Why Doesn’t Reassurance Work?

My father died of a heart attack at fifty-two. I was nineteen, and I was the one who rang his office when he did not come home.

Ravi is forty-nine. He has had every test and they are all clear. He tells me so, kindly, each time. I believe him. And when he does not pick up his phone, I am back in that corridor within a minute. He is getting tired of saying it. Why can I not simply know what I know?

Chitra, you do know it. I think the trouble is that you are asking a sentence to do a job that sentences are bad at.

The two lines

You will have seen the drawing. There are two horizontal lines of the same length. One ends in arrowheads pointing outward and the other in arrowheads pointing in. One looks plainly longer.

Take a ruler to them. They are equal. Put the ruler down and look again. One still looks longer.

Andy Clark discusses this illusion in Surfing Uncertainty, his book on the predicting brain, and what interests him is that second look. You have measured, and you are not in any doubt. The knowledge makes no difference to what you see.

Why agreeing is not enough

His explanation is about how the seeing was built. On the account he defends, perception rests on expectations laid down over a very long run of experience. A statement you accept, such as “the lines are equal”, does not reach down into all of that. In his words, it cannot “overturn the long-term learning of the system”.

He notes two exceptions, and both matter for you.

The first is that such learning can be altered by what he calls extensive re-training. That means experience and a great deal of it.

The second is that words do change what we perceive when the evidence itself is ambiguous. A sentence can tip an unclear scene one way or the other. It cannot overrule a clear one.

What a corridor teaches

Clark is writing about lines on a page. He says nothing of bereavement, so I am stretching his point, and you should weigh it as a stretch.

At nineteen, one unanswered telephone taught you something in a single night that most people never have to learn. It was learnt with the whole body. “The tests are clear” is a true sentence, and it arrives at a different level. Ravi is putting a ruler to the lines. You agree with the ruler. The lines go on looking unequal.

That does not mean you distrust him. It also does not mean he is failing to convince you. Convincing is not what is needed.

A light that is set too fine

Clark borrows an image from a group of researchers. Imagine a car whose temperature warning light is over-sensitive and flashes at the slightest change. The garage finds nothing. The light keeps flashing. To you, doubting the garage begins to seem reasonable. To a passenger who has never seen the light, you seem a little unhinged.

He uses the image for conditions far more serious than a fear like yours, and I am borrowing only the picture. What it captures is how lonely an alarm can be. Ravi cannot see your light.

What re-trains

If Clark is right, two things might help where reassurance has not.

One is repetition of a plain kind. An unanswered phone, followed an hour later by Ravi walking in with the vegetables. Then again, and again. Each ordinary ending is a small piece of new experience, and you could start counting them.

The other is to make the moment less ambiguous. A silent phone can mean anything. A message that says “in a meeting until six” means one thing. That is not reassurance. It is better evidence.

For Ravi, there may be relief in giving up the argument. He does not have to win it. He could say, “The alarm went off. I am here.”

A fear that began with a sudden death at nineteen may be carrying grief that never had its turn. If it is taking up much of your day, a counsellor who works with bereavement would be a good person to see.