The Certainty of uncertainty

I once had a client who told me that she suffered from an anxiety disorder that was disrupting her entire life. I told her that anxiety disorders are medical diagnoses I’m not qualified to make or treat, but I’d happy to chat with her. So I asked about the times and places where she seemed to feel most distressed, and she said that she ALWAYS felt anxious. ALL the time? Absolutely. Was she feeling anxious in her sleep? Well, no. What did she like to do? Well, she enjoyed reading historical fiction and painting with watercolors. But she was working a lot of overtime and didn’t get to do those things very often. Could she recall the last time she read a historical novel or painted? Yes. I asked her to close her eyes and recall the last time she enjoyed one of those activities, and prompted her to recall the entire event – the chair she was sitting in, her surroundings, the sounds going on around her, the time of day, the clothes she was wearing. As she became fully immersed in the memory of that pleasant experience, I asked her to rate her anxiety on a scale of 1-10 in that moment. She said it was maybe a 2. I asked if she was sure. She was smiling. She talked about how much she loved those moments when a book would make her forget everything and just enjoy being snuggled on the sofa with her favorite blanket and her cat purring next to her. But probably only for a moment. She was sure the anxious feelings were always there. In fact, she said, the anxiety was at least a 2. It was night and that always made her anxious. The more she thought about it, the more she became aware of how much anxiety she actually did have while reading.

All I had to do was ask her to check for certainty and her anxiety began to reassert itself.

This was clearly a client who was struggling with a pervasive sense of uncertainty (because that’s what anxiety IS) and was desperate to establish a feeling of certainty. Unfortunately, the only thing that she was able to feel certain about was that she had a pervasive sense of uncertainty. So she did what humans do and ignored all the data that contradicted her certainty. Those moments didn’t count. They weren’t her real experience.

From my perspective this client wasn’t suffering from “anxiety” so much as cognitive bias and a rather nasty paradox: the only thing she was certain of was a deep and abiding uncertainty. We talked about developing some strategies for noticing and amplifying feelings of certainty, safety, and calm. And the first question she asked was “What if it doesn’t work?”

We shared a genuine laugh over that. Her self-diagnosis appeared to be spot on. Fortunately, I was able to demonstrate a very effective technique right there on the spot, and she was reassured (again) that she did, in fact, possess the ability to feel calm and safe. If we can experience it for a moment, we can experience it for another moment. Life is, in the end, just a series of moments.

Thankfully, my client did discover that she had the internal resources to feel better in any moment, and learned to find certainty in that. She deployed her creativity, and her hopefulness, and her ability to distract herself – all of which were massive strengths for her – and turned them toward noticing and amplifying the feelings of safety and certainty that she DID have. For a change.

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The Certainty of uncertainty

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