Living with Ambivalence

A Swim in Denial

What we can't think about and how it shapes us.

by Kirby Farrell, Ph.D.  

Ambivalence can be paralyzing, exasperating, or intimidating when you have to admit that we're of two minds (at least) about everything.

The idea began to intrigue me when I found to my amazement that most (smart) college students I asked were unable to define ambivalence. They confused it with ambiguity and equivocation. The concept that we have conflicted feelings and attitudes about everything seemed strange to them, or only hazily familiar.   

 The truth is, ambivalence is everywhere and worth knowing about. For instance, you're telling somebody what you really want to get done today, and you sit there earnestly elaborating the details, over and over and over, until your friend finally gets up saying, "Well, I shouldn't keep you," pulling the ambivalence alarm to get you moving.

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Sometimes Agony and Ecstasy Coexist

Humans are capable of being happy and sad simultaneously.

Published by Adam Alter in Alternative Truths

Emotions arise from deep within our reptilian brains, and we sometimes mistake their primitiveness for simplicity. When someone says they're feeling a certain way, we have a pretty good idea of what that means; we have an intuitive sense of what it means to be happy and sad, hateful and enamored, proud and embarrassed--but what dawned on me during my blissfully painful run was how often we experience two seemingly contradictory emotions simultaneously.

Many films similarly inspire happiness and sadness simultaneously. Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful is one such film, as Benigni's character tries to shield his son from the horrors of the Nazi death camps by turning life into a game. The audience laughs at Benigni's clownish antics one minute, and remembers the terrible gravity of the backdrop the next minute. (The critics felt similarly ambivalent: the Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert lauded the film for finding "the right notes to negotiate its delicate subject matter," whereas Salon.com's Charles Taylor complained about "the sheer callous inappropriateness of comedy existing within the physical reality of the camps.")

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How to Handle Multiple Desires

Desire is complicated, and we often feel ambivalent about what we want most

Published by  Leslie C. Bell, Ph.D., LCSW in Hard to Get

Many of us, it turns out, want seemingly contradictory things. We want to be independent but we also want to be taken care of. We want a respectful and communicative partner but we also are drawn to people who are distant.

Desire is a complicated thing, and pretty much always involves some ambivalence. We rarely want one thing completely and purely. More often than not, and particularly when it comes to things that really matter like love and career, we have mixed feelings about what we want. So ambivalence doesn't mean not wanting something, it simply means being conflicted about what you want.

If you find yourself feeling that two desires are incompatible, for example for a relationship and a career (or insert other "for example" desires here), question that assumption and challenge yourself to imagine having both. 

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I would have to say that I have lived and continue to live most of my life in ambivalence (work, relationships, diet, exercise, politics, religion, societal expectations, cultural norms), the one exception being my spiritual life or spirituality in general -- the more, the better. And perhaps because I am NOT ambivalent about spirituality, the conflicts I experience in the rest of my life don't cause undue discomfort (most of the time). Or maybe it's because I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Gemini.