intimate moment is a face-to-face conversation, while men feel close when they work or play sitting alongside someone.

For Autistic self-disclosure to really have an impact on someone, you need a mutually respectful, trusting relationship. They need to be willing to keep learning and revise their understanding of what Autism is as they go along.

You think if you don’t talk about it, you can just pretend everything is all right? Everything is not all right. Not with us, not with your parents, not with anything today. And if you let yourself go anywhere real with it, you have to acknowledge it.

While a deep need in each of us is to know and be known, there is one deeper. One that undergirds everything else. It's the stuff of us. Out of it, we breathe, or not. We wander the earth like shipwrecked castaways, intersecting other island dwellers, and when we meet them, we hold ourselves out in offering and grant them a chance to accept or reject us. With our souls held together with twine and tape and glue, we bounce from rejection to rejection until we find the one who accepts us. This is the thirst of the human soul, and only one thing satisfies it: to be accepted in the knowing.

The Adult Whose Needs Were Mostly Met in Childhood… • Is satisfied with reasonable dividends of need-fulfillment in relationships. • Knows how to love unconditionally and yet tolerates no abuse or stuckness in relationships. • Changes the locus of trust from others to himself so that he receives loyalty when others show it and handles disappointment when others betray. The Adult Whose Needs Were Mostly Not Met in Childhood… • Exaggerates the needs so that they become insatiable or addictive. • Creates situations that reenact the original hurts and rejections, seek relationships that stimulate and maintain self-defeating beliefs rather than relationships that confront and dispel them, • Refuses to notice how abused or unhappy she is and uses the pretext of hoping for change or of coping with what is unchanging. • Lets her feelings go underground. “If the only safe thing for me was to let my feelings disappear, how can I now permit the self-exposure and vulnerability it takes to be loved?” • Repeats the childhood error of equating negative attention with love or neurotic anxiousness with solicitude. • Is afraid to receive the true love, self-disclosure, or generosity of others. In effect: cannot receive now what was not received originally.

Self-disclosure is intrinsically rewarding and extrinsically valuable. It can lighten our burden, make abstract negative emotions more concrete, and build affiliation. So, to begin to harness your regrets to improve in the future, try any of the following: Write about your regret for fifteen minutes for three consecutive days. Talk about your regret into a voice recorder for fifteen minutes for three consecutive days. Tell someone else about the regret in person or by phone. Include sufficient detail about what happened, but establish a time limit (perhaps a half hour) to avoid the possibilities of repetition and brooding.

- Durham, amo-te. Riu-se cinicamente. - É verdade: sempre te amei... - Boa-noite, boa-noite. - Digo-te, é verdade...vim cá para tu dizer...exactamente da mesma maneira que tu: sempre fui como os Gregos sem o saber. - Desenvolve esta afirmação. As palavras abandoram-no de imediato. Só conseguia falar quando não lhe era pedido. p.74, MAURICE, E.M. FORSTER -------------------------------------------------- Durham, I love you." He laughed bitterly. "I do — I have always —" "Good night, good night." "I tell you, I do — I came to say it — in your very own way — I have always been like the Greeks and didn't know." "Expand the statement." Words deserted him immediately. He could only speak when he was not asked to.

In fact, the same intervention or response may even have the opposite effect on two different clients with contrasting developmental histories and cultural contexts. For example, if a client’s parent was distant or aloof, the therapist’s judicious self-disclosure may be helpful for the client. In contrast, the same type of self-disclosure is likely to be anxiety-arousing for a client who grew up serving as the confidant or emotional caregiver of a depressed parent. Greater sharing with the therapist may help the first client learn that, contrary to her deeply held beliefs, she does matter and can be of interest to other people. In contrast, for the second client, the same type of self-disclosure may inadvertently impose the unwanted needs of others and set this client back in treatment as, in her mind, she experiences herself back in her old caretaking role again—this time with the therapist. This unwanted reenactment occurs because the therapeutic relationship is now paralleling the same problematic relational theme that this client struggled with while growing up.

Some people find illeism annoying (although it doesn’t bother Daniel Pink). But its existence as a style of speech and narration exemplifies the final step in the regret-reckoning process. Talking about ourselves in the third person is one variety of what social psychologists call “self-distancing.” When we’re beset by negative emotions, including regret, one response is to immerse ourselves in them, to face the negativity by getting up close and personal. But immersion can catch us in an undertow of rumination. A better, more effective, and longer-lasting approach is to move in the opposite direction—not to plunge in, but to zoom out and gaze upon our situation as a detached observer, much as a movie director pulls back the camera. After self-disclosure relieves the burden of carrying a regret, and self-compassion reframes the regret as a human imperfection rather than an incapacitating flaw, self-distancing helps you analyze and strategize—to examine the regret dispassionately without shame or rancor and to extract from it a lesson that can guide your future behavior.

