Offering: September 12, 2022
Does anyone actually love mystery & if so, the uncertain-intolerant demand to know how
Image description: An olive skinned-hand holds a Tarot card in front of a snake plant, a wooden floor and a white wall. The card is The Fool, by Pamela Colman Smith, from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. A person stands on the precarious edge of a rocky cliff with a traveler’s bag-and-stick slung over one shoulder and a white rose in the hand on the opposie side. A small white dog is next to them, jumping on hind legs. There is a white sun in the corner, a yellow background and snow capped mountains in the distance.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
Intolerance of uncertainty is something I think about a lot.
It’s defined by Michel Dugas and colleagues as “the tendency to react negatively on an emotional, cognitive, and behavioral level to uncertain situations and events" (2004).
Psychologists Joan Davidson and Rochelle Frank write that intolerance of uncertainty overlaps in certain ways with intolerance of ambiguity, though they are not the same.
Intolerance of ambiguity “involves experiencing current situations as threatening due to their ambiguous features” while intolerance of uncertainty “involves a sense of threat related to the unpredictability of future events” (2014).
There’s prospective anxiety, which is anticipation of uncertainty, and then there's inhibitory anxiety which is unwillingness or inability to act in the presence of uncertainty.
Both have been linked with DSM disorders including generalized anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive, panic and social phobia.
Intolerance of uncertainty and intolerance of ambiguity both seem to be super common, and I find them super interesting. Both speak to the need to have true, complete things to rest in. This can be problematic, for sure.
As mentioned above it can limit flexibility, drive obsession and compulsion, and make life tight where it wants to be spacious. As someone who has fit that description many times in my life I want to say, though, that my challenging relationship with uncertainty and ambiguity is also in large part to thank for my deep love of stories.
Because I love stories so much, and am getting ready to start doing clinical work again, I’ve been studying narrative therapy, which is a style of work that feels a bit like the talk therapy version of old initiation rituals where a person leaves home for the forest, gets rearranged and comes back changed.
Which is to say that if you are certain about your story, through the narrative process you will work at being less sure through a series of deconstructive and space-opening questions. Then, you will ask whether the story could go differently and if yes, spend time gathering proof to support the tales and realities you prefer.
One of the things that feels good about stories for me is that they have a beginning, middle, and end. So when you’re telling or being told a story it’s reasonable to expect you’ll walk away feeling more certain about the meaning of something, and not less. Regardless of the scale and seriousness of the uncertain or ambiguous material that we’re performing meaning on when we make stories, it feels safe to say that we make them to cope with what we’re seeing, and we do it because it does something for us psychologically.
Narrative work is about summoning the unconsidered or surprising details that would blow apart the sure things. Sure things can be generative and they can also be stifling, as we know. So I've been reading and thinking a lot about what it looks like to open up what's been presented to you as closed—like a story about yourself, others, or the world—and making new worlds with what you find in the shadows of the main lines.
I love this way of thinking about stories because it stands for a way of relating with uncertainty that makes room for some agency. I get to invite the wild thing by asking questions and seeking what I couldn't have planned to find. Me personally, I'm never going to stop needing to make stories about my situations. And we can call it “needing to be in control” or “intolerance of uncertainty” or obsession or worry or any other symptom in the DSM. But agency takes the edge off. Nothing wrong about it.
If you read enough writing on myths and old stories and even on Tarot, you will encounter some variation of language that says things to the effect of “myths confirm ambiguity” rather than settle it (Hillman, 1997). Psychologist James Hillman famously (in my mind) wrote that “myths do not tell us how,” and that the specific act of mythologizing, or connecting the symbols in our own lives with mythic ones, is only doing its job if it's yielding more uncertainty, not less.
As someone who probably scores high on the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale (yes, that’s a real thing), I feel like this helps me understand why I’m so attracted to Tarot and myths and other old tales. I have an intuitive sense that with enough exposure to strange visuals, I will learn to lean into both uncertainty and ambiguity. So far, I think this has been true, at least in terms of my meaning-making work. I need less for the stories to mean things right away, and that’s made way for a lot of nourishment.
Hillman went as far as to say that revelation of truth was both the prerequisite and the result of mystery. This feels like a poetic way of saying that if we could somehow learn to tolerate what we don't know or can’t paste a label on yet, we’d be on track to be wise. Looking back, I’ve rarely known what fruits were ripening in me until one day I just had them.
Knowledge often feels either immanent as a juice stain on lips or nonexistent. And if you pluck a secret too soon from the vine, it won't feed you for long or be sturdy enough to withstand the trenches. As much as we love to make tales, truth tells its own story in its own time, not ours.
Reading people like Hillman has made me want to do much more than tolerate uncertainty. I want to love mystery, in a way that I’m simply not convinced is possible. What would one do who wants to blush and sigh softly while watching a fruit do a slow motion explosion knowing all she can do is to water it, and wait, and hope that it tastes good? Ironically, I guess, when it comes to the question of how to love mystery, I need answers.
The stories we tell are a starting point. Well-told tales are like shields or fortresses that keep out the unexpected, and good questions asked at opportune times can put dents in the walls or chinks in that armor. Questions can deform what was once seen as natural or normal.
In his book The Other Within, disabled storyteller Daniel Deardorff noted “the genius of deformity” and quoted Gaston Bachelard who describes imagination as “the faculty of deforming the images offered by perception” (2004). To perform meaning on an existing story means to use the imagination to take what we've been given, and deform it. To deconstruct a narrative and put it back together is to go out to the forest and then return again, changed. Questions are the compass and the knife, the talismans. Used well, they can get us out and back in one piece.
Deformity is by definition an exception to something that’s considered dominant or normal. In narrative therapy, the deformity might be called the “sparkling moment” (Combs & Freedman, 1996) which is when we’re telling our stories and a detail pops out that doesn’t conform to the main narrative. It’s also arguing about something and your partner points out what you're not seeing and you’re like, well shit.
The deformity or sparkling moment is an anomaly with new worlds inside, experiences that refuse the script. And because we’re always matching patterns and seeking coherence, these are details that can be easy to miss. We often have to go out of our way to seek them. It’s inconvenient.
When I think about intolerance of uncertainty, I do think about being unable to withstand not knowing the meaning of something or what the present will bring to bear on the future. But I also think about being unable to see what I don’t already believe. I think about new gods showing up at the door with the promise of new realms, and being so fixated on the old ones that I turn them away and miss out.
Questions are the carriers, mythic Caspians that take us into the underworld, or from the center of the certain to the stuff at the edges we don't have names for yet. And when we find the sparkling moments, they are openings.
But sometimes openings appear to us, in Deardorff’s words, as "glory in the cloak of shame” (2004). This idea is represented by “fool” characters like Perceval in the Grail Legend, who is described like this by a knight who encounters him in the forest: “His wits are distinctly scattered. Whatever I ask him, point blank, he answers sideways, and off the mark, asking the names of things and how they’re used…” (1999).
Shame-laden as they may be, fools are also widely understood to be unexpected medicine-bringers. Jokers with secret passcodes who spill them in riddles. Dispossessed people that no one trusts, whose accidents are miracles.
“Call it whatever you like! It isn’t nice, it doesn’t fit, it shouldn’t be allowed, and it doesn’t belong” writes Deardorff, who was disabled by polio as a child and used a wheelchair for most of his life (2004).
Both questions and fools have to do with openings to the unknown—hence the shape of the 0 on The Fool card in Tarot. But because they so often appear “in the cloak of shame,” to access them we have to imagine or to deform what we think of as divine. I think this includes our most compelling stories and what we take as omniscient truth.
The subversive act of probing and seeking and asking for more texture than what was given is just one of many possible ways to dance with uncertainty or ambiguity when you might rather stay plastered to the wall.
And because new truths arrive in unexpected clothing, dressed as outlandish or un-belonging or outcast, we fashion questions as offerings to uncertainty, invitations to the unruly and uncouth, and doorways for new gods to walk through.
I want to argue that storytelling itself is a sacrificial practice, and I’ll say more about that next week. But for now, an invitation: The next time you tell a story, or listen to one, pay attention to what’s being omitted, which is to say sacrificed. Wonder about which gods are benefitting from that, and what whoever’s telling the story hopes to be blessed with in return.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud click here.
You’re reading the Offering September 12, 2022. Weekly Offerings are generally for paying subscribers but I made this one public for secret reasons.
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Sources
Davidson, J & Frank, R. (2014). The transdiagnostic roadmap to case formulation and treatment planning: Practical guidance for clinical decision making. New Harbinger Publications.
Deardorff, D. (2004). The other within: The genius of deformity in myth, culture and psyche. Inner Traditions.
De Troyes, C. (1999). Perceval. Yale University Press.
Dugas, M. J., Buhr, K., & Ladouceur, R. (2004). The role of intolerance of uncertainty in etiology and maintenance. In R. G. Heimberg, C. L. Turk, & D. S. Mennin (Eds.), Generalized anxiety disorder. New York: Guilford.
Combs, G. & Freedman, J. (1996). Narrative therapy: The social construction of preferred realities. W.W. Norton & Company.
Hillman, J (1997). Re-visioning psychology. William Morrow Paperbacks.