You don’t actually fear uncertainty
Embracing uncertainty: This is probably one of the biggest, hottest topics in the anxiety and OCD community. Anxiety and OCD just thrives on this fear of uncertainty. This is what keeps our thought cycles alive, it’s what keeps the rumination alive, it’s what keeps the fear and anxiety in our body alive:
>>not having certainty
>>not knowing what’s going to happen
>>not knowing for sure an answer
>>feeling unsure about a choice, commitment, or decision
>>feeling anxious about an unknown future
This is the fuel to the flame of anxiety and OCD. It’s what keeps us up at night. It’s what torments us.
I want to break down what this is all really about.
I want you to ask yourself, “Am I really afraid of the unknown? Or am I afraid of something I've projected into the unknown?”
In reality, all of existence is uncertain. Everyday that we wake up is uncertain. We don't really fear what’s going to happen in the next moment, even though the next moment is always uncertain, because we have not projected some terrible thing. We are able to embrace uncertainty in a lot of things in life, but when it comes to our relationships we are really afraid of the uncertainty. Why? Relationships are really important to us. They are valuable to us. They require a lot of vulnerability and for us to put our heart out there. When we have vulnerability and importance mixed with uncertainty, the anxious mind begins to create all of these terrible things that might happen and it plugs that into this uncertainty and unknown.
It tries to make the unknown known with something terrible that’s going to happen.
We aren’t actually afraid of the uncertainty because we face it every day of our lives. We are afraid of what we think lies within the uncertainty around our relationships.
We are not afraid of the uncertainty, we are afraid of this horrible potential scenario that we have created.
Think of it like this: The anxious mind is an excellent horror film director. The anxious mind has created a horror film and inserted it into the unknown and uncertain spaces of relationships. What’s really happening is that we are afraid, not of the uncertainty, but of what we might feel if this horrible, terrible horror film came to life. We are afraid of our feelings. We are afraid of the pain. We are afraid of the discomfort. When the anxious mind creates a horror film and worst-case scenario, we become deeply afraid of feeling pain and heartache. We fear our own uncomfortable emotions. We fear that we might have to feel them. We fear that if we were in this horror film, that we would feel awful and we would be stuck in that feeling forever. We wouldn’t know how to navigate that feeling.
One part of this fear of uncertainty is fear of feeling pain and discomfort, and the other part is doubting our ability to navigate pain and discomfort and the belief that you will be stuck in this pain forever.
You’re saying to yourself: I don’t trust myself to navigate pain. I don’t trust myself to navigate challenges. I don’t trust in my creative ability to navigate if I come up against pain.
When you buy into this belief, you go into powerlessness. You think “if I were to experience this horrible thing and feel this horrible feeling, I am powerless to it.” When you believe this, you feel disempowered.
But you have forgotten about our resilience. You have forgotten about your innate creative ability to navigate challenges. You, as a human being, it is in your DNA to navigate challenges, to be resilient, and to overcome. That is how our species has gotten to this point today.
Anxiety makes us forget that when we slip into powerlessness.
There are two things that we must do in order to no longer live in fear of what we have projected into the unknown:
If we are afraid of feeling pain and discomfort and we are trying to rationalize our way out of the potential of feeling that, we need to make friends with pain, emotion, and discomfort. The longer you fear sadness, grief, discomfort, loss- the more anxiety has the upper hand.
How do we make friends with emotions? How do we make friends with sadness? With discomfort?
By being in our BODIES. The discomfort is something we feel in our body. We want to escape our bodies and our felt experiences so we go up into our heads. We have to learn how to be with our bodily sensations.
Boiled down, pain is just sensation and energy occurring in our body. In order to be able to open ourselves up to the possibility of pain discomfort and sadness (which is an inherent part of the human experience with no path we can choose to avoid that), we have got to be able to befriend our bodies, befriend the sensations, befriend the emotions; be able to tolerate the sensations, breathe with them, sit with them, move with them. To move with the energy in our body instead of being afraid of it.
A lot of us live in such a disembodied society that we don’t know what to do with our emotions. We are told that we should only feel select emotions. We are told to avoid and to numb pain and discomfort and in doing so we are numbing ourselves to joy. And then we wonder why am I not feeling happy and connected in love and my relationship?
We are white knuckling it, saying I don’t want to feel pain in this relationship, I don’t want anything bad to happen. I am avoiding the possibility of pain. I am avoiding the possibility of sadness and loss and grief.
When we do this, then joy, love, infatuation, excitement, connection, passion- all of that goes out the window too. We have to reorient into our body, into feeling, and into being with our sensations, no matter the discomfort.
This is one piece of the puzzle in no longer being so terrified and avoidant of the possibility of feeling pain, discomfort, or sadness.
The other part is to build self-trust - to step into our power, to reconnect with our resilience. The other part of fearing uncertainty was believing that I don’t know how to navigate pain and challenges because I believe I am going to be stuck.
When we say we’re afraid to be stuck, we are really saying “I will be powerless”. We need to connect with self-trust and with our own power. When we become familiarized with those things- what it feels like to be in your own power, what it feels like to be able to trust yourself and your ability to navigate challenges and overcome things. When we are connected and in-tune with that, we can face life with more courage and bravery and say, even if shit hits the fan, even if I experience pain heartache and disappointment and regret, I trust in my ability to navigate that. I trust that I am not going to be stuck in the pain forever. I trust in my creative ability to find a new path for myself. I trust in my ability to be able to hold space for pain and emotion and discomfort. I trust in my body’s ability to be able to move through those things. I trust that no feeling, no matter how painful, lasts forever.
To sum it all up, you do'n’t fear the uncertainty itself. You fear what the mind has projected into the spaces of uncertainty. In order to step fully into live and love without feelings of overwhelming terror, we have to learn to be in our bodies, to be with feeling, to be with sensation, to embrace the fullness of human emotion. When we try to avoid or numb ourselves to discomfort, we are avoiding and numbing ourselves to joy, love, sexuality, excitement, and passion. We must be able to be in our bodies and feel and tolerate the full range of human emotion instead of being so afraid of them. We must step into our power and step into self-trust.
Connect with your ancestors and make this into a spiritual practice, even! Think “my ancestors have navigated challenges, I have all of that within me. All of humanity before me has navigated challenges, I have that within me. It’s in my blood. It’s in my DNA. I can creatively navigate challenges. I am not powerless. I am not going to collapse. I CAN navigate whatever life throws at me. I CAN process the pain. I CAN let myself grieve and feel.”
It is helpful to remember the times when we have overcome pain and sadness, where we have navigated challenges, where we were disappointed because something didn’t work out, when we created a new path for ourselves, trusting and remembering our resilience.
If you want to learn how to do this and embody this as more than just something you cognitively know, you have to experience it and feel it. Its visceral, its experiential, it’s felt, its embodied. You live it and you experience it.
At Healing Embodied, this is what we have helped hundreds of people experiencing relationship anxiety do.
And we can support you in embracing your emotions and trusting yourself so that you can show up in your relationship with confidence instead of fear of what might happen in the future.
We have a range of incredible services to support you in that. You can check those out here: Relationship Anxiety Support