On Second Thought: How Ambivalence Shapes Your Life, William R. Miller (100%)

Mind your thoughts, they become your words. Mind your words, they become your actions. Mind your actions, they become your habits. Mind your habits, they become your character. Mind your character, it becomes your destiny.
Like music, life might be simpler without dissonance, but it would be far less interesting.
The essence of ambivalence is to experience conflicting motivations simultaneously. It is possible to both want and not want something, to be attracted and repelled at the same time. One part of you says “Go” and another says “Stop.”
The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald observed that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
Ambivalence is actually a process of evaluation, comparing the relative positives and negatives of possible choices.
Understanding ambivalence requires asking both of the following: How much or in what ways do you like or favor? How much or in what ways do you dislike or oppose?
You can experience them both together: love and anger, happiness and sadness, fear and excitement. Such mixed emotions tend to increase with age and experience.
An unpleasant component of No-No ambivalence is its inescapability, the feeling of being trapped. You seemingly must choose one or the other, and neither looks good. Even not to choose is itself making a decision, allowing the choice to be made by circumstances, someone else, or the passage of time.
Aware of it or not, people who are experiencing ambivalence literally lean more, swaying a bit from side to side.2 Chances are you already know how to read some such cues: averted eye contact, silent pauses, or a sigh.
the word but is rather like an eraser. It subtly devalues what went before and emphasizes what follows. Substituting the word and decreases this recency effect somewhat, although the latter half of the statement still seems to carry a bit more weight:
It is clear that exposure to information can change attitudes, values, behavior, and life-shaping choices. Although not stated as such, Rokeach was essentially arousing ambivalence by highlighting values inconsistency. The effect was surprisingly far-reaching.
How is identification relevant to ambivalence? You may become particularly possessive and defensive about peripherals that you associate with your identity, your self. For someone to disapprove of or even question one of these is to criticize you as a person, which in turn tends to evoke more extreme reactions.
When pressured to choose, short-term consequences can trump longer-term considerations. A phenomenon known as delay discounting involves giving less weight to consequences that are farther in the future,
Ambivalence is seldom evenly balanced. Either the negative or the positive will predominate, and the more conflicting the information is, the greater the subjective tension.
It is easier to talk yourself out of rather than into a change.
Your own values are influenced by the experiences of your friends, loved ones, community, and culture. A common source of personal ambivalence is when your own beliefs or actions differ from those of significant others.
Whose values do matter to you? This is often called your reference group, a collection of people with whom you identify,
A good example is the terminology used to describe someone. Linguistic research in social psychology reveals how the language used to describe personality traits contains both a descriptive and an evaluative dimension.3 The descriptive aspect denotes the extent to which someone shows a particular characteristic of behavior. How readily do they part with money, change their mind, or behave aggressively? The evaluative dimension reflects the extent to which the speaker regards that characteristic to be positive or negative.
Once you have committed to an evaluation in the presence of significant others, there is a tendency to maintain and defend that impression, and deviating from it becomes a source of ambivalence.
Another social dynamic regarding ambivalence is persuasion—requesting, inviting, encouraging, or even demanding change.
Suppose you persist in arguing for A, thereby evoking multiple counterarguments for B. You do your best to overcome any objections, but they continue countering. They hear you making one argument, and they hear themselves defending the opposite. Whom are they more likely to believe? Blaise Pascal observed that “People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.”6 You can literally talk yourself into or out of change.
Both partners see pros and cons of both choices. As one of them voices reasons to move, the other naturally raises reasons to stay. If this pattern persists, each may become increasingly committed to the position he or she is defending.
The physiology of being anxious and being psyched is essentially the same. What you experience physically is different from what you think or feel about it, and how you interpret or label it.
Bottom line: The emotions that you experience are influenced by how you interpret what is happening inside and around you.
A fairly clear characteristic of ambivalence is that people who see both pros and cons on a topic are generally more open to considering new information.
Those who feel two ways about something do spend more time processing, carefully considering the information at hand, which eventually can lead to clearer intention and motivation for action.
People who are ambivalent take longer to decide and are less likely to act impulsively. When you are ambivalent, preexisting attitudes are less likely to determine your actions.
Unresolved ambivalence can result in vacillating back and forth between two mutually exclusive options. This pattern has been called bistability,
Ambivalence can also resolve into disengagement: “I’m done with ____.” The back-and-forth whiplash and the push and pull emotions just become tiring, and disentanglement is an appealing alternative.
responses to ambivalence generally move in one of two directions: (1) opening up to new information and possibilities in an effort to resolve ambivalence or (2) closing down to new information to reduce negative emotions.
Ambivalent people are more likely to see unusual associations and detect uncommon relationships, both important components of creativity.
The key, reflected in great art, seems to be a blend of joy and woe; in other words, ambivalence.
It appears that psychological resilience is indeed linked to experiencing a combination of positive and negative thoughts and emotions when coping with stressful events.18 In other words, the presence of positive in addition to negative emotions seems to help people bounce back from adversity.
One is more decisive and is prone to choosing too quickly or impulsively. The other prefers to examine all the alternatives carefully and may still have difficulty in finally deciding.
Sometimes ambivalence can be paralyzing, immobilizing. You don’t know what to do, and so rather than making what could be a wrong move, you freeze like a deer in the headlights and do nothing. When you come to the fork in the road, you want to take both paths and you cannot, so you set up camp there. You put off having to decide. It is possible to remain camping at the decision point of ambivalence for a very long time.
Yet another avoidant strategy is to deny that there is anything to be ambivalent about. There are various ways to do this. One is to remain ignorant in order to avoid unwelcome information.
Max Planck, observed in his autobiography that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
A familiar theme is sour grapes: disparagement of the rejected choice. “I wouldn’t have enjoyed it anyhow.” If you have acted negatively toward or harmed someone, even unintentionally, there is a risk of denigrating or devaluing the person to diminish ambivalent (guilt) feelings.
When you act with kindness toward people, your opinion of them tends to improve. Actions drive attitudes, and vice versa.
Life’s significant choices are often made in the midst of ambivalence. Such decisions gradually shape your life, your character, and your future.
Without conscious attention and intention, your core values may be overrun by short-term concerns. The noisy immediate influences of the world around you can drown out your own good sense and the softer voices of what matters most.
There seems to be a natural tendency toward self-actualization, to grow into your positive potential, just as an acorn naturally develops into an oak tree with its own knots and gnarls.
five different possible selves that have been described in psychological literature on the subject: your ideal, dream, probable, nightmare, and shadow self.
What the interviewer is doing here may look simple but it is actually quite skillful and takes some practice. The interviewer could have spent more time talking about all the things Charles likes about the internet, why he wouldn’t want to change, and the obstacles to doing so. It also would have gone very differently if Charles was being told why and how he should do it. Instead the interviewer asked particular questions and highlighted aspects of what Charles said to help him keep moving out of the forest.
Ambivalence is also important and valuable at a social level. Dialectic tensions and their resolution lie at the heart of politics and religion.
Distress and psychological symptoms are linked not so much to the objective presence of ambivalence, but to acceptance of it and ability to manage conflicting motivations.
Perhaps this is why ambivalence often becomes more of a familiar friend as we age.
In relationships and public discourse, ambivalence is the dance of persuasion and negotiation by which decisions are reached together.
In the end, ambivalence can be embraced as a gift, a privilege of choosing among possible selves and futures.
From that perspective, ambivalence is the very essence of being human.

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On Second Thought: How Ambivalence Shapes Your Life, William R. Miller (100%) #96