When in Doubt, Make Belief

An OCD-Inspired Approach to Living with Uncertainty

Jeff Bell

• Publisher: New World Library
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781577319092
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Self Improvement

When in doubt, make belief. For author and news anchor Jeff Bell, these are words to live by. Literally. As someone who has spent much of his life battling severe obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), Bell has had to overcome crippling uncertainty few people can imagine. In this powerful follow-up to his critically acclaimed memoir, Rewind, Replay, Repeat, Bell expounds on the principles of applied belief that allowed him to make such a remarkable recovery from this "doubting disease" and the lessons he's learned while traveling the country talking about doubt. With the help of more than a dozen leading experts, Bell offers readers practical techniques for pushing through the discomfort of uncertainty — whether it stems from OCD or just everyday worries — and demonstrates how a shift from decisions based on fear and doubt to ones based on purpose and service can transform any life. Featuring interviews with Sylvia Boorstein, Patty Duke, Dan Millman, Leon Panetta, Tom Sullivan, and others

PART ONE

IN (THE SHADOW OF) DOUBT

CHAPTER ONE

With or Within Doubt?

Intellect-Based vs. Fear-Based Doubt

Dark and cold is the Shadow of Doubt,
with the winds of fear whipping about…

I can’t recall just when I wrote these words — the start of some unfinished poem that looped in my head for many years — but I do know exactly where I was: deep in the recesses of a frigid blackness I would come to associate with uncertainty — the chronic, crushing variety that those of us with OCD know all too well.

This place, this Shadow of Doubt, is hardly the exclusive territory of OCD sufferers. I know from the many stories I’ve collected over the years that doubt casts a shadow across all kinds of life challenges, from issues of physical and mental health to those posed by the simple rigors of everyday living. I think it’s safe to say that almost everyone has experienced, at some point or another, at least a glimpse of the darkness and a tinge of the chill that uncertainty can prompt.

That said, I also think that those of us who have battled severe OCD have an intimate knowledge of this shadow that few others can appreciate. We who have spent years lost in the darkness of doubt know what it’s like to be utterly consumed by uncertainty, stripped of even the most basic human sensibilities that would offer us a way back to the light. This is why I want to introduce you to the OCD world and the view from its darkest corners. With the help of a handful of others who share my challenges, and a number of the world’s top experts who make their livings studying and helping people like me, I hope to offer you a guided tour of the Shadow of Doubt, with an insider’s perspective and an eye toward the trapdoors and fun-house-like distortions awaiting us at every turn.

But first, let me offer a few words about a key distinction we need to make when talking about doubt and the roles that it plays in our lives.

HEALTHY VS. UNHEALTHY DOUBT

Doubt, as I’ve come to understand it, can be broken down into two very disparate, well-defined categories: doubt based on intellect and doubt based on fear. Unfortunately, the latter can often disguise itself as the former, making the distinctions between the two important to understand.

Intellect-Based Doubt

Intellect-based doubt is what some might call “healthy doubt.” It stems from our innate inquisitiveness and natural inclination to challenge the apparent, and it fuels our human curiosity and caution. It is based on reason, logic, and rational deduction. And it most definitely serves us well.

Consider some of the great scientists — Albert Einstein, Galileo, Copernicus, Charles Darwin; the great philosophers — Socrates, Plato, René Descartes, Saint Augustine; and the great revolutionaries — Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. All employed their intellect-based doubt to challenge the accepted but flawed paradigms of their time, and all changed the world in very positive ways.

And what about the great spiritual believers — those individuals who have shaped our religious and spiritual frameworks? They too, I would argue, were some of the greatest doubters who ever lived. Historian Jennifer Michael Hecht does a masterful job of making sense of this paradox in her bestseller Doubt: A History, tracing a religious and philosophical evolution and showing how each generation’s doubt becomes the next generation’s certainty.

Most of us are not actively seeking to challenge paradigms or change the world. We are, however, trying to navigate through life; and for that task, we too need to draw on our intellect-based doubt and act with it, again and again.

ON HEALTHY DOUBT

Jennifer Michael Hecht, PhD, author of Doubt:A History

Q: I’ve heard you say that history’s greatest doubters and greatest believers have a lot in common. Can you explain?

A: What I’m suggesting is that the great doubters are more like the great believers than the great mass of people. They’re both deeply entrenched in questions and thinking about issues. And so the people who are putting forward opposing positions are really on the same team in comparison to all the people who don’t care.

Q: These individuals you’ve profiled in Doubt — the great doubters — what is their common thread? What is the one thing you can point to in all these people?

A: Most of the great doubters constructively use their doubt. Most of them decide that — because of their doubt — they have to help other people. As in Plato’s parable of the cave, they’re always going back down into the cave to help drag more people up into the sun, even though the sun hurts. It occurs to me that this parable is very interesting for someone with OCD, because you have to drag a person up into the very painful light of the day, but once they get there they realize that that’s truth, not what they were playing in the dark of the cave. It’s a real beauty. It shows you that learning always hurts. If you’re not hurting, you’re not learning; you’re just adding some facts to your old picture of the world.

Q: What can the average person draw from your research into the historical role of healthy doubt?

