Can Confusion Be Good?

Confusion is not the enemy, but the way out of places your heart has outgrown.

There is a part of me that has an addiction to certainty, to figuring everything out.

If I could just understand that person’s reason, their intention or their motive, I could move on with my day.

If I could just figure out what I am doing with this project, with my career, with my life, then I could start living.

Last time I checked, certainty wasn’t a virtue, and figuring it out wasn’t one of the teachings of Buddha or Yeshua.

I am learning that more valuable than clarity is acceptance for my lack of clarity. Surrendering to another day where I don’t have all the answers allows me to move into the next day with more ease and love for the confused self.

But I hate confusion, and worse, I get so mad at myself when I am confused. It’s like a fog that settles into what would have otherwise been a beautiful day at the beach. I can’t see what is right in front of me, and I am often left with just myself when, before the fog, I had a beautiful view of the waves.

Having everything figured out is the greatest illusion of all.

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I was working with my therapist one recent morning on the ways I give my power away. She asked me several questions that stressed me out. Then I went blank.

Confusion rolled in.

I got angry at the confusion, for it was a cloud that blocked the answers I was sure I had. Answers I needed to move forward.

Then she asked: “What if confusion is not the enemy, Jocelyn? Think about it — confusion has helped you get out of some pretty terrible situations. Let’s rethink this resistance at your confusion.”

What?! No, no, no. Confusion can’t be my friend. It is a tool of “the enemy.”

Often, when I begin to address the psychological games of some people in my life when doing body and chair work with my therapist, my mind goes blank, and my ability to think leaves my body. I get confused. Then I panic.

I immediately go to: What is wrong with me? Am I broken? Am I dissociating? If so, what does that mean?

She has spent years teaching me to accept and love with compassion all parts of me, even my less desirable parts, even the part that used to abandon herself to belong, but this? Not confusion, not the parts of me that go blank and abandon me when I need answers.

She then said that my addiction to certainty, to figuring everything out, and I will add — my impatience to figure it out — is what allowed me to latch on to the false narratives of others when experiencing self-doubt and confusion. I rushed to their false certainty, their truth, when confusion was asking me to sit with myself until I found my truth.

Offering me a fresh perspective on confusion, she asked me: “What if that confusion is what keeps us unstuck in situations we no longer need to be stuck in?”

See, when I leaned on the clarity of things that no longer honored the woman I was becoming, whether that be a boss, a title, a paycheck, a parent or a partner, I stayed in unhealthy spaces. But when I started to feel confused and go blank, I started seeking understanding.

I started to seek a way out.

The confusion motivated me to move, to question, to do something about it. The confusion I felt was my internal compass spinning in circles, telling me I am not in a safe space. The confusion saved me.

Confusion can often feel like the absence of information. But what if it is the information we needed in that moment when chaos settled in and said: it is time to leave the rooms you have existed in.

I know that I have given my power away in a myriad of ways over my lifetime. As a woman, I have been trained to. Men have too in their ways, whether it was for a paycheck, a promotion, a woman they loved, or a parent who did not honor their sovereignty.

But one way I give my power away is in my need to figure things out, my need for certainty, so I give my power to the person, place or thing I am trying to figure out.

When we let go of the need for answers, especially answers from outside sources, we can return to ourselves.

I am learning that confusion is often the sign that our old understanding is dissolving and our heart is expanding to receive something truer.

I am learning that confusion is not failure. It is an invitation into the mystery of the heart-led life those of us are walking into once we have walked away from the structures that could no longer hold our big hearts.

I am talking to you, corporate. I am talking to you, fear-based and fragile entities.

Confusion is the fog that rises when we outgrow a former framework. It comes not to punish, but to unfasten us from what is too small, too rigid, too known, too familiar.

Certainty, like a biweekly paycheck, a town we’ve lived in for too long, or a misaligned partner, may feel safe, but certainty can also be a cage in disguise.

As the divine feminine frequency rises to heal imbalances on our planet, most of us will begin to experience more confusion as our growing intuition pulls us away from former rigid certainties.

To be divorced from gender, the yin and yang of the masculine and feminine frequencies offer different properties, yet both are needed in equal measure for balance on our planet, in our workplaces, homes and relationships.

The feminine is associated with the moon, intuition, receiving, mystery, thus darkness. But not darkness in the ways we think of as evil. Darkness like the primordial womb of creation. Masculine energies are associated with action, the sun, assertiveness, decisiveness, order, logic and clarity.

Too much of either is not good for a soul or a society. A balance is where all flourishes.

In this way, confusion is a feminine frequency. It is circular, nonlinear, full of paradox and contradiction, and not because it is broken, but because it is gestating wisdom in layers that cannot be rushed. It is the chaos before creation, the darkness before dawn.

It is the stillness before our individual becomings.

Confusion doesn’t mean we are lost; it means we are in the Great Mother’s womb of creation. We are in the liminal space of what once was true for us, but what we are growing out of, the goo inside the chrysalis.

In our lives, we undergo a million deaths and a million rebirths. Within the womb of each choice we make, we shed the skin of our former selves hundreds of times a day, every time we choose to outgrow and learn, to reach for truth and thrive in that discomfort.

When I feel confused now, I try not to demand clarity like a soldier. That is the old way of the hyper-masculine energies we as a collective are healing from.

May we approach confusion like a midwife? Sit with it. Speak to it. Let it reveal itself in whispers, not orders. After all, a woman doesn’t relax and receive, or birth a child, unless she feels safe, not by being yelled at or abused, as a flower doesn’t bloom by manipulation or force. So why do we do that to ourselves?

