How to understand your need for certainty

The need for certainty is a common response to childhood trauma. When you grow up in a dysfunctional home, you find safety in knowing and controlling the outcome.

The need for certainty is a symptom of a brain that’s been wired for survival rather than healthy living. This starts early in childhood when you sense a lack of support from the adults around you.

Children in healthy homes feel supported in a way that allows them to explore the world around them without fear. With that home base to return to, they approach life with a spirit of curiosity and playfulness.

Children from dysfunctional homes, however, sense that their parents are not there for them. They develop a fearful inner child obsessed with keeping them safe because no one else will.

This prevents the playful exploration of a healthy child who is open to see where things go. Your inner child wants to know how things are going to end up so it can brace itself. It does not trust that it can deal with unknown outcomes and experiences these as a dangerous threat.

Certainty & self-sabotage

It’s easy to see how the need for certainty creates self-sabotage such as procrastination. You have a deep need to know how things will turn out in order to feel safe. So, putting things off helps you avoid facing the unknown.

Things won’t turn out badly if you never get to the finish line. You can’t fail when you never complete the task.

If you were ignored or overly-criticized as a child, you strive for perfection as a path to acceptance. Perfectionism is the enemy of completion and contributes to procrastination as well.

The need for certainty may even contribute to negative thinking. It feels safer to expect the worst than deal with the unknown.

You may have got in trouble without knowing why or experienced constant disappointment. Controlling the outcome feels like protection from abuse and crippling shame (because you blamed yourself for a disappointing outcome).

A matter of life & death

Everyone has a need for certainty to a degree. However, for the childhood trauma survivor it feels like life or death.

That’s because it developed in childhood as a response to the trauma of feeling abandoned by your caregivers. It comes out of a primal need to keep yourself safe and alive.

So, if you criticize yourself for your need to control the outcome, go easy. That’s a natural response to pain too great for a child to bear.

Imagine being a little child and feeling like no one had your back. You had to take care of yourself even though you were too young to know how.

That child deserves compassion, not criticism, and it still lives inside you. Thank it for trying to care for you with its limited resources. Reassure it that you’re the adult now and can withstand the results of an uncertain outcome.

You will live if things don’t go your way, and celebrate if they do. You can use your adult skills and resources to navigate many different outcomes in ways you couldn’t as a child.

Begin to envision how you want things to turn out rather than defending against a negative outcome. You have been conditioned to find safety in expecting the worst, but it robs you of the joy of living.

Certainty & trauma response

It feels difficult or impossible to talk yourself out of fear of uncertainty because it lives in your body. That’s where trauma gets stored.

Instead of positive self-talk, try acknowledging the fear in your body, even placing a hand over that part. Say something like “I see you, fear, and you have a right to be here.”

That inner part is trying to prevent you from danger and needs your reassurance. Let it know that you appreciate what it’s doing for you but it doesn’t have to protect you anymore.

Perhaps you could give it a new job like looking for ways to have fun. Assign it a task of finding a new hobby or outlet, so it won’t feel rejected.

next steps

Now, you know the deep-seated reasons for your fear of uncertainty and how to soothe your trauma responses.

I’ve written a whole book on healing self-sabotage from childhood trauma. You can get it here: It’s Not Your Fault: The Subsconscious Reasons We Self-Sabotage and How to Stop.