We come into contact with people only with our exteriors—physically and externally; yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life, a private and secret self. We are, in reality, somewhat split in two, the self and the body; the one hidden, the other open. The child learns very quickly to cultivate this private self because it puts a barrier between him and the demands of the world. He learns he can keep secrets—at first an excruciating, intolerable burden: it seems that the outer world has every right to penetrate into his self and that the parents could automatically do so if they wished—they always seem to know just what he is thinking and feeling. But then he discovers that he can lie and not be found out: it is a great and liberating moment, this anxious first lie—it represents the staking out of his claim to an integral inner self, free from the prying eyes of the world. By the time we grow up we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe. But we pay a price. After years of turning people away, of protecting our inner self, of cultivating it by living in a different world, of furnishing this world with our fantasies and dreams—we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else. We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority—it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are—only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional breakthrough only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself. We emit huge globs of love to our parents and spouses, and the glob slithers away in exchanges of words that are somehow beside the point of what we are trying to say. People seem to keep bumping up against each other with their exteriors and falling away from each other. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer is the modern master of this aspect of the human tragedy. Take even the sexual act—the most intimate merger given to organisms. For most people, even for their entire lives, it is simply a joining of exteriors. The insides melt only in the moment of orgasm, but even this is brief, and a melting is not a communication. It is a physical overcoming of separateness, not a symbolic revelation and justification of one’s interior. Many people pursue sex precisely because it is a mystique of the overcoming of the separateness of the inner world; and they go from one partner to another because they can never quite achieve “it.” So the endless interrogations: “What are you thinking about right now—me? Do you feel what I feel? Do you love me?

The mystery of presence is that encounter wherein the self-disclosure of one evokes a deeper life in the other. There is nothing you need to “think” or understand to be present; it is all about giving and receiving right now, and it is not done in the mind. It is actually a transference and sharing of Being, and will be experienced as grace, gratuity and inner-groundedness. Thus there is always a great leap of inner authenticity that is associated with true mutual presence, because in being received graciously, we are able to receive ourselves at an ever-deeper level yet recognize that we are both part of something Greater itself. It gives one great happiness and deep joy. We really are socially contagious human beings, but we settle for “human doings.” It is at the being level that life is most vitally transferred.

It seems to me, then, that vulnerability and and self-disclosure are at the heart of what we understand about the nature of God. And the reason I believe gay and lesbian people are spiritual people is that we too have participated in vulnerability and self-disclosure, especially in the process of coming-out. When someone shares with you who they really, really are, it is a special offering. To do so when it risks rejection is a profound, holy gift.

Contradictions. Fauxnerable people are not consistent in their character. • Disclosures that focus on the past. “I struggled with porn” or “I was such a mess.” This isn’t vulnerability. Vulnerability is about showing up courageously in the present moment with how you are currently affecting someone or experiencing your inner life. • Staged fauxnerability. A fauxnerable pastor or leader may conjure up tears at will on stage but show little empathy or care face to face. • Victim mentality. The fauxnerable pastor may blame his staff, a bad system, or a needy spouse. • Lack of curiosity. Vulnerable people are curious. Fauxnerable people are defensive and reactive. • Oversharing. An emotional dump is not necessarily an act of vulnerability but may in fact be a way of using you to engender sympathy or to take their side. • Self-referencing. His fauxnerability is in service of his ego, not an expression of mutuality or connection.

The poetry and politics of the Christmas story hit me as if I were hearing it for the first time: the idea that some force of love and logic inside this mysterious universe might choose self-disclosure in the jeopardy of one impoverished child, born on the edge of nowhere, to teach us how we might live in service to one another is overwhelming. Its eloquence is overwhelming. Unfathomable power expressed in powerlessness. I nearly laugh out loud. Genius. Inexpressible presence choosing to be present not in palace but in poverty.

A theophany consists of a self-disclosure by the divine. It does not consist of something the percipient does; it consists of something the divine—the God or gods, the high power—does. Moses did not create the burning bush. Elijah, on Mount Horeb, did not generate the low, murmuring voice. How are we to distinguish a genuine theophany from a mere hallucination on the part of the percipient? If the voice tells him something he does not know and could not know, then perhaps we are dealing with the genuine thing and not the spurious.

