There is something I have found myself noticing more and more within both my therapy and my supervision room. It is less about the particular issues people are bringing and more about the way they are trying to make sense of them; a growing discomfort with ambiguity, a powerful urge to know exactly what something means, and an understandable but increasingly familiar longing for certainty in situations where certainty simply may not exist (or be beneficial!).
People arrive carrying conversations that have been replayed hundreds of times in their minds, messages that have been reread, relationships that have become the subject of forensic level psychological analysis, and questions which are often less about what happened than about what another person’s behaviour definitively tells us about who they are. There can be a sense that if only we could locate the correct explanation, identify the correct label or find the correct framework, then perhaps the anxiety of not knowing would finally settle. We would know who’s to blame, or what to do.
Human beings have always sought patterns and explanations, particularly when we feel frightened or unstable. Certainty can create an enormous sense of psychological safety because it gives us the feeling that we know where we stand and, therefore, what we should do next. For somebody whose early relationships were unpredictable, reading the room and anticipating other people’s moods may once have been genuinely protective. There are very good reasons why uncertainty can feel difficult for many of us.
What interests me is what happens when that deeply human desire for certainty meets a culture increasingly capable of supplying an answer to almost any question within seconds.
We are living through an extraordinary cultural experiment in attention in this online age. Much of the information we encounter now reaches us through our screens, and through systems designed to predict what will keep us watching, clicking, sharing and returning. When attention becomes commercially valuable, emotionally provocative content has an obvious advantage, and certainty is often much easier and more lucrative to communicate than complexity.
Nuance takes time, and our culture doesn’t allow for much of that.
It requires us to consider context, to tolerate contradictions and sometimes to discover that our original interpretation was incorrect or incomplete. It asks us to stay with questions that don’t immediately resolve themselves, and rarely make us feel better anytime soon. Many of us simply dont have the time to mull things over in long form, and as ideas compete for our attention in seconds and confidence can easily be mistaken for authority, we fall victim to the attention economy and those who are cashing in on it for our time or attention.
Perhaps that is part of why so many of the mainstream media narratives are organised around opposing positions. Someone is right and somebody is wrong; a person is safe or toxic; a public figure is either hero or villain; a relationship is healthy or unhealthy; an uncomfortable opinion becomes evidence of the kind of person somebody fundamentally is.
There are, of course, situations in which clarity is needed. Harm needs to be named. Abuse shouldn’t be softened into a philosophical discussion about everybody’s perspective. Oppression is not simply a misunderstanding between two equally positioned individuals, and power fundamentally changes the meaning of many interactions.
But clarity and certainty are not quite the same thing.
I can be clear that something hurt me without being certain about everything happening inside the person who hurt me. I can establish a boundary without producing a psychological diagnosis to justify it. I can decide that a relationship is no longer right for me without needing to establish that the other person is objectively bad. Equally, I can understand why somebody behaved as they did without that understanding requiring me to accept their behaviour.
Those positions require us to hold more than one truth at once, which is considerably harder than choosing a side. And it’s something that’s often learnt in therapy.
It’s something important to consider how quickly our relationship with truth itself is changing. We have access to more information than any previous generation, yet establishing what is real can feel increasingly difficult. Images can be generated, voices recreated, videos manipulated, quotations stripped from their context and false information repeated so widely that familiarity begins to resemble credibility. Artificial intelligence can offer beautifully structured explanations with extraordinary confidence while lacking any evidence at all.
We therefore find ourselves living inside a strange contradiction: we have never had so many answers available to us, while the question of what we can trust has become increasingly complicated.
Perhaps it is unsurprising that certainty becomes attractive under those conditions. When the world feels difficult to verify, confidence can begin to feel like solid ground.
This is one reason I am also increasingly interested in the way therapeutic language has moved beyond the therapy room. In many ways, its great. People now have language for boundaries, trauma, attachment, consent, neurodivergence and emotional abuse that previous generations often lacked, and those frameworks can offer enormous relief when they finally give shape to an experience somebody has struggled to articulate.
