The curse of mixed feelings

There’s something I’ve experienced throughout life that I never had a name for until recently.

Sometimes, it’s like an itch. Other (thankfully, very occasional) times it’s more like a creature, a gremlin if you will, wrestling under my skin, fighting forces only known to itself, fighting to be heard. Most of the time, I have no idea what the gremlin is trying to say. It doesn’t use words. I’m not sure it can. It’s as confusing as it is uncomfortable – in some moments, its presence is downright anxiety-inducing. I’m aware this metaphor is probably making me sound crazy, but here we are.

My new favourite word: ‘ambivalence’

I used to think ‘ambivalence’ was a fancy word for ‘meh’. As in, a lack of care, a lack of opinion. That definitely didn’t describe the gremlin, because as far as I can tell, the gremlin cares. A lot. That’s kind of its problem - it ties itself in knots trying to vanquish negative feelings, to figure out the right decision, to protect itself and, I guess, me. When I discovered the actual meaning of ambivalence, I had a name for the mysterious gremlin at last.   

Ambivalence means to having mixed, or even contradictory, feelings about something. It’s when we experience simultaneous opposing emotions, such as love and hate, desire and fear, or approval and disapproval.

I’m sure we all know the phrase: “two things can be true at once”. Rationally, we know that life is a hundred shades of grey. But greyness is inconvenient - our brains like tidy solutions, neat categories and easy decisions. It’s at odds with how life actually is.

   As I’ve talked about before, modern social media fuels this lean towards black and white thinking: ‘if it doesn’t feel right, it’s wrong’, ‘if it’s not 100% yes, it’s a no’, ‘if he wanted to, he would’, ‘he/she is a narcissist’, ‘live life with no regrets’, ‘I’m this [insert X category/diagnosis], therefore Y’. For every sweeping statement, we don’t talk about all the messy, subjective stuff beneath them.

This just in: complicated feelings are normal

Everyone experiences mixed feelings. It’s part of the human experience. Mixed feelings arise around big life events – career, where you live, relationships, marriage, kids – as well as trite things, like whether to go to a friend’s birthday dinner when you’re skint. But people don’t talk openly about it. Of course they don’t - that would tarnish the illusion of having their shit together.

Even people who seem SO sure of their path have probably experienced ambivalence about their choices at some point, even if only briefly. If, like me, you lean towards overthinking, you might experience ambivalence more than others. Here are some examples of things I have mixed feelings about - I love the cushiness of my job currently but resent how unengaged I feel a lot of the time. I love the slow, calm pace of where I live but I simultaneously feel suffocated by it. My heart wants a family with my partner but my head fears the changes and sacrifices that children would bring. I want to challenge myself with an adventurous trip with friends but know the itinerary would burn me out in two days flat.

I realised that what the aforementioned gremlin was wrestling with was opposing feelings. It was trying to neutralise two clashing forces within - what happened instead was anxiety, indecision and, often, shame for feeling ‘complicated’ at all (especially when it seems like others never feel that way). 

I don’t want to overthink this, but I will :)

I think this relates to something I learnt about in my coaching and counselling training called internal family systems (IFS) or Parts Work. IFS is a type of therapy that sees the mind as made up of different ‘parts’, almost like a family that lives inside us. Each part has its own thoughts, feelings, and roles. Some parts protect us, some carry pain, and some help us function day-to-day. Most of the time the parts coexist quite harmoniously. Other times they get into conflict – for example, your adventurous part vs. your homebody part. When this happens, there’s tension. That feeling of tension between the parts, I think, what I’ve been calling the gremlin.

IFS also talks about the Self - your core, calm, compassionate inner leader. Many people view this as your ‘intuition’. Which brings me to the final bit of this ramble – that acceptance and intuition can help us move through ambivalence to the other side, to a calm gremlin and harmonious parts.

I’ve learnt that, sometimes, you’ve gotta just let the gremlin do its thing. Let the parts fight it out. Listen to them, but don’t take too much to heart. Just because you feel something is right, wrong, good or bad doesn’t automatically make it so. A therapist once told me that believing our emotions are the truth is a cognitive distortion called emotional reasoning (guilty as charged). When the gremlin makes an appearance, it’s not about tamping down the ambivalence until it becomes a single, pleasant emotion, but accepting we have ambivalence and tapping into intuition as a guiding light instead.

It’s not always easy to access intuition (or the ‘Self’) as the noise of mixed feelings can be deafeningly loud. But as cliché as they are, I’ve found that journalling, meditation, empty chair exercises and talking out loud to yourself (I know it’s kooky, but I think it works) help identify that strong voice beneath the gremlin. Also, time. Feelings are always shifting and evolving, sometimes in unexpected ways.

If you’ve managed to stay with me through this muddied metaphor, then well done. While I still experience ambivalence in big ways and small ways, I haven’t heard from the gremlin in quite some time. It’ll be back, of course – but hopefully I’ll be slightly more prepared for it when it does.