You don’t know what you’re doing, and neither do I.

I have always been fascinated by the hidden depths and intricate complexities of the human psyche. That fascination led me into the field of clinical psychology where, as a psychotherapist, I helped people explore and find healing in those depths.

My fascination also led me to become a graduate school professor where, for 27 years, I trained fledgling psychotherapists in the foundational principles of psychodynamic psychology.
Unlike other psychologies that approach the psyche primarily from the superficial conscious level of experience, psychodynamic psychology is based on the understanding that we have unconscious depths. There is no such thing as a pure, unadulterated, or objective human perception or experience. Every moment of our lives we are being influenced by forces, internal and external, conscious and unconscious, that push us in one direction or another   These forces might be as simple as the signal from my stomach that tells me I am hungry or as complex as the "Signal" from my wife that tells me I'd better make my own dinner.

Consequently, the question is never "have the things I think I know been influenced by forces outside my awareness" but, rather, "to what extent have the things I think I know been influenced by forces outside my awareness." This flies in the face of the universal human inclination to trust one's own mind above all else. We all know that our minds can be deceived, but the average person is incapable of discerning when that has happened.
We are convinced by our experiences of certainty despite the fact that certainty is an emotion and, like all emotions, easily manipulated. Certainty is something you feel, not something you "have" or attain. It is based at least as much in neurochemistry as in facts or evidence. In fact, a feeling of certainty carries absolutely no authority.

Here’s an illustration. After the tragedy at Charlottesville, I was having coffee with  a friend when he said: "it's too bad those liberal protesters had to start all that violence." I challenged him and he insisted he was absolutely certain that this was true because there was video surveillance footage. I let it go, but the next day I asked if he had sources that I could look at. He blustered about me not trusting his judgment but then relented and promised to send the weblinks via email. I was surprised but waited with eager anticipation for a new perspective.

When no email arrived after a week, we met for coffee again. When I asked he quickly admitted he had lied about the video but insisted that the lie was completely justified. “You have been brainwashed by the liberal media,” he explained, “so you are incapable of seeing the obvious truth.” He, on the other hand, has been listening to authoritative "people in the know" for years. These sources say that it happened as he said. He felt it was urgent to "save" me from my ignorance so he lied, hoping my feelings for him would be enough to convince me of the truth. In all sincerity, he lied to me to get me to believe what he felt certain to be true. Needless to say, I will never trust my friend's feelings of certainty again, but I was able to forgive him and salvage our friendship. I could do that because I, too, have been "that guy" in more ways than one.

I spent 50 years immersed in a very dogmatic Evangelical subculture in which being right was more important than virtually anything else. In fact, being right in one's theological beliefs separated the "real Christians" from everyone else and determined whether or not one was going to heaven. Absolute certainty was a requirement and anything less was considered lack of faith. I remember with deep regret innumerable times that I dismissed or disrespected others because I felt certain I was right and they were wrong. As an adult, I began examining my heart and realized that there were many things I said that I believed with absolute certainty when, in fact, I had never been allowed to come to those beliefs through the usual questions and doubts. I knew I would be shamed, shunned, and ridiculed if I did not say that I believed these things. I remember concluding that someone more qualified than I must have determined that they were true.

When I was a professor, my favorite class every year was the one in which I started by projecting the following statement at the front of the room: "what you call your "faith" is a collection of illusions that you have constructed to protect yourself from your existential fears." I would read the statement aloud and then sit down on the desk at the front of the room to scan the students' faces. In my first year of teaching, the first thing I noticed was that some of the students were grinning at me. These were the students who had come to graduate school for exactly this kind of discussion. They were ready to dive in. I also noticed faces that looked more worried, or even angry. In fact, the very first time, a middle-aged woman in the back row quickly snatched up her belongings and rushed out the door. I followed her into the hallway where she told me with real fear in her voice that she had been thinking such questions all her life but knew that if she said them out loud she would be rejected by her church and possibly divorced by her husband. I did my best to assure her that, while I could not guarantee what would happen at home, in my classroom she would be safe to ask any questions and express any thoughts without danger.

Back in the classroom, I would sit at the desk in silence. By this point in the semester, my students knew that I could comfortably sit in silence for the next two hours if they did not initiate and engage in a meaningful discussion. The first comments usually came from a student who, like me, Had grown up in an evangelical subculture. He, and it almost always was he, would often quote Scripture in an attempt to defeat the opening statement, the very definition of begging the question. Other students would point out the flaws in that argument and the discussion would be off and running. Over the years this discussion proved to be rather predictable because we had all been trained with the same  evangelical scripts.  As I guided the discussion the point would eventually come when a student would excitedly announce:  "I just realized, the statement doesn't say that my beliefs are false, only that I didn't arrive at them as simply as I thought I did!” This is the moment I was waiting for because from that point we could have a genuine exploration.  We could now explore the inner world of thoughts, feelings and beliefs and the unconscious forces that make it impossible for us to be certain of our objectivity. Since there is no such thing as objectivity the closest thing one can accomplish is a genuine curiosity about oneself and the sources of one's beliefs in an uncensored way. For psychologists-in-training, the capacity to observe oneself is the most essential skill. As my students and I transparently explored the forces that had pushed and pulled us toward our beliefs they were honing the skills that they would need as psychotherapists.

