A self-confessed enneatype Six, those of you familiar with the teachings of enneagram will appreciate how at the forefront of my lived-experience this couplet will be! Writing this draft a few weeks back – as I kicked off the third term of my enneagram professional development group – I was increasingly appreciative for what the existential tradition has to offer…
Doubt and Trust
Many, if not all, of the couplets introduced thus far have been easily harvested from the existential-phenomenological writings: furthermore, I have tended to use the original terminology. Writing to this couplet, it strikes me how personal both the words chosen and the experiences of doubt and trust are. The humanistic tradition and philosophy has much to say about the uncertainty of our existence as we are thrown into a finite life with infinite possibilities: on some level we know what life might deliver in our experience; and yet its timing is never sure. Undeniably, one consequence of that unknowing is existential anxiety. For many, it also incurs a sense of doubt. “What is there out there? How will I know what to do when it is encountered? Will I manage? What if I don’t make the best choices or right decision?” It might be argued that doubt is less ontological (part of the very fabric of human being) and more on the level of ontics (real being, my being as lived and observed). However, I choose to present it here because it comes up so often in client work; and furthermore its counterpart – trust – can help us hold in mind what is a good outcome of therapy. In what are we doubting? And in what can we find trust within?
A theory that might come to mind when we explore doubt and trust is one from developmental rather than existential theory: that of Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development (1950). I start here in part because it might help us tease out some of that ontological / ontic situating for our client work i.e. what might be at the level of being-in-the-world, and what might be rooted in a particular childhood. Erikson theorised that as individuals become and grow, we meet a series of thresholds and faced by two opposing tendencies. The resolution of the polarity allows integration of those qualities into the child’s self. Interesting for us here is that the first stage (as a newborn) is basic trust and mistrust. Basic trust is a child’s expectation that needs would be met by caregivers and the world is a safe place. Distrust is the result of unmet needs. The next life stage according to Erikson is the early childhood task of integrating autonomy with shame / doubt. Moving through this stage relies upon the caregiver promoting self-sufficiency while maintaining a secure environment. We might already gain a sense as to how the successful (or not) negotiation of these first two years may create a certain field in bodymind, interacting with the ‘given’ ontological thrownness. “Can I trust the world? Is it okay to be me?” We might also make links with Laing’s ontological security.
And yet, even with a ‘good enough’ nurturing environment, we leave childhood with the ‘anxiety of being’ intact; even if this might only come into our awareness as such later in life. For some, this anxiety might be more prevalent. Rollo May is a writer that helps us navigate the ‘normal’ and more ‘neurotic’ level of anxiety. Of relevance here is May’s description of the latter as when the “incapacity for coping adequately with threats is not objective but subjective” (May, 1950 pg 199), a phenomenon that feels to me like ‘doubt’. There is a gap between one’s resources and the demand, whether this is an accurate assessment or simply a perception. We may hear it in the client who utters “I am not sure I can do this”. That pattern may be more pervasive in some, and yet I would argue that doubt is an oscillation between the anxiety and guilt we explored earlier as ontological. “What is the right thing to do here?” In tension with “I could have made a better decision”. We can live bound by that indecision, or as Spinelli points to, “equally we might throw ourselves into a life which seems to require doubt and risk, whose very uncertainty revels in its defiance of security and predictability” (1997, pg 10). The quote here might feel like a call to courage (Tillich, 1952); in the territory of doubt Tillich is someone whom we can trust.
More accurately, we might say ‘faith, yet for many that word has religious overtones and I realise my choice of ‘trust’ could appear more palatable and secular. For Kierkegaard, a movement toward the religious is inevitable given the aesthetic (relation to self) and ethical (relation to other) spheres are unable to alleviate despair (1843/2012). Viewed cynically (the reader might look at psychology’s ‘terror management theory’) we turn to the absolute and infinite as a consequence of meeting our death awareness, but Kierkegaard saw transcendence of scientific rationalism appropriate in meeting the ambiguity of the world and our existence. Doubt is thus the seed. As Kirkby (2005) describes in a client case there is an invitation “to make a leap of faith and plunge [ourselves] into doubt, uncertainty, self-reliance and ambiguity, all characteristics of the religious mode” (pg 46). I would argue this transpersonal move is the case even if we live a secular life. This is akin to the invitation to encounter the double-nothingness (see the couplet ‘nothingness and potential’).
Doubt might therefore be conceived in two ways: there is the doubt in one’s self and capacity to ride the ‘huge tide of accident’. As a lived experience, this feels like it describes the back and forth between the anxiety and guilt of choice; and then there is the doubt that is in fact necessary for faith. Tillich defines faith as “the state of being ultimately concerned” (1957, pg 1). He further writes that “an act of faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped and turned to the infinite.” (1957, pg 16). By very definition, an ultimate concern is a relating with the infinite, and so must always include an element of uncertainty and therefore doubt. Writer Anne Lamott includes Tillich’s idea in her writing, explaining “the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there” (2006).
Where does trust come in? For Tillich, trust arises from faith. Akin to Heidegger’s notion of resoluteness (1927), the constellation of doubt and faith gives rise to trust as we affirm our essential nature “which includes our mortality and our doubts and fears, and allow ourselves to see emotionality as a function of our vitality” (van Deurzen, 2005). When I was completing my masters research, one of my co-researchers used a beautiful definition of emotional well-being: to be confident in one’s experience. To remain open to and trust our experiencing, no matter what that is. No wonder that Tillich called for courage (from the old French ‘coeur’, heart; and corage, being open to innermost feelings). Like Nietzsche before him, Tillich knew the importance of emotion as being indicative of living a vital life. “Courage is the affirmation of being in spite of the threat of non-being” (Tillich, 1952). Epitomising the inhabiting of the dialectic, the apparent polarities of doubt and trust are inclusive through the attitudes of faith and courage, or as van Deurzen (2005b) says “to be called back by truth is to remain open to contradiction, paradox and ambiguity as much as by the doubt and wonder about what we see inside and around us” (pg 275). How do we en-courage and support our clients to trust their direct experience rather than finding a solution for it? “Wisdom is not to know for sure but to always continue questioning and trust that somehow, somewhere, sometime, what seems incomprehensible will start to make sense as opposites meet and contradictions come together” (van Deurzen 2005b pg 275).