Yet language developed to help us explore human experience can also become a way of closing exploration down.
I increasingly hear people analysing one another through therapeutic frameworks with a degree of certainty that would make many therapists uncomfortable. Somebody who needs space becomes avoidant. Somebody behaving selfishly becomes narcissistic. A disagreement over what happened becomes gaslighting. A difficult emotional response becomes a trigger or evidence of trauma. An attachment style becomes a rigid personality.
Sometimes these frameworks help us to understand, but sometimes analysis can become anxiety dressed as understanding.
If I can explain you completely, perhaps I don’t have to experience the vulnerability of not knowing you. If I can identify your pattern, locate your wound and predict what you will do next, perhaps I regain some control over what happens between us. The uncertainty of relationship becomes temporarily replaced by the apparent safety of interpretation. In its simplest terms, we lose our human ability to connect and for connections to evolve.
The difficulty is that relationships aren’t objects waiting to be correctly decoded. They are living, fluid systems that are continually being created between people.
This is one of the things I find endlessly fascinating about relational work. Who I am with one person is not precisely who I become with another. Different relationships call different parts of us forward. Safety can allow qualities to emerge that fear suppresses. A particular dynamic can activate an old wound that remains almost invisible elsewhere. Trust changes behaviour, as does mistrust, and what happens between two people today becomes part of the conditions in which they meet tomorrow.
We affect one another, and this is part of the beauty of being human.
A relationship therefore cannot be fully understood by analysing two individuals separately and then placing them beside one another. Something new exists between them, and that something can shift over time. People learn one another. They misunderstand each other. They repair. disappoint. grow. Sometimes they become safer together, sometimes less so, and sometimes a relationship reveals something neither person could have predicted at the beginning.
Connection requires enough openness for that unfolding to happen.
Increasingly, though, I wonder whether we are becoming less practised at tolerating the period before we know what something is or can be.
Virtual relationships can intensify this because so much relational information is missing. A message arrives without the softness of someone’s face, the history contained in their tone of voice or the subtle cues our bodies absorb when we share physical space. Silence can mean almost anything, yet we are left alone to fill it with meaning. We can then take that uncertainty elsewhere, searching for interpretations from friends, online communities, therapists, influencers or AI before we have even asked the person involved what was happening for them.
We become more connected to information about relationships while sometimes becoming less connected to the actual relationship in front of us.
There is something else happening here that I think therapy needs to be particularly careful about, which is our tendency to individualise almost everything.
Contemporary psychological culture places enormous emphasis on personal responsibility. We are encouraged to regulate ourselves, heal ourselves, improve our communication, strengthen our boundaries, recognise our patterns, choose healthier people and become increasingly self-aware. There is wisdom in much of this, and personal agency matters of course. But personal responsibility without systemic awareness and open communication can become a profoundly limited way of understanding human beings.
None of us exists independently of our environment. Our nervous systems did not develop outside culture, and our choices are not made outside power. Poverty changes what is possible. Racism changes what is possible. Disability, gender, sexuality, housing, employment, healthcare, education and access to community all shape the conditions within which individual lives unfold. Some people have far more room to make mistakes, recover from them and reinvent themselves than others.
If therapy zooms endlessly into the individual without ever zooming back out, we can accidentally transform structural problems into personal ones. The question quietly shifts from what has happened around you? to why haven’t you learned to cope with it better?
That is not liberation! Or healing!
I think meaningful therapeutic work asks us to hold both agency and context at the same time. We are responsible for how we participate in relationships, but we are also participants in systems that existed long before us and which continue to shape what is rewarded, punished, visible and possible.
The same tension exists in our wider political culture.