Like the woman who ran out of class many of the students uncovered fears associated with asking difficult questions, not only because their place in their religious community hung in the balance but, they'd been told,  so did their very salvation. The rules in my classroom were different:

 Doubt is not the opposite of faith, the opposite of faith is certainty.

Doubt is, in fact, a prerequisite of faith. Without room for doubt, belief becomes indistinguishable from delusion.

I certainly could not condemn my friend for trusting in his feeling of certainty since I have done the same myself many times. My strongest lesson in understanding certainty comes from my experience of disability from a major traumatic brain injury. In 2008 a small home accident caused a tiny tear in the interior wall of my right carotid artery. That tear caused a clot that precipitated a massive ischemic stroke in the right hemisphere of my brain. As I lay on the ground waiting to be found I felt an unnatural lack of concern or anxiety. I felt a great sense of certainty that I was merely tired and dehydrated and once someone helped me up I would be fine. Only later did I realize that I was experiencing a common symptom of right hemisphere brain damage: anosognosia, a lack of awareness of one's own disability. In its extreme form anosognosia can cause the disabled patient, even if partially paralyzed, to insist that he or she is perfectly fine. Perhaps the most prominent historical example is William O. Douglas, a Supreme Court justice who although confined to a wheelchair denied any limitations at all.

Although I am a psychologist and practiced in self-awareness, I could not escape the effects of damage to my brain. I lay on the ground feeling absolutely certain that I was fine until my wife found me and tried to help me up. When I saw the terror in her eyes as she looked at my drooping face, it hit me that I had had a stroke.

False feelings of certainty and deficits in self-awareness are obviously not confined to the topics of religious belief and brain damage. In fact, nothing could be more relevant to the topics in the headlines and In conversations on social media or around the dinner table. Like my friend and I discussing the tragedy at Charlottesville, most of us find ourselves occasionally shaking our heads in disbelief at the opinions of the people we thought we knew.

I remember vividly the day that I made a covenant committing myself to accept others' feedback about my limitations. It was soon after my stroke while I was in intensive care. I needed to have a bowel movement so two orderlies carried me from my bed and placed me on a commode. One handed me a roll of toilet paper and said: "you ok?" I nodded and they left. It hadn't occurred to me that I would be anything but ok, At age 46 I had been wiping my own butt for a long time and I felt fine. But after they left I lost my balance and fell to the floor. Thankfully only my pride was injured when the commode tipped over and spilled on top of me. The next day my surgeon called the two orderlies into my room where he berated them for leaving a stroke patient in such a dangerous situation. I remember the awful feeling in my gut as he shouted at them "you don't ask the patient if he is okay trying something unassisted, We decide if he is ready for that!"  At that moment I vowed to never hide from awareness of anything about myself. Realizing that my brain injury limited my awareness, I made a Ulysses contract with my wife.

In Homer's Iliad Ulysses wanted to hear the beautiful songs of the sirens although he knew they would drive him insane and destroy him and his crew. He made a pact with his sailors that they would tie him to the mast and not let him loose no matter how much he begged. They would fill their ears with beeswax so only he would hear the beautiful but deadly music. He instructed them to kill him If he broke loose. Ulysses contracts are sometimes made by those with severe mental illness in which they instruct their loved ones to force them to receive treatment in the future if they experience a severely debilitating episode.  I told my wife that the day would likely come when I would not accurately see my own limitations, so I made a covenant to seek and trust feedback from her or others close to me regarding the evaluation of my capacity.

The first test came when she refused to let me drive. It took three years before I improved enough to regain my license. However, the biggest test of my commitment to that contract came 8 years after my stroke when my faculty colleagues told me "we think it is time for you to move on and let someone else take your place." 

I have a Ulysses moment whenever my friends of color—or white women for that matter—tell me what it is like to survive in this culture designed to preserve white male privilege and promote white supremacy. They have to understand me better than I understand myself so they can live in a world designed for me. They must be winsome and non-threatening while also stroking white male egos, finding a tolerable balance between showing the deference expected by those in power and maintaining self-respect.  I used to tell my students "until you have been out of the brine you don't know that you are a pickle." For most of my life, I was unaware that the world operates differently for me than for women and people of color. It was just the world, not my world. It seems so naive now, but I used to think “everyone gets the same chances.”

Now that I have awakened to those realities, I am astounded by the grace and patience extended to me by those wounded by my ignorance. Because our perception of the world is shaped and molded by race, culture, and gender we are, to some extent, "disabled" for living in a pluralistic, multicultural world. This numbing habituation lulls us into something akin to the anosognosia of a brain injury. We feel we know with certainty what is real and true despite the extreme limitations to our awareness.

At this point in the conversation (and frankly this is especially true of white males) people will sometimes throw up their hands and say "well, then, everything is relative, you can say anything you want is true." That kind of slippery slope histrionic is the sound of the last gasp of privilege and entitlement refusing to surrender.

The only reason for refusing to open your mind to the perspective of others not like you is if you refuse to change because you want to force them to live in a world tailored to your advantage and comfort.

Those who have matured beyond this kind of infantile, selfish arrogance realize that the only way to move past the limitations and distortions of one's own perspective is to open your heart to those who have not always soaked in the same brine as you.

What kind of pickle are you? Can you make a Ulysses contract with someone unlike you to help you see what you've been missing?