Want to know everything? Perhaps it’s best if you don’t | Mental health

If we want to build a better life, we must be able to not know. Does this sound confusing? Maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about? GOOD! This is excellent practice.

If you can’t tolerate not knowing, you run the risk of organizing your life so that you can know everything (or at least try to know everything), and you might end up robbing your life of all spontaneity and joy. You never have the experience of exploring a new place and discovering something exciting because you have already Googled it. And you’re not giving a new relationship a chance to develop because you’ve already pushed this person aside. You plan the life of your life, and your only pleasure comes from seeing things turn out exactly as you planned.

To be able not to know, for the poet John Keats (and the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion who cited him), means being “able to be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable search for facts and reason.” This gives rise to a state of mind in which your thoughts can wander and wonder, you can be curious, have feelings, and from those feelings thoughts can arise, and you can dream, test ideas, and explore.

It sounds good, like a deep inner freedom. But that’s not how I feel.

I hate not knowing. I have always been more inclined to irritably seek facts and reason. It’s bad enough when I don’t know something that I will one day know: waiting for the results of a test, or hearing about a job interview, setting a timer for a pregnancy test – each of these experiences is excruciating for me. I used to tie myself in all kinds of knots, convincing myself that I knew the outcome would be bad, to protect myself from ignorance and the potential for disappointment.

But even worse is the feeling of not knowing where there is no right answer, where it is a matter of judgment and balancing different difficult outcomes – where no one can tell you what to do. The only way to survive and grow through this situation is to not know.

I learned this through the experience of becoming a mother. I remember my good friend telling me that I needed to learn to let go of what was going to happen during pregnancy and learn to ride the wave, because it was a case where I really couldn’t know. (That’s the worst part for me – when someone knows something I don’t.)

My third trimester and the birth of my daughter were peppered with emergencies that turned out not to be emergencies, and then real, terrifying emergencies. A doctor told us the baby had to come out right away – only for another doctor to tell us we could wait. It was extremely anxiety-inducing and bad for my already high blood pressure. However, what bothered me the most was that one expert seemed to know, while another expert seemed to know the exact opposite.

I hated not knowing and not being able to trust the people who were supposed to know – not understanding why no one seemed to know. But a caring clinician explained to me that, for my particular case of pre-eclampsia, doctors knew that before 34 weeks’ gestation, if possible, it was generally best to keep the baby inside; and after 37 weeks gestation it was generally safer to take the baby out – but between 34 and 37 the evidence was hotly debated and each doctor would form a different view based on their clinical experience, personal risk tolerance and their own judgment. So no one knew. It helped me when I realized this.

Before training to become a psychodynamic psychotherapist, I didn’t even know that I couldn’t not know. Even though my husband has repeatedly told me (and continues to do so) how irritating it is to always have to know everything and act the way I do, I figured it was his problem for not appreciating and valuing my wonderful breadth of knowledge.

But when I began training as a psychotherapist and also became a patient of psychoanalysis, it very quickly became clear that my knowledge was not a valuable character trait, but a defensive strategy, and a very bad one at that. I knew things – I planned things, I learned things, I became good at things – to avoid not knowing things. I thought I knew – but in reality, I didn’t understand.

The problem with knowing everything as a defensive strategy is that it is extremely ineffective. Besides being impossible, it makes you feel much worse. If you think it’s your job to know everything, then when reality hits you, you feel like a failure. “If only I had known!” Ha. No. If only you couldn’t have known.

So I am still developing a capacity to not know. It’s been years but it’s still early. I still find it distressing, I still hate it, but I’m better able to tolerate it – at times. I have had to improve because it is the most valuable thing I can offer my patients: my ability to tolerate not knowing and to be interested.

This is the most important growth skill for my child, because I don’t know much and she needs me to survive this. It is crucial to be in touch with reality, to build a better life and a freer mind. It’s unfortunate, but I had to admit that this was a rare occasion when my husband was right.