Ambivalence
Holding strong opposing feelings or wants toward the same person, choice or thing at once, such as love and anger toward a parent, or wanting and not wanting a promotion.
What drives it
Ambivalence is honest: most important things carry both costs and benefits. Being unable to tolerate it drives people into black-and-white positions; being able to hold it allows mature decisions.
How it shows
Work
Agrees to a decision in the meeting and stalls on it afterwards; 'yes, but' cycles; a leader who asks for candid feedback and then bristles at it; repeated reopening of settled questions.
Relationships
Hot and cold toward a partner; 'I can't live with him and I can't leave'; praising a parent and then listing grievances in the same breath.
Self
Each time you lean one way, the arguments for the other side suddenly get louder. Relief when someone else makes the decision for you.
What tells it apart
Splitting: The ambivalent person feels both at once and can say so; splitting swings between all-good and all-bad at different times and cannot hold both in the same moment.
Passive aggression: Ambivalence is open about the conflict ('part of me wants this, part doesn't'); passive aggression hides the 'no' behind a surface 'yes'.
Procrastination: Ambivalent delay ends when the conflict is named and worked through; procrastination persists even when the person fully wants the outcome.
A test
Ask the person to argue both sides; if they can feel the pull of each side at once, it is more likely ambivalence, and if they can only hold one at a time and then flip, it may be closer to splitting.
Questions to carry
- Asked to argue both sides, how much of each pull can the person feel at the same time?
- Toward whom do I feel love and anger at once, and which one do I usually hide?
How strong the research is
moderate. Measured and studied in attitudes research and central to motivational interviewing; the psychoanalytic claim that love and hate always coexist is clinical theory.
Where it comes from
Eugen Bleuler, 1910; Sigmund Freud, 1912; Megan Thompson, Mark Zanna and Dale Griffin, 1995; William Miller and Stephen Rollnick, 1991 (motivational interviewing)
Sources
- Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677)