Your Client Is Asking You a Question They Never Ask Out Loud: "How do YOU live with the uncertainties I don't know how to live with?"

When a client comes in, they often don't only need you to understand their uncertainty. They bring you into uncertainty. Then, at some level they ask: What do you do when you face uncertainty?

They don't only tell you about feeling helpless. You become helpless also. Then, at some level ask, What do you do with your own helplessness?

Your client hands you the same predicament they are struggling with. And asks, without words, and watches without knowing: how do you live that predicament inside yourself?

Not what skills you utilize, or how you manage the predicament, or what awareness you bring. But how do you live it, hold it, wrestle with it, turn towards it, relate to it, care for it, grow warm to it.

The therapist's own way of meeting this predicament is perhaps the deepest learning a client receives from therapy.

Explaining it or intentionally modeling could be helpful, but often doesn’t land the same because the client is in relationship with someone who is actually living differently inside the very thing.

All our training and learning and insights and methods…Necessary and helpful. But humans are primarily social learners. Which means we learn from watching other people and interacting with them, often without anyone explicitly teaching us anything. 

Parents don’t often successfully teach by explaining to their children why they shouldn’t lie or in rewarding honesty. It is their own relationship to the truth, both unconscious and conscious, that will likely override everything. 

We learn from how other people are. 

Let's imagine a client is scared they aren't going to get better. They hadn’t with their previous therapists, and they aren't making much “progress” with you. And now the therapist is scared and also begins to wonder: Maybe I can't help them. Maybe they really aren't going to get better. Maybe I am not good enough to help them. Maybe I'm not competent.

We know this territory as countertransference. But the fact that we begin to feel something of our clients isn't the part that interests me.

They've handed us some version of their problem, and it has awakened our own uncertainty, helplessness, questions about our competence, and our own investment in a particular outcome.

And then the client, without knowing it, watches: How do you live here?

What is the internal stance you hold toward yourself in response?

If the therapist has a strong foundational okayness, a steady center that doesn't rely on others or external factors, then uncertainty is less of a threat. Then outcomes are less of a preoccupation, which free us up to more outcomes. Their lack of control is not so destabilizing. They don’t have to restore their own sense of efficacy, control or security.

They have less to do, because their center isn't recruiting external things or people in order to feel centered. This way of working is easier because you do have to do less, but harder because you have to really show up for your own self.

So you can actually lean into:

 I don't know if this person is going to get better. I don't know if I can help them. I really hope I can. I have just as much expertise as the next person. But damn, life is so mysterious and I don't know what is best for them because no one can truly know. It hurts my heart to care about someone and not know where we are going together. It’s painful to hit the limits of what I or another can conceivably control.

And they can notice all the familiar fear and grasping inside themselves and say, Yes, of course you are here, too. Thank you for showing up. For caring enough to show up. I got you.

And because of that, they can remain embodied, warm and okay, in the shared vulnerability of being human, with the client. Curious. Available. Not inwardly frantic, not trying to change the client so that something in themselves can feel more steady.

Neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but grounded in the realm of not knowing and the possibilities that arise from there. 

So perhaps a client who is terrified of uncertainty under their healing trajectory doesn't only need a therapist who can teach them how to tolerate uncertainty. They may need to spend time with someone who, more and more, actually can. Being just a few steps further down the road, is sometimes all that’s needed.

These are the dilemmas of existence that underlie the struggle of being human. Yes, there can be more specific questions directly above these: How do you manage depression, anxiety, betrayal? What tools can help?

But underneath them remain the things we humans find most difficult and vulnerable:

How do you deal with being uncertain? With being limited? With not knowing what comes next? With not being able to make another person change? With not being able to will our own selves to change? With having control over just a small part of myself and my life, and how do I make the most of that? With discovering things about yourself that are unflattering? With shame? With wanting to feel a sense of okayness and belonging, and unsure how to find it.

Considering most healing things we give them are not answers we ever say out loud.

They are the internal stance in which we live them out.