We begin life with the world presenting itself to us as it is. Someone—our parents, teachers, analysts—hypnotizes us to "see" the world and construe it in the "right" way. These others label the world, attach names and give voices to the beings and events in it, so that thereafter, we cannot read the world in any other language or hear it saying other things to us. The task is to break the hypnotic spell, so that we can become undeaf, unblind, and multilingual, thereby letting the world speak to us in new voices and write all its possible meaning in the new book of our existence.

Men don’t open up because they are prideful and self-protective. The lonely, isolated man is that way because he won’t make himself known to others. Disclosure of self is the currency of intimacy. It’s what our wives want and what true friendship demands. You don’t have to spill your guts to everybody or anybody, but God will get you to the place where you know you need to do it with somebody. The temptation to keep it all inside is the downside of being wired as a protector. He loves us too much to leave us alone. You will never fulfill your potential as a man of God going it alone.

While a deep need in each of us is to know and be known, there is one deeper. One that undergirds everything else. It's the stuff of us. Out of it, we breathe, or not. We wander the earth like shipwrecked castaways, intersecting other island dwellers, and when we meet them, we hold ourselves out in offering and grant them a chance to accept or reject us. With our souls held together with twine and tape and glue, we bounce from rejection to rejection until we find the one who accepts us. This is the thirst of the human soul, and only one thing satisfies it: to be accepted in the knowing. [Murphy Shepherd]

To those who in their turn selectively handle Mormon history and discourage our probing it in a number of areas, one needs to say (or at least to ask): Haven’t we been, if anything, overly cautious, overly mistrustful, overly condescending to a membership and a public who are far more perceptive and discerning than we often give them credit for? Haven’t we, in our care not to offend a soul or cause anyone the least misunderstanding, too much deprived such individuals of needful occasions for personal growth and more in-depth life-probing experience? In our neurotic cautiousness, our fear of venturing, haven’t we often settled for an all-too-shallow and confining common denominator that insults the very Intelligence we presume to glorify and is also dishonest because, deep down, we all know better (to the extent that we do)? Isn’t our intervention often too arbitrary, reflecting the hasty, uninformed reaction of only one or a couple of influential objectors? Don’t we in the process too severely and needlessly test the loyalty and respect of and lose credibility with many more than we imagine? Isn’t there a tendency among us, bred by the fear of displeasing, to avoid healthy self-disclosure—public or private—and to pretend about ourselves to ourselves and others? Doesn’t this in turn breed loneliness and make us, more than it should, strangers to each other? And when we are too calculating, too self-conscious, too mistrustful, too prescriptive, and too regimental about our roots and about one another’s aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual life, aren’t we self-defeating?

...the pursuit of what is best can never be carried on without constant appeal to the standard of God's gracious self-disclosure in the Scriptures.

In his work on the sinner’s soul, Christ remakes the heart of stone into a heart of flesh, and he opens the sinner’s eyes to the incredible riches of God’s Word. This divine illumination comes from Christ alone as the Logos, or Word. Christ is our all-sufficient Prophet, our teacher, and the self-disclosure of the invisible God (John 8:26; 14:9; 17:8). Christ is the telescope by which we see God in creation, and the clue that leads us through the history of divine providence. Through Christ the Bible is applied to the hearts and lives of Christians.

When spiritual community is deprived of the life-giving oxygen of self-disclosure, darkness has found a sacred home.

God’s gracious self-disclosure in Scripture can never be adequately assessed by those who insist on being independent knowers: for God to structure his revelation to accommodate such a desire would be to foster the sin from which the gospel frees us. God in his great mercy refuses to pander to our unlimited lust to be gods. He has ensured that his own self-disclosure should be abundantly clear to those who by grace have eyes to see and ears to hear, but can never be as rigorously self-evident as a mathematical theorem where human beings control all the definitions and the rules of the relationships. We walk by faith, and not by sight.

El Shaddai, carries with it a possible derivation of “God of the mountain,” a common understanding of deities in the ancient Near East as revealed in power on mountains (Mount Sinai and Mount Zion are God’s locations of self-disclosure).[9] Finally, Yahweh is the “eternally self-existent one” who is the unique covenantal name of Israel’s deity in opposition to the nations.[10]

When Yahweh told Moses he revealed himself to the forefathers as El Shaddai, but not as Yahweh, he was saying that they only knew him in a limited sense that was not as full as he was about to reveal. The Mosaic revelation of Yahweh on Sinai would be a dramatic world changing self-disclosure of God’s unique character through his Law, a new revelation of God. This is what would separate them from the nations as a holy people of God’s own choosing.