I find myself asking this question often these days, frustrated that I slip back into the old routine of forcing too often. But there is that frustration again. Where is the compassion for the human I am becoming over and over, every day? I stop the snowball before it rolls down the mountain, causing an avalanche.

I am learning to trust that the confusion will ripen into knowing, not the brittle knowing of facts, but the deep knowing of embodied truth.

Confusion is the crumbling of false certainty to make room for truth. Confusion humbles the ego, which is like the know-it-all voice that lives in your head. Confusion pushes that voice aside and settles into the soul for answers.

Confusion is not always the enemy. It can be our initiation. And if I can sit in it without shame, it can deliver deep wisdom needed for my becoming.

But there is another type of confusion that I have seen and felt in myself and others, and I do not wish to confuse the two. There is the confusion of those caught in the grip of addiction, or caught in trauma loops of unhealed pain from the past.

It is confusion that is not met with presence and humility but with control and fear. This confusion doesn’t lead to truth but avoids it.

When confusion is aligned with love, it becomes a teacher.

When it is aligned with ego, it becomes a trap.

So ask yourself: Does this confusion disorient you to reorient you? Is this confusion a bridge or a loop?

And when confusion rolls into your life like the fog rolling in off the ocean, may we sit with it for a moment and become curious. I want to invite it into my lap and ask it is trying to tell me, write it a letter, and imagine what it would write back.

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When I am confused, it can feel like I am stuck in a prison cell, and I am all alone. I want to get out of there, but I have no idea where the keys are. I know my heart holds the keys, but my logical self doesn’t let her have them yet.

Then it hit me as I journaled about it — the discomfort of not knowing how to escape that seeming prison of confusion is the very thing that will cause me to look for answers.

Then my creativity surfaces from deep within to help me find solutions once I am open and willing to seek a solution instead of looping in the problem, wearing that grey cloak of victimhood. If I lean into the confusion and find stillness in that prison cell, and hold it in my arms, it holds the answers.

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” I am reminded of this Joseph Campbell quote.

After I got out of the session with my therapist regarding the ways I contort myself in relationships with people who do not belong in my life, I sat with some things.

What if I accepted all the fear, all the confusion, but anchored myself in knowing that my feelings matter, no matter what those people think? My experiences matter. I matter. And true love would meet me where I am and become curious about my feelings and experiences, rather than being critical of them, I say still wearing my grey cloak of victimhood.

Jocelyn, you so quickly point to where other people in your life do this, but in what ways are you doing it to yourself?

Damn. There is that cave again.

I surrendered and walked into that dark and confusing place where everything echoed back to me in the bone-chilling silence. There, I met myself. I met with my intolerance for my confusion and told her I understand she just wants me to be safe in the land of certainty. I told her that her confusion was accepted here, and I appreciated the ways it moved me out of places my heart knew I no longer wanted to exist in.

Self-love softened me into a puddle, which allowed me to slip through the bars of that prison cell.

I softened further into the truth that I don’t have to have all the answers, I don’t have to be certain to be whole.

Confidence is not true when it relies on false certainty. I started to open my eyes to the ways I unknowingly look to confident people to guide me. But every corrupt leader and dictator this planet has seen was confident. Delusional, but confident.

Some may think confidence is a lack of self-doubt, but often the people who mistreat us are only confident because they are unwilling to look at the hard stuff and get really uncomfortable, to question themselves.

He is confident because he is unwilling to be confused.

He is confident in the illusion of his false self-image, the mask, so he is constantly questioning you and those who sit opposite of him. True confidence is not knowing everything and being OK with that. True confidence is not blindness to the self, but it is to have your eyes wide open in the dark, and to see with eyes of the ancient Greek blind seer, the prophetic self.

I imagine that true confidence says: I don’t have all the answers, but I am willing to sit in my confusion and am committed to finding the solution.

True confidence is trusting in myself to find clarity someday, while not rushing the parts of me that don’t know yet, and being confident in the version of me seeking, loving and journeying back to myself.

In this way, I can speak my truth without fear. I can stand by my confusion. I can even stand by the scared little girl who fears punishment for speaking her truth. I can be messy. I can fall apart and even drift into the void of darkness, and from that space of darkness, I can start to find my way out with my eyes and heart wide open.

This is what some may call the dark night of the soul. The spaces in our psyche when we are drifting into the void that is absent of everything we thought we knew, to be willing to stay there for a time, knowing we are not lost there forever, and that when we find our way out, we will have a new clarity rooted in a more solid foundation of love, not the narrative of the person, place or system that wants us to stay trapped in their imposed confusion.

Exploitative systems and people don’t want you to be confused about their confusing actions. They want you to be tidy with your emotions. This is why some may say in job interviews and dating apps that they desire a “confident woman,” because what they mean is that they want a woman who is not messy, who will not doubt their behavior, and who will not dare to seek answers within from the confusion they impose.

It is part of their game — they are confusing, but don’t you dare be confused. So you analyze their messages, you reach out to them for answers and certainty, when all they offer is more confusion. You want them to understand your confusion. You want them to see your pain. Please stop. They will never be able to give you that. Only you can.

Walk away. Find your own truth. Embrace your confusion, not theirs.

I hope I can continue to embrace and accept my confusion for the gift it has been. It has become a bridge back to my true self.

Confusion can be a door to exit the people, places and spaces your beautiful heart has outgrown.

Life is a constant undulation of clarity and confusion, expansion and contraction, yin and yang, light and dark. May we hold it all like the vast, beautiful worlds that we are.