If everything around you seems dark,
Look again.
You may be the light.
- Rumi
How do you take even one step, if Doubt steps in to block your every impulse?
For most people, there are realms where they feel greater confidence, making it easier to move – and others where they act more hesitant. You probably already know which is which for you.
When you’re experiencing doubt, it’s relatively easy to notice the concerns that give you pause. But have you ever wondered how you do doubting?
It’s an intriguing process. Doubt asks you to split into two and sing as if with a double-voice, adding a tremulous treble line above the base-note hum of your original impulse. Doubt’s counterpoint melody goes, Yes, but wait…
Before Doubt butted in, there was no decision to be made. This is the state that Taoism and Zen refer to as ‘not-doing.’
If you watch a toddler, they’re all in. They don’t pull back a hand reaching for a morsel of food, or a toy. They haven’t yet learnt to question if they really want it. They want it: that’s all they know, and that’s all there is for them to know.
Then grown-ups come along and ask, Are you sure?
How do you answer that? Where do you turn to look? What do you listen to? Do you sniff at your proposed course of action, to check that it smells right?
Doubt comes in wearing sensible garb. Its calling card is helping you to double-check that the path you intend to tread is solid, free from traps, wise.
We trust Doubt because, sometimes, it helps us to avoid disaster. Fools rush in, we say.
But let Doubt have the upper hand, and instead of doing a quick extra check, it stalls and equivocates. Maybe it’s safe to go ahead, but on the other hand…
If you let Doubt move in and become your everyday companion, it can make it seem as if there is no way to resolve the to-and-fro of pros and cons. Its spell teaches you to hover in the Land of Indecision.
If you let Doubt move in and become your everyday companion, it can make it seem as if there is no way to resolve the to-and-fro of pros and cons.
Is there a voice that can break Doubt’s spell?
We often hope that such a voice can arrive from outside ourselves. We ask friends’ opinions, we consult colleagues, we sound it out with our spouse. (This ‘we’ includes me, by the way.) We look for a boost from the outside because our own voice, turned against itself, only carries half its original strength.
If the authority you consult is powerful enough in your world, you may feel happy to nod and follow its lead.
But at least some of the time, Doubt then does a double-take and asks, But is this right for me?
Which brings you back to the task of deciding for yourself.
Speaking over yourself
If you watch someone doubting themselves, it can seem as if they are darting back and forth between two chairs:
Chair 1: Shall I?
Chair 2: Or perhaps better not?
Notice how, when you’re in Chair 2, doubt sounds like your own voice, like it’s “me” talking. But as soon as you switch chairs, doubt seems “not-me,” an opposing force.
This sets up Doubt as something that you need to wrestle down. Something to conquer. A victory over yourself.
But there is only yourself to achieve it with! What a conundrum!
We have another phrase for this oscillating state: to be in two minds. But how can you be in two minds at the same time? It sounds almost spooky…
Our language and traditional common sense speak of a person’s mind as if it’s all one thing, like one of those chairs. But at least since Freud, we’ve been aware that a person’s inner landscape contains multitudes. You don’t just have one inner voice – it’s more like an inner chorus. You can carry within your psyche many varied, and sometimes contradictory, perspectives.
You don’t just have one inner voice – it’s more like an inner chorus. You can carry within your psyche many varied, and sometimes contradictory, perspectives.
So it’s perfectly possible for one person to entertain two contrasting points of view on the same topic.
Despite this, our language still carries on with the metaphor of battling doubt. Some even talk of teaching you how to “banish doubt forever.” Since this inward battle is pitching you against you, this frame sets up for one part of you to lose, by default.
And that’s not all that’s in play when we’re grappling inwardly with doubt.
Meeting your inner ‘monster’
Freud once used the image of a house as a way to describe and map the many modes and faculties inside a human being. In a letter to a fellow psychologist, Freud wrote that he was particularly fascinated with the basement, the hidden depths of the psyche, for which he coined the term the sub-conscious.
It’s no secret that Freud viewed the sub-conscious with a mix of fascination and suspicion. But he was not the originator of this outlook. Over the previous two thousand years, many religions espoused the view that human nature is split into two: good and evil, spirit and body, “higher” and “lower” self. The well-lit above-ground chambers of intellect and aspiration, and the dark dank sub-basements where everything you’d rather banish lingers.