God exhibits a natural benevolence toward all his creatures, and it is called "love" in this restricted sense. The purpose is to preserve them for his use, including the display of his wrath when he punishes them for their sins. But to the chosen ones, God's love also means self-sacrifice (in redeeming them through Christ) and self-disclosure (in providing them theological knowledge).

All knowledge in life is an ongoing theory and practice. A scientist deems something a "fact" because it has been experimented with and come up as a constant. However, as a quantum physicist for more detail on scientific "fact" and the game changes almost entirely. That which was formerly seen as simple then gains a broad new perspective of complex microcosmic parts whose interactions and origins are still a mystery. However, the hypothesis of scientific theorists are much more rational and educated than absurd suppositions made by both early man and contemporary theism. The truth is that you cannot simply put your trust in science alone to give you irrefutable answers to life's questions and nature's mysteries. If you are not the person doing the research and conducting the experiments, or part of the jury of peers that review the evidence then you are in fact practicing blind faith in scientific disclosure.... Relying on others for information is akin to faith, as faith is accepting without questioning. One should instead learn to question, yet be adaptable and change as new evidence arises... While everyone may know something that you do not, that does not mean you shouldn't question what you learn. A Satanist questions everything and this should include his own beliefs and self acknowledged truths. Everything is subject to change, and beliefs should not be exempt from this fact. ~ John M. Penkal, Truly Satanic Volume I: Satanism

Man cannot know God by his own wisdom and power, but only by God's self-disclosure, which he delivered through the prophets and the apostles.

It seems to me, then, that vulnerability and self-disclosure are at the heart of what we understand about the nature of God. And the reason I believe gay and lesbian people are spiritual people is that we too have participated in vulnerability and self-disclosure, especially in the process of coming-out. When someone shares with you who they really, really are, it is a special offering. To do so when it risks rejection is a profound, holy gift.

The Gospel according to John reveals the helplessness of the human mind before the great Mystery which is God, and Paul in First Corinthians teaches that God can be known only as the Holy Spirit performs in the seeking heart an act of self-disclosure. 

Questions about God's existence, self disclosure, saving action and almighty power reminded me of my inadequacies. For me the theo in theology had become little more than a question mark. I could confidently discuss philosophy, psychology and social change, but God made me uneasy.

I functioned as a movement theologian, continuously shifting from movement to movement toward whatever new idea i thought might seem to be an acceptable modernization of Christianity. This required me to be constantly on the move, networking, editing, writing, strategizing and serving as an information adviser for student movement leaders. This was admittedly a massive departure from classic Christianity, which I recognize but ignored. If theology require reasoning out of God's self-disclosure, I was certainly not doing that--rather the opposite.

The word of the cross is not reducible to the disclosure of new ethical or religious possibilities that the self must actualize.

When Allah manifests Itself to us as the Real, or the Cosmos, we perceive the Divine Names. The Names, due to their distinction from one another (although they all proceed from the same Essence), generate duality. The Names are the self-disclosure of the Essence. However, in knowing Allah as Essence, the dervish crosses over to Unity.

The question that concerned the Jew was not whether there is a God but rather who that God is. What is His name? What is His nature and character? And the whole of the Old Testament focuses on God’s self-disclosure—the unveiling of His character, His person, and His nature to His covenant people.

As opposed to the previous naturalistic models of religion, original monotheism locates the beginnings of religion in God. This approach finds a home within the religious context itself. Someone who believes in the Bible or the Qur’an, for example, would hold that the reality of God preceded human awareness of God. People responded to God’s self-disclosure, and religion came into existence. Any changes in religion consist of either a closer approach to or a deviation from the divine disclosure.

