I have come to know thousands of people over the course of my life and career. I have been invited to hear stories most people never have the space to tell aloud–the many ways people love, grieve, betray, protect themselves, begin again, and struggle to understand who they are. Through all this exposure to humanity, I have realized that I have not become more certain about people. Strangely, it has led me to the realization that I may be less certain. Or perhaps a more fitting explanation is that knowing people so intimately has cultivated a deeper reverence for the complexity of who we are. A traumatic childhood can shape choices decades later. A stranger’s kind gesture may change the course of your week. A podcast, book, conversation, love affair, death, connection, diagnosis, or unexpected friendship can shift someone’s understanding of themselves and their life. The more closely I’ve observed people, the less interested I’ve become in reducing them to simple explanations.
Despite the lovely variation I’ve witnessed in individuals over time, I have noticed the same fundamental struggles appear again and again. People wonder whether they’re lovable, or whether they’ve made the right decision. They struggle with the shame of repeating something even while fully understanding that it keeps happening. They wonder if they’ve disappointed someone or if someone is upset with them. They dread the thought that they may never feel differently. Most of us believe that our struggles are unique to us, while a lot of the time they are quite universal. This is one of the unexpected gifts I’ve received through spending so many years listening to people share their inner worlds with me. We tend to experience our suffering privately, and that can make it feel uniquely ours. Like no one understands or that we are somehow doing it wrong. Yet across radically different lives, people wrestle with remarkably similar questions. I’ve essentially spent my career discovering that there isn't a backstage where everyone else knows what's going on. We're all living it for the first time. We may just share far more than we realize. And perhaps recognizing this opens the door to the beginning of compassion. Your life may be unlike mine. But the experience of trying to be human within it may not be quite so different.
If people are this complex, why is it so uncomfortable to allow them to remain complex? Because uncertainty is uncomfortable. Knowing why something happened can give us the illusion of closure. We want to know why someone left, or why a parent or loved one behaved the way they did. We want to know why we were mistreated or whether someone even loves us. Whether we made the right decision. What someone meant by what they said. Why something happened or turned out the way it did. We want to know who is right. Why they didn’t stay. What happens next. There are so many questions that remain within us in life that create tension when left unanswered. Sometimes an answer–even a painful one–feels safer than the unknown. And so often we fill in the empty space. She left because I’m unlovable. He never cared about me. They’re selfish. I’m too much. I wasn’t enough. That relationship was a mistake. I never should have taken that job. The story closes the loop. The nervous system has something solid to hold onto. But certainty can sometimes end an inquiry prematurely and close-off the curiosity possible when we give space for the unanswered questions. Sometimes the lens doesn’t merely distort what we’re seeing. Sometimes it fills in what we cannot see at all.
We cannot reduce a human being to a simplistic idea of who they are because a human being is not a fixed thing. We are living systems–constantly receiving information, adapting, protecting, opening, breaking apart, and reorganizing around what life reveals to us. We soften, develop habits, and abandon them. We encounter circumstances that reveal capacities we didn’t know we possessed. Experience teaches us things. Love reorganizes us. So does grief. Parenthood has transformed me–and continues to do so–through each new age and stage of my children and the challenges and obstacles we’ve overcome together. Betrayal has also required a reorganization of who I am, as I know it has for so many others. Safety also reorganizes us. Travel. Friendship. Trauma. Beauty. Loss. Age. And sometimes something seemingly insignificant changes us in ways we couldn’t have anticipated. There is nearly always more to discover within the complexity of a human being. That doesn’t mean you are required to stay in a close relationship with someone to continue discovery. But certainty may not always be the goal.
If I decide I already know who you are, I may stop noticing who you're becoming.
If I decide I already know who I am, I may stop noticing who I'm becoming, too.
We have more psychological language available to us than perhaps ever before. Some of that language can be enormously useful. It can help us recognize patterns, name experiences, understand relational dynamics, and find language for things we've struggled to articulate. But a framework can slowly become a conclusion leading to the dangerous habit of turning patterns into identities. If someone displays avoidant tendencies, we might see a post about the behaviors and conclude that person is an avoidant. Someone behaves selfishly or manipulatively and becomes a narcissist. Someone hurts us in one way or another and now they’re toxic. Not only do we label and categorize others into fixed identities, we do it to ourselves as well. I’m a people-pleaser. I’m anxiously attached. I’m just bad at relationships. While some of these descriptions may hold some truth, the language qualifies our knowledge of the person’s patterns as who they are or who we are. We cannot simply turn people into nouns based on their behaviors. The question is not whether the patterns exist. They clearly do. The deeper question here to examine is:
At what point does naming a pattern help us understand someone, and at what point does the name prevent us from looking any further?
Once the label becomes the conclusion, inquiry stops. We may decide we already understand who someone is and what their behavior means. Sometimes distance or the ending of a relationship may absolutely be necessary. But even then, we do not have to reduce another human being to the pattern that made the boundary necessary. Perhaps there are other possibilities for how we hold what we have learned about ourselves and one another.
