by Jason Bennett, 2007

To have a successful career as an actor you must have a process for relating to and accessing your core vulnerability -- the most sensitive, open, empathic, deeply feeling, “real, inner you” -- your “inner child.” By learning to respect and nurture your own vulnerability, you can realize profound creativity and depth in your acting. Conversely, lack of access to one's vulnerability is the cause of much bad acting, and can result in actors shouting at one another with no real “heart” connection.

Some traditional acting techniques are designed to trick the actor's brain into vulnerable states through character fantasies or emotional recall. But because these techniques are essentially “mind games,” they are less effective and safe than developing conscious and controlled access to your own vulnerability, which you can then use at will when you are acting.

Vulnerability underlies every human conflict – and thus is at the core of all meaningful acting. Acting that is devoid of genuine vulnerability almost always fails.

We are born entirely helpless, unable to do anything for ourselves. The vulnerable child we are born as remains within us our entire lives. Our personality develops around it like the rings of a growing tree. The vulnerability remains and informs our emotional intelligence, fuels the ecstasy of intimacy and love, the devastation of loss, and so on.

When you connect with your core vulnerability, you have the deepest sense of who you are and what you want. Part of determining what a character wants, a key to great acting, is by feeling into the character’s vulnerability. Without a conscious or intuitive understanding of the character’s vulnerability, you cannot fully grasp the cause of the conflict in any drama. And you cannot recognize what the character’s objectives are or why they do what they do.

Recognizing a character’s vulnerability begins by embracing your own. And for many actors, this is a life-long practice.

Vulnerability is not good or bad, it is simply real. Some kinds of vulnerability feel awesome and some feel terrifying. All vulnerability is profoundly experiential and memorable. The more we learn how to nurture our vulnerability, the more intimacy we can experience and the safer and happier we are likely to be in the world.

But live in a culture where vulnerability is ridiculed, abused, medicated and repressed. Because of this, many reading this article do not even know about their vulnerability – consciously. Some literally have been abused out of a connection to their vulnerability. In these people, vulnerability seems bad and the need to “escape it” drives much of what they do.

When we do not know how to embrace and nurture our own vulnerability, we are more likely to enter into conflict with others, have a harder time keeping ourselves emotionally safe and may seek the approval of others to an unhealthy extreme.

Here are common examples of things people do to avoid vulnerability (some more obvious than others):

• We eat so we don’t starve. Starvation leads to intense vulnerability – and death.

• We exercise to feel better about ourselves, to be more healthy, to be more likely to attract a mate, to improve our mood, etc. Think about the opposites of all these: feeling bad about yourself, being sick, being unlikely to attract a mate, being in a worse mood. They all are more vulnerable, less safe states of being.

• We go to law school to become a lawyer because we were told thousands of times as we grew up that we had to; that it was respectable; because our father is a lawyer; we have to carry on the family tradition, etc. If we don’t, perhaps we feel more vulnerable: we have less approval from our family, we feel less respectable and like a failure in life. Thus, the objective of becoming a lawyer has root causes of escaping vulnerability.

• We yell back profanity at someone we feel has insulted us – or we stay quiet and smile and tell ourselves how primitive they are. Either is a power move to feel less vulnerable about the situation. Power moves in life take us out of vulnerability.

• We go to war because we are threatened. Our vulnerability is triggered and we feel we must attack.

• People use drugs and alcohol to escape vulnerabilities and feel stronger and more secure.

• We seek a mate because without one we feel lonely and more vulnerable. Or another kind of person may wish to never find a mate, because their relationships only seem to cause more vulnerability. Both people are trying to escape vulnerability and to feel safer in the world.

The above examples sound negative to many people. But access to the most sensitive, vulnerable parts of you is also necessary for intimacy and love. The process of falling in love is, in part, the process of revealing your vulnerabilities to another human being and having them accepted and embraced. Being revealed to another human being in this manner is the source of the greatest ecstasy imaginable! We feel the most deeply known and connected to another person and this can be pure bliss. But this is why losing someone you have deeply loved can be the most painful experience imaginable – our inner child is temporarily abandoned until we learn to take care of ourselves again (or find someone else to take care of our vulnerability).

There are thousands more examples – clearly the examples above are simplified for this article. Take a moment and think about the things you do during your day and the reactions you have. Look for a “charge” – a feeling that you have to do something or a strong reaction. If this exists, there is an underlying vulnerability driving your behavior. It will be easiest to feel into the underlying vulnerability when there is an energetic charge involved. See if you can “feel into” the underlying vulnerability that would arise if you didn’t do those things or didn’t react the way you did.

Send me some examples through email. I’ll help you out if it seems tough at first.

Learning about your own vulnerability, and how your reactions and life objectives arise from those vulnerabilities, is a vital part of professional actor training. You can learn an experiential vocabulary of human vulnerabilities, and thus how to recognize the vulnerability of each meaningful character you play. Feeling into this vulnerability is vital for your performance to be dimensional, unpredictable, theatrical and full.

There are books available about vulnerability, inner child work and intimacy. This kind of instruction is still left out of some actor training. It is unfortunate because relating to vulnerability, your own and the characters', is essential for each role you play.

Sometimes, the idea is promoted that playing actions and pursuing objectives, while acting, will naturally result in the exposure of character vulnerability (and other states of being) -- sort of by accident. But because this does not train actors to be fully conscious of their own process, it is far less reliable. Actors may get blamed, in these classes, for a lack of depth in their work. And the actions/objectives paradigm is not enough in many real-world acting situations, where other actors are not present to connect with or you must be in a very intense vulnerable state when the director says “action.” You may need more.

You can learn to respect and embrace your vulnerability -- consciously. You can learn to effortlessly access your vulnerability for your acting – in a safe and joyous way. You don't need mind tricks, wild fantansies (which may not work on cue) or teacher/director manipulation or abuse.

Some kinds of vulnerable states of being that actors need are: panic, anxiety, insecurity, worry, abandonment, loneliness, deficiency, hopelessness, despair, love, ecstasy, the magical child, discovery, not knowing, the playful child, joy, wonder, awe, innocence and more.

The key for your acting is to access vulnerable states of being without being taken over by them – to consciously access vulnerable states – from the grounded center of who you are. Archetype Work, as taught by our faculty, strengthens your boundaries, while deepening and stabilizing your sense of who you are. It allows you to heal and embrace your vulnerabilities. Learning about your own vulnerabilities, and the archetypes in you that compensate for your vulnerability, allows you to safely include these energies in your acting.

Nothing can compare to standing before an audience and revealing who you are on the most profound levels, within imaginary obligations as “the character,” in service of telling a story. These are the moments actors live for. And by accessing the depths of who you are in this manner, you are doing service for your audience.

Audiences go to movies and the theater to be entertained. Part of what the audience gets is to experience and remember who they are on the deepest and most profound levels. In part, this is achieved by the actor’s ability to access who they are on the most profound levels, thus “facilitating” the audience into a meaningful and entertaining experience regardless of the genre.

Any actor, with any level of experience, can benefit from learning about Archetype Work and The Psychology of Selves. In so doing, you will experience more reliable, clear and magical ways of creating characterizations and performances. Please write to me with any questions you have, I’m happy to respond. Happy Acting!