One variant of what I have been calling the "standard view" is the "safety-valve theory." The claim is sometimes made that women's emotional caregiving does more than secure psychological benefits to individual men: This caregiving is said to shore up the patriarchal system as a whole by helping to stabilize the characteristic institutions of contemporary patriarchal society. These institutions, it is claimed, are marked by hierarchy, hence by unequal access to power, and by impersonality, alienated labor, and abstract instrumental rationality. Now men pay a heavy price for their participation in such a system, even though the system as such allows men generally to exercise more power than women generally. The disclosure of a person's deepest feelings is dangerous under conditions of competition and impersonality: A man runs the risk of displaying fear or vulnerability if he says too much. Hence, men must sacrifice the possibility of frank and intimate ties with one another; they must abandon the possibility of emotional release in one another's company. Instead, they must appear tough, controlled, and self sufficient, in command at all times. Now, so the argument goes, the emotional price men pay for participation in this system would be unacceptable high, were women not there to lower it. Women are largely excluded from the arenas wherein men struggle for prestige; because of this and by virtue of our socialization into patterns of nurturance, women are well situated to repair the emotional damage men inflict on one another. Women's caregiving is said to function as a "safety valve" that allows the release of emotional tensions generated by a fundamentally inhuman system. Without such release, these tensions might explode the set of economic and political relationships wherein they are now uneasily contained. Hence, women are importantly involved in preventing the destabilization of a system in which some men oppress other men and men generally oppress women generally.

One variant of what I have been calling the "standard view" is the "safety-valve theory." The claim is sometimes made that women's emotional caregiving does more than secure psychological benefits to individual men: This caregiving is said to shore up the patriarchal system as a whole by helping to stabilize the characteristic institutions of contemporary patriarchal society. These institutions, it is claimed, are marked by hierarchy, hence by unequal access to power, and by impersonality, alienated labor, and abstract instrumental rationality. Now men pay a heavy price for their participation in such a system, even though the system as such allows men generally to exercise more power than women generally. The disclosure of a person's deepest feelings is dangerous under conditions of competition and impersonality: A man runs the risk of displaying fear or vulnerability if he says too much. Hence, men must sacrifice the possibility of frank and intimate ties with one another; they must abandon the possibility of emotional release in one another's company. Instead, they must appear tough, controlled, and self sufficient, in command at all times. Now, so the argument goes, the emotional price men pay for participation in this system would be unacceptable high, were women not there to lower it. Women are largely excluded from the arenas wherein men struggle for prestige; because of this and by virtue of our socialization into patterns of nurturance, women are well situated to repair the emotional damage men inflict on one another. Women's caregiving is said to function as a "safety valve" that allows the release of emotional tensions generated by a fundamentally inhuman system. Without such release, these tensions might explode the set of economic and political relationships wherein they are now uneasily contained. Hence, women are importantly involved in preventing the destabilization of a system in which some men oppress other men and men generally oppress women generally.

all true inwardness still shrinks from self-revelation just because it is full of all goodness. The desire for revelation, however, and the realization that it is only in articulation that it can obtain release from the tyranny of silence compel the expression of an inwardness; yet it still shrinks from disclosure because it fears that by this it will lose its noblest elements.

speech (and of the communal encounter that it frames) emphasizes the witness’s necessary “openness” to the alterity (unpredictability and unknowability) of the addressee. How does one understand that openness, which seems to be integral to, and formative of, any testimonial address? I propose that at issue is the subjective precariousness of self-disclosure by the witness—of revealing oneself, or of laying oneself bare in the presence of another. At issue is also, to put it in a rather enigmatic way, the making of a testimonial statement: “my life depends on your believing.” That statement of “life dependence” resonates particularly strongly in Améry’s suicidal meditations and in Kertész’s lament for the ephemerality of his camp memories.

When persons encounter God's self-disclosure, they not only know who God is but also who they are.

But this central significance of Jesus is also retrojected through time, especially to the origins of the world, with Jesus (the "Logos" and "Son") depicted as the agent through whom God created all things (1 Cor 8:6; Heb 1:2; John 1:1-3). So, practically all of God's previous actions and self-disclosures can be retroactively understood in light of Jesus.

Paul in First Corinthians teaches that God can be known only as the Holy Spirit performs in the seeking heart an act of self-disclosure

Nothing in the law or the ethical codes of the mental health professions prohibits clinician self-disclosure. It is an unspoken, informal convention that nonetheless functions with a lawlike force, restraining candid speech. The conventional wisdom used to be that in order for therapy to work, therapists needed to function as “blank slates” upon which patients could project their longings, needs, and fantasies without the interference of knowing their therapists’ actual biographies. But the blank slate is a myth: therapists can’t avoid disclosing aspects of their identities automatically, for no other reason than their existence is embodied in directly observable features like ethnicity or age. Yet the de facto prohibition against therapist self-disclosure persists, in large part I believe because of stigma, and perhaps an overidentification by therapists in a “helper” role and corresponding anxieties around any concessions to their own experiences of human vulnerability. I believe it’s time as a society that we move forward to a more honest and open dialogue about the reality of mental health. Removing stigma won’t eliminate mental illness, but it will make it easier to talk about it without adding an extra dose of shame to an already painful experience.

