Curiosity Over Certainty

The final piece from this collection on the conversation with the guys on the mountain is about curiosity.

Here's something I tell almost every client who sits across from me, and it's become something close to a personal creed at this point: be wildly curious. What does this mean exactly you ask? This is the kind of curious that makes you ask a follow up question instead of assuming you already know the answer. The kind that makes you turn toward your own mind with genuine interest instead of judgment. I think this one orientation, more than almost anything else I've learned in this field, is what separates people who stay stuck from people who keep growing.

I didn't always practice this as intentionally as I do now. It really clicked for me when I started watching our political divide widen. I watched family members and friends plant themselves in opposite camps, so sure of their own side and so quick to write off the other without ever really asking why someone believed what they believed. Nobody was asking anymore. Everybody was just defending. Watching curiosity disappear from those conversations, and watching relationships strain because of it, is in part what pushed me to start practicing wild curiosity everywhere in my own life, not just in the therapy room.

Curiosity About Your Own Brain

Most of us walk around with a running narrator in our heads that we've never questioned. This part tells us we're lazy, or too sensitive, or just "like this." We take this parts word for it. We rarely stop to ask why it's saying what it's saying, or whether it's even telling the truth. When a client tells me they shut down every time their partner brings up an issue in their relationship, I'm not interested in labeling that a flaw. I'm interested in the story underneath it and how did this part come to be? What did shutting down protect you from? What part of you comes forward and why does Self want to hide. When did this part start working? Those questions almost always lead somewhere real, usually somewhere from childhood, somewhere that made complete sense at the time but may need some updating.

Curiosity about your own brain sounds like this:

Instead of "I always ruin things," try "I wonder what I'm afraid will happen if I don't."

Instead of "I'm just an angry person," try "I wonder what's underneath this anger, because anger is rarely the whole story."

Instead of "I don't know why I do that," try "Let me actually find out why I do that."

This shift, from judgment to curiosity, is one of the most reliable tools I know for reducing shame. And shame, especially for a lot of the men I work with, is often the real thing blocking connection in the first place. You can't be curious and ashamed at the same time. They don't coexist well. So every time you choose curiosity about your own mind, you're also loosening shame's grip, even if just a little.

Curiosity About the People You Love

This is where it gets even more interesting to me, because I think we lose curiosity about the people closest to us faster than anyone else. We stop asking our friends real questions because we assume we already know the answers. We stop asking our partners how they're actually doing because we think we've heard it all before.

I see this constantly in couples work. Partners who've been together for years, who can finish each other's sentences, who have quietly stopped being curious about each other. They've replaced questions with assumptions. "She always does this because she's controlling." "He never listens because he doesn't care." These aren't observations. They're stories we've stopped checking.

The friendships and relationships that hold up over decades are almost always the ones where both people kept asking each other questions. Not just "how was your day," but the real ones. What are you afraid of right now? What's something you've been thinking about that you haven't said out loud? What do you need from me that I might not be giving you?

Try this the next time you're with a close friend or your partner: ask one question you're pretty sure you already know the answer to, and actually listen like you don't know the answer because the reality is, you don’t. Even when you're not wrong, something happens in that moment of being genuinely asked. People feel it. It's one of the simplest ways I know to make someone feel seen. It can be as simple as "how are you feeling really?" A word to the wise on this, often people are uncomfortable by expressing themselves so they may still say something like "I’m good, everything is good." I remember asking a friend this after playing a game called We're Not Really Strangers and he got pretty uncomfortable. He said he didn't want to answer not only because he didn't feel like people cared but because he didn't know the answer himself. Pausing and really thinking about it caused a level of vulnerability that he wasn't ready for which is okay. But at least I gave him the space to share and if not then, later. And this only deepened our friendship.

Why This Matters More Than It Sounds Like It Should

Curiosity keeps you soft in places where certainty tends to make you hard. It keeps a marriage alive after the tenth year. It keeps a friendship honest after the twentieth reunion. It keeps your own self understanding evolving instead of calcifying into a story you told about yourself at twelve or twenty two and never revisited.

I think a lot of the loneliness I wrote about in my last post, and a lot of the disconnection I see in this work every single day, comes down to a quiet loss of curiosity. We stop asking. We start assuming. And assumptions, even accurate ones, don't build closeness the way questions do.

So if you take one thing from this post, let it be this. Get curious about your own mind before you judge it. Get curious about the people you love before you decide you already understand them. Always be wildly curious. It has changed how I practice, how I show up in my own relationships, and honestly, how I move through the world.

One piece of feedback I hear from clients more than almost anything else is that I've asked them questions no friend or previous therapist ever has. I don't say that to brag. I say it because I think it comes directly from this practice of staying wildly curious. When you actually stay curious instead of assuming you already know someone's story, you end up asking things other people never thought to ask.

If you're finding yourself stuck in old patterns, whether in your relationship with yourself or with the people closest to you, therapy can be a place to get curious together. Paradigm Psychology offers telehealth across California, Washington, and PSYPACT states. We'd be glad to help you get curious. Reach out to Paradigm Psychology and let's start a conversation. Sometimes the first step toward feeling better is simply getting curious together.

Written by Kayla Bunderson, Psy.D. Dr. Kayla Bunderson is a clinical psychologist specializing in trauma and men's mental health.