For more than two years I worked with a small international team of researchers on a deceptively simple problem: how to measure the depth of a person’s immediate experience as they speak. That depth turns out to be one of the better predictors we have of whether psychotherapy will actually help someone. The instrument that has measured it for decades is intricate and unwieldy, so we set out to build a leaner version, one a clinician or a researcher could hold in mind during an actual session. The new scale is finished now and headed for publication, and in the final stages of refining it I was struck again by this: How much new understanding opens up the moment we stop being sure.

The lowest rung is certainty

The scale grew out of a question asked at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s, by Eugene Gendlin and his colleagues Marjorie Klein, Philippa Mathieu and Donald Kiesler. Why do some therapy clients change while others, in for the same length of time and making the same apparent effort, do not? Their answer was disarmingly concrete. The difference shows up in how a person speaks, so that clients who change are, quite literally, speaking from a different place than those who stay the same. You might find what predicted success surprising: successful clients speak in halting, uncertain phrases that often change as they check back with something internally sensed, a direct and fluid lived experience.

Our updated version (EXP-II) enables us to sort any spoken statement into one of four levels. At the first and lowest level, a person speaks with a certainty that precludes questioning. Events and feelings are reported as settled facts. “He is tense all the time.” “What she said made me angry.” There is no room to maneuver in such sentences, nothing the speaker is turning over or wondering about, because the world has already been named and the naming has closed it.

The smallest, most consequential shift

The second level is a small move with large consequences: the turn from knowing to not-knowing. “I wonder where my anger at my mother actually comes from.” The words are almost identical to the first-level version, but the stance behind them has changed entirely. The speaker has loosened their grip on the answer and grown curious about their own experience, and this is the doorway through which everything else passes.

At the third level, a person begins to feel for something that words do not yet fit. Gendlin called this a direct reference, the felt sense of a meaning that is present in the body before it can be put into words. You can often hear it in the pauses, in the way a speaker checks a word against some inner sense of whether it is right. “It is not really anger I feel toward my mother. It is more like a heaviness, something dense in my chest.”

The fourth level is what happens when a person stays with that felt sense long enough that it begins to move. The heaviness becomes, as the speaker keeps attending to it, “a vast, helpless darkness, not exactly helplessness, more like trying to mop up the ocean.” Then, often with a small shock of recognition, something turns. “Of course. She had such a hard childhood, and I have been trying to take care of her my whole life, and I cannot. It is like mopping up the ocean.” That last shift, when the felt sense gives way and a new understanding arrives that logic alone could never have reached, is considered the highest level of experiencing, a process that engenders what Gendlin called a felt shift. It can bring about a profound new perspective on the situation. It is also, not coincidentally, much of what therapy is for.

What strikes me every time I sit with this scale is that certainty is the floor. It is the one level from which nothing new can come.

Dreams ask the same of us

Dreams make this requirement even more plainly than the consulting room does. A dream will not yield its meaning to a confident interpreter. The fastest way to learn nothing from a dream is to be sure you already know what it means, to reach for a dream dictionary, or to decide that the snake or the falling or the visiting dead must stand for one fixed thing. In the tradition I work in, imposing a meaning on someone’s dream is considered not just unhelpful but a kind of trespass, because meaning emerges from the dreamer, slowly, experientially, or it does not emerge at all.

I have witnessed this shift hundreds of times while working with dreamers, or my own dreams. A nightmare that has repeated for years will begin to change the moment the dreamer re-enters it with open curiosity rather than dread. When I guide someone to locate the supportive elements already present in a frightening dream and to stay with them, the dream itself often shifts. Terrifying figures soften, a dangerous fall lands gently, the whole scene reorganizes into something the dreamer could not have scripted in advance. The dream responds to the attitude we bring it, and the attitude that opens us to new understandings is not mastery but a willingness to sit with uncertainty.

A discipline of not-knowing

None of this is an argument against knowledge. There are moments when certainty is exactly what is needed, when a clear diagnosis opens the door to the right help, or when naming something plainly is itself a relief. I am not romanticizing confusion, and I am wary of the opposite excess, the swimmy posture that finds everything mysterious and refuses to commit to anything at all. My point is narrower and, I think, more useful. Certainty is a fine place to arrive at and a poor place to live from.

When being sure becomes a permanent residence, when we are certain about other people, about our own feelings, about what a dream or a symptom or a difficult day must mean, we lose the very capacity that lets us learn and change. There is a reason, I suspect, that we have a word for the way the confident mind talks itself out of reality. We call it rationalization. The certainty that feels like clarity is often the very thing holding a new understanding at bay.

The scale we built measures four levels, but it really points to a single movement, the small, courageous act of loosening our grip on what we already know. Whether we are sitting with a client, or with a dream, or simply with the ordinary fog of a hard week, the most fertile thing we can say is also the simplest. I am not sure yet. Let me stay with this a little longer.

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Where in your own life has staying with not-knowing opened something that certainty had kept closed? For a fuller treatment of dreams as living, responsive processes, see my book, A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy: Demystifying Dreamwork (Routledge, 2025).

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