John finds it wonderfully appropriate: in the eternal “Word” that becomes flesh, God discloses himself in creation, revelation, and redemption. Even the word Word is evocative. We might paraphrase, “In the beginning God disclosed himself, and that self-disclosure was with God, and that self-disclosure was God.

The Incarnation is the ultimate act of divine self-disclosure.

As kids, we were exposed to sexist, racist and violent cartoons and video games. We have been bombarded with images of thin females and hypermuscular males. Then we grew up and started to use Internet and then social media. For some of us, Internet has been a way to escape from loneliness, for some others it has bred loneliness. Then comes Facebook. It has been good for some of us and bad for some others. This is a place where the distinction between public space and private space has blurred. Our self-disclosure patterns have been modified. We share things that we are not supposed to share offline. Dad shot daughter’s laptop because of a letter on Facebook. Some of us built their self-esteem on how many ‘friends’ we have made on Facebook. Social media is everywhere. Nowhere else to go. Social media penetrates all aspects of our lives. This book is about this penetration. It can be read as a book for general public or as a textbook together with the educational materials provided in Appendices. It is unique in endorsing a psychological approach to social media. It tells the story of many of us. De te fabula narratur!

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is a God of the living, who mingles with our acquaintances and colleagues. If we open ourselves to life as the arena of divine self-disclosure, we may find the Lord who undergirds our lives with the certainty of dignity and value at any point in our experience.

Many of the early Upanishads are in dialogue form, which gives us a sense of participating in the disclosure of the Upanishadic secrets. We encounter such charismatic wisdom teachers as Yājnavalkya, King Ajātashatru, and Uddālaka, who were once surely inaccessible to all but the most serious seekers after wisdom. It is quite amazing that today we can obtain inexpensive paperbacks that reveal what was once the most concealed esoteric teaching and the price of which was certainly much higher than a few dollars: it called for obedience and submission to a teacher, often for many long, trying years, before anything at all was disclosed to the student. Perhaps because we think we can come by this wisdom so easily and cheaply, we generally do not really value it. For instance, how many of us have actually changed our lives significantly after delving into these esoteric scriptures? The transmission of the Upanishadic teachings was not merely a matter of passing on theories. Rather it involved the transmission of the spiritual force or presence of the teacher, who had at least glimpsed the Self, if not fully realized it. Hence the qualified aspirant was expected to be like an empty vessel into which the guru’s grace and wisdom could be poured. The Upanishadic sages showed little concern about justifying any of their teachings philosophically, precisely because their verity could be demonstrated to the initiate through direct transmission. Only as other metaphysical traditions—both Hindu and non-Hindu—started to rival Advaita Vedānta, did the Vedānta teachers have to become more sophisticated philosophers and defenders of their faith.

If the painful disclosure of a parallel love is to lead to a more honest future—for either one of the relationships involved—the other woman needs to be treated as a human being. She needs a voice and a place to dignify her experience. If the affair needs to be ended so the marriage can survive, it should be done with care and respect. If the lover needs to break it off to regain her own self-esteem and integrity, she needs support, not judgment. If the marriage is to end and the hidden love is to come out of the shadows, it will need help to go through the awkward transition to legitimacy. Without the perspective of the third, we can never have more than a partial understanding of the way that love carves its twisting course through the landscape of our lives.

Ask for advice. Not only does it garner useful insights, it makes us seem smarter as well. Follow up. Asking questions makes us look good, and facilitates positive interactions, but follow-up questions are particularly useful because they show we’re interested and care enough to learn more. Deflect difficulty. When someone asks an unfair question, asking a related one back allows us to direct the conversation in a different direction, showing interest while keeping personal information private. Avoid assumptions. When trying to get people to divulge potentially negative information, be careful of questions that assume things away. Start safe, then build. Deep self-disclosure requires social connection. But to get to that point, people need to feel safe first. So to deepen social relationships, or turn strangers into friends, start simple and build from there, encouraging reciprocal self-disclosure. Knowing what to ask, and when, can help us make better impressions, collect useful information, and foster more meaningful connections with those around us.

To establish this closeness with someone else, we need to have something called ‘reciprocal self-disclosure’ – this means being able to communicate often with each other, without fear or criticism, in an accepting way.

Having a high level of self-disclosure is one of the most important building blocks in an intimate relationship, as well as in social ones, too.