“Divide and conquer” is not a new strategy. Power has always been easier to maintain when people’s anger is directed horizontally towards one another rather than upwards towards the structures organising their lives. What feels particularly significant now is the environment through which those divisions travel. Political actors, commercial platforms, influencers, campaigners, trolls and automated bots can all participate within the same attention economy, although their motives and influence are not identical. Content which provokes fear, disgust or outrage can travel rapidly, and repeated exposure to increasingly narrow versions of reality can make opposing groups appear not merely mistaken but incomprehensible.
That doesn’t mean people are passive victims of algorithms, nor does it mean political disagreement is inherently unhealthy. Conflict, protest and disagreement are necessary features of a functioning society. What concerns me more is the erosion of the space in which disagreement can remain relational. Where we can be open to each other. When every opposing position becomes evidence of stupidity or moral corruption, curiosity becomes risky. When changing your mind can be treated as weakness or betrayal, certainty becomes part of belonging, and we all need to belong. Once certainty becomes socially protective, it becomes very difficult to relinquish.
Perhaps this is why I don’t think the answer is simply to tell people to become more comfortable with uncertainty. For some people, uncertainty has historically meant danger. For marginalised communities, vigilance may be grounded in repeated experiences of genuine discrimination rather than distorted thinking. For somebody shaped by relational trauma, not knowing what another person is thinking can activate memories held far more deeply than conscious reasoning. We need to be careful not to turn tolerance of uncertainty into yet another individual wellness task.
The more interesting question might be how can we create enough safety, individually and collectively, that uncertainty becomes survivable? Can we reclaim uncertainty as the healthy component of being human that it is?
In therapeutic terms, that can mean staying alongside somebody while meaning develops rather than rushing to provide an interpretation. In relationships, it might mean allowing ourselves to ask rather than assume and remaining curious long enough to hear an answer that doesn’t fit the story we have already constructed. In our relationship with information, it may mean becoming more conscious of how often certainty is being sold to us, noticing when an explanation is emotionally satisfying precisely because it confirms what we already believe, and becoming willing to return to context, source and complexity before deciding that we know.
It may also involve reclaiming slowness.
There is something almost countercultural now about allowing a difficult conversation to breathe before deciding what it means, about reading beyond a headline, about resisting the invitation to have an immediate opinion, or simply saying that we don’t know enough yet. We are so accustomed to immediacy that reflection can begin to feel like hesitation, or even failure when sometimes it is simply thoughtfulness.
I think there is something deeply hopeful in reclaiming that space. Because uncertainty is not only where anxiety lives, it is also where possibility lives. If another person is completely fixed in our understanding of them, there is no room for them to surprise us. If we are completely fixed in our understanding of ourselves, there is no room for us to grow and evolve. If a relationship is entirely predetermined by attachment styles, diagnoses, past behaviour or psychological theory, there is very little space left for repair, emergence or choice.
Hope itself requires uncertainty because hope rests upon the possibility that what exists now is not necessarily what will exist next. Transformation requires the same thing. So does meaningful social change. Perhaps, then, uncertainty is not simply an uncomfortable gap between one answer and another. Perhaps it is a psychological and relational space worth protecting; a place where curiosity can remain alive long enough for something genuinely new to emerge.
This doesn’t require abandoning discernment, ignoring patterns or pretending that every perspective is equally supported by reality. It doesn’t ask us to remain endlessly open to people who repeatedly harm us, or to replace accountability with understanding. It asks something more difficult. It asks whether we can know what we know without pretending to know everything. Whether we can remain accountable for ourselves while remembering that nobody exists outside context. Whether we can use psychological knowledge to become more curious rather than more certain. Whether we can recognise the powerful forces competing for our attention without imagining ourselves immune to them. Whether we can allow relationships enough space to become something rather than deciding what they are before they have finished unfolding. And perhaps, in a culture increasingly organised around immediacy, certainty and division, protecting our capacity to remain open is becoming quietly radical.
Not openness without boundaries, or curiosity without discernment, but the kind of openness that leaves enough room for complexity and for change.Because not knowing does not always mean that we are unsafe or powerless, sometimes it simply means that the story is still unfolding.