A: The answer is joy. Joy. The welcoming into your whole self of a “not-knowing” is a profound opportunity. You get a profound sense of joy in trying to figure out the world and be creative and loving within this absurd universe. It creates in people a feeling of sudden freedom. So often people describe accepting doubt into their lives as [deciding] that they’re not going to close down into some new certainty. To use a metaphor I see all the time through history, it’s like suddenly being let out into a field to just run and be.

Fear-Based Doubt

I happen to be sitting in a Starbucks in New York City at this moment, watching a man outside my window contemplating the wisdom of crossing Park Avenue against the flashing “Don’t Walk” light, as the woman in front of him has just done. He takes a step off the curb, only to hesitate and return to the sidewalk. Clearly, his intellect-based doubt has left him questioning his ability to cross the four lanes of traffic without getting run over.

In this case, reason, logic, and rational deduction have served this pedestrian well. But what if my guy on the street corner (I’ll call him Fred) decides he should never cross Park Avenue? Maybe he recalls a recent news story about a pedestrian killed in a Manhattan crosswalk and worries that he’ll be next. He thinks back on the countless times he has crossed this street. He’s never been hit. He’s never seen anyone else get hit. But still Fred stands there, frozen by fear. What if he gets crushed by a speeding car? What if he’s killed? Who will take care of his family? A knot grows in his stomach. He feels his heart race.

Is this intellect-based doubt that’s keeping Fred on the corner?

No. This, I would venture to say, is an “unhealthy” form of doubt we all battle to some degree — namely, fear-based doubt, or uncertainty based not on reason, logic, and rational deduction but rather on emotional, black-and-white, and catastrophic thinking. Fred knows at some intellectual level that the odds of his getting hit crossing Park Avenue with the light are infinitesimal. Yet he is allowing his fear to suggest that because someone has been killed in this fashion, he could — and likely, would — be as well; and that prospect is unacceptable.

Fortunately, as I continue to ponder all this, the “Walk” light turns green for Fred, and he makes his way safely across Park Avenue and out of my view. From here, I imagine, he will continue using his intellect-based doubt to navigate his way across one Manhattan street after another to wherever it is he’s going.

ON HEALTHY VS. UNHEALTHY DOUBT

Stephen Hinshaw, PhD, Professor and Chair,
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley

Q: Why do we need intellect-based doubt?

A: Well, the world as we all know it isn’t the most predictable place. There is poverty; there is, as we now know today, huge economic uncertainty. There are problems that we all face in terms of knowing what the right thing to do is. So we had better have, for lack of a better term, rational doubt about what we should be doing with our lives, because there are so many decisions to be made every minute, every hour, every day.

Q: What about fear-based doubt: why does this form of doubt tend to impact us in unhealthy ways?

A: What happens is that such fear-based doubt kicks in lots of physiological responses. If I’m really engaging in this fear-based doubt, I am probably secreting cortisol, a stress hormone, throughout my body, because cortisol is one of the hormones that prepares us to fight or flee. It’s really good that that happens when an elephant or some other predator comes charging into the room; but what if we’re secreting cortisol and other stress hormones when we don’t need to be? We now know, from fifty years of research, that there are real physiological and psychological consequences of being in this stressed state. This sets the stage for diabetes. This sets the stage for coronary artery disease and stroke, especially if you have other underlying vulnerabilities. It is also clearly implicated in the affective disorder known as depression. In other words, if my body is not going to use the cortisol and stress hormones and take that energy surge, there’s nothing to do with it, and it’s going to take a physiological and psychological toll in terms of some of our leading killer diseases and in terms of things like depression.

Q: Is it human nature for us to try to rid ourselves of the discomfort that stems from doubt?

A: It is human nature, a lot of psychologists have said, to be in a state of equilibrium. We resist, at a bodily level, terribly uncomfortable feelings. And we’ll do almost anything to kind of right ourselves — to be out of this plagued mental feeling and out of this stress-hormone-laden physiological burden.

The Fuzzy Lines of the Shadow

Fred chose to cross the street, acting with doubt. Had he opted not to, he might have instead crossed a threshold from intellect-to fear-based doubt, from a New York street corner to the Shadow of Doubt. Maybe he would have stayed in the Shadow only for the duration of a traffic-light cycle, coming to his senses quickly and getting on with his life. But maybe he would have remained stuck within doubt, like so many of the people I’ll introduce you to in the pages ahead. And maybe Fred would have been none the wiser about why he made the choices he did.

The truth is, there are no gates at the edge of the Shadow, no clear signs to welcome us or let us know when we’re leaving. Guide-posts would be very helpful, indeed. But they don’t exist. Instead, most of us have to figure out for ourselves when we have slipped into the realm of fear-based doubt, and that’s often no easy task. As I warned, the same fear-based doubt that can distort our thinking is also quite adept at masquerading as intellect-based doubt.

So how then do we know when our doubts are healthy and deserve our attention? How do we know when they are fear-based and distorting our thinking? Allow me to take a stab at answering those questions with a series of other questions I’ve learned to ask.

• Does this doubt evoke far more anxiety than either...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Michael A. Jenike, MD
• Introduction
• Part One: In (The Shadow Of) Doubt
• Part Two: Making Belief (Ten Steps Out When Stuck In Doubt)
• Part Three: Chossing Greater Good
• Afterword
• The Ten Steps Out When Stuck in Doubt
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author