OM: A little self-disclosure builds rapport, no? I often use my personal journey to treat clients. I’ve gathered many tools in my journey, tools I’m willing to— FEW: Can you not use the word “journey” ever again? It makes my skin crawl. I’m not crazy about “tools,” either.

Since then, every time I feel I’ve made a mistake, I talk about it fully, publicly, and frequently. I quickly came to see the biggest advantage of sunshining a leader’s errors is to encourage everyone to think of making mistakes as normal. This in turn encourages employees to take risks when success is uncertain . . . which leads to greater innovation across the company. Self-disclosure builds trust, seeking help boosts learning, admitting mistakes fosters forgiveness, and broadcasting failures encourages your people to act courageously.

When done well, self-disclosure can bridge some distance with patients who feel isolated in their experiences, and it can encourage more openness. But if it’s perceived as inappropriate or self-indulgent, the patient will feel uncomfortable and start to shut down—or simply flee.

As Coates explains, hedges like these “are used to respect the face needs of all participants, to negotiate sensitive topics, and to encourage the participation of others.” These interpersonal tools are especially handy for women, who almost always dive into sensitive territory at some point during their discussions. Coates collected some enlightening data on how women hedge with one another from a group discussion among female friends about Britain’s notorious Yorkshire Ripper case of the early 1980s. The speakers were recalling how, during the hunt for the perpetrator, the police asked the public to consider their family members as suspects. At one point, a woman named Sally revealed that she once thought for a second that the killer might have been her husband. The hedges in her statement are underlined: “Oh god yes well I mean we were living in Yorkshire at the time and I—I mean I. I mean I did/ I sort of thought well could it be John?” These hedges here are not representative of Sally’s indecision—she isn’t hedging or breaking off her sentences due to, as Otto Jespersen said, “talking without having thought out what [she is] going to say.” Sally knows exactly what she wants to get across. But because the topic at hand is so sensitive, she needs the wells and I means so she doesn’t come off as brusque and unfeeling. “Self-disclosure of this kind can be extremely face-threatening,” Coates explains. “Speakers need to hedge their statements.” This is true in so many situations. For instance, saying something along the lines of, “I mean, I just feel like you should maybe, well, try seeing a therapist” is a gentler, easier-to-hear way of saying, “You should see a therapist.” The latter statement, though direct, could come across as cold in the context of a heart-to-heart conversation. The hedged version is more tactful and open, inviting of the listener’s point of view, and leaves space for them to interject or share a different perspective (unlike “You should see a therapist,” which is closed off and doesn’t make room for anyone else’s input).

We could never hope to understand God—or His word, for that matter—on our own terms. Man does not know God by investigation but by revelation, by God’s self-disclosure, by His very words.

they found no association between loneliness and the quality of a physical connection in a relationship. But they found a strong association between loneliness and a lack of self-disclosure. This means that couples who don’t reveal their “true selves” may be setting themselves up for long-term suffering.

the disclosure of the divine through the self-perceptive knowledge of the individual soul, this was the task of art, its human duty, its perceptive duty and therefore its reason for being, the proof of which was art's nearness to death, and its duty, since only in this nearness might art become real, only thus unfolding into a symbol of the human soul

I think of the Jewish novelist Chaim Potok, whose artistic hero Asher Lev searches for imagery to express the pain of modern Judaism. The only thing he can find that will do—to the predictable horror of his community—is the crucifixion scene, which he paints in fresh and shocking ways. I think of the way in which the first Harry Potter novel ends with the disclosure that Harry had been rescued, as a young child, by the loving self-sacrifice of his mother. We could go on.

People who do not have access to a good listener may not only be denied the opportunity to heighten their self-awareness, but they are also denied valuable feedback as to the validity and acceptability of their inner thoughts and feelings. By discussing these with others, we receive feedback as to whether these are experiences which others have as well, or whether they are less common. Furthermore, by gauging the reactions to our self-disclosures we learn what types are acceptable or unacceptable with particular people and in specific situations. […] The appropriate use of self-disclosure is crucial to the development and maintenance of long-term relationships […] Those who disclose either too much or too little tend to have problems in establishing and sustaining relationships.

There is no hint here that preaching is thought of primarily as self-expression of subjective experience or feeling-disclosure or autobiography or `telling one's story' so as to neglect Scripture."275 It is the Word that is to be preached.

