How Do I Develop Self-Confidence While Choosing to Live With Uncertainty?
/Choosing to live with uncertainty can be challenging at times. It requires us to be vulnerable and to face our fears that we have long protected ourselves from. Of course, our fears are often what make us sensitive to the intrusive thoughts. Intrusions do not create obsessions, but it’s the doubt regarding the content of those thoughts that lead to further obsessional thinking and behaviour (O’Connor and Aardema 2012). Put simply, if we reduce the doubt, we would likely be better able to cope with our fears. However, that would require us to have better self-confidence in ourselves to cope with our fears. For example, if a person who feared social situations had the self-confidence to manage his fears of being rejected by a group, he would be better able to cope with the uncertainty and challenge his anxiety. If he were to participate in exposure and response prevention (ERP) with emphasis on living with uncertainty, we would want him to enter situations expecting to be judged by everyone. His goal would be to continue his life as if he were judged and not ever fully knowing if he were. This requires self-confidence in knowing that he can handle his feared situations, regardless of the outcome. What encompasses self-confidence is going to differ for everyone, however when it comes to OCD and anxiety treatment, I think it’s important to highlight how having faith in yourself and trusting your abilities can go a long way in your road to recovery.
Self-confidence is about developing by doing things despite our anxiety about it (Welford 2013). If you kept saying to yourself that it wasn’t worth completing your exposure homework or letting go of your rituals because it may trigger you to confront your fear, you will continue to hang on to the anxiety and suffer with OCD. What is important to acknowledge is that choosing to challenge your OCD will be difficult and it will require patience, support, and compassion. To do so, it’s important to recognize inner self-dialogue that may be reducing your self-confidence throughout your recovery. Your inner dialogue may be a reflection of how you may have motivated yourself in the past. If how you motivate yourself is through criticism, that may only make treatment more difficult and further impair your abilities to build self-confidence throughout this process. Although you may have completed exposures in the past through using self-criticism as a motivator- you may be further increasing the anxiety by activating systems within the body that react to threats. In the future, when you experience the anxiety brought on by your criticism, it will spur additional anxiety through what we call state-dependent learning. In turn, when you attempt to stay with an anxiety-provoking situation when completing an exposure and you motivate yourself to do so through self-criticism, you will have two competing situations bringing on anxiety.
We want your inner self-dialogue to match your smaller goals. If your goal is to complete exposures then you will want to acknowledge the difficulty, but provide self-support that is encouraging and empathetic. For instance, you may say statements such as
‘this may be difficult, so perhaps I can practice by trying with exposures that are not so overwhelming.’ As you continue to change your dialogue from critical to supportive, it will be easier for you to tackle difficult situations that you are confronted with during your recovery.
Thoughts can certainly influence how we feel, but our feelings about ourselves can also influence how we react in certain situations. If we feel inadequate and incapable of performing an exposure, we’ll likely continue to see exposure situations as threatening and difficult. Adopting a more flexible way of thinking may be important for your development as a lifelong learner. Approaching therapy and exposure situations with openness, curiosity and as a welcome challenge can help boost your confidence and belief in your abilities. The helpful inner dialogue could include, it’s perfectly normal to feel anxious, I am learning and it will take time for me to get a hang of this. To help build confidence, attempt exposures that are easier and more manageable.
Developing a compassionate mindset requires pushing ourselves through self-encouragement and self-support at the appropriate times (Welford 2013). During recovery, adopting a compassionate mindset is needed when attempting to resist compulsions or when completing an exposure. Self-compassion is about recognizing when we are struggling and making a commitment to do what we can to improve in a step-by-step manner (Welford 2013) There are times where you may feel high levels of anxiety or anger, but it’s the process of remaining committed despite the difficulty that is imperative to developing a compassionate mindset.
You may choose words that help you stay motivated to the task and encourage yourself as you would if it was a friend or colleague that are looking for support in a similar situation. I recall a seminar presented by Kymberly Quinlin and the International OCD Foundation’s annual conference. She often asks her patients to speak to themselves as they would a little chick that is about to hatch out of a little egg (Tirch, Quinlan, and Nicely 2020).
We are programmed biologically to detect threats in our environment. Individuals with OCD may see threats when triggered by their intrusive thoughts or by situations that may be anxiety-provoking. The threat system is activated and will process information by focusing on the negatives of the situation that confirm danger and overrules positive feelings or events that discredit safety. Of course, all situations carry an inherent risk, but it’s still important to recognize how your mind is processing situations that you're avoiding or about to challenge through exposure. The threat system can bring on feelings of shame, failure, and embarrassment. Shame undermines our self-confidence. Shame also brings on self-criticism and further degrades our self-esteem. The critical voice that you talk to yourself may seem to be motivating at times, but in fact, it only continues to fracture your self-concept. Thinking about our thinking becomes very important in challenging these negative feelings.
The following questions may help you challenge your self-critic (Welford 2013):
What are your greatest fears about giving up your self-criticism?
What do you think might happen if you let it go?
If your self-critic does have your best interests at heart, is it going about things the right way?
Choosing a Guide to Building Self-Confidence
Here is a passage from the text, The Power of Self-Compassion, by Welford 2013:
“You have a child for whom you care greatly. When you enroll your child at school, there are two classes for her age group, so you have a choice between two teachers. You visit one class and the first teacher tells you she is going to help the children improve by acting quickly to correct their mistakes. This will result in, for example, having something taken away from them or having them sit at the front of the class so that they learn not to make the same mistake twice. While the teacher is relaying this information to you, a child in the class spills a drink across the table and on the floor. Immediately the teacher notices and shouts at her in a stern voice to be more careful, telling her to clean up the mess she has made and never to be so clumsy again. To reinforce this message, the child is given twenty lines to write out. The teacher whispers in your ear: “If they learn that bad things happen after mistakes, they quickly learn not to make them.”