Is it any surprise that Freud’s associations with the “lower” regions of the self ran in the same direction as suggested by his culture? In the house of Freud’s imagination, the basement was where the “animal” self lived the life of the flesh and where the “base” instincts lurked.
This suspicion toward the self is so embedded that people often worry that if they touch some deeper places in themselves, they will uncover some “pit of iniquity,” some revelation about themselves that will have them running for the hills in terror or revulsion.
I remember vividly this expectation welling up inside me at the start of my training in psychology. Probing deeper felt intensely scary.
How can you trust yourself if you believe that somewhere in your depths lurks a monster version of you? Or if not exactly a monster, then at least a dodgy, slippery, untrustworthy self?
How can you trust yourself if you believe that somewhere in your depths lurks a monster version of you?
What makes it trickier still, if you’re primed to suspect, you can find evidence to support the doubt. Any time you hesitate, or change your mind – there you go again, being untrustworthy.
Doubt is not just about deciding which course of action to adopt – but how to trust the “me” that makes the decision.
Often, people attempt to solve this by striving to “be better.” They hope that it will be easier to trust themselves once they’ve managed to become wiser, more disciplined, a paragon of virtue.
But of course, in this chase to the pinnacle, people bring along the rest of themselves. So they keep on running into their “imperfections.” Their hope of becoming the ideal fades.
This is the greater challenge when I talk with people about self-trust.
How to find a way out of the entrapping circle?
I will offer you the same reply as I offer clients. In countless close-up conversations, when people speak of what they’ve been holding at bay, banished to the nether regions of their psyche, what emerges into the light is not some “resident evil.” Instead, it’s always something tender and intensely human. Something that’s been difficult to make space for. Something that’s been hard to inhabit openly. Something carrying a spark of their aliveness.
The violence people fear at the hands of their “monstrous” hidden self… is actually their everyday. It is the violation of demanding perfection and denying the organic and imperfect nature of being human.
The violence people fear at the hands of their “monstrous” hidden self… is actually their everyday. It is the violation of demanding perfection and denying the organic and imperfect nature of being human.
When I say something like this in a conversation, a complex mix of responses flash across my client’s face. I don’t ask them to believe. I ask instead that they dare to check for themselves. If they agree, we hold an ‘interview’ with one of their inner ‘monsters.’ It’s their own words – their own answers – that persuade people.
As the ‘monster’ voice from inside them – often for the first time ever – speaks of its longing, of its pain, of its secret gift, people’s faces light up as their bodies lighten up. Their demeanor changes and they say things like “I love what I’m about!” (This spontaneous joyous outburst from a client’s mouth has become a favourite quote.)
For me, these moments are like watching the most beautiful sunrise that ever was.
What if, all the way down to your deepest depths, what there was to find was warm, flawed, living human beauty?
What if you could know and feel this, every day and night?
And if you could allow this to be so, even if just for a moment in your imagination, what version of you would you become, bathed in the rays of such a truth?
The point is, to take any step at all, you need (enough) trust in yourself. When you trust your take, you can take a step – even if you then immediately retract it. Whether leading or following, you’re doing it with your whole self.
Your feet know the way
Remember how we started, by noticing how Doubt stepped in to put in question what felt real to begin with? Trusting what’s true begins with knowing what you know: your arm wanting to move, your eyes seeing what they see, your ears hearing what they hear.
The writer Terry Pratchett made up a phrase for this anchor in your truth: First Sight. It means seeing what is really there instead of what one hopes to see, expects to see, or what others see.
What if how you see and what you feel could be, as they once were for your toddler self, truths you could trust? Of course, you would arrive here not by reverting to the innocence of childhood, but with the benefit of sophistication won by arduous adventure. You arrive here, as great travelers returning home after circumnavigating the globe, approaching the same place from the other side.
What if how you see and what you feel could be, as they once were for your toddler self, truths you could trust?
Doubt arrived when your personal inner world first came into contact with the social world – when your First Sight was tested through encounters with how others see and feel. I call the challenge this creates Autonomy-in-Connection. This will be the theme of my next Letter.
The freedom to change
The freedom to take a step has to be matched
with the freedom to change your mind.
If you take a step forward,
your very next step could be
to go back to where you started from.
Just like you could take one step into a room,
and then decide to leave it.
Each of those two steps
can be made with full conviction.
Is there a decision that’s been sitting with you
that could feel lighter
if you knew it could be reversed?
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