Because God Knows Us, We Do Not Need for Others to Know Us. Much of the frenzy of modern self-disclosure stems from the insecurity of being anonymous. Our culture makes much of those who make much of themselves. When no one bothers to exalt us, we feel driven to self-promotion. We present it under the guise of family activities or hobbies or humor, but it is actually a cry: “See me! Know me! I am of worth, too! I have something to contribute!” These pathetic cries for attention are not necessary if we are secure in being known by Jesus. When we understand that Jesus knows us intimately and loves us deeply—despite what He knows about us—this alleviates any need to be known and exalted by others.

Poetry is self-disclosure at its utmost sincerity.

Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization. To apprehend one-self as victim is to be aware of an alien and hostile force outside of oneself which is responsible for the blatantly unjust treatment of women and which enforces a stifling and oppressive system of sex-role differentiation. For some feminists, this hostile power is “society” or “the system”; for others, it is simply men. Victimization is impartial, even though its damage is done to each one of us personally. One is victimized as a woman, as one among many. In the realization that others are made to suffer in the same way I am made to suffer lies the beginning of a sense of solidarity with other victims. To come to see oneself as victim, to have such an altered perception of oneself and of one’s society is not to see things in the same old way while merely judging them differently or to superimpose new attitudes on things like frosting a cake. The consciousness of victimization is immediate and revelatory; it allows us to discover what social reality is really like. The consciousness of victimization is a divided consciousness. To see myself as victim is to know that I have already sustained injury, that I live exposed to injury, that I have been at worst mutilated, at best diminished in my being. But at the same time, feminist consciousness is a joyous consciousness of one’s own power, of the possibility of unprecedented personal growth and the release of energy long suppressed. Thus, feminist consciousness is both consciousness of weakness and consciousness of strength. But this division in the way we apprehend ourselves has a positive effect, for it leads to the search both for ways of overcoming those weaknesses in ourselves which support the system and for direct forms of struggle against the system itself. The consciousness of victimization may be a consciousness divided in a second way. The awareness I have of myself as victim may rest uneasily alongside the awareness that I am also and at the same time enormously privileged, more privileged than the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. I myself enjoy both white-skin privilege and the privileges of comparative affluence. In our society, of course, women of color are not so fortunate; white women, as a group and on average, are substantially more economically advantaged than many persons of color, especially women of color; white women have better housing and education, enjoy lower rates of infant and maternal mortality, and, unlike many poor persons of color, both men and women, are rarely forced to live in the climate of street violence that has become a standard feature of urban poverty. But even women of color in our society are relatively advantaged in comparison to the appalling poverty of women in, e.g., Africa and Latin America. Many women do not develop a consciousness divided in this way at all: they see themselves, to be sure, as victims of an unjust system of social power, but they remain blind to the extent to which they themselves are implicated in the victimization of others. What this means is that the “raising” of a woman’s consciousness is, unfortunately, no safeguard against her continued acquiescence in racism, imperialism, or class oppression. Sometimes, however, the entry into feminist consciousness, for white women especially, may bring in its wake a growth in political awareness generally: The disclosure of one’s own oppression may lead to an understanding of a range of misery to which one was heretofore blind.

GOD IS SO WONDERFULLY GENEROUS in his self-disclosure. He has not revealed himself to this race of rebels in some stinting way, but in nature, by his Spirit, in his Word, in great events in redemptive history, in institutions that he ordained to unveil his purposes and his nature, even in our very makeup. (We bear the imago Dei.)

God's "name" is part of his gracious self-disclosure. It is a revelation of who he is (Ex. 3:14; 34:5-7, 14). God's "name," then, is brought very near us in the story of his wonderful deeds: that is, who God is is disclosed in the accounts of what he has done.

This raises a critical question regarding the inspiration and authority of the Old Testament: If Moses and Joshua misunderstood the will and purposes of God in reference to the Conquest, then what parts of God’s self-disclosure in the Old Testament can we trust? The question is moot if we ask the same of all who feel under no obligation to abide by Old Testament laws governing Sabbath worship, ritual circumcision, animal sacrifices, eating pork, charging interest, and capital punishment for adulterers and those who pick up sticks on the Sabbath. If Biblebelieving Christians are asked how they can justify setting aside great blocks of divine commands in the Old Testament as “truth for today,” even the most avowed scriptural literalists among them respond: because we are no longer living under the old covenant but the new. Exactly!

Christian faith only begins when we attend to God’s self-disclosure in Christ and in Scripture, where we meet him as the Creator who “commands all men everywhere to repent” and to “believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ . . . as he has commanded us” (Acts 17:30; 1 John 3:23; cf. John 6:28 ff.). Christian faith means hearing, noting, and doing what God says.