Why Are We Ambivalent?

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Unlike approaches that prescribe the changes that people should make, motivational interviewing helps people identify changes they believe are in their own best interests. Why, then, we might wonder, would a decision to make that kind of change be a kind of wager? Why can’t we be completely sure, as well as whole-hearted, when we commit to a new direction or way of living that reflects our own goals and values?

It was the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who famously observed that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

Human beings are unique in that we are capable of visualizing a future different from our present. We are also unique in possessing the awareness that our actions are choices rather than inevitabilities, and that choosing between different options plays an important role in determining what our future will look like. We don’t just value our freedom to choose: a robust body of research on the psychological phenomenon of reactance shows that when that freedom is threatened or taken away—especially when it comes to matters that are important to us—we are powerfully motivated to preserve or restore our freedom by defending and reasserting our autonomy.

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But the freedom to choose is a double-edged sword. Each choice we make excludes other possibilities and forecloses other options. Offered two different jobs, we can only accept one; decide to marry one person and we cannot marry any other. If all goes as we hope, we will never have the experience of working at the other job or spending our life with another partner. If we do, sometime later, leave that job or divorce and marry someone else, we will still never know how our life would have been different had we made that choice the first time around. And more sobering still: our capacity to envision a future that’s different from our present also makes us the only animal that is aware of its own mortality—that knows that the time we have to make our choices, and enjoy their fruits, eventually (and often sooner than we’d wish) will come to an end.

Despite all that is riding on such major life decisions—and even on much less momentous choices—we must also live with the knowledge that every decision we face requires us to act without knowing what the consequences of our choice will be. We could decide to start an exercise program, hoping it will bring us better health, increased energy, greater satisfaction with our appearance; but not only can’t we be certain that we will stick with it and achieve those benefits—even if we do, we don’t know for sure that we will finally feel that the sacrifices we made (the cost of the gym, the early mornings or late evenings, the time away from family or other activities we enjoy) were worth what we gained. Only after we’ve chosen, and experienced the consequences of our actions, can we really know whether the choice we made was the right one.

Given what’s at stake, it’s no surprise that the knowledge that we could choose wrong, despite all our best efforts to identify the choice that’s best for us, makes us anxious. And that’s why we are vulnerable to being plagued with self-doubt—and the more important and consequential the choice, the greater our hesitation is apt to be.

It is for these reasons that Bill Miller ends On Second Thought, his rich account of ambivalence and its vicissitudes, by arguing that being ambivalent is not just a normal part of decision-making—it can fairly be seen as “the essence of being human.” Contemplating this same reality, the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre offered the startling formulation that human beings are condemned to freedom. But Miller sees it differently. He argues that we need not view the experience of ambivalence as something we must simply accept and learn to live with—we can embrace ambivalence, by recognizing what a privilege it is to be able to contemplate different paths, consciously decide which we will take, and in so doing choose among possible selves and futures.

To hold this view of ambivalence not just as something to be overcome but as a gift might seem difficult to achieve (especially when we are caught in the vicious cycle of tension, avoidance, impulsive action, and self-blame that ambivalence can trap us in). What can help is the realization that ambivalence need not always be a trap—that there are benefits to being ambivalent that we can learn to obtain. The oft-unrecognized positive face of ambivalence will be our next focus in this blog.