(Safe) Uncertainty

Every Clinical Psychology trainee at Salomons Institute of Applied Psychology knows of Barry Mason. No, not the songwriter, but the family therapist who’s 1993 paper on the value of safe uncertainty has been passed down to many a trainee therapist since. Originally developed to offer family therapists a new way of approaching difficulties that families bring, the paper has implications for much more than just systemic therapy practice. 

While doing a reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) recently on how to stay well during the pandemic, it was clear in many of the questions that it’s the uncertainty of the situation that is troubling a lot of people. And this isn’t anything new - humans have long preferred certainty, largely because perceived predictability and familiarity means opportunities to prepare and adapt. So, when the population is facing uncertainty on a scale this big, it’s bound to cause more than a few people to lose their emotional footing. 

Humans are hard-wired for survival and often that means playing it safe, living and working in low-risk situations where we can use pre-prepared strategies to avoid or minimise loss. However, in the rarer circumstances that we are called upon to manage unforeseen challenges, we fight like anything for our own survival. We draw on all our resources - physical, mental, instinctual - to weather the storm.

Often when trying to face these unforeseen challenges (and even sometimes the predicted ones) we fall into some kind of position akin to Mason’s descriptions of unsafe uncertainty and unsafe certainty. We find ourselves floundering, unsure of what to do and looking for an expert to tell us the solutions (unsafe uncertainty). Or, we think we know exactly what the right solution is and we’re looking for someone to help facilitate it (unsafe certainty). In both positions, we assume that there are known, correct answers to our difficulties and we look towards someone who will be able to reveal and enact these, and provide a sense of safe certainty. For some of us, we might have (high) expectations that this person in the know should be us; others might look towards an expert or professional.  

But the problem with safe uncertainty, as Mason describes, is that it is somewhat restrictive. Striving for safe certainty means trying to make problem-solving an exact science, with a solution, or set of solutions, for each difficulty. This is typically how problem-solving in health and social care is often practised in the UK currently - for any possible risk or potential difficulty there are guidelines, policies and risk-management protocols to abide by. Whenever something new, or out-of-the-ordinary occurs, instead of recognising and accepting that some systems are too complex to work in this way and that a more dynamic approach might be needed, we just add in yet another policy to resolve the situation once and for all (until the next time something new occurs). 

However, these aren’t the only positions available. There is also, as Mason put forward, safe uncertainty. In this position, there are no assumptions of correct, known solutions. People are free to take a more collaborative, exploratory reflection of what ails in order to make changes that seem to fit with the meaning and ethos of a system. In this way, we are discouraged from jumping to premature certainty and favouring more accessible or well known resolutions. Instead, a position of safe uncertainty may uncover the existence of several other possibilities and therefore a more creative and dynamic way of responding to difficulty. 

So how does one become more comfortable with the notion of uncertainty, such that we can embrace safe uncertainty? Mason purposely made no suggestions in his 1993 paper, reinforcing the idea that to rely on the existence of known solutions offers false comfort. However, I will offer one possibility: by increasing confidence in ourselves. 

Uncertainty in our environment brings into harsh light our uncertainty about ourselves - the lack of confidence in our abilities and the precariousness of our survival in the face of abrupt adversity. Without the ability to prepare, the likelihood of us getting through the difficulty is more dependent on personal characteristics like our strength, our aptitudes, our personalities and the quality of our instincts and judgements. Even if we manage to keep our physical bodies alive, our perhaps already fragile egos might not survive such a harsh personal test. 

So perhaps it would help to become more confident in ourselves, more convinced of our self-esteem and self-worth. Like infants who only dare to venture away from their caretakers when their attachment is secure enough, perhaps as adults we will be better able to brave a position of safe uncertainty when we have a secure attachment to ourselves. 

So we can look for ways to boost self-confidence. We can recall times that we have coped and remember what helped us to do that. We can brave new challenges, no matter how small, to reveal strengths and resourcefulness that we were previously unaware we owned. Or we can just explore, ask ourselves and others questions, take risks and perhaps find our own ways to be safely uncertain.