21/08/2026
Certainty seduces us because it promises prevailing relief.
If I know this outcome will happen, I can prepare for it. I can rehearse it. I can find safety and regulation around it.
The illusion of certainty regulates the emotional anguish that lives within the ambiguous edges of not knowing. We assign certainty to a grandiose pedestal, as if just knowing the answer would allow us to relax into something that feels impossible to trust.
And so, we rely on brilliant strategies in an attempt to obtain certainty. These include habits like avoiding, researching, checking, seeking reassurance, ruminating, monitoring emotions, developing multiple contingency plans, and revisiting decisions that have already been made. Some of these strategies are unwanted. Others feel embedded within us; they are respected and validated, despite evoking immense distress.
All of these strategies offer brief hits of relief, reinforcing the need to continue doing them when uncertainty emerges. The more we continue engaging in these strategies, the more habituated we become to the security offered within these mental cycles. Amid them, we code uncertainty as a dangerous beast that must be tamed. Because we fear it, we want to eradicate it. Or, in the case of this work, patients sometimes want their therapists to eradicate it for them.
There is a great deal of suffering here.
This is because certainty, of course, is impossible. Few things in this life are guaranteed. And even though we intellectually know this, truly accepting the bounds of this unknown can, at times, feel impossible.
https://substack.com//note/p-211500639?r=iz3zh&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
