At any given time in the day, we feel more than two ways about something.  Maybe you wanted eggs for breakfast, but didn’t want to take the time to make them, so you had the same old cereal you eat most days.  Or maybe you’d hoped to exercise before work, but figured you needed your sleep this morning and could just not lay off the snooze.  Every time we feel more than one way in a given situation we feel conflicted.  However, our habits and conditioning often push us in predicted directions.  My snooze button will win out every time, so unless there is a plane to catch or my kids are late for school, I am pretty darn sure that I am not getting up at 4:30am to exercise (however much I might want to).  Some of us may be resolved to our daily habits and blissfully peaceful in the fact that there are things we “should” do, but just don’t want to do quite enough.  We may know that it would improve our health or our quality of life, but then again, if we felt this strongly enough, wouldn’t we just do it?  For most, the answer is “No, I just don’t want to do it enough! “ or in this example, “Exercise is just not as valuable for me as my sleep.”  I am just not ambivalent enough about my exercise dilemma to make a change, just as my husband is perfectly happy to eat cereal every morning because it is more important to him to get to work early so he can see his kids before bedtime than it is to eat some eggs.  Screw the eggs!  We have priorities.

Understanding that extreme ambivalence is necessary to make major change can be a powerful tool.  It breeds a sense of compassion and empathy for our family members and us.  When my husband walks like a zombie to the cereal cupboard, I feel tremendous empathy and appreciation that he will literally do the same thing every day, however bored he might be, because he values his time with our children more than his own taste buds.  But when you, or even friends, family or acquaintances are struggling with much deeper issues, like substance abuse or domestic violence, it can be harder to access that compassion.  People make positive change only when they are supported, and to be supportive, it is vital to recognize that without enough ambivalence, people will not change.

For years I worked with women who were in violent relationships with their partners.  It was quite common to hear from these women, as well as from friends and coworkers who knew about the work that I was doing, that they “should just leave.”  The women felt blamed for their decision to stay with an abusive partner and this furthered the isolation of being in a violent relationship.  What these women’s friends and family often failed to recognize is that these women realized all of the negative aspects of being in a violent relationship, they just also realized the positive aspects.  Their partners may have been very loving most of the time, provided financially for them, been great dads to their children most of the time, and most commonly “when things were good, they were really good.”  So, a decision had to be made.  And the decision was frequently to stay, unless things got worse.  The worse things got, the more ambivalent these women became about staying with their partners and the braver they got about leaving them.  The key to making a change was not that their friends and family finally got through to them; it was that the bad had to outweigh the good in order for something to shift.  If we are not ambivalent enough about a negative situation in our lives, nothing will change.  And if we do not recognize the ambivalence in ourselves and other’s, we cannot truly be empathic and supportive.  Imagine the gift of compassion one feels when we recognize that they are stuck in feeling more than one way in a given situation.  It takes the judgment out and helps us to be more present.

To really gain empathy for those who are stuck, we need to start with ourselves.  Identify one thing that you’d like to change in your life, making it as specific as possible (i.e. talking to a friend a couple nights a week instead of watching TV) and list all of the reasons you don’t do it. Feel compassion and understanding for yourself, recognizing that your desire to change may just not be strong enough.  Then, focus on the negative aspects of what you are doing, without judgment; the consequences of losing contact with your friends, of feeling isolated or overtired.  Without judgment-this is the key.  And see if you can start to feel a little more ambivalence, a little desire to shift this habit that might not be so good for you.  This is what counselors practice with individuals struggling with substance abuse, and it is quite effective.  Why?  Because it is nonjudgmental.  Because the ambivalence is motivating.  It feels safe to make changes because when everyone else in their lives is judging them for drinking or using drugs, there is at least one person who recognizes that while the drinking and using drugs may not be working for them, in many ways it is.  And they don’t judge it.  That is a gift.  It promotes compassion and compassion facilitates change.

If we take this understanding of ambivalence and compassion to a meta level, it becomes an even more powerful tool to facilitate change.  Fred Luskin is a Stanford professor known for his work in the area of forgiveness.  He has facilitated forgiveness and reconciliation in regions wrought with turmoil, such as Northern Ireland and the Middle East, with huge success.  He currently runs Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism, devoted to  “understanding the neural, mental and social bases of compassion and altruism.”

If you are a practitioner, visit http://www.motivationalinterview.org/ for more information about the powerful tool of ambivalence using the technique of motivational interviewing.