On leaving, you go straight to the other class. The second teacher tells you that he feels it is very important for children to profit by their mistakes, be open about them and curious about how they came about, and learn how they can prevent them in the future. As you are speaking, a child’s knife and fork clatter to the floor (both visits were occurring at lunchtime!). The second teacher quickly approaches the child, squats down next to him, and in a gentle and inquisitive voice says, “What happened?” “I was putting my hand up for second helpings, and my elbow caught my knife, and that caught my fork, and…” “John, given that this happened, what do you need to remember the next time you want to put your hand up for seconds?” And so the conversation between child and teacher continues for a little while in this gentle manner.
Which teacher would you choose for your child?”
Building self-confidence requires learning how to become a good friend to ourselves, this means neither too critical nor passive (Welford 2013). Changing your self dialogue to reflect that of the ‘second teacher’ can be helpful in your recovery. Encouraging yourself, doesn’t mean providing yourself with reassurance. Encouragement could mean reminding yourself about small accomplishments you have made in therapy, celebrating progress, reminding yourself that your efforts will pay off, staying centered in your present moment reality, believing that you can, praising the confidence you do have, and acknowledging that every situation is an opportunity to grow.
Part of developing self-confidence is learning how to be compassionate with yourself. One attribute that is important to do so is considering care for your well-being. This is an important concept that requires you to commit and motivate yourself to achieve greater health. Also essential to self-confidence growth is recognizing the importance of becoming attuned to your sensitivity to distress and noticing when you are struggling and meeting the experience with openness and willingness. This is part of the process of challenging your OCD. The process becomes an ongoing experience of ups and downs, but with perseverance, a brighter path will follow. Sympathy requires you to meet these experiences with warmth: This is hard, and it’s understandable that I will struggle in this way (Welford 2013).
Meeting your distress with empathy and nonjudgment can go a long way in your recovery. This may mean checking in with yourself to see what you need in relation to the difficulties you experience. This may mean seeking extra support from a friend providing yourself with positive praise or a reward. Wilfred argues, “In relation to your self-confidence, being able to tolerate distress involves acknowledging the emotions you feel and giving them space. It may involve resisting the urge to avoid a problem and lead you to feel the fear and do it anyway.” Changing our relationship to discomfort, pain, and difficulty can help you during your recovery. When it comes to challenging our relationship with pain, we need to recognize how it is influenced by resistance. Here is a simple formula I like to refer to: Pain x Resistance = Suffering. Germer’s text, the Guide to self-compassion notes, “Pain is the unavoidable discomfort that comes into our lives. Resistance refers to any effort to ward off pain, such as tensing the body or ruminating about how to make the pain go away. Suffering is what results when we resist pain. Suffering is the physical and emotional tension that we add to our pain, layer upon layer. How we relate to pain determines how much we’ll suffer. (Germer 2016)” Germer argues that the more we ruminate about our pain, the more we suffer- which is optional. The suffering only further brings on blame on ourselves and further brings on feelings of being defective. The purpose of developing self-confidence is to learn to challenge your anxiety from a position of strength. Germer adds, we must learn to distinguish between ‘safety’ and ‘discomfort. Feeling ‘vulnerable’ or ‘uncomfortable’ doesn’t necessarily mean your unsafe (Germer 2016).
Having strength and courage is the most important part of building self-confidence. Imagining how you would cope with a feared situation with courage and strength are the building blocks that will help you manage to live with uncertainty. Part of this process will be examining how you may have learned to be helpless in situations that resemble your fears. This is going to require unlearning. Learned helplessness refers to a mental state where your unable or unwilling to solve a problem even though there are viable solutions. You may have learned that your fears are unsolvable from others, what you have seen in the media, or what you imagine the situation to look like with no solutions. Courage and strength are required to help teach us to continue to try to help ourselves because we are capable of it. Learned helplessness blinds us to choices that could help us confront our feared situations.
Exercise:
Think of 3 different situations that were considered challenging that you met with strength, determination, and acceptance.
Our imagination is creative. Creative enough to scare us completely about challenging our fears. But, it’s doing its job. Throughout your time with OCD and anxiety, you have reinforced a message that you couldn’t handle the fear through avoidance and performing safety behaviours. The message only created a scarier image of what life could look like if you were confronted by your fears. Of course, this only reinforced the learned helplessness that you imagine would happen if you were truly confronted with your feared situation- incapable and disempowered. Your imagination only makes it more difficult to see what options are available to help yourself in the situation, because it’s been tainted with catastrophe. As you continue to get immersed into your imagination, your senses become fused with your imaginative story and you become immersed into the story. Strength comes with perseverance and making choices. Even if your imagination paints a horrid picture, you will have to continue despite not knowing what will happen. We only have our educated guesses. We may have to rely on our educated guesses on how we could cope- but again, choosing to cope is a choice that challenges helplessness.
O'Connor, K., & Aardema, F. (2012). Clinician's handbook for obsessive compulsive disorder: Inference-based therapy. Wiley-Blackwell.
Welford, M. (2013). The power of self-compassion: Using compassion-focused therapy to end self-criticism and build self-confidence. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
Germer, P. D. C. K., Thorne, S. R., & Hoopla digital. (2016). The mindful path to self-compassion. United States: Tantor Audio.
Trich, Quinlan, and Nicely (2020). Self Compassion and Courage: An Introduction to Compassion Focused Therapy for Anxiety and Shame. IOCDF Conference 2020.