I used to be addicted to certainty. I didn’t know I was addicted to it. I might have realized that just a fews day ago.
I wrote yesterday about the power of AA for overcoming addictions.
There are other ways to overcome them also. Sometimes the consequences of our addictive behavior are so devastating that they take away our desire to engage in it anymore. That’s what happened to me when I got acutely mentally ill. After two serious episodes I wanted to do everything in my power not to get ill again. I felt like the addictive behavior could be a slippery slope back there. And that completely put me off it. Rather than wanting it anymore I wanted to avoid it at all costs.
Of course I could have tried to replace it with a different addiction. That’s always the temptation, to quickly fill in the hole that has accidentally been opened up, because it’s ‘safest’ that way. If I don’t fill in the hole, I will leave space into which some feelings I don’t like to feel could surface.
I believe a better way is not rushing to fill the space. What if I can be still and present and breathe and rest instead? Then perhaps, good things will flow into that space, in their own time, because ‘all good things come to those who wait‘. Patience is indeed a virtue – as long as it is my free choice to be patient, rather than a rule unintentionally and unknowingly installed into my life.
Anyway, about certainty. How did I become addicted to it and why do I believe it was an addiction? Rather than a legitimate ‘search for truth, perhaps’?
When I was young, as best I can understand, I was mostly among adults who thought it was best to shield children from the truth. And/or who found it hard to speak the truth. And/or who sometimes didn’t even know what the truth was. Maybe they didn’t know what they didn’t know. Hey no human knows everything! And parenting is hard at the best of times. There’s no formal training and some people who become parents have rather suboptimal examples of parents to emulate.
But to a child, adults do seem like they know everything. What they imply is to be believed and what they say is to be believed even more. If something didn’t fit together then it was probably me who was wrong. They were adults. They knew better than me. They must be right!
In other words I grew up in an environment that was often significantly invalidating. I often felt confused and alone. I remember feeling quite sad for a number of weeks once (when I was around 8 years old?) but I had no idea why.
There were some things in my life however, that made sense. At some point, I discovered mathematics! It was amazing. I could get it right and it was easy to get it right. I understood how to get it right. If I ever didn’t, there was an explanation that could help me move from getting it wrong to getting it right.
That was so comforting. If only all of life could be that way! I’m not sure, but perhaps that’s how my addiction to certainty began. That’s maybe when and why I started craving the right answers and believing there always was a right answer that I would be able to find, if I looked hard enough. Because, if that’s true in mathematics, why wouldn’t it be true for everything else?
So I was addicted to certainty. I was on a compulsive search for ‘the right answer’. One of the answers I wanted to find was, how to be happy. I was sometimes happy but not always. I was often lonely. I would have liked to have had more friends.
At college (in 1984) I ran across Christianity. The “You have sinned, but if you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior and invite him into your life he will be your friend forever and it will be transformed!” type of Christianity. The kind in which having a personal relationship with Jesus is very central.
I was lonely and wished I had more friends, so the idea of Jesus being my friend hugely appealed to me. Sure I could confess I was a sinner, no biggie. I could talk to someone who I wasn’t sure was there and invite him into my life on the off-chance he was. I did and – well, I had a powerful emotional/something experience. A sort of inside experience, not a physical senses experience, but unlike anything I had ever experienced before in my life. It was really amazing and I was very convinced by it that Jesus was real and indeed had entered my life in a mysterious but very real way.
Not long after that I was rather blindsided when I found out part of the package deal of being a Christian, according to my new Christian friends ( associates may be more accurate), was believing the Bible was the Word of God. Like, literally, as if he wrote it down with his own pen.
This was a bit of a bizarre belief about a 2000 or so year old book, to be honest. It came as a total shock to me – I had thought Christians vaguely believed the Bible was a fairly reliable book about Jesus and God. Nevertheless, hey, God is God and he can do anything. Including having people write down a book that is literally his words. Somehow. He’s God, he can do that if he wants. He can do anything. Who am I to say he didn’t choose to do that?
Anyway, being certain about this was desirable for me, an addict to certainty. So I did my very best to make sure I could believe the Bible was the Word of God with certainty. When I was troubled by a doctrine that seemed absolutely wrong I searched hard to find anyone who could take the same Bible and find an alternative doctrine I could accept in the same pages. Maybe not literally from the same page but as long as it was somewhere in the Very Words of God, that was ok.
I was addicted to my certainty and perhaps I was addicted to my beliefs as well, because it seems like I needed them to be right. My security and comfort and happiness was based on them being right.
When I became acutely mentally ill with psychotic mania, one of the symptoms (you can look these up all over the Internet) was increased self-confidence ie more certainty about everything. Another one was impaired judgment ie being more wrong about everything. Once I accepted my mental illness diagnosis I realized that my days of certainty were over. Or rather, I wanted them to be over.
This is what it’s like to be diagnosed Bipolar: the more sure I am about something, the more I start second-guessing myself and thinking “Am I right to be this sure or is this a symptom of my illness?” In interactions with people who know about the diagnosis, if they think I’m sounding more assured than usual, they might start wondering if that’s a symptom. Sometimes I really am fairly sure (but not certain!) that I know more about a topic than another person. Sometimes I am being person-splained to in a way that feels very invalidating. But, if I strongly protest, instead of listening, they might get distracted into “Hmmm – is she a little manic, perhaps?” This can be very frustrating, but, as someone who cannot take it for granted that their brain is working well, I need to listen to others. And consider what they say. Just in case they are more right than me, because I’m somewhat ill.
From now on my life was going to be about always allowing for the possibility that I might am wrong. If I stop doing that then it’s the surest path back into mental illness. A path along which my certainty will only increase, making it more and more likely I’ll refuse medication that could help, and act in ways that are very destructive to me and the people I care about.
I was no longer able to rely on certainty and faith for my comfort, security and happiness. Even if I’d wanted to turn there I couldn’t anymore. I would have to learn to live without them. What I found, eventually, after getting used to uncertainty, was that I preferred it. It had been so exhausting:
- trying to find source materials which could help me maintain my belief the Bible was The Very Words of God
- trying to listen to what God was saying to me when I prayed and read the Bible
- trying to be a good Christian
(For what it’s worth, why is it that Christians say we are saved by grace, but then every sermon seems to say “Try harder! Be better! What happened to the grace?)
Anyway, since I had been addicted, I hadn’t known when to stop. Now that was over. I could rest. But I didn’t know how to feel happy and secure and comforted without my addiction.
I knew who did know how, though – atheists! I started reading an atheist forum to see how they dealt with uncertainty. Actually some of them seemed just as addicted to certainty as I had been. They were certain – that God did not exist – and they seemed compelled to be there day after day, posting about why they had a problem with Christian beliefs. Anyway, that was not helpful to me. But I found light and inspiration on those forums too. There was an elderly gentleman on there whose posts exuded so much joie de vivre that I wondered at first if he was a Christian who was just pretending to be an atheist. But after a while I realized he wasn’t pretending. He was just enjoying the beauty and simple things in his life. I remember reading his post about eating watermelon for breakfast outside on his deck in the morning sun. I felt so much joy and peace and happiness flowing from his words. That’s what I want, I thought. That happiness, joy and peace, in the midst of uncertainty.
It took a while, but over time I was able to transition into a life with peace amidst uncertainty.
I believe there are Christians who are not addicted to certainty. Speaking for myself, I’m pretty sure (but not certain!) that I was addicted. I appreciate the freedom I now have, that I never had before.