Human beings have a long-standing history of creating systems for understanding our reality. We’ve created religion, philosophy, politics, and psychology. We pass on and embrace spiritual traditions, cultural identities, and relationship theories. There is nothing inherently wrong with creating maps. We need them. Maps help orient us. They give us direction, parameters, guidance, and destinations. We feel more belonging and agreed-upon paths of existence.
But: A map becomes dangerous when we forget it is a map.
If we use the map to become rigid in our ideas, belief systems, or identities, we lose the capacity for growth. The map exists as a way of understanding where you are, what relationships are asking of you, and what becomes possible as awareness deepens and growth blossoms. We can use these systems of understanding reality as a means to further expand our awareness of behaviors, meaning, and deep thought processes. And as our awareness expands, we can begin to see one another on different paths but all walking this life journey together. Instead of holding fast and tight to a framework of reality, maybe we use it as a transformational tool of deeper understanding of ourselves and others. Even the frameworks I create in my own work are intended to help us look more closely, not tell us what we will find. The purpose of a useful framework is not to end inquiry. It is to deepen it.
What would it feel like to let the question remain unfinished? Because experience has taught me that some questions just don’t have resolution. You may ask yourself over and over: Why did they do it? And analyze or assume as you may–you may never find the true answer that leaves you feeling certain. You may often wonder: Would my life have been different if…? Did I make the right decision? Did they really love me? Why did this happen? What would have happened if I’d stayed? Who would I have become? But the truth of the matter is that sometimes there simply isn’t an answer capable of making an experience make sense. There’s not always logic to life. But when our well-being becomes dependent upon answering what cannot be fully answered, we can remain suspended between what happened and our need to make sense of it. So perhaps integration isn’t always reaching an explanation. Sometimes integration is developing enough spaciousness that the mystery no longer needs to be solved in order for us to keep living. It’s not the deep sigh of resignation–it’s the deep sigh of letting go of the need to know all the answers to something we may never find and creating a greater capacity to hold onto what we do know.
I’ve been studying the Tao Te Ching and the teachings of Seneca recently and I’ve noticed something similar in the way they inquire. They wonder. They leave things open. They observe human behavior without complete certainty regarding origins. They offer possibilities. They invite contemplation, deep thought, and complexities of existence. They share their wisdom without inferring they have found all the answers. Their way of inquiry feels strikingly different from the immediacy of contemporary information culture. If something happens to us, we search for an explanation. Someone behaves strangely and we search for the label or diagnosis. We’re uncomfortable and look for someone who can tell us what it means–even a therapist. It’s tough to sit with something in a culture dominated by productivity. Even doing the ‘inner work’ can morph into a race toward being ‘healed’. But some questions benefit from being carried with gentle curiosity instead of force. We can carry them through a walk, a journal, books, conversations, or relationships. Maybe through years. And then:
Perhaps wisdom sometimes comes from staying with a question long enough for the question to change us.
This is not meant to create the impression that we should never reach conclusions on anything in life. We absolutely have to in so many situations. We need to discover and express boundaries. We make decisions daily–some smaller than others–that are required of us. We recognize harmful behavior. We choose partners and we leave situations that no longer serve us. We make determinations on what we value and how we align our lives as such. So the invitation is not perpetual indecision. It’s something much more mature:
Can conviction coexist with humility?
I can say, This relationship isn’t right for me any longer, without deciding I completely understand you. I can say, That behavior was hurtful to me, without knowing everything that created it or reducing the entire human being to that pattern. I can disagree with you without needing to make you foolish or wrong. I can establish a boundary without making you a villain. I can change my mind when new information arrives. I can say, That’s not for me, without judging your choices or preferences. I can say:
I don’t know.
Although we praise intellect and knowledge–and at times elevate those who speak with certainty about one subject or another–maybe not knowing everything is a precious attribute as well. Maybe mature understanding isn’t:
I know you.
Maybe it’s:
I know there is more of you than I can know.
That changes partnership. It changes parenting. It changes friendships, therapy, and family relationships. It even changes how we encounter strangers. Because if I believe there is more to you than what I currently see, I remain available. I don’t close myself off to a finalized, assumed version of you. I listen differently. I ask with curiosity and compassion. I become slower to reduce your behavior to my interpretation of it. I am humbled when I discover something about you that I hadn’t considered before and contradicts what my mind initially established as the truth. And I allow you to change.
Maybe love can’t be reduced to simply knowing someone. Maybe love is remaining willing to discover them.
We have only ever inhabited one human life from the inside: our own. I don't think I will ever know another human being entirely. Most of us are still discovering rooms within ourselves we didn't know existed. There are parts of myself I am still meeting. But perhaps complete understanding was never the requirement for love. Perhaps what we can offer one another is something quieter: presence. Curiosity. To listen when someone's experience doesn't resemble our own. The humility to remember that there is history beneath behavior and an entire inner world beyond what we can see.
We have never lived anyone's life but our own. And still, we keep reaching toward one another.
Perhaps we don't need certainty to do that.
Perhaps we only need enough openness to keep looking. Maybe that is precisely why we need each other.
What might become possible if you allowed the people in your life–including yourself–to remain a little unfinished?