Uncertainty

ANNA FROST, NCPsyA

You need to know where you stand. And it's destroying your relationship.

You excel because you plan, control, anticipate. You map outcomes and manage variables. At work, this makes you indispensable. At home, it makes for battle.

You need your partner to commit to a timeline. You need to know where the relationship is headed. You need guarantees that it will work out. You demand reassurance and create conflict trying to nail things down. Or you might withdraw, convinced it’s doomed anyway.

Your partner likely feels interrogated and unsafe – like nothing they do is ever enough.

Call – 303.547.8493

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Can't Tolerate Not Knowing?

Feelings of uncertainty originate when early experiences were unsafe – when parents and adults in early life were not sufficiently reliable and predictable.

The need for certainty in current relationships most often comes from a lack of it early on. If your childhood was unpredictable or chaotic, or you didn’t know what mood your parent would be in, you learned to anticipate, control, and prepare for the worst.

But healthy relationships require tolerating ambiguity and cultivating trust. Trust isn’t about having guarantees. It’s about being willing to be vulnerable not knowing how it will turn out. It’s about and staying available, honest, and caring when the future is unclear.

When you need certainty, you’re trying to protect yourself from loss. But the protection itself prevents intimacy. Your partner can’t relax. They can’t be themselves because they have to perform the role you’ve assigned them and provide the reassurance you’ve demanded.

The relationship becomes about managing your anxiety instead of building connection.

familiar?

What My Work Looks Like

I work with individuals and couples where uncertainty has become paralyzing. We begin by discovering where this need for control originated. We need to identify and understand what contributed to your specific situation. When this is understood, you gain perspective about other possible outcomes and become capable of metabolizing feelings of uncertainty. In session, you’ll learn that you don’t need to control everything to be okay. You’ll learn you can be vulnerable and trusting with your partner. When you can do that, the relationship shifts from a battle for certainty into an actual partnership.

Example: David, 38, was a research physicist and was up for tenure at a prestigious university. He had been married and divorced, and was serious about marrying Megan, a woman he had dated for 4 years.

David was highly intelligent, introverted, and excelled at solving problems and delivering results. Being up for tenure put significant uncertainty in his life and Megan was thinking of leaving him because he was always pushing her to make decisions – pushing for certainty when she wasn’t ready. Facing the potential loss of this relationship, he decided to talk with someone.

In session, David talked about his uncertainty about tenure, and uncertainty about the potential loss of Megan. These issues were causing immense distress, keeping him awake at night. He indicated he felt ungrounded and unsure how to manage. In talking over his situation and what he wanted, he began to understand and metabolize the aspects of uncertainty that kept him from being able to accept ambiguity and begin to explore and cultivate trust in relating. He subsequently invited Megan to join him for couples work and he began to relax into this relationship because they, together, worked toward and developed a healthy communication style.

Sessions are 45 to 60 minutes, most often weekly, beginning with a series of 6 sessions. Available by phone, Zoom, or in person from anywhere in the US. Everything is completely private. No chart notes, no paper trail. Nothing leaves the room.