Confusion is a Blessing
I would change tomorrow if I only knew that it would work the way I need it to, my client said yesterday morning. Phrased with some variation, this is a sentence that I frequently hear, and it reflects a nearly universal experience – our fear of uncertainty. It’s a natural response to the feeling of not having control over a situation, and not knowing what might happen in the future certainly carries a great potential for a major loss of control. The fear of uncertainty is not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, it can be a useful survival mechanism in situations where there is real danger. The trouble is that the “danger” isn’t always as real as we imagine it to be. Additionally, I will try to make the case that we can’t grow as people, that we can’t fundamentally change without embracing uncertainty.
Stoic philosophers, such as Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, believed that the fear of uncertainty arises from our attachment to external things and our desire for control over them. Using the mindfulness lingo, we can say that the fear of uncertainty comes from clinging. The Stoics argued that we should focus on cultivating internal virtues, such as wisdom and courage, and accept the uncertainty of external events as a natural part of life. And, indeed, no matter how privileged we may be, we can’t choose much about what happens to us. We are always shaped by a culture we’re born into, that has its own values and taboos, we are raised by families and around people who will push us in certain directions unbeknownst to us. Look at the past few years globally: we’ve faced a pandemic that took millions of lives and altered almost every life individually through lockdowns and consequently lost jobs, there is a war raging on Europe’s Eastern borders and – according to a quick Google search – in about 27 other places in the world. Every few months, someone reminds us that we are on the brink of a nuclear war. Another economic crisis is unfolding. Not to make anyone anxious, but our lives are swayed and changed by things that are so far beyond our reach that there is no way around some degree of uncertainty.
Philosophers with widely varying views about the world, from the Stoics all the way to Martin Heidegger emphasize that we can find authenticity if we work on our internal principles and focus on the meaning that we assign to the world and events that affect us. As a therapist and a coach, I can only nod in approval: focusing on our values is a good way to feel grounded and safe even in the toughest of circumstances. Our constructions of ourselves and the world give us clear directions on how to act in different situations.
My all-time favorite psychologist, George Kelly, noted the importance of personal meaning-making in shaping our well-being. According to Kelly, each individual creates a unique system of personal constructs that they use to interpret and understand the world around them.
Kelly believed that the meaning of any event or experience is not inherent in the event itself but rather in the individual's interpretation of that event. In other words, people construct their own meanings based on their own unique set of personal constructs.
For example, two people may experience the same event, such as a job loss, but construct very different meanings around that experience based on their own personal constructs. One person may interpret the job loss as a personal failure leading them into stagnation and even depression, while the other person may see it as an opportunity to enrich their experience by trying out new career paths.
Kelly also believed that personal constructs are not fixed but can be modified and expanded through new experiences and interactions with others. This means that individuals have the power to change their own personal constructs and the meanings they attach to events and experiences.
Pragmatist philosophers, such as William James and John Dewey, have a similar point of view. They emphasized the importance of practical action and experimentation in dealing with uncertainty. They argued that we should not become paralyzed by fear and indecision but rather actively engage with the world and test our beliefs and hypotheses through experience.
And while Kelly, James, Dewey and I may talk about it in such theoretical terms, the actual practice of change is something different. One thing is to deal with an external threat that has a defined form for us (we have constructs for it) and it’s a whole other thing to have to change your constructs in order to explain the world. In other words, psychological change poses a much greater threat. Not only do you have to change how you see yourself, but you also leave yourself defenseless against those external threats, at least for a theoretical minute.
I often find myself repeating the same simple mantra: change means doing things differently. And while that’s true, what I’m also saying is rather disturbing for many: there’s a part of your internal world that you’re leaning on, and that part is no longer doing its job; you have to let it go and try something new. This “something new” will bring new experiences that we’ll have a hard time making sense of and they may not generate the results we hope to see. In other words, change is inevitable but change for the better is everything but certain!
Insofar as he would have dared to make claims about human nature, George Kelly might have said that it’s our need to anticipate and control events. Our desire to know the outcome, to know what will happen next, to have something safe and stable to rely on (even if it’s not pleasant!) is visible in many aspects of our culture. We build strong buildings that will remain unchanged for centuries, we create philosophies that tell us how to live and what the world is really all about, there’s religion that explains the world for many people, we have science that tries to anticipate even the most minute aspects of our world, we even turn to astrology and tarot to know the future when our own experience doesn’t offer a solid theory. And this has been the case since the dawn of mankind.
When people come to coaching or therapy or when they decide to change on their own, what they must anticipate is the fact that they will, at some point, lose clarity, only so that another kind of clarity can be created. George Kelly put it better:
What I am saying is that it is not so much what man is that counts as it is what he ventures to make of himself. To make the leap he must do more than disclose himself; he must risk a certain amount of confusion. Then, as soon as he does catch a glimpse of a different kind of life, he needs to find some way of overcoming the paralyzing moment of threat, for this is the instant when he wonders who he really is - whether he is what he just was or is what he is about to be. Adam must have experienced such a moment.
When we experience confusion, it means that we are faced with new information, experiences, or situations that challenge our existing knowledge or understanding of the world. While confusion can be immensely uncomfortable and unsettling, it can also be an opportunity to expand our knowledge, develop new skills, and gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us. To become something else, we have to stop being what we are, and that moment feels like being suspended in air: you’ve just jumped off a cliff toward the other side and you’re flying through the air: whether you will land on your feet safely, break your arm but make the jump or fall into the abyss – you can’t know.
By embracing the uncomfortable confusion that accompanies change, we are opening ourselves up to infinite, creative possibilities. As soon as you feel confusion setting in, you know you’ve just challenged your limitations and your world is expanding.
A lot of work in psychotherapy and in life coaching revolves around this necessary but off-putting embrace: we have to teach our clients how to be OK with not knowing, and even more than that – how to see confusion as a blessing!
Confusion allows us to embrace the complexity of the world and come up with useful ways of seeing it that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to notice. Confusion can generate new problems, but it can also lead us to find solutions we didn’t even know we needed! Truly embracing uncertainty means being OK with life without solid ground. And while this may sound like a preposterous proposal, let’s remember that this is probably one agreement that all important thinkers can come to: there is actually no solid ground in life! Our fixation on security and certainty is a result of our cultural conditioning and socialization, nothing more.
Instead of living in the illusion that our constructs will last forever that we’ll find one ultimate, final set of values, we might as well learn to enjoy the creative process of watching the ground beneath our feet dissolve and then reform. Since confusion is inevitable, we might as well use it to grow better, to extend our world further, to allow ourselves to be in tune with the rest of this restless universe we live in.
When my clients tell me that they would change only if they knew what’s the correct answer or the final outcome of their experiment, all I can say is that there is no final outcome. Nothing in this world stands still, so no such thing as finality exists. Whatever mess you make and whatever confusion you throw yourself into, there is beautiful creativity in that chaos. Without creativity, there is no change. Yes, stability and safety are fickle and temporary, but if these moments of stability are to be to pleasant and rewarding, we must immerse ourselves into confusion and fish out something new.
Confusion is a blessing because confusion is the way in which we evolve our thinking. Without confusion, there would truly only be suffering, as we would end up stuck in outmoded and useless ways of thinking.
