The Three As
Ambivalence
Ambivalence is perhaps the biggest buried lede in all of our work in sustainability.
In all of our focus on values, beliefs, opinions, motivations, and desires, we overlook the reality of ambivalence. Ambivalence is perhaps the most important feature of how we humans relate with change. It doesn’t matter if it’s positive or negative, wanted or unwanted change—ambivalence may still be there.
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So what is ambivalence?
Most simply it refers to simultaneous, conflicting desires, attachments, motivations, and values. It’s the experience of feeling torn between competing drives. On the one hand, if you are a spiritual person, one may want to be caring stewards of creation. On the other hand, what about our responsibilities to our family and work that require ecologically degrading practices? Ambivalence means that even those of us with the best intentions find ourselves in knots and tangles, trying to work our way through the conundrums towards a more aligned way of life.
Ambivalence is a complex concept used actively in motivational interviewing, in the public health sectors, psychotherapeutic practice, cognitive behavioral therapy, and many more modalities. It is widely recognized in health and psychological sectors as essential to actively engage ambivalence through a variety of ways—many of which are reflected in our resources. When we do actively engage ambivalence, we are met most often with resistance.
Ambivalence can be understood as the natural conflicts and dilemmas that we encounter as we wake up to the realities of our current system and the need for radical change.
When we meet ambivalence with compassion, curiosity, and empathy, something amazing happens. We begin to hear ourselves articulate both sides of an issue. When given the space, we can bring to light where we are most in conflict with ourselves. Once this happens, we have the ability to move though our change journeys more effectively.
When we only articulate one side of the picture, we often find ourselves arguing for the other side. Why? Because we tend to express what motivational interviewing calls counter-change arguments from the other side of the ambivalence. As the founders of the practice write in their seminal textbook Motivational Interviewing, ”By continuing to express the arguments against change, people can literally talk themselves out of changing. Similarly, people can talk themselves into change by continuing to voice pro-change arguments.”
Recognize ambivalence as a key ingredient in how people wrestle with new solutions, behavioral changes, and collective forms of engaging on the biggest issues of our time. This is not because there is a lack of care or will or commitment, but because as humans we struggle with change, and often feel our identities are at stake. We can feel between a rock and a hard place. And it’s our job to pay attention and attune to these conflicts, to name them, to acknowledge them, and then to evoke the motivational path forward. These are complex and charged topics, and ambivalence is part of the territory. The more we can recognize this, and create ways of rolling with the resistance that comes our way, we can design effective ways of engaging people.