I hear it in my practice all the time: “I want to be more confident.” What does this really mean? When I probe, clients usually express something along the lines of not caring what people think about them, and being able to handle anything that happens to them.

These ideas get bandied about in our culture like slogans, but I find they ring hollow. They seem like obsolete echoes of the American individualist ideal, which deprive us of our humanity. What does that life really look like? How can you have meaningful relationships if you don’t care how anyone feels toward you? I could name some people in high places who operate that way, and they’re not figures I want to emulate.

Being able to “handle” anything—this is about control. People don’t want to feel hijacked by their own emotions. They want to face every challenge in life unfazed. Is this, too, desirable? To move through the world feeling nothing, regardless of what happens to us? Most folks would keep only the good feelings and experiences, but how can you have yin without yang? What is joy without pain, or pride without fear?

The Joy Junkies

Avoiding emotional pain has become the American way of life. Much of my work is about shepherding people through their own feelings, helping them accept the multitudes of life’s experiences, and learn that they can live through those experiences and grow. I’d rather be resilient than unflappable, because when I feel things, it reminds me I’m human.

In our age, when so many corporate and political forces seem keen to turn us into robots, it is rebellious just to be human, to feel things. This means defying the temptation to “feel” good all the time by filling our minds and bodies with stimuli off screens and grocery shelves, because that’s not feeling; it’s numbing.

When we treat anxiety in therapy, we flesh out the details of the fear with a constant refrain of, “And then what?” What will actually happen if this person rejects you, or you miss your deadline, or you get sick? Making the possibilities real often makes them less scary. What remains, after this, are fear of feeling and fear of death.

Because when we really experience things, especially if we were numbing before, our feelings can be frightening. Emotions become overwhelming to the point that people develop anxiety about anything unpleasant, not from the details of what’s happening, but from the discomfort itself. And that makes numbing look awfully tempting, so the cycle repeats.

I can’t help my clients feel good all the time, because that’s impossible. Anyone who says differently is a snake oil salesman. And I can’t make the deep fears go away; we all live with our own mortality. But bad news-good news: it’s better this way, because this is what makes you a person. You’re made of flesh and blood and feelings, and that’s a beautiful thing.

The Painful and the Sublime

Pain, hardship, and stress are necessary parts of life, and make it worth living. It doesn’t mean “confidence” should be a bad word, but how can we redefine it? What if it means being open to the richness of life, in all its dimensions? Being able to endure through hardships and grow, rather than avoiding them? Caring and valuing what people in your life think of you, because you value your connections with them?

Living is scary; I don’t deny that. Every day we face uncertainty, and the only certainty we are given is the one we least want to hear. But I choose to embrace death, not run from it. If life were everlasting, why do anything at all? I find comfort in knowing I have a beginning and an end, and it motivates me to build something of value between them.

Directly or indirectly, I work on this with every client. I try to help people embrace their positions at the helm of their own lives, their ability to shape their experiences. Whatever challenges we face, we have choices available to us, even if those choices are rotten. In the words of Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

How things affect us is out of our control. We don’t choose our feelings, just like we don’t choose our bodies, or our families. So have grace for yourself. “Confidence” needn’t have anything to do with these things you can’t control. But it can be about building intuition and strength of character. If you allow yourself to embrace the messiness of life and your own humanity, you can discover some wonderful things, like growth, beauty, sublimity, and love. Your experiences will change you, and you just might find that you’re open to being changed.

Sadly, pervasive numbing has degraded human life and relationships. I touched on a lot of this in my social media piece, so I won’t repeat it here. It’s not our fault, for the most part. We’ve been handed the syringe. But it’s still our choice if we want to keep using it. I’m not immune to temptation myself, but I try every day to feel present and alive. I try to orient my life toward celebrating my experiences and connections with other people, to be a defiant humanist.

Text and Photograph © 2026 Philip Bender

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