Want to know everything? Maybe it’s better if you don’t Mental health

If we want to build a better life, we have to be able to not know. Does this seem confusing? Maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about? good! This is great practice.

If you can’t stand not knowing, you risk arranging your life so that you can know everything (or at least try to), and you may end up depriving yourself of any spontaneity or joy. You never have the experience of exploring a new place and discovering something exciting, because you’ve already Googled it. And don’t give a new relationship a chance to develop because you’ve already written off this person. You plan the life out of your life, and your only enjoyment comes from things that work out exactly as you knew they would.

The capacity not to know, for the poet John Keats (and the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, whom he quotes), means “the capacity to be in a state of uncertainty, obscurity, and doubt, without any hasty pursuit of truth and reason.” It leads to a state of mind where your thoughts can wander and wonder, you can be curious, you can have feelings, and from those feelings ideas can grow, you can dream, test ideas and explore them.

It feels good, like deep inner freedom. But that’s not how it feels to me.

I hate not knowing. I’ve always been more inclined to neurotically arrive at truth and reason. It’s bad enough when I don’t know something I’ll eventually know: waiting for test results, getting a response from a job interview, setting a timer for a pregnancy test—each of these experiences is traumatic for me. I was tying myself in all sorts of knots, convincing myself that I knew the outcome would be bad, to protect myself from not knowing and the possibility of disappointment.

But what’s worse is not knowing where there’s no right answer, where it’s a matter of judgment and balancing different difficult outcomes – where no one can tell you what to do. The only way to survive and grow through this is to get better at not knowing.

I learned this through the experience of becoming a mother. I remember my dear friend telling me that I had to learn to let go of knowing what would happen during pregnancy and learn to ride the wave, because this was one of those cases where I couldn’t really know. (This, by the way, is the worst for me – when someone knows something I don’t know.)

My third trimester and the birth of my daughter were filled with emergencies that turned out not to be emergencies, and then some terrifying actual emergencies. A doctor will tell us that the baby should come out now -Only for another doctor to tell us we could wait. It was very worrying and bad for my already high blood pressure. However, what bothered me most was that one expert seemed to know, while another seemed to know the exact opposite.

I hated not knowing, not being able to trust people who were supposed to know – and not understanding why no one knew. But one thoughtful doctor explained to me that for my particular case of preeclampsia, doctors knew that before 34 weeks of pregnancy, if possible, it was generally best to keep the baby inside; After 37 weeks of pregnancy, it was generally safer to remove the baby – but between 34 and 37 weeks of pregnancy, the evidence was hotly debated, and each doctor formed a different view based on his or her clinical experience, personal risk tolerance, and judgment. So no one knows. It helped me when I understood that.

Before I trained to be a psychodynamic psychotherapist, I didn’t even know that I couldn’t know. Even though my husband repeatedly told me (and still does) how annoying it is that I always have to know everything and act like I do, I thought his problem was that he didn’t appreciate and appreciate my amazing breadth of knowledge.

But when I began training as a psychotherapist, and also became a psychoanalytic patient, it soon became clear that my knowing was not a valuable character trait, but rather a defense strategy, and a very bad one at that. I knew things – I planned things, I learned things, I mastered things – to avoid not knowing things. I thought I knew – but actually, I didn’t understand.

The problem with knowing everything as a defense strategy is that it is completely ineffective. As well as being impossible, it actually makes you feel much worse. If you think it’s your job to know everything, when reality hits, you find yourself feeling like a failure. “If only I knew!” Ha. No. If only I were able to not know.

So I’m still developing the ability to not know. It’s been years but it’s still early days. I still find it painful, and I still hate it, but I can handle it better – sometimes. I have had to get better at this because it is the most valuable thing I can offer my patients – my ability to tolerate not knowing and caring.

It’s the most important developmental ability for my child, because I don’t know much and she needs me to survive. It is crucial to staying in touch with reality, to build a better life, and a freer mind. It’s unfortunate, but I had to admit that this was a rare occasion where my husband was right.