When Certainty Becomes Too Small

A reflection on complexity, perspective, and making room for more.

There’s a moment that happens often in therapy.

Someone says something with hesitation in their voice, almost like they’re confessing. They’ll say:

“I know this sounds contradictory…”

And then they’ll tell me two things that feel impossible to hold at the same time:

I miss someone and I don’t want them back.

I’m relieved it ended and I’m grieving.

I’m deeply lonely and I want to be alone.

I want closeness and I want space.

Usually what follows is some version of:

“So which one is it?”

But there’s another version of this moment that happens just as often.

Someone feels entirely certain, entirely hurt, entirely angry, entirely hopeless, entirely convinced of their own perspective. And together we begin noticing that something else may also be present: grief underneath anger, love underneath hurt, fear underneath certainty, a partner’s experience appearing beside their own.

Not because their original experience is wrong.

But because sometimes the work is making room for another experience to become available too: sometimes another feeling within us, sometimes another perspective, sometimes another person’s experience becoming easier to hold alongside our own.

Many of us learn, for good reasons, to believe there should only be one answer: one feeling, one story, one truth.

But experience rarely organizes itself that neatly.

—

One thing I notice often in therapy is that people can become exhausted trying to decide which part of themselves is the real one.

If I’m struggling to show up for someone, maybe I don’t care enough. If I feel resentful, maybe I’m ungrateful. If I’ve done something harmful, maybe I’m just harmful. If I’m overwhelmed, maybe my needs aren’t legitimate. If I’m scared, maybe I’m not brave.

Or sometimes the opposite happens.

We become so identified with one feeling, one perspective, or one story that everything else begins to disappear.

So we start trying to resolve the contradiction, or avoid it entirely. We defend one side. We dismiss the other. We argue ourselves into certainty.

And often, the more urgently we try to resolve it, the narrower our world becomes.

—

Something I appreciate about psychological research is that there is growing support for the idea that our ability to hold complexity, to remain flexible in the presence of competing thoughts, emotions, needs, and experiences, is often connected to wellbeing.

Not because difficult emotions disappear. Not because clarity suddenly arrives.

But because we stop assuming that tension, ambivalence, or contradiction mean we’re failing to understand ourselves.

We become more able to stay with experiences that don’t fit neatly together, and to trust that feeling more than one thing at once is not necessarily a sign we are lost.

—

This is one of the places therapy can feel different.

Not because someone tells you which truth is correct.

But because there is room to stay with experience long enough to see what begins to emerge.

To discover that grief and relief sometimes arrive together, that boundaries and love can coexist, that anger does not cancel understanding, that fear and courage are often much closer together than we imagine, and that being overwhelmed does not automatically mean being incapable.

Sometimes this becomes surprisingly concrete.

Someone notices deep sadness and begins arguing with it, trying to get rid of it, explaining why it shouldn’t be there, or becoming so identified with it that it starts to feel like the only thing that is true.

Often the work is something quieter.

To find the sadness in the body and let it be there.

To make room for it.

To stay with it.

And then, not instead of the sadness and not in competition with it, to notice what else might also be here.

A moment of calm.

A small sense of hope.

Warmth.

Connection.

Relief.

To practice discovering that we can hold more than one experience at once without needing them to cancel each other out.

And that our experience, and perhaps our relationships too, can become more spacious than the certainty we first arrived with.

Some experiences cannot be reconciled. Some losses remain losses. Some relationships remain complicated.

Sometimes the work is not integration.

Sometimes it is simply becoming less afraid of complexity.

—

If you notice yourself reaching for certainty, trying to decide which feeling counts, which version of yourself is the real one, or finding it difficult to imagine anything outside the truth you already feel:

Sometimes what’s most helpful is noticing the rigidity or constriction that can come with reaching so hard for certainty, and the ways it can keep us in conflict with ourselves or with the people we love.

Sometimes making more room for complexity can make more truth available, and with it, more freedom.

Sometimes the more helpful questions are not questions of contraction, but of expansion.

Questions like:

“What would happen if I make room for both?”

Or:

“What other truths might also be in the room?”