Therapists are drawn to this work out of a deep desire to help, to understand, to offer something meaningful. But in that same drive, we often get lost—chasing after the next best modality, perfecting our case conceptualizations, or seeking validation that we are good therapists. We want to get it right, to find the model that will best hold the complexities of human suffering, to neatly tie up our clients’ experiences in a way that makes sense to us (and, if we’re honest, reassures us that we’re doing a good job). But this very pursuit can take us further away from what we are actually here to do: to accompany our clients in their unfolding, uncertain, and ultimately incomplete lives.

At its core, our discomfort with being an incomplete therapist is a fear response. The brain’s limbic system, particularly the amygdala, is wired to seek safety through certainty and coherence (LeDoux, 2015). When we feel uncertain—about a case, about a client’s progress, about our own competence in session—our nervous system reacts as if we are under threat. We seek ways to manage this discomfort: more training, more models, more frameworks to help us make sense of what feels ambiguous or out of control.

This is not inherently bad; learning and growing as therapists is essential. But when our pursuit of mastery becomes a compulsion—driven more by fear of inadequacy than by genuine curiosity—we lose the ability to be present. Instead of experiencing our clients, we filter them through our frameworks. We impose coherence onto their stories rather than sitting with their contradictions. We try to lead them somewhere, instead of standing beside them in the uncertainty.

The ability to tolerate ambiguity and emotional discomfort is key to psychological flexibility and modeling security in the face of an ever-changing reality. The prefrontal cortex, which regulates emotional responses, can either help us sit with discomfort or, when overwhelmed, drive us toward compulsive certainty-seeking behaviors (Shackman et al., 2011). This is why therapists (like clients) can find themselves in fight-or-flight patterns—grasping at certainty in an effort to calm our own anxieties about not knowing enough, not being enough.

The world itself is not a finished project. It is shifting, in flux, always becoming something else. The philosopher Alan Watts put it simply: “Reality, on reality’s terms, is that there is no fixed reality to grasp” (Watts, 1951). Yet as therapists, we often resist this truth. We try to arrive somewhere—some level of expertise or mastery that will finally make us feel secure. But if the world itself is incomplete, how could we ever be anything but?

Accepting our incompleteness does not mean giving up on growth. It means shifting from a perfectionistic drive for mastery to an embodied practice of presence. It means tolerating our own not-knowing so that we can sit with a client in theirs. It means relinquishing the illusion that we can (or should) fully understand another person.

Paradoxically, it is in embracing our incompleteness that we become most available to our clients. Trying to “be a good therapist” can create distance; it turns the client into an object to be understood rather than a person to be met. Holding too tightly to our theories, models, or expertise can prevent us from feeling our clients—just like gripping a soft blanket too tightly means we never actually experience its texture.

What Clients Need: A Therapist Who Can Sit in the Unknown

So much of what clients struggle with—anxiety, obsessive rumination, compulsive behaviors—is rooted in an intolerance of uncertainty (Carleton, 2016). They seek therapy not for quick answers, but for help in learning how to live without them. When we, as therapists, anxiously chase after coherence—forcing meaning, offering advice too quickly, or conceptualizing too rigidly—we are subtly reinforcing the very patterns of avoidance that clients are trying to unlearn.

Therapy at its best is not about providing certainty but about cultivating the capacity to sit with uncertainty. This is, at its core, a neurobiological process: when clients experience co-regulation with a therapist who is not urgently trying to fix or interpret them, their nervous system learns that it is safe to simply be (Porges, 2011). This kind of presence—one that does not push for resolution, that does not demand completeness—is what ultimately helps clients let go of their own neurotic compulsions for control.

The true endpoint of our work is not mastery, but openness. It is not perfecting our skills, but deepening our ability to be with others in all their unfinished, unresolved humanness. To be an incomplete therapist is not a flaw but a necessity—because completeness would mean distance, and distance would mean missing the very thing we are here for: the real, raw, unfiltered presence with another human being.

So perhaps the invitation is this: to let go of the urge to be a good therapist, to make perfect sense of our clients, to arrive at some final destination of expertise. Instead, we can practice staying open, staying uncertain, staying right here. Because in the end, it is not knowing our clients that heals them—it is simply being with them, in all the unknowns, together.