Doubt is a universal human experience.
Most people have doubts about their abilities, their future, their relationships, and about God.
Doubt gets a negative connotation, but it can actually be very constructive.
Comfort zones rarely build anything. It’s only in the discomfort of doubt – self-doubt or doubts about others – where we can effectively grow.
The key to healthy doubt is to understand its source.
Dr. Gary Habermas, a well known religious researcher and professor, identifies three types of doubt:
- Factual (lack of information)
- Emotional (rooted in pain)
- Volitional (unwillingness to trust)
What’s interesting is, most doubts aren’t factual or volitional – they’re emotional.
Distrust and doubt stems from the heart, not the mind, and thus isn’t solved by information alone.
This is why a husband who doesn’t trust his wife is never satisfied with knowing where his wife is or what she’s doing at all times. He’ll always wonder, and he’ll always want more information.
It’s because the issue isn’t about information. It’s about the emotional damage of the person who’s unwilling to trust.
Emotional doubt arises when feelings overshadow facts, leading to “what if” questions without evidence.
Anxious or obsessive thinking often fuels emotional doubts and distrustful thinking.
This is what causes people to doubt their salvation or question God’s goodness even though they have the facts that reinforce those beliefs.
There will always be facts to the contrary of what you believe. The question isn’t which side has more facts. The question is, which side are you willing to trust?
To overcome emotional doubt, the brain has to be taught how to process information differently.
For example, instead of running with the first conclusion your mind produces, ask yourself why there’s resistance to trust. Does the idea of trusting hurt? If so, that’s a red flag that there’s pain beneath the surface to be dealt with.
It’s amazing what processing information from a neutral perspective can do. If you can train your brain to simply be an observer of facts, then the pain of trusting can be dealt with separately from the act of choosing a path.
You control your doubts and how you process them.
It isn’t the events in our lives that cause trauma – it’s our interpretation of events and our reaction to those events that causes the most impact.
Faith in anyone or anything should always be grounded in facts. Trust should, in essence, be a conscious decision to stop chasing alternate conclusions and lean on the facts you have.
It’s like the old chair that looks sturdy enough to hold your weight. You can’t know until you release your weight and try it.
In the same way, you can train the habit of faith by learning enough and letting go.
Self-confidence and relationships work the same way. Kick the tires, see if you think you can trust it, then let go and try it. If it holds weight, release more and see if it holds. Continue until trust is built.
You’ll never out-learn distrust and doubt. The only way forward is